man is a very irrational beast.

“I’m sorry, no”

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?

Threats delivered without anger but with “poise”—that is, confidence and self-control—are great tools. Saying, “I’m sorry that just doesn’t work for me,” with poise, works.

I just knew we needed to trust the process. I wrote a two-page document that instructed Benjie to change course. We were going to use nearly every tactic in the active listening arsenal:

Tactical Empathy.

of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded—say, $37,263—feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation.

being right isn’t the key to a successful negotiation—having the right mindset is.

Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.