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

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