Chris Voss - High stakes negotiation: How to negotiate like your life depends on it

Inside Influence

My next guest Chris Voss was the FBI lead kidnapping negotiator and what that means is he had to understand influence at a level and with stakes that you and I can barely imagine. During his 24 year tenure in the FBI He was trained in the art of negotiation at Scotland Yard at Harvard Law School. He is also the recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in law enforcement and has taught business negotiation at a number of prestigious universities around the world.

He is the founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group and he’s also also the author of Never split the difference which is a book that I genuinely cannot recommend highly enough. If negotiating persuading or influencing is a part of your daily life which I can promise you it is. In our conversation we jumped in to a number of really fascinating ideas. The first of which was how yes is actually the last thing we want to hear which blew my mind because I had assumed that negotiation was all about getting to a Yes and apparently not one single hostage negotiation technique is designed to get a yes. What are they designed for. You’ll have to listen. We talk about high stakes conversations. How does he prepare. His mental state going into these conversations where literally lives are on the line. We talked about delivering bad news. How to do it quickly and efficiently and get straight into what’s next.

I invite you to sit back and listen and take a fascinating peek behind the curtain of what has to have been one of the most interesting careers I’ve ever heard of. And as a result take some tools and in the words of Chris start negotiating like your life depends on it.

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