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

wanted.
It was still a kind of showdown, of course, but the doctor
took the confrontation and bravado out of it by giving the
patient the illusion of control. As an old Washington Post
editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has
learned to disagree without being disagreeable has
discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”
This same technique for suspending unbelief that you
use with kidnappers and escaping patients works for
anything, even negotiating prices. When you go into a store,
instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can
describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions.
Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of
hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a
bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the
greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I
supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is
that you really are asking for help and your delivery must
convey that. With this negotiating scheme, instead of
bullying the clerk, you’re asking for their advice and giving
them the illusion of control.
Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already
been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful
negotiating technique for transforming encounters from
confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving
sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.

CALIBRATE YOUR QUESTIONS