Words matter. These are the best Christopher Voss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Salary negotiations are particularly important because people are testing you as both a co-worker and an ambassador. They really don’t want you to be a pushover, and they don’t want you to be a jerk.
There is great power in deference. Deference works with everybody.
Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out of the window.
The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in.
Every job that you take, the term that you should always include is, ‘How can I be involved in the strategic projects that are critical to the future of the company?’ You ask that question. It’s a great ‘how’ question.
In reality, every single negotiation involves another commodity that’s far more important to us, which is time – minutes, hours, our investment in time. So even if you’re talking about dollars, the commodity of time is always there because there has to be a discussion about how the commodity of dollars is moved.
What drives you? What’s your motivation? That’s not emotion. That’s passion. It’s a different word.
People who are lying are, understandably, more worried about being believed, so they work harder – too hard, as it were – at being believable.
As human beings, we’re powerfully swayed by how much we feel we’re being respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they’ve been treated fairly and lash out if they don’t.
‘Fair’ is, like, this incredibly overused term in negotiations: ‘I just want what’s fair.’ ‘What’s the fair market price?’
People typically only believe they’re in a negotiation when dollars are involved. And maybe sometimes they’re smart enough to see if there’s a commodity that you can count being exchanged. And, of course, the commodity that we most commonly exchange is money.
I wanted to be a hostage negotiator.
Whether we notice it or not, we spend our days negotiating for something: for our spouse to do more housework, a child to eat just three more bites or go to bed on time, an extended deadline on a project, a salary increase, a better rate on a vacation package.
In Syria, for some time, they have been trading hostages for a number of things: for weapons, for money, for political influence, and for favors.
I was on the SWAT team in the FBI, and I had always wanted to be in SWAT.
The ‘Rule of Three’ is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation, it’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.
Since retiring from the FBI in 2007, I’ve traveled the world and worked with everyone from CEOs to their managers and everyday workers on how to apply techniques from hundreds of high-stakes, life-or-death negotiations to business negotiations.
‘No’ is a dynamic that you’ve got to master before you can ever master ‘yes.’
Very few negotiations are begun and concluded in the same sitting. It’s really rare. In fact, If you sit down and actually complete your negotiation in one sitting, you left stuff on the table.
The sooner you cut off negotiations with someone you shouldn’t be dealing with, it gives you the chance to move on to a more profitable deal.
Mirroring is simply repeating what someone just said. It creates more reception from the other side, it focuses attention, and it gives them an opportunity to dial in more with you and you to dial in more with them. It causes an almost completely unconscious response for the person to want to go on.
What I really think of myself as is a person who’s great at negotiation coaching and consulting.
Negotiation is often described as the art of letting the other side have your way. You have to give the other side a chance to put stuff on the table voluntarily.
Emotions aren’t the obstacles to a successful negotiation; they are the means.
There are a lot of negotiators that really will give in on a deal because being understood is more important than getting what they want. And there’s a particular type in particular, the assertive negotiator: being understood is actually more important to them than actually making the deal.
Price doesn’t make deals, and salary doesn’t control your career.
Body language and tone of voice – not words – are our most powerful assessment tools.
In my years as the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: Hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.
If you’re going to play the bargaining game, you just need to make the other side mad. You want them to get a little annoyed. Then you know that you’ve come in with a good price.
Once you understand what a messy, emotional, and destructive dynamic ‘fairness’ can be, you can see why ‘fair’ is a tremendously powerful word that you need to use with care.
Successful negotiation is not about getting to ‘yes’; it’s about mastering ‘no’ and understanding what the path to an agreement is.
The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Ask questions, that begin with ‘How?’ or ‘What?’ so your opponent uses mental energy to figure out the answer.
What you want to do is put people in a position where they feel connected enough to you that they’re willing to collaborate with you; they’re willing to show you the things that they were scared to tell you about before.
Most people offer obvious telltale signs when they’re lying.
In a job negotiation, the implementation of that deal is your success that also causes the company to succeed.
