How to win a negotiation, with former FBI hostage chief Chris Voss

• My negotiation background really started even before I became an FBI hostage negotiator because I needed to get some training. And that training was really intense, focused listening on a suicide hotline. Really learning about emotional intelligence and what drives people, and then how to navigate that in a way that calms people down, makes people make decisions.

• "Gunmen burst into the Chase Manhattan Bank in Park Slope this morning. And ever since negotiators have been trying to get them to give up."

• "Hostage negotiators used a bullhorn to try and talk to the gunman."

• "Billy, we're on the same page."

• "What persuaded the gunman finally to come out? I think it was excellent hostage negotiating."

People in intense situations aren't changing their patterns. They're still working in the same way that they would under less intense circumstances; they're still making the same decisions. So if you take hostage negotiation skills, which are navigating human emotions, and you put them in the middle of business and personal negotiations, you've actually got a great way to work your way through business negotiations, and personal and everyday life negotiations.

If you think that successful negotiations are successful because of logic or arguments or reason or compromise, you're losing money — you're leaving millions of dollars on the table. And over the course of a lifetime, that could be true for everybody. Tactically, emotional intelligent negotiation is the way you make great deals, and the way you have great long-term relationships.

And sometimes they miss that and they think that the problem is a person across the table. And that's why, oftentimes, people think of it as conflict and actually treat it as conflict. Negotiation is really about what people are making decisions based on what they care about, what's your passions? Every decision you make, you make based on what you care about, which I'm afraid by definition makes decision-making an emotional process.

First of all, understanding where the other side's coming from, and especially emotionally, and then being able to feed it back to them in a way that they signal to you that you've got it right. Understand and demonstrate that understanding. 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.

So once we completely understand where somebody's coming from, then with tactical empathy, we get a much better feel for exactly how they feel about things, how that drives them — and then how we can interact with the things that are driving them. The reasons you won't make a deal are typically more important than the reasons you will make a deal.

There's Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economics theory that says that people will put a value on losses at least twice what an equivalent gain is. So losing $5 stings at least twice as much as gaining $5. Losing $5 feels like losing $10 or even $35 — it's just a ridiculous skewing in our brains over loss.

So knowing that fear of loss is probably going to drive someone's decision-making more than anything else, tactically, I want to diffuse those fears. I want to get them out of that fear-based thinking, and I want to get them really in a more rational, open frame of mind as quickly as I can, which is why, tactically and empathetically, I want to address their fears first.

Well, labeling is the best way to practice tactical empathy: In its strictest form, it's just saying, or writing, "it seems like, it sounds like, it looks like," putting a label on the dynamic. And science is showing us now, that if we label a negative, it diminishes it.

I'll actually say to somebody ahead of time, "Look, this is gonna sound really harsh, and there's a really good chance that when I get done saying what I'm gonna say, you're not gonna like me at all." And then I'll say what I have to say, and they'll say, "Wow, that wasn't that bad." So I know I can take a very preemptive approach to negative thinking because I know what a barrier it is to decision-making...