Never split the difference Chris Voss

From policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, to becoming the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator to teaching negotiation at leading universities, Chris Voss has tested the techniques in Never Split the Difference across the full spectrum of human endeavor and proved their effectiveness.

Takeaways

1. Negotiation begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin.
2. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.
3. Tactical empathy brings our attention to both the emotional obstacles and the potential pathways to getting an agreement done.
4. Giving someone’s emotion a name, otherwise known as labeling, gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about.
5. “No” provides a great opportunity for you, and the other party to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want.

Summary video