فصل 04

CHAPTER 4

BEWARE “YES”—MASTER “NO”

Let me paint a scenario we’ve all experienced: You’re at home, just before dinner, and the phone rings. It is, no surprise, a telemarketer. He wants to sell you magazine subscriptions, water filters, frozen Argentine beef—to be honest, it doesn’t matter, as the script is always the same. After butchering your name, and engaging in some disingenuous pleasantries, he launches into his pitch.

The hard sell that comes next is a scripted flowchart designed to cut off your escape routes as it funnels you down a path with no exit but “Yes.” “Do you enjoy a nice glass of water from time to time.” “Well, yes, but . . .” “Me, too. And like me I bet you like crisp, clean water with no chemical aftertaste, like Mother Nature made it.” “Well, yes, but . . .” Who is this guy with a fake smile in his voice, you wonder, who thinks he can trick you into buying something you don’t want? You feel your muscles tighten, your voice go defensive, and your heart rate accelerate.

You feel like his prey, and you are!

The last thing you want to do is say “Yes,” even when it’s the only way to answer, “Do you drink water?” Compromise and concession, even to the truth, feels like defeat. And “No,” well, “No” feels like salvation, like an oasis. You’re tempted to use “No” when it’s blatantly untrue, just to hear its sweet sound. “No, I do not need water, carbon filtered or otherwise. I’m a camel!” Now let’s think about this selling technique. It’s designed to get to “Yes” at all costs, as if “No” were death. And for many of us it is. We have all these negative connotations with “No.” We talk about the rejection of “No,” about the fear of hearing it. “No” is the ultimate negative word.

But at the end of the day, “Yes” is often a meaningless answer that hides deeper objections (and “Maybe” is even worse). Pushing hard for “Yes” doesn’t get a negotiator any closer to a win; it just angers the other side.

So if “Yes” can be so damn uncomfortable, and “No” such a relief, why have we fetishized one and demonized the other?

We have it backward. For good negotiators, “No” is pure gold. That negative provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want. “No” is a safe choice that maintains the status quo; it provides a temporary oasis of control.

At some point in their development, all negotiators have to come to grips with “No.” When you come to realize the real psychological dynamic behind it, you’ll love the word. It’s not just that you lose your fear of it, but that you come to learn what it does for you and how you can build deals out of it.

“Yes” and “Maybe” are often worthless. But “No” always alters the conversation.

“NO” STARTS THE NEGOTIATION

My fascination with “No” in all its beautiful nuance began with a conversation I had a few months before my negotiation career began.

I started my career with the Bureau as a member of the FBI SWAT team in the Pittsburgh Division but after nearly two years I was transferred to New York, where the FBI attached me to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). It was an amazing post: We spent our days and nights tracking suspected terrorists, investigating their cells, and assessing whether or how they might strike. We were untying knots of human anger in the midst of America’s biggest city, making life-and-death decisions on who was dangerous and who was just blowing hot air. The work fascinated me.

Ever since my first days with the Bureau, I had been obsessed with crisis response. The immediacy of the task enthralled me. The stakes were high. Lives hung in the balance.

The emotional terrain was complex, changing, and often conflicting. To successfully gain a hostage’s safe release, a negotiator had to penetrate the hostage-taker’s motives, state of mind, intelligence, and emotional strengths and weaknesses. The negotiator played the role of bully, conciliator, enforcer, savior, confessor, instigator, and peacemaker—and that’s just a few of the parts.

I thought I was cut out for every one of them.

A few weeks after I got to Manhattan, I showed up at the desk of Amy Bonderow, who ran the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Team in New York. I didn’t know beans about negotiating, so I went for the direct approach.

“I want be a hostage negotiator,” I said.

“Everyone does—got any training?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Any credentials?”

“Nope.” I answered.

“Any experience?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

“Do you have a degree in psychology, sociology, anything at all related to negotiation?”

“No.”

“Looks like you answered your own question,” she said. “No. Now go away.”

“Go away?” I protested. “Really?”

“Yep. As in, ‘Leave me alone.’ Everybody wants to be a hostage negotiator, and you have no résumé, experience, or skills. So what would you say in my position? You got it: ‘No.’” I paused in front of her, thinking, This is not how my negotiating career ends. I had stared down terrorists; I wasn’t going to just leave.

“Come on,” I said. “There has to be something I can do.”

Amy shook her head and gave one of those ironic laughs that mean the person doesn’t think you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell.

“I’ll tell you what. Yes, there is something you can do: Volunteer at a suicide hotline. Then come talk to me. No guarantees, got it?” she said. “Now, seriously, go away.” My conversation with Amy kicked off my awareness of the complex and hidden subtleties of conversation, the power of certain words, the seemingly unintelligible emotional truths that so often underlie intelligible exchanges.

A trap into which many fall is to take what other people say literally. I started to see that while people played the game of conversation, it was in the game beneath the game, where few played, that all the leverage lived.

In our chat, I saw how the word “No”—so apparently clear and direct—really wasn’t so simple. Over the years, I’ve thought back repeatedly to that conversation, replaying how Amy so quickly turned me down, again and again. But her “No’s” were just the gateway to “Yes.” They gave her—and me—time to pivot, adjust, and reexamine, and actually created the environment for the one “Yes” that mattered.

While assigned to the JTTF, I worked with an NYPD lieutenant named Martin. He had a hard shell, and whenever asked for anything he responded with a terse negative. After I’d gotten to know him a bit, I asked him why. “Chris,” he said, proudly, “a lieutenant’s job is to say, ‘No.’” At first, I thought that sort of automated response signaled a failure of imagination. But then I realized I did the same thing with my teenage son, and that after I’d said “No” to him, I often found that I was open to hearing what he had to say.

That’s because having protected myself, I could relax and more easily consider the possibilities.

“No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “No.” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice.” Instead, “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.

Jim Camp, in his excellent book, Start with NO,1 counsels the reader to give their adversary (his word for counterpart) permission to say “No” from the outset of a negotiation. He calls it “the right to veto.” He observes that people will fight to the death to preserve their right to say “No,” so give them that right and the negotiating environment becomes more constructive and collaborative almost immediately.

When I read Camp’s book, I realized this was something we’d known as hostage negotiators for years. We’d learned that the quickest way to get a hostage-taker out was to take the time to talk them out, as opposed to “demanding” their surrender. Demanding their surrender, “telling” them to come out, always ended up creating a much longer standoff and occasionally, actually contributed to death.

It comes down to the deep and universal human need for autonomy. People need to feel in control. When you preserve a person’s autonomy by clearly giving them permission to say “No” to your ideas, the emotions calm, the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and the other party can really look at your proposal. They’re allowed to hold it in their hands, to turn it around. And it gives you time to elaborate or pivot in order to convince your counterpart that the change you’re proposing is more advantageous than the status quo.

Great negotiators seek “No” because they know that’s often when the real negotiation begins.

Politely saying “No” to your opponent (we’ll go into this in more depth in Chapter 9), calmly hearing “No,” and just letting the other side know that they are welcome to say “No” has a positive impact on any negotiation. In fact, your invitation for the other side to say “No” has an amazing power to bring down barriers and allow for beneficial communication.

This means you have to train yourself to hear “No” as something other than rejection, and respond accordingly. When someone tells you “No,” you need to rethink the word in one of its alternative—and much more real—meanings: ? I am not yet ready to agree;

? You are making me feel uncomfortable;

? I do not understand;

? I don’t think I can afford it;

? I want something else;

? I need more information; or

? I want to talk it over with someone else.

Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or simply label their effect:

“What about this doesn’t work for you?”

“What would you need to make it work?”

“It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.”

People have a need to say, “No.” So don’t just hope to hear it at some point; get them to say it early.

PERSUADE IN THEIR WORLD

I’d like to present you with a guy named Joe Businessman as he readies himself for a negotiation. You’ve met him before. He’s the prepared type, with all his Getting to Yes strategies written out and memorized. And he’s more than ready to unleash them on the guy across the table. Joe pauses to look at his expensive suit in the mirror, fantasizing about the impressive things he’ll say and the fancy charts and graphs that’ll back up those things and leave his counterpart—his opponent—vanquished and in defeat. He is Russell Crowe in Gladiator. He is The Man.

Now allow me to let you in on a secret: None of that preparation will mean a damn thing. His negotiation style is all me, me, me, ego, ego, ego. And when the people on the other side of the table pick up those signals, they’re going to decide that it’s best to politely, even furtively, ignore this Superman . . . by saying “Yes”!

“Huh?” you say.

Sure, the word they’ll say right off is “Yes,” but that word is only a tool to get this blowhard to go away. They’ll weasel out later, claiming changing conditions, budget issues, the weather. For now, they just want to be released because Joe isn’t convincing them of anything; he’s only convincing himself.

I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment.

A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.

Human beings the world over are so used to being pursued for the commitment “yes” as a condition to find out more that they have become masters at giving the counterfeit “yes.” That’s what the people facing Joe Businessman are doing, dangling the counterfeit “yes” so they can hear more.

Whether you call it “buy-in” or “engagement” or something else, good negotiators know that their job isn’t to put on a great performance but to gently guide their counterpart to discover their goal as his own.

Let me tell you, I learned that the hard way.

Two months after talking with Amy, I started answering phones for HelpLine, the crisis hotline founded by Norman Vincent Peale.

The basic rule was that you couldn’t be with anybody on the phone for more than twenty minutes. If you did your job, it wasn’t going to take you longer than that to get them to a better place. We had a thick book of organizations we referred them to for help. It was a paramedic approach: patch them up and send them on their way.

But people in crisis only accounted for about 40 percent of the calls we got. The majority of the calls came from frequent callers. These are highly dysfunctional people, energy vampires whom no one else would listen to anymore.

We kept a list of frequent callers and when you got one, the first thing you had to do was check to see if the person had called that day, because they were only allowed one call a day. They knew it, too. A lot of times, they’d say, “Yeah, I’m Eddie. I haven’t called yet today. Go ahead and check the list. You got to talk to me.” Since I was there primarily to learn a skill, I loved the frequent callers. They were a problem, and I loved trying to figure them out. I felt I had some talent at it. I felt like a superstar.

When it came time for my performance review, they assigned me a shift supervisor named Jim Snyder. Jim was a hotline veteran and a sweetheart; the only problem was he always wanted to joke around. Jim understood that volunteer burnout was the biggest problem at a hotline, so he dedicated his time to making work fun. I became good friends with Jim.

For my review, Jim waited until I got a call and went into the monitoring room where the supervisors could listen to our calls. The call was from one of my frequent clients, a cabbie with a fear of going outside and plenty of time to tell me about it. This energy vampire (his name was Daryl) launched into his shtick about how he was going to lose his house and with it his will to live if he couldn’t work.

“Seriously, when was the last time someone tried to hurt you on the streets?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, it’s been a long time,” Daryl said.

“Like . . . ?”

“I can’t really remember a date, Chris. Maybe a year, I guess.”

“So it’s safe to say that the outside world hasn’t been too hard on you, right?”

“Yes,” Daryl said. “I suppose so.”

We went back and forth like this for a while, as I made him admit that most of us had little to fear in the world. I was feeling good about my new skills, about listening to Daryl and then “CareFronting” him, which was the slightly goofy name we gave to assertively—but caringly—responding to frequent callers.

It was all flowing, and our rapport was great. I even got Daryl to laugh a few times. By the time I was done with him, he couldn’t give me one reason not to step outside.

“Thank you, Chris,” Daryl said just before he hung up. “Thanks for doing such a great job.”

Before I went to see Jim, I leaned back in my chair and basked in that compliment. How often do you get that from a man in pain, I thought. Then I sprung up and strode toward the monitoring room, so proud I was practically buffing my nails on my shirt and patting my own back.

Jim motioned me to the chair in front of him and gave me his biggest smile. I must have returned it with twice the wattage.

“Well, Chris,” he said, still smiling. “That was one of the worst calls I ever heard.”

I stared at him, gape-jawed.

“Jim, did you hear Daryl congratulate me?” I asked. “I talked him down, man. I killed it.”

Jim smiled—I hated that smile right then—and nodded.

“That’s one of the signs, because they should be congratulating themselves when they get off the line,” he said. “They don’t need to be congratulating you. That tells me you did too much. If they think you did it—if you were the guy who killed it—how is he going to help himself? I don’t want to be harsh, but you were horrible.” As I listened to what Jim said, I felt that acid stomach rush you get when you are forced to accept that the guy dumping on you is completely right. Daryl’s response had been a kind of “yes,” but it had been anything but a true commitment “yes.” He’d made no promise to action. His “yes” had been designed to make me feel good enough to leave him alone. Daryl may not have known it, but his “yes” was as counterfeit as they came.

You see, that whole call had been about me and my ego and not the caller. But the only way to get these callers to take action was to have them own the conversation, to believe that they were coming to these conclusions, to these necessary next steps, and that the voice at the other end was simply a medium for those realizations.

Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that connection is useless unless the other person feels that they are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for creating the connection and the new ideas they have.

I nodded slowly, the fight drained out of me.

“One of the worst calls?” I said to Jim. “That’s right.”

I worked hard at reorienting myself from that point on. I asked so many questions and read so much about it that soon they had me teaching two classes for new volunteers at HelpLine: the opening class, on active listening; and the one on CareFrontation.

Got it, you say. It’s not about me. We need to persuade from their perspective, not ours. But how?

By starting with their most basic wants.

In every negotiation, in every agreement, the result comes from someone else’s decision. And sadly, if we believe that we can control or manage others’ decisions with compromise and logic, we’re leaving millions on the table. But while we can’t control others’ decisions, we can influence them by inhabiting their world and seeing and hearing exactly what they want.

Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door.

As we saw with my chat with Daryl, you’re not going to logically convince them that they’re safe, secure, or in control. Primal needs are urgent and illogical, so arguing them into a corner is just going to push your counterpart to flee with a counterfeit “Yes.” And being “nice” in the form of feigned sympathy is often equally as unsuccessful. We live in an age that celebrates niceness under various names. We are exhorted to be nice and to respect people’s feelings at all times and in every situation.

But nice alone in the context of negotiation can backfire. Nice, employed as a ruse, is disingenuous and manipulative. Who hasn’t received the short end of the stick in dealings with a “nice” salesman who took you for a ride? If you rush in with plastic niceness, your bland smile is going to dredge up all that baggage.

Instead of getting inside with logic or feigned smiles, then, we get there by asking for “No.” It’s the word that gives the speaker feelings of safety and control. “No” starts conversations and creates safe havens to get to the final “Yes” of commitment. An early “Yes” is often just a cheap, counterfeit dodge.

About five months after she’d told me to “go away,” I stopped by Amy Bonderow’s office and told her that I’d volunteered at HelpLine.

“You did?” she asked, smiling with surprise. “I tell everybody to do that. And nobody ever does.”

It turned out that Amy had started her negotiating career by volunteering at the same place. She started naming people who were now mutual friends of ours. We laughed about Jim.

In a sudden shift, Amy stopped speaking and stared at me. I shifted in my shoes as she gave me the Pause. Then she smiled.

“You get the next position.”

At that time, there were five other people aiming for the same slot, people who had psychology degrees, experience, and credentials. But I was on the road to the next hostage negotiation training course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, ahead of everybody else. My career as a negotiator had officially begun.

“NO” IS PROTECTION

Think back to the telemarketer at the beginning of this chapter. The obvious reply to his question—“Do you enjoy a nice glass of water?”—is “Yes.” But all you want to do is scream, “No!” After a question like that you just know the rest of the phone call is going to be painful.

That, in a nutshell, distills the inherent contradictions in the values we give “Yes” and “No.” Whenever we negotiate, there’s no doubt we want to finish with a “Yes.” But we mistakenly conflate the positive value of that final “Yes” with a positive value of “Yes” in general. And because we see “No” as the opposite of “Yes,” we then assume that “No” is always a bad thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Saying “No” gives the speaker the feeling of safety, security, and control. You use a question that prompts a “No” answer, and your counterpart feels that by turning you down he has proved that he’s in the driver’s seat. Good negotiators welcome—even invite—a solid “No” to start, as a sign that the other party is engaged and thinking.

Gun for a “Yes” straight off the bat, though, and your counterpart gets defensive, wary, and skittish. That’s why I tell my students that, if you’re trying to sell something, don’t start with “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” Instead ask, “Is now a bad time to talk?” Either you get “Yes, it is a bad time” followed by a good time or a request to go away, or you get “No, it’s not” and total focus.

As an exercise, the next time you get a telemarketing call, write down the questions the seller asks. I promise you’ll find that your level of discomfort correlates directly to how quickly he pushes you for “Yes.” My colleague Marti Evelsizer was the one who first opened my eyes to why “No” was better than “Yes.”

Marti was the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Coordinator in Pittsburgh at the time. She was a dynamo and a negotiating genius, which earned her huge respect both within the Bureau and with the local police. But human beings are innately jealous, and her immediate supervisor was no exception to that rule. Her success diminished him, and that made her a threat.

His jealousy got the better of him when the Pittsburgh Police Department’s Hostage Negotiation Team asked her to sit on the selection board for their new candidates. Picking her, and doing so over her boss, was an unprecedented move.

So her boss decided to remove her from her position. For ignoring her regular duties, he said. But really it was for being a threat.

When Marti sat down with her supervisor for her official dismissal, her options were few. He had every right to do as he pleased.

Marti told me that she considered a variety of scenarios. She thought about going right at his jealousy and hashing it out, or explaining how the job would reflect well on the Bureau: “Would you like our office to be honored for its expertise?” But by the time she sat down with him, she had picked one of the most strongly worded “No”-oriented setup questions I have ever heard.

“Do you want the FBI to be embarrassed?” she said.

“No,” he answered.

“What do you want me to do?” she responded.

He leaned back in his chair, one of those 1950s faux-leather numbers that squeak meaningfully when the sitter shifts. He stared at her over his glasses and then nodded ever so slightly. He was in control.

“Look, you can keep the position,” he said. “Just go back out there and don’t let it interfere with your other duties.”

And a minute later Marti walked out with her job intact.

When I heard Marti do that, I was like, “Bang!” By pushing for a “No,” Marti nudged her supervisor into a zone where he was making the decisions. And then she furthered his feelings of safety and power with a question inviting him to define her next move.

The important thing here is that Marti not only accepted the “No”; she searched it out and embraced it.

At a recent sales conference, I asked the participants for the one word they all dread. The entire group yelled, “No!” To them—and to almost everyone—“No” means one thing: end of discussion.

But that’s not what it means.

“No” is not failure. Used strategically it’s an answer that opens the path forward. Getting to the point where you’re no longer horrified by the word “No” is a liberating moment that every negotiator needs to reach. Because if your biggest fear is “No,” you can’t negotiate. You’re the hostage of “Yes.” You’re handcuffed. You’re done.

So let’s undress “No.” It’s a reaffirmation of autonomy. It is not a use or abuse of power; it is not an act of rejection; it is not a manifestation of stubbornness; it is not the end of the negotiation.

In fact, “No” often opens the discussion up. The sooner you say “No,” the sooner you’re willing to see options and opportunities that you were blind to previously. Saying “No” often spurs people to action because they feel they’ve protected themselves and now see an opportunity slipping away.

Since I’ve demystified “No” for myself, I’ve found the ideas, perceptions, and baggage that people have with that two-letter word to be fascinating. To me, it’s like watching a movie or a music video from the 1980s for the umpteenth time. You can identify with the experience—while simultaneously being conscious of the fact that the world, and you, have moved on.

Today, I coach my students to learn to see “No” for what it is. Rather than harming them or those they negotiate with, “No” protects and benefits all parties in an exchange. “No” creates safety, security, and the feeling of control. It’s a requirement to implementable success. It’s a pause, a nudge, and a chance for the speaker to articulate what they do want.

As you can see, “No” has a lot of skills.

? “No” allows the real issues to be brought forth;

? “No” protects people from making—and lets them correct—ineffective decisions;

? “No” slows things down so that people can freely embrace their decisions and the agreements they enter into;

? “No” helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable, and in control of their decisions;

? “No” moves everyone’s efforts forward.

One of my grad school students, a political fund-raiser named Ben Ottenhoff, drove home this lesson with a bang. For years, he’d been using a traditional “Yes pattern” fund-raising script to raise money for Republican congressional candidates.

FUND-RAISER: Hello, can I speak with Mr. Smith?

MR. SMITH: Yes, this is he.

FUND-RAISER: I’m calling from the XYZ Committee, and I wanted to ask you a few important questions about your views on our economy today. Do you believe that gas prices are currently too high?

MR. SMITH: Yes, gas prices are much too high and hurting my family.

FUND-RAISER: Do you believe that the Democrats are part of the problem when it comes to high gas prices?

MR. SMITH: Yes, President Obama is a bad person

FUND-RAISER: Do you think we need change in November?

MR. SMITH: Yes, I do.

FUND-RAISER: Can you give me your credit card number so you can be a part of that change?

In theory at least, the “Yes” answers built up a reservoir of positivity that exploded into donations when requested at the end of the script. The problem, in reality, was that the “Yes pattern” scripts had been giving poor rates of return for years. All the steps were “Yes,” but the final answer was invariably “No.” Then Ben read Jim Camp’s book Start with NO in my class and began to wonder if “No” could be a tool to boost donations. Ben knew that giving the potential donors a no-hard-feelings way to get off the call was going to be a tough sell to his grassroots fund-raisers, because it goes against everything they had been trained to do. But Ben’s a smart guy, so instead of totally swapping scripts he had a small group of his grassroots guys test-market a “No”-oriented script.

FUND-RAISER: Hello, can I speak with Mr. Smith?

MR. SMITH: Yes, this is he.

FUND-RAISER: I’m calling from the XYZ Committee, and I wanted to ask you a few important questions about your views on our economy today. Do you feel that if things stay the way they are, America’s best days are ahead of it?

MR. SMITH: No, things will only get worse.

FUND-RAISER: Are you going to sit and watch President Obama take the White House in November without putting up a fight?

MR. SMITH: No, I’m going to do anything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

FUND-RAISER: If you want do something today to make sure that doesn’t happen, you can give to XYZ Committee, which is working hard to fight for you.

See how clearly that swaps “Yes” for “No” and offers to take a donation if Mr. Smith wants? It puts Mr. Smith in the driver’s seat; he’s in charge. And it works! In a truly remarkable turnaround, the “No”-oriented script got a 23 percent better rate of return.

The only sad part of Ben’s tale is that despite the huge improvement in results, he couldn’t roll out the script to all his fund-raisers. It went against fund-raising orthodoxy, and longtime fund-raisers like the fake comfort of the “Yes.” Genius is often missed the first time around, right?

One negotiating genius who’s impossible to miss is Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I always quote to my students one of his best lines on negotiation: “Every ‘No’ gets me closer to a ‘Yes.’” But then I remind them that extracting those “No’s” on the road to “Yes” isn’t always easy.

There is a big difference between making your counterpart feel that they can say “No” and actually getting them to say it. Sometimes, if you’re talking to somebody who is just not listening, the only way you can crack their cranium is to antagonize them into “No.” One great way to do this is to mislabel one of the other party’s emotions or desires. You say something that you know is totally wrong, like “So it seems that you really are eager to leave your job” when they clearly want to stay. That forces them to listen and makes them comfortable correcting you by saying, “No, that’s not it. This is it.” Another way to force “No” in a negotiation is to ask the other party what they don’t want. “Let’s talk about what you would say ‘No’ to,” you’d say. And people are comfortable saying “No” here because it feels like self-protection. And once you’ve gotten them to say “No,” people are much more open to moving forward toward new options and ideas.

“No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away.

Think of it like this: No “No” means no go.

EMAIL MAGIC: HOW NEVER TO BE IGNORED AGAIN

There’s nothing more irritating than being ignored. Being turned down is bad, but getting no response at all is the pits. It makes you feel invisible, as if you don’t exist. And it’s a waste of your time. We’ve all been through it: You send an email to someone you’re trying to do business with and they ignore you. Then you send a polite follow-up and they stonewall you again. So what do you do?

You provoke a “No” with this one-sentence email.

Have you given up on this project?

The point is that this one-sentence email encapsulates the best of “No”-oriented questions and plays on your counterpart’s natural human aversion to loss. The “No” answer the email demands offers the other party the feeling of safety and the illusion of control while encouraging them to define their position and explain it to you.

Just as important, it makes the implicit threat that you will walk away on your own terms. To stop that from happening—to cut their losses and prove their power—the other party’s natural inclination is to reply immediately and disagree. No, our priorities haven’t changed. We’ve just gotten bogged down and . . . If you’re a parent, you already use this technique instinctively. What do you do when your kids won’t leave the house/park/mall? You say, “Fine. I’m leaving,” and you begin to walk away. I’m going to guess that well over half the time they yell, “No, wait!” and run to catch up. No one likes to be abandoned.

Now, this may seem like a rude way to address someone in business, but you have to get over that. It’s not rude, and though it’s direct, it’s cloaked with the safety of “No.” Ignoring you is what’s rude. I can tell you that I’ve used this successfully not just in North America, but with people in two different cultures (Arabic and Chinese) famous for never saying “No.” KEY LESSONS

Using this chapter’s tools in daily life is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society’s biggest social dictums. That is, “Be nice.”

We’ve instrumentalized niceness as a way of greasing the social wheels, yet it’s often a ruse. We’re polite and we don’t disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction. But by turning niceness into a lubricant, we’ve leeched it of meaning. A smile and a nod might signify “Get me out of here!” as much as it means “Nice to meet you.” That’s death for a good negotiator, who gains their power by understanding their counterpart’s situation and extracting information about their counterpart’s desires and needs. Extracting that information means getting the other party to feel safe and in control. And while it may sound contradictory, the way to get there is by getting the other party to disagree, to draw their own boundaries, to define their desires as a function of what they do not want.

As you try to put the chapter’s methods to use, I encourage you to think of them as the anti–“niceness ruse.” Not in the sense that they are unkind, but in the sense that they are authentic. Triggering “No” peels away the plastic falsehood of “Yes” and gets you to what’s really at stake. Along the way, keep in mind these powerful lessons: ? Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it.

? “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning.

? “Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman.

? Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” ? Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively.

? Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.

? If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”-oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.