An FBI Negotiator Helped Me to Reduce My Rent
Use This When You Need to Buy a Car or Ask for a Salary Increase.
May of 2020. Badly damaged by the Coronavirus crisis and the subsequent lockdown, my business (a touristic hostel) was on the verge of lacking cashflow. I needed to either renegotiate with the landowner a better deal, or we would burn our financial reserves in only a few months.
I had one week before the negotiation, so I looked for some material to help me. That is when I found Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, a very good evaluated book written by Chris Voss.
A former FBI senior negotiator, Chriss Voss, saved the life of few hostages. In a certain way, he also helped to save my business from failure in 2020.
Here I will expose some of the greatest insights of the book, how they were useful to me, and they can be useful to you.
Listen. Listen Intensely
People want to be understood and accepted. This is a universal premise and sometimes can sound even cliché. But as often is true, this potential cliché brings his doses of reality.
Listening is the cheapest but the most effective tool that you can use for a successful negotiation. According to Chris Voss, By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.
Researches in the field of psychotherapy show that when people feel listened to, they also listen to themselves deeper. This helps the other part to clarify their own thoughts and understand their own feelings. They become less defensive and more willing to listen to opposing points of view. It also makes the entire situation calmer and puts logic on the table.
When you drive out anxiety and nerves and bring calmness and logic, you are doing it well. Do not buy those internet techniques telling you that you should make your counterpart feel nervous or uncomfortable, especially when they have something that you want.
People that see a negotiation as a battle of arguments have voices in their heads. Sometimes they are overwhelming. Or, as Voss summarizes, When they’re not talking, they’re thinking about their arguments, and when they are talking, they’re making their arguments. Often those on both sides of the table are doing the same thing, so you have what I call a state of schizophrenia: everyone just listening to the voice in their head.
To follow this advice was especially difficult for me. Not only because I am quite explosive (something that I am solving thanks to another brilliant author, Gary Chapman), but also because I was a bad listener.
Isopraxism
If you ever watched the series The Office, you saw Andy Bernard imitating the words of his superiors and calling this mirroring. I guarantee: it is not as ridiculous as it looks there, and it works. It even worked for an obnoxious character like Andy.
Mirroring is also called isopraxism, and in essence, is imitation. Humans and other animals have the behavioral pattern to copy each other to bring comfort. This copy may be of body language, speech, vocabulary, speed, or tone of voice, and often it occurs unconsciously. We are not completely aware of it when it happens. But if while you are on a date, your partner starts to imitate your gestures, take that as a signal of bonding.
Bonding, and rapport, leads to trust. So you already can guess where this leads you. Trust is an essential ingredient of a successful negotiation. We fear what is different, and we are drawn to what is similar to what we can trust. Wolfs of a pack hunt together.
As deep as all that may look, when we see how the FBI uses this technique, it is almost laughable. For their negotiators, a mirror is when you repeat the three last words, or the critical one to three words, of what the other part just said. From the entire FBI negotiation manual, mirroring is the closest one to a Jedi mind trick.
Simple, and yet uncannily effective.
Did I use this trick in my own negotiations? Yes, surely, I did until I realize that my counterpart (the landlord) is also using this technique with me. This resulted in some comic situations, like the same expression being repeated three times.
Do not be a Pitbull when dealing with another Pitbull
What happens when you put two male Betta fishes in an aquarium? The same when you put two alpha roosters in a cage or two aggressive Pitbulls in a closed space.
If you play pitbull against another pitbull, you will end with lots of bruises and most likely not achieving what you could. But Chris Voss has another way to approach aggressive counterparts. It is divided into four-to-five steps:
- Use the late-night FM DJ voice. If you are in doubt of what that means, just like I did, look for Derek Gaunt on Facebook. Or just imagine a tone between Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey.
- Start with “I’m sorry . . .”
- Mirror (see the previous section)
- Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart.
- Repeat.
During this process, slow it down. Attempting to achieve final goals too early is one of the most common mistakes from negotiators. People feel when you are in a hurry, and they will feel that they are not being heard. This can undermine the gained trust, destroy the rapport, and put all your previous efforts down to the sink.
Quiet the voices in your head, listen, and put your entire focus on the other person, on what he or she is saying.
To apply that during my business meetings and negotiations with suppliers, I always reserve on my schedule a time buffer to be used if the negotiation takes an unexpected turn.
This extra time helps me to not rush the meeting, to listen properly to what the other side has to say, and calmly design a common place where we can both compromise and have mutual benefits.
How am I supposed to do that?
Of everything that Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It taught me, this was the most unexpected.
Calibrated questions have immense power.
First of all, what are calibrated questions in the first place? They avoid verbs or words like “can,” “is,” “are,” “do,” or “does.” Those verbs make closed-ended questions. Close-ended questions can be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no.”, and you don’t want that.
A quick yes or no reveals little to nothing from your counterpart; it does not create leverages to you. Escape from them, and use open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions are the ones starting with “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.”. They inspire the other side to think and then develop their position, speaking it out. Of all those questions, the best are the ones starting with what and how.
This is because who, when, and where regularly just invite the counterpart to tell facts or opinions without thinking much. The “why” must be used with care because it can backfire, presenting an unhealthy accusatory tone.
Remember the last time you went to a clinical doctor? What questions did he make to you? Chances are that most of them were open-ended, so he could have a better outlook of the patient for his diagnostic.
Open-ended questions also invite the other part to talk and slow down the tempo of the negotiation. They help you to cool down, bite your tongue, and avoid knee-jerk reactions.
Pause. Ask questions. Let the other speak. Gather more information and, if possible, bring the counterpart to your side to create solutions for you.
This brings us to the greatest question to be used by a negotiation: How am I supposed to do that?
Asking that — in a deferential way — will turn your position into a request for help. It will invite the counterpart to participate in your struggle and solve it, be it with concessions and a better offer or with a non-monetary incentive. If the other side does not offer anything, he is tacitly admitting that your demands are fair. Either way, you are building a stronger position.
Last but not least, remember that people will take more risks to avoid a loss than to earn something. Make sure the other side knows that there is something that they lose if hands are not shaken at the end of the negotiation and that a deal is in both of your best interests.
What my landlord would lose if we did not make a rent-reduction deal? The tenant. And in this crisis, how long would take him to find another tenant? Probably too much. Fortunately, he understood that.
I wish you the same success in your future negotiations!
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any significant financial decisions.
Levi Borba is the CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here.