Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how
to recognize which one is being used.
Human beings the world over are so used to being
pursued for the commitment “yes” as a condition to find out
more that they have become masters at giving the
counterfeit “yes.” That’s what the people facing Joe
Businessman are doing, dangling the counterfeit “yes” so
they can hear more.
Whether you call it “buy-in” or “engagement” or
something else, good negotiators know that their job isn’t to
put on a great performance but to gently guide their
counterpart to discover their goal as his own.
Let me tell you, I learned that the hard way.
Two months after talking with Amy, I started answering
phones for HelpLine, the crisis hotline founded by Norman
Vincent Peale.
The basic rule was that you couldn’t be with anybody on
the phone for more than twenty minutes. If you did your
job, it wasn’t going to take you longer than that to get them
to a better place. We had a thick book of organizations we
referred them to for help. It was a paramedic approach:
patch them up and send them on their way.
But people in crisis only accounted for about 40 percent
of the calls we got. The majority of the calls came from
frequent callers. These are highly dysfunctional people,
energy vampires whom no one else would listen to
anymore.
We kept a list of frequent callers and when you got one,