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

Jim smiled—I hated that smile right then—and nodded.
“That’s one of the signs, because they should be
congratulating themselves when they get off the line,” he
said. “They don’t need to be congratulating you. That tells
me you did too much. If they think you did it—if you were
the guy who killed it—how is he going to help himself? I
don’t want to be harsh, but you were horrible.”
As I listened to what Jim said, I felt that acid stomach
rush you get when you are forced to accept that the guy
dumping on you is completely right. Daryl’s response had
been a kind of “yes,” but it had been anything but a true
commitment “yes.” He’d made no promise to action. His
“yes” had been designed to make me feel good enough to
leave him alone. Daryl may not have known it, but his “yes”
was as counterfeit as they came.
You see, that whole call had been about me and my ego
and not the caller. But the only way to get these callers to
take action was to have them own the conversation, to
believe that they were coming to these conclusions, to these
necessary next steps, and that the voice at the other end was
simply a medium for those realizations.
Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and
connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that
connection is useless unless the other person feels that they
are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for
creating the connection and the new ideas they have.
I nodded slowly, the fight drained out of me.
“One of the worst calls?” I said to Jim. “That’s right.”