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

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