فصل 03

CHAPTER 3

DON’T FEEL THEIR PAIN, LABEL IT

It was 1998 and I was standing in a narrow hallway outside an apartment on the twenty-seventh floor of a high-rise in Harlem. I was the head of the New York City FBI Crisis Negotiation Team, and that day I was the primary negotiator.

The investigative squad had reported that at least three heavily armed fugitives were holed up inside. Several days earlier the fugitives had used automatic weapons in a shoot-out with a rival gang, so the New York City FBI SWAT team was arrayed behind me, and our snipers were on nearby rooftops with rifles trained on the apartment windows.

In tense situations like this, the traditional negotiating advice is to keep a poker face. Don’t get emotional. Until recently, most academics and researchers completely ignored the role of emotion in negotiation. Emotions were just an obstacle to a good outcome, they said. “Separate the people from the problem” was the common refrain.

But think about that: How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are the problem? Especially when they are scared people with guns. Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window.

That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them. They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up. For them, emotion is a tool.

Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.

The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient. The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That’s exactly what good negotiators do.

Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less, and listening more. You can learn almost everything you need—and a lot more than other people would like you to know—simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your mouth shut.

Think about the therapist’s couch as you read the following sections. You’ll see how a soothing voice, close listening, and a calm repetition of the words of your “patient” can get you a lot further than a cold, rational argument.

It may sound touchy-feely, but if you can perceive the emotions of others, you have a chance to turn them to your advantage. The more you know about someone, the more power you have.

TACTICAL EMPATHY

We had one big problem that day in Harlem: no telephone number to call into the apartment. So for six straight hours, relieved periodically by two FBI agents who were learning crisis negotiation, I spoke through the apartment door.

I used my late-night FM DJ voice.

I didn’t give orders in my DJ voice, or ask what the fugitives wanted. Instead, I imagined myself in their place.

“It looks like you don’t want to come out,” I said repeatedly. “It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”

For six hours, we got no response. The FBI coaches loved my DJ voice. But was it working?

And then, when we were almost completely convinced that no one was inside, a sniper on an adjacent building radioed that he saw one of the curtains in the apartment move.

The front door of the apartment slowly opened. A woman emerged with her hands in front of her.

I continued talking. All three fugitives came out. None of them said a word until we had them in handcuffs.

Then I asked them the question that was most nagging me: Why did they come out after six hours of radio silence? Why did they finally give in?

All three gave me the same answer.

“We didn’t want to get caught or get shot, but you calmed us down,” they said. “We finally believed you wouldn’t go away, so we just came out.”

There is nothing more frustrating or disruptive to any negotiation than to get the feeling you are talking to someone who isn’t listening. Playing dumb is a valid negotiating technique, and “I don’t understand” is a legitimate response. But ignoring the other party’s position only builds up frustration and makes them less likely to do what you want.

The opposite of that is tactical empathy.

In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart, and the vocalization of that recognition.” That’s an academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to another human being, asking what they are feeling, and making a commitment to understanding their world.

Notice I didn’t say anything about agreeing with the other person’s values and beliefs or giving out hugs. That’s sympathy. What I’m talking about is trying to understand a situation from another person’s perspective.

One step beyond that is tactical empathy.

Tactical empathy is understanding the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and also hearing what is behind those feelings so you increase your influence in all the moments that follow. It’s bringing our attention to both the emotional obstacles and the potential pathways to getting an agreement done.

It’s emotional intelligence on steroids.

As a cop in Kansas City, I was curious about how a select handful of veteran cops managed to talk angry, violent people out of fights or to get them to put down their knives and guns.

When I asked how they did that, I rarely got more than a shrug. They couldn’t articulate what they did. But now I know the answer is tactical empathy. They were able to think from another person’s point of view while they were talking with that person and quickly assess what was driving them.

Most of us enter verbal combat unlikely to persuade anyone of anything because we only know and care about our own goals and perspective. But the best officers are tuned in to the other party—their audience. They know that if they empathize, they can mold their audience by how they approach and talk to them.

That’s why, if a corrections officer approaches an inmate expecting him to resist, he often will. But if he approaches exuding calm, the inmate will be much more likely to be peaceful. It seems like wizardry, but it’s not. It’s just that when the officer has his audience clearly in mind, he can become who he needs to be to handle the situation.

Empathy is a classic “soft” communication skill, but it has a physical basis. When we closely observe a person’s face, gestures, and tone of voice, our brain begins to align with theirs in a process called neural resonance, and that lets us know more fully what they think and feel.

In an fMRI brain-scan experiment,1 researchers at Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention—good listeners—could actually anticipate what the speaker was about to say before he said it.

If you want to increase your neural resonance skills, take a moment right now and practice. Turn your attention to someone who’s talking near you, or watch a person being interviewed on TV. As they talk, imagine that you are that person. Visualize yourself in the position they describe and put in as much detail as you can, as if you were actually there.

But be warned, a lot of classic deal makers will think your approach is softheaded and weak.

Just ask former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

A few years ago during a speech at Georgetown University, Clinton advocated, “showing respect, even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand and, insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.”

You can predict what happened next. A gaggle of pundits and politicians pounced on her. They called her statement inane and naïve, and even a sign she had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood. Some said that she had blown her chances at a presidential run.

The problem with all of that hot air is that she was right.

Politics aside, empathy is not about being nice or agreeing with the other side. It’s about understanding them. Empathy helps us learn the position the enemy is in, why their actions make sense (to them), and what might move them.

As negotiators we use empathy because it works. Empathy is why the three fugitives came out after six hours of my late-night DJ voice. It’s what helped me succeed at what Sun Tzu called “the supreme art of war”: to subdue the enemy without fighting.

LABELING

Let’s go back to the Harlem doorway for a minute.

We didn’t have a lot to go on, but if you’ve got three fugitives trapped in an apartment on the twenty-seventh floor of a building in Harlem, they don’t have to say a word for you to know that they’re worried about two things: getting killed, and going to jail.

So for six straight hours in that sweltering apartment building hallway, the two FBI negotiating students and I took turns speaking. We rotated in order to avoid verbal stumbles and other errors caused by tiredness. And we stayed relentlessly on message, all three of us saying the same thing.

Now, pay close attention to exactly what we said: “It looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”

We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation. We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to them.

In a negotiation, that’s called labeling.

Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.

Labeling has a special advantage when your counterpart is tense. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail”—makes them seem less frightening.

In one brain imaging study,2 psychology professor Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people are shown photos of faces expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater activity in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the areas that govern rational thinking. In other words, labeling an emotion—applying rational words to a fear—disrupts its raw intensity.

Labeling is a simple, versatile skill that lets you reinforce a good aspect of the negotiation, or diffuse a negative one. But it has very specific rules about form and delivery. That makes it less like chatting than like a formal art such as Chinese calligraphy.

For most people, it’s one of the most awkward negotiating tools to use. Before they try it the first time, my students almost always tell me they expect their counterpart to jump up and shout, “Don’t you dare tell me how I feel!”

Let me let you in on a secret: people never even notice.

The first step to labeling is detecting the other person’s emotional state. Outside that door in Harlem we couldn’t even see the fugitives, but most of the time you’ll have a wealth of information from the other person’s words, tone, and body language. We call that trinity “words, music, and dance.”

The trick to spotting feelings is to pay close attention to changes people undergo when they respond to external events. Most often, those events are your words.

If you say, “How is the family?” and the corners of the other party’s mouth turn down even when they say it’s great, you might detect that all is not well; if their voice goes flat when a colleague is mentioned, there could be a problem between the two; and if your landlord unconsciously fidgets his feet when you mention the neighbors, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t think much of them (we’ll dig deeper into how to spot and use these cues in Chapter 9).

Picking up on these tiny pieces of information is how psychics work. They size up their client’s body language and ask him a few innocent questions. When they “tell” his future a few minutes later, they’re really just saying what he wants to hear based on small details they’ve spotted. More than a few psychics would make good negotiators for that very reason.

Once you’ve spotted an emotion you want to highlight, the next step is to label it aloud. Labels can be phrased as statements or questions. The only difference is whether you end the sentence with a downward or upward inflection. But no matter how they end, labels almost always begin with roughly the same words:

It seems like . . .

It sounds like . . .

It looks like . . .

Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.

But when you phrase a label as a neutral statement of understanding, it encourages your counterpart to be responsive. They’ll usually give a longer answer than just “yes” or “no.” And if they disagree with the label, that’s okay. You can always step back and say, “I didn’t say that was what it was. I just said it seems like that.”

The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen. We all have a tendency to expand on what we’ve said, to finish, “It seems like you like the way that shirt looks,” with a specific question like “Where did you get it?” But a label’s power is that it invites the other person to reveal himself.

If you’ll trust me for a second, take a break now and try it out: Strike up a conversation and put a label on one of the other person’s emotions—it doesn’t matter if you’re talking to the mailman or your ten-year-old daughter—and then go silent. Let the label do its work.

NEUTRALIZE THE NEGATIVE, REINFORCE THE POSITIVE

Labeling is a tactic, not a strategy, in the same way a spoon is a great tool for stirring soup but it’s not a recipe. How you use labeling will go a long way in determining your success. Deployed well, it’s how we as negotiators identify and then slowly alter the inner voices of our counterpart’s consciousness to something more collaborative and trusting.

First, let’s talk a little human psychology. In basic terms, people’s emotions have two levels: the “presenting” behavior is the part above the surface you can see and hear; beneath, the “underlying” feeling is what motivates the behavior.

Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him.

What good negotiators do when labeling is address those underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.

We’ll come back to the cranky grandfather in a moment. First, though, I want to talk a little bit about anger.

As an emotion, anger is rarely productive—in you or the person you’re negotiating with. It releases stress hormones and neurochemicals that disrupt your ability to properly evaluate and respond to situations. And it blinds you to the fact that you’re angry in the first place, which gives you a false sense of confidence.

That’s not to say that negative feelings should be ignored. That can be just as damaging. Instead, they should be teased out. Labeling is a helpful tactic in de-escalating angry confrontations, because it makes the person acknowledge their feelings rather than continuing to act out.

Early on in my hostage negotiation career, I learned how important it was to go directly at negative dynamics in a fearless but deferential manner.

It was to fix a situation I’d created myself. I’d angered the top FBI official in Canada when I entered the country without first alerting him (so he could notify the Department of State), a procedure known as “country clearance.”

I knew I needed to call and assuage him to straighten out the situation, or I risked being expelled. Top guys like to feel on top. They don’t want to be disrespected. All the more so when the office they run isn’t a sexy assignment.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said when he answered the phone.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated. “It’s Chris Voss.”

Again there was a long silence.

“Does your boss know you’re here?”

I said he did, and crossed my fingers. At this point, the FBI official would have been completely within his rights to tell me to leave Canada immediately. But by mentioning the negative dynamic, I knew I’d diffused it as much as I could. I had a chance.

“All right, you’ve got country clearance,” he finally said. “I’ll take care of the paperwork.”

Try this the next time you have to apologize for a bone-headed mistake. Go right at it. The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it. Whenever I was dealing with the family of a hostage, I started out by saying I knew they were scared. And when I make a mistake—something that happens a lot—I always acknowledge the other person’s anger. I’ve found the phrase “Look, I’m an asshole” to be an amazingly effective way to make problems go away.

That approach has never failed me.

Let’s go back to the cranky grandfather.

He’s grumpy because he never sees the family and he feels left out. So he’s speaking up in his own dysfunctional way to get attention.

How do you fix that?

Instead of addressing his grumpy behavior, you acknowledge his sadness in a nonjudgmental way. You head him off before he can really get started.

“We don’t see each other all that often,” you could say. “It seems like you feel like we don’t pay any attention to you and you only see us once a year, so why should you make time for us?”

Notice how that acknowledges the situation and labels his sadness? Here you can pause briefly, letting him recognize and appreciate your attempts to understand what he’s feeling, and then turn the situation around by offering a positive solution.

“For us this is a real treat. We want to hear what you have to talk about. We want to value this time with you because we feel left out of your life.”

Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts.

One of my Georgetown University students, a guy named TJ, who worked as an assistant controller at the Washington Redskins, put that lesson to work while he was taking my negotiations class.

The economy was in the toilet at the time, and Redskins season ticket holders were leaving in droves to avoid the cost. Worse, the team had been terrible the year before, and off-field player problems were alienating the fans.

The team’s CFO was getting more worried—and cranky—by the day, and two weeks before the season was to start he walked by TJ’s desk and slammed down a folder full of paper.

“Better yesterday than today,” he said and walked away.

Inside was a list of forty season ticket holders who hadn’t paid their bills, a USB drive with a spreadsheet about each one’s situation, and a script to use when calling them.

TJ saw right away that the script was a disaster. It began by saying that his colleagues had been trying to call for months, and the account had been escalated to him. “I wanted to inform you,” it read, “that in order to receive your tickets for the upcoming season opener against the New York Giants, you will need to pay your outstanding balance in full prior to September 10.”

It was the stupidly aggressive, impersonal, tone-deaf style of communication that is the default for most business. It was all “me, me, me” from TJ, with no acknowledgment of the ticket holder’s situation. No empathy. No connection. Just give me the money.

Maybe I don’t need to say it, but the script didn’t work. TJ left messages; no one called back.

A few weeks into the class, TJ rewrote the script. These weren’t massive changes, and he didn’t offer the fans any discounts. What he did was add subtle tweaks to make the call about the fans, their situation, and their love of the team.

Now the team was “YOUR Washington Redskins” and the purpose of the call was to ensure that the team’s most valuable fans—the delinquent customers—would be there at the season opener. “The home-field advantage created by you each and every Sunday at FedEx Field does not go unnoticed,” TJ wrote. He then told them, “In these difficult times, we understand our fans have been hit hard and we are here to work with you,” and asked the ticket holders to call back to talk through their “unique situation.”

Though superficially simple, the changes TJ made in the script had a deep emotional resonance with the delinquent ticket holders. It mentioned their debt to the team but also acknowledged the team’s debt to them, and by labeling the tough economic times, and the stress they were causing, it diffused the biggest negative dynamic—their delinquency—and turned the issue into something solvable.

The simple changes masked a complex understanding of empathy on TJ’s side. With the new script, TJ was able to set up payment plans with all the ticket holders before the Giants game. And the CFO’s next visit? Well, it was far less terse.

CLEAR THE ROAD BEFORE ADVERTISING THE DESTINATION

Remember the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear in reaction to threats? Well, the faster we can interrupt the amygdala’s reaction to real or imaginary threats, the faster we can clear the road of obstacles, and the quicker we can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust.

We do that by labeling the fears. These labels are so powerful because they bathe the fears in sunlight, bleaching them of their power and showing our counterpart that we understand.

Think back to that Harlem landing: I didn’t say, “It seems like you want us to let you go.” We could all agree on that. But that wouldn’t have diffused the real fear in the apartment, or shown that I empathized with the grim complexity of their situation. That’s why I went right at the amygdala and said, “It seems like you don’t want to go back to jail.”

Once they’ve been labeled and brought into the open, the negative reactions in your counterpart’s amygdala will begin to soften. I promise it will shock you how suddenly his language turns from worry to optimism. Empathy is a powerful mood enhancer.

The road is not always cleared so easily, so don’t be demoralized if this process seems to go slowly. The Harlem high-rise negotiation took six hours. Many of us wear fears upon fears, like layers against the cold, so getting to safety takes time.

That was the experience of another one of my students, a fund-raiser for the Girl Scouts, who backed into naming her counterpart’s fears almost accidentally.

We’re not talking about someone who sold Girl Scout cookies: my student was an experienced fund-raiser who regularly got donors to pony up $1,000 to $25,000 a check. Over the years, she’d developed a very successful system to get her “clients,” usually wealthy women, to open their checkbook.

She’d invite a potential donor to her office, serve a few Girl Scouts cookies, walk her through an album of heartwarming snapshots and handwritten letters from projects that matched the woman’s profile, and then collect a check when the donor’s eyes lit up. It was almost easy.

One day, though, she met the immovable donor. Once the woman sat down in her office, my student began to throw out the projects her research had said would fit. But the woman shook her head at one project after another.

My student found herself growing perplexed at the difficult donor who had no interest in donating. But she held her emotion in check and reached back to a lesson from my recent class on labeling. “I’m sensing some hesitation with these projects,” she said in what she hoped was a level voice.

As if she’d been uncorked, the woman exclaimed: “I want my gift to directly support programming for Girl Scouts and not anything else.”

This helped focus the conversation, but as my student put forth project after project that seemed to fulfill the donor’s criteria, all she got was still rejection.

Sensing the potential donor’s growing frustration, and wanting to end on a positive note so that they might be able to meet again, my student used another label. “It seems that you are really passionate about this gift and want to find the right project reflecting the opportunities and life-changing experiences the Girl Scouts gave you.”

And with that, this “difficult” woman signed a check without even picking a specific project. “You understand me,” she said as she got up to leave. “I trust you’ll find the right project.”

Fear of her money being misappropriated was the presenting dynamic that the first label uncovered. But the second label uncovered the underlying dynamic—her very presence in the office was driven by very specific memories of being a little Girl Scout and how it changed her life.

The obstacle here wasn’t finding the right match for the woman. It wasn’t that she was this highly finicky, hard-to-please donor. The real obstacle was that this woman needed to feel that she was understood, that the person handling her money knew why she was in that office and understood the memories that were driving her actions.

That’s why labels are so powerful and so potentially transformative to the state of any conversation. By digging beneath what seems like a mountain of quibbles, details, and logistics, labels help to uncover and identify the primary emotion driving almost all of your counterpart’s behavior, the emotion that, once acknowledged, seems to miraculously solve everything else.

DO AN ACCUSATION AUDIT

On the first day of negotiating class each semester, I march the group through an introductory exercise called “sixty seconds or she dies.” I play a hostage-taker and a student has to convince me to release my hostage within a minute. It’s an icebreaker that shows me the level of my students, and it reveals to them how much they need to learn. (Here’s a little secret: the hostage never gets out.)

Sometimes students jump right in, but finding takers is usually hard because it means coming to the front of the class and competing with the guy who holds all the cards. If I just ask for a volunteer, my students sit on their hands and look away. You’ve been there. You can almost feel your back muscles tense as you think, Oh please, don’t call on me.

So I don’t ask. Instead, I say, “In case you’re worried about volunteering to role-play with me in front of the class, I want to tell you in advance . . . it’s going to be horrible.”

After the laughter dies down, I then say, “And those of you who do volunteer will probably get more out of this than anyone else.”

I always end up with more volunteers than I need.

Now, look at what I did: I prefaced the conversation by labeling my audience’s fears; how much worse can something be than “horrible”? I defuse them and wait, letting it sink in and thereby making the unreasonable seem less forbidding.

All of us have intuitively done something close to this thousands of times. You’ll start a criticism of a friend by saying, “I don’t want this to sound harsh . . .” hoping that whatever comes next will be softened. Or you’ll say, “I don’t want to seem like an asshole . . .” hoping your counterpart will tell you a few sentences later that you’re not that bad. The small but critical mistake this commits is denying the negative. That actually gives it credence.

In court, defense lawyers do this properly by mentioning everything their client is accused of, and all the weaknesses of their case, in the opening statement. They call this technique “taking the sting out.”

What I want to do here is turn this into a process that, applied systematically, you can use to disarm your counterpart while negotiating everything from your son’s bedtime to large business contracts.

The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an accusation audit.

This idea of an accusation audit is really, really hard for people to get their minds around. The first time I tell my students about it, they say, “Oh my God. We can’t do that.” It seems both artificial and self-loathing. It seems like it would make things worse. But then I remind them that it’s exactly what I did the first day of class when I labeled their fears of the hostage game in advance. And they all admit that none of them knew.

As an example, I’m going to use the experience of one of my students, Anna, because I couldn’t be more proud at how she turned what she learned in my class into $1 million.

At the time, Anna was representing a major government contractor. Her firm had won a competition for a sizable government deal by partnering with a smaller company, let’s call it ABC Corp., whose CEO had a close relationship with the government client representative.

Problems started right after they won the contract, though. Because ABC’s relationship had been instrumental in winning the deal, ABC felt that it was owed a piece of the pie whether it fulfilled its part of the contract or not.

And so, while the contract paid them for the work of nine people, they continually cut back support. As Anna’s company had to perform ABC’s work, the relationship between ABC and Anna’s company fragmented into vituperative emails and bitter complaining. Facing an already low profit margin, Anna’s company was forced into tough negotiations to get ABC to take a cut to 5.5 people. The negotiations left a bitter aftertaste on both sides. The vituperative emails stopped, but then again all emails stopped. And no communication is always a bad sign.

A few months after those painful talks, the client demanded a major rethink on the project and Anna’s firm was faced with losing serious money if it didn’t get ABC to agree to further cuts. Because ABC wasn’t living up to its side of the bargain, Anna’s firm would have had strong contractual grounds to cut out ABC altogether. But that would have damaged Anna’s firm’s reputation with a very important customer, and could have led to litigation from ABC.

Faced with this scenario, Anna set up a meeting with ABC where she and her partners planned to inform ABC that its pay was being cut to three people. It was a touchy situation, as ABC was already unhappy about the first cut. Even though she was normally an aggressive and confident negotiator, worries about the negotiations ruined Anna’s sleep for weeks. She needed to extract concessions while improving the relationship at the same time. No easy task, right?

To prepare, the first thing Anna did was sit down with her negotiating partner, Mark, and list every negative charge that ABC could level at them. The relationship had gone sour long before, so the list was huge. But the biggest possible accusations were easy to spot:

“You are the typical prime contractor trying to force out the small guy.”

“You promised us we would have all this work and you reneged on your promise.”

“You could have told us about this issue weeks ago to help us prepare.”

Anna and Mark then took turns role-playing the two sides, with one playing ABC and the other disarming these accusations with anticipatory labels. “You’re going to think we are a big, bad prime contractor when we are done,” Anna practiced saying slowly and naturally. “It seems you feel this work was promised to you from the beginning,” Mark said. They trained in front of an observer, honing their pacing; deciding at what point they would label each fear; and planning when to include meaningful pauses. It was theater.

When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.”

This received an emphatic nod from the ABC representatives, so Anna continued by outlining the situation in a way that encouraged the ABC reps to see the firms as teammates, peppering her statements with open-ended questions that showed she was listening: “What else is there you feel is important to add to this?”

By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal.

This provided an entry point for Mark, who explained that the client’s new demands had turned his firm’s profits into losses, meaning that he and Anna needed to cut ABC’s pay further, to three people. Angela, one of ABC’s representatives, gasped.

“It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said, heading off the accusation before it could be made.

“No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned by the acknowledgment to look for common ground.

With the negatives labeled and the worst accusations laid bare, Anna and Mark were able to turn the conversation to the contract. Watch what they do closely, as it’s brilliant: they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company.

“It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise.

“Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged.

Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count.

Several weeks later, the contract was tweaked to cut ABC’s payout, which brought Anna’s company $1 million that put the contract into the black. But it was Angela’s reaction at the end of the meeting that most surprised Anna. After Anna had acknowledged that she had given Angela some bad news and that she understood how angry she must feel, Angela said:

“This is not a good situation but we appreciate the fact that you are acknowledging what happened, and we don’t feel like you are mistreating us. And you are not the ‘Big Bad Prime.’”

Anna’s reaction to how this turned out? “Holy crap, this stuff actually works!”

She’s right. As you just saw, the beauty of going right after negativity is that it brings us to a safe zone of empathy. Every one of us has an inherent, human need to be understood, to connect with the person across the table. That explains why, after Anna labeled Angela’s fears, Angela’s first instinct was to add nuance and detail to those fears. And that detail gave Anna the power to accomplish what she wanted from the negotiation.

GET A SEAT—AND AN UPGRADE—ON A SOLD-OUT FLIGHT

Up to this point, we’ve been building each skill as if they were musical instruments: first, try the saxophone mirror; now here’s the bass label; and finally, why don’t you blow a note on the French horn of tactical silence. But in a real negotiation the band all plays together. So you’ve got to learn how to conduct.

Keeping all the instruments playing is really awkward for most people. It seems to go by in such a rush. So what I’m going to do here is play a song at slow speed so you can hear each instrument note by note. I promise you’ll quickly see how the skills you have been building play off one another, rising, riffing, falling, and pausing in perfect harmony.

Here is the situation (the song, if you will): My student Ryan B. was flying from Baltimore to Austin to sign a large computer-consulting contract. For six months, the client representative had gone back and forth on whether he wanted the services, but a major system collapse put the representative in a tight spot with his CEO. To shift the blame, he called Ryan with his CEO on the line and very aggressively demanded to know why it was taking Ryan so long to come ink the contract. If Ryan was not there by Friday morning, he said, the deal was off.

Ryan bought a ticket for the next morning, Thursday, but a freak lightning storm whipped up in Baltimore, closing the airport for five hours. It became painfully clear that Ryan wasn’t going to make his original connection to Austin from Dallas. Worse, when he called American Airlines just before departing, he found that his connection had been automatically rebooked to 3 p.m. the next day, putting the contract in jeopardy.

When Ryan finally got to Dallas at 8 p.m., he ran to the gate where the day’s final American Airlines flight to Austin was less than thirty minutes from takeoff. His goal was to get on that flight or, at worst, get an earlier flight the next day.

In front of him at the gate, a very aggressive couple was yelling at the gate agent, who was barely looking at them as she tapped on the computer in front of her; she was clearly making every effort not to scream back. After she’d said, “There’s nothing I can do,” five times, the angry couple finally gave up and left.

To start, watch how Ryan turns that heated exchange to his advantage. Following on the heels of an argument is a great position for a negotiator, because your counterpart is desperate for an empathetic connection. Smile, and you’re already an improvement.

“Hi, Wendy, I’m Ryan. It seems like they were pretty upset.”

This labels the negative and establishes a rapport based on empathy. This in turn encourages Wendy to elaborate on her situation, words Ryan then mirrors to invite her to go further.

“Yeah. They missed their connection. We’ve had a fair amount of delays because of the weather.”

“The weather?”

After Wendy explains how the delays in the Northeast had rippled through the system, Ryan again labels the negative and then mirrors her answer to encourage her to delve further.

“It seems like it’s been a hectic day.”

“There’ve been a lot of ‘irate consumers,’ you know? I mean, I get it, even though I don’t like to be yelled at. A lot of people are trying to get to Austin for the big game.”

“The big game?”

“UT is playing Ole Miss football and every flight into Austin has been booked solid.”

“Booked solid?”

Now let’s pause. Up to this point, Ryan has been using labels and mirrors to build a relationship with Wendy. To her it must seem like idle chatter, though, because he hasn’t asked for anything. Unlike the angry couple, Ryan is acknowledging her situation. His words ping-pong between “What’s that?” and “I hear you,” both of which invite her to elaborate.

Now that the empathy has been built, she lets slip a piece of information he can use.

“Yeah, all through the weekend. Though who knows how many people will make the flights. The weather’s probably going to reroute a lot of people through a lot of different places.”

Here’s where Ryan finally swoops in with an ask. But notice how he acts: not assertive or coldly logical, but with empathy and labeling that acknowledges her situation and tacitly puts them in the same boat.

“Well, it seems like you’ve been handling the rough day pretty well,” he says. “I was also affected by the weather delays and missed my connecting flight. It seems like this flight is likely booked solid, but with what you said, maybe someone affected by the weather might miss this connection. Is there any possibility a seat will be open?”

Listen to that riff: Label, tactical empathy, label. And only then a request.

At this point, Wendy says nothing and begins typing on her computer. Ryan, who’s eager not to talk himself out of a possible deal, engages in some silence. After thirty seconds, Wendy prints a boarding pass and hands it to Ryan, explaining that there were a few seats that were supposed to be filled by people who would now arrive much later than the flight’s departure. To make Ryan’s success even better, she puts him in Economy Plus seating.

All that in under two minutes!

The next time you find yourself following an angry customer at a corner store or airplane line, take a moment and practice labels and mirrors on the service person. I promise they won’t scream, “Don’t try to control me!” and burst into flames—and you might walk away with a little more than you expected.

KEY LESSONS

As you try to insert the tools of tactical empathy into your daily life, I encourage you to think of them as extensions of natural human interactions and not artificial conversational tics.

In any interaction, it pleases us to feel that the other side is listening and acknowledging our situation. Whether you are negotiating a business deal or simply chatting to the person at the supermarket butcher counter, creating an empathetic relationship and encouraging your counterpart to expand on their situation is the basis of healthy human interaction.

These tools, then, are nothing less than emotional best practices that help you cure the pervasive ineptitude that marks our most critical conversations in life. They will help you connect and create more meaningful and warm relationships. That they might help you extract what you want is a bonus; human connection is the first goal.

With that in mind, I encourage you to take the risk of sprinkling these in every conversation you have. I promise you that they will feel awkward and artificial at first, but keep at it. Learning to walk felt awfully strange, too.

As you internalize these techniques, turning the artifice of tactical empathy into a habit and then into an integral part of your personality, keep in mind these lessons from the chapter you’ve just read:

? Imagine yourself in your counterpart’s situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas (you may well find them crazy). But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening. And once they know that you are listening, they may tell you something that you can use.

? The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal, so focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence; get them into the open.

? Pause. After you label a barrier or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don’t worry, the other party will fill the silence.

? Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust.

? List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true.

? Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics.