Never Split The Difference Summary & Review (Chris Voss) - ANIMATED

Never Split the difference goes in a totally opposite direction to most traditional negotiation tactics, advice and teachings. And for a good reason. The author, Chris Voss is a former FBI negotiator who is used to dealing with hostage takers, bank robbers and violent people of all types.

And when the stakes are as high as someone’s life, the generic “getting to yes” or “win win negotiating” fall flat on their face. After all, if the person who you love most in the world has been taken hostage “splitting the difference” with the other side is probably not what you want the outcome to be. Chris Voss teaches us that why most of the old-school negotiation tactics don’t work as well is because they ignore the actual human being doing the negotiating.

People are irrational, emotional and biased. It is what makes it human after all. A successful negotiation is about being emotionally intelligent and empathetic to the other side.

It is about forming a genuine human connection with the other person. Emotion, not logic determines the success of failure of negotiations. Your goal as a negotiator is to establish TRUST by getting the other side to see you as welcoming, perceptive, insightful and warm.

You are not there to bully them into submission and bury them with facts - you are there to empathize and help them see that solving your problem solves their problems too. It all starts with ACTIVE LISTENING Before you can turn human emotions to your advantage, you need to make the other person feel HEARD and understood. To do that, you need to become a master of “active listening”.

It is the act of muting your own internal commentary and focusing 100% of your attention to what the other person is saying. This is radically different to what you are used to doing in everyday life which is “passive listening” - hearing what you want to hear and filtering out the rest. Or concentrating on formulating your answer while the other person is still talking, thus not really paying attention.

To demonstrate your superb listening skills, you make use of a tactic called “mirroring” - you reply using the last 3 or 4 words of what the other person said. For example, if they say “I cannot believe it’s going to be so unbelievably cold on Friday”, your reply starts with “Yeah Friday is going to be unbelievably cold…” and then you continue with what you want to say. By imitating their speech patterns you are signalling (on an emotional level) to the other person that you are not only hearing them, but you are similar to them.

This creates trust. You have made the other person feel heard, now it is time to level-up and make them feel understood. You do that by employing “tactical empathy”.

It is understanding someone else’s perspective and then vocalizing it, in order to get what YOU want. You do that by what the author calls “labelling”. You actively listen to the other person and then you vocalize their emotion with a neutral third-person phrase such as “It seems like you” / “It looks like you” or / It sounds like you.

Let me demonstrate this with an example from the book. A pharmaceutical rep was having a conversation with a doctor who told her upfront he is totally uninterested in switching to the drug she was offering (talk about starting the negotiations on the wrong foot). But while they were talking the rep noticed that the doctor’s voice and entire attitude lights up when he was talking about his patients.

So, she employed some “tactical empathy” and said “It seems like you really care about the well-being of your patients”. which made the doctor bring his guard down and turn whole situation around. The rep actively listened, extracted the emotion from the conversation and stated it out loud with “it seems like”.

In this case she was on-point in her observation, but even if she wasn’t using a third-person phrase like that leaves her with an exit strategy. If the doctors would have said “not even close”, she could always reply “I didn’t say it was the case, I just said it SEEMED like it”, thus diffusing a potentially bad situation. Your goal as a successful negotiator is to actively listen, employ tactical empathy and use mirroring and labelling to get to the other side to the magical two words - “that’s right”.

When you have summarized the other person’s words and emotions and you’ve earned a “that’s right” from them, they are crediting you with seeing things their way. You have connected with them on an emotional level which totally transforms the negotiation environment. The next step is to use “calibrated questions”.

These are open-ended “how” and “what” questions for when you inevitably hear something you don’t like. For example, if you are negotiating with your landlord who wants to increase your rent, instead of just saying “no” you can hit him with a “how am I supposed to do that” or “what are we really trying to accomplish here”. This type of questions prompts for a longer answer.

They put the other person to work helping you solve your problem. If they reply with something which is better, but still not what you had in mind, you employ some tactical empathy and another variation of the same calibrated question. So, if your landlord says “Ok, how about with do this price instead of this”, you can reply with “It sounds like you think your property is undervalued compared to similar properties in the area, but how am I supposed to afford that given my salary which is fixed” and you keep going till you have reached your goal.

Successful negotiations are all about understanding that the emotions of the other person play a much bigger role than facts and logic. By making them feel heard and understood you can diffuse any situation. When you make use of empathy to demonstrate that you really understand their perspective and connect with them on an emotional level, you can turn any negotiation in your favour.

Now, let’s see how you can make use of this tactics to make yourself into a better negotiator.