5 Lessons in Negotiation from an FBI Hostage Negotiator

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
I'll start with this, Chris, I don't know if you can see this, but I'm writing down today's date, because today is the day that I become a better negotiator.
You are a master negotiator, former FBI negotiator for 20 plus years. Now you've been consulting, teaching the art of negotiation to business people and anybody who needs negotiation. And the funny thing about negotiation is it's the skill we all need that I feel like I personally never got taught. I never, it's all self-taught, anything you learn and one of the things I realized was so often I was negotiating and I didn't even realize it. Whether it was with an investor or with an employee or a customer, life is full of negotiations. And so I'm excited because I think this is gonna be quite useful. So maybe my starting point is this. If today was the day I'm getting better at negotiation, where do I start?

**Chris Voss** (1:05)
Yeah. Well, first thing is let the other side go first.

**Chris Voss** (1:09)
And then is the difference, actually listening is a challenge. Because when the other person is talking, there's times you want to jump in. It's almost impossible to resist. It's basically if there are five, six steps to becoming a better listener.

**Chris Voss** (1:27)
The real challenge comes at step two.

**Chris Voss** (1:30)
It's a hijack point.

**Chris Voss** (1:34)
If you're listening at all, as opposed to completely focusing on your internal dialogue where you're waiting to speak, most people get past that stage.

**Chris Voss** (1:45)
But if you're listening at all, either listening to rebut, aha, here's where you're wrong.

**Chris Voss** (1:52)
The urge to correct is irresistible.

**Chris Voss** (1:55)
I mean, it's insanely impossible to overcome. So you'll jump in there to hijack the conversation to correct. The urge to correct is so irresistible that we actually use it as one of our negotiation skills. I'll say something wrong on purpose because you will not be able to resist the urge to correct me with the truth. And it's a great way for me to trigger getting hidden information out of you that you won't regret giving me because you won't, the old saying, we don't remember what was said, we remember how we felt in the moment. The urge to correct is so satisfying that you'll never regret telling me something you shouldn't have told me because it felt so good in the moment. So that's the power of this hijack moment, hijack to correct. Now, the other thing that you'll do frequently is hijack to relate, and it's called story stealing, and you won't mean to do it. But the other person will say something that triggers this incredible memory in you of a past experience, something that happened to you, it's one of the fallacies of common ground.

**Chris Voss** (3:08)
And you'll completely be unable to resist that urge to jump in, to tell me your story.

**Chris Voss** (3:15)
Oh my God, the same thing happened to me.

**Chris Voss** (3:18)
And you'll feel incredibly good in that moment, not realizing how squashed I feel. And it's one of the people, one of the reasons why people refer to the story stealing. Because it feels so good to you, you can't imagine that what I feel is like, how, you had to have a better story than me.

**Chris Voss** (3:39)
You had to one up me.

**Chris Voss** (3:40)
You had to do better than me. And you can't imagine that that's the case because the memory it triggered in you was so good. So actually listening through that hijacked moment is one of the big challenge, probably the single biggest challenge of becoming a better negotiator. Because you got to listen to somebody all the way through. And then, and here's how powerful it is to make somebody feel heard.

**Chris Voss** (4:05)
Because just because you've been heard doesn't mean you feel heard. Just because I do understand doesn't mean that you feel understood.

**Chris Voss** (4:18)
So I've had a wedding a couple weeks ago in Ireland. And it's my first substantive conversation with the bride, the night of the, after the wedding ceremony.

**Chris Voss** (4:31)
And as you could imagine, she's unconscious on her feet.

**Chris Voss** (4:35)
She's making the rounds through the wedding reception dinner. She's obligated to speak to everybody.

**Chris Voss** (4:43)
Because that's what brides got to do with the bride and groom.

**Chris Voss** (4:45)
We're supposed to walk around, say hello to everybody, make them feel happy that they are there and thank them for showing up.

**Chris Voss** (4:52)
And all I'm doing when I'm talking to her, my first real conversation with her is telling her, what she went through that day. I'm telling her what she went through. I said, you know, this is probably easier to run a small country in South America than it was to pull off this wedding. And you're here to celebrate the union of two families and your husband is here because he's got to be. So I'm laying all this out to her, all of what she's going through, showing her completely that I understood everything that she went through leading up to that point.