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

Ask yourself: What is it about a deadline that causes
pressure and anxiety? The answer is consequences; the
perception of the loss we’ll incur in the future—“The deal is
off!” our mind screams at us in some imaginary future
scenario—should no resolution be achieved by a certain
point in time.
When you allow the variable of time to trigger such
thinking, you have taken yourself hostage, creating an
environment of reactive behaviors and poor choices, where
your counterpart can now kick back and let an imaginary
deadline, and your reaction to it, do all the work for him.
Yes, I used the word “imaginary.” In all the years I’ve
been doing work in the private sector, I’ve made it a point to
ask nearly every entrepreneur and executive I’ve worked
with whether, over the course of their entire careers, they
have ever been a witness to or a party of a negotiation in
which a missed deadline had negative repercussions.
Among hundreds of such clients, there’s one single, solitary
gentleman who gave the question serious consideration and
responded affirmatively. Deadlines are often arbitrary,
almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the
consequences we think—or are told—they will.
Deadlines are the bogeymen of negotiation, almost
exclusively self-inflicted figments of our imagination,
unnecessarily unsettling us for no good reason. The mantra
we coach our clients on is, “No deal is better than a bad
deal.” If that mantra can truly be internalized, and clients
begin to believe they’ve got all the time they need to