The Ledger, every show

“In concise emails, an email that's, once you get north of five lines, you're bordering on it being too long.”

“You can say it in a way you can demonstrate understanding without agreement. This is the way it seems to you. I'm going to seem like a jerk. That doesn't say that you are. It's an awareness of the impact that you're going to have on the other side, based on th…”

“These are neurochemical reactions. These are not voluntary reactions. This is hard science. These are neurochemicals. I can pick your brain up or down based on a tone of my voice. Now you can fight it, but you can't stop me from triggering the reaction.”

“Your first move is to remove yourself as a threat. Then you're out of conflict because you're no longer a threat.”

“Cause I'll make fun of myself. And if somebody really wants to run with it, then I know, and then I know, all right, so if you're ignoring my feelings, you're ignoring the feelings of other people on a team as well.”

“Basically in inauthentic is exhausting, and they can't keep up with the lies. So if they're hiding from you who they are, when they get tired, you're going to see who they are. So they'll be able to keep it up early in the morning, fresh cup of coffee, rocking…”

“I'd make an observation. I'd do what we call a cold read. Take a look at their face, do a read, say, you look preoccupied. You look troubled. You look happy. You look like your thoughts are someplace else. Just kind of whatever my gut instinct, intuition tells…”

“We believe that a mirror is one to three words. Once you get north of five, that's too many words.”

“The reason why it's superior to a question, if I say, what did you mean by that? You'll probably repeat what you just said with the exact words, possibly even louder, sort of like an American overseas. If you repeat the exact words louder, it automatically bec…”

“There's no way around the fact that negotiations is a perishable skill. There just isn't. And anybody, if you're not working at your communication skills, you're keeping your emotional intelligence up, it goes dormant. It doesn't go away. But it does go dorman…”

“There's nothing more effective to clearing negatives than just calling out the elephant in the room, not denying it, not explaining it, just calling it out. That is neuroscience, Proven the best way to get rid of negatives.”

“When you're curious, you also have pushed fear out of your brain. You can't be afraid and curious simultaneously. When you're curious, you're in a positive state of mind, which is smarter. You hear better. You see patterns more quickly. You see deals faster. W…”

“When you're saying no to one of four things. You're saying no to either the terms, the price, the behavior, or the person.”

“Real good negotiation is real good emotional intelligence, and I like taking a deep dive into people and connecting with them.”

“Your success rate in anything is higher as soon as you sort of forget about failing and focus on learning”

“Cause negotiation skills are perishable and you don't know they wrote invisibly.”

“If you talk out loud in a soothing, calming voice, that voice comes out of your mouth, it goes through the air, comes back into your ear, it hits your mirror neurons, it calms you down.”

“If you think of yourself as a direct and honest person, And you're just trying to get your point across. You're so blunt that it obscures your message.”

“The real issue with any deal is implementation. It's not agreement. Yes is nothing without how. I can give you fake yeses all day long, and you're never going to get what you wanted.”

“We were in competition for a negotiation contract with one of the major telecommunications companies, and through the process of that found out that fully 50% of the deals they sign never get implemented.”

“She starts a conversation by saying, I've got a lousy proposition for you, which is enormously disarming.”

“70% of the buy decisions are made more to avoid loss than to accomplish gains.”

“Make a list of the stuff you want to deny. And instead of denying it, cause denying things makes it worse. Just pull it out, you know, and say, look, you know, I know that my industry has a reputation for being fast talking salesman.”

“If I ask you a question, it has a tendency to get you to stop and think and contemplate and formulate an answer. If I just use a label, it seems like you've got something on your mind. There's something about that that instead of you formulating an answer, it …”

“Any negative that's there, ignoring it is leaving a landmine, but calling it out gives you your best chance at eliminating it as an issue. Whether you're an unknown startup or whether or not you got a strong competitor.”

“The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don't know you're in. So first of all, anytime the word yes is in your, is in the air, somebody's trying to get a yes out of somebody or something, you're in a negotiation. Or if I want is in your brain you're in a…”

“The commodity that's in each and every negotiation is time, not price, not money. Dollars are not always involved, but time always is.”

“Never be mean to somebody who could hurt you by doing nothing. So the reality is that's probably true of everybody you interact with because you're interacting with them because you want them to do something.”

“We found out the labels were the most universally applicable skill of all the tools.”

“Teenagers have learned that once a parent says no, they're probably actually more persuadable. Because the act of saying no makes people feel safe.”

“Well, flow is where you're padding recognition and your decision making is at its peak. Your mental endurance increases and your overall performance is much better.”

“Don't laugh because you're in a good mood. Force a laugh, and you'll actually feel better chemically. You'll trigger a chemical change.”

“And we have some people we're doing business with that I really don't like. But it benefits my company a lot, and so I'm not kidding myself about who I'm dealing with.”

“So I'd tell my younger self, Just be nicer. Don't change any of your positions. Don't go in any other directions. Just be nicer about it. You get a lot farther.”

“New ideas is such a threat to their self concept. They're horrified that maybe they were doing it wrong”

“I think everybody's got two lines of code, somewhere deep down inside. Somebody said something to everybody when we were little kids, that was like our two line of, two lines of magic code in there, and figuring out what that code is, those two lines, is what …”

“Let's say they're yammering on about the PTA. I'll probably say, what do you love about the PTA? Now that's probably going to trigger an instantaneous state change in them and change the conversation. And then I can dig into it deeply and pretty soon I'm going…”

“Anyway, I'm listening to him at a talk one time, and he says, you're six times more likely to make a deal with somebody you like.”

“Warren Buffett, he scans the headlines, period. He doesn't read the articles. But it, you know, he's known for scanning the headlines of several papers.”

“We're actually, about a year from now, I expect the operations manual for Never Split the Difference. We're working on that now. All the things that we've learned, how we've up-leveled the skills, we really are categorizing them at three levels now. Which we d…”

“But the mirror actually gets them to rearticulate it again with slightly different words.”

“Also, I'm very intentioned about my important phone calls. I don't take a call while I'm driving, while I'm walking, I'm sitting and listening”