Let’s go back to the cranky grandfather. He’s grumpy because he never sees the family and he feels left out. So he’s speaking up in his own dysfunctional way to get attention. How do you fix that? Instead of addressing his grumpy behavior, you acknowledge his sadness in a nonjudgmental way. You head him off before he can really get started. “We

Humanize yourself. Use your name to introduce yourself. Say it in a fun, friendly way. Let them enjoy the interaction, too. And get your own special price.

The most powerful word in negotiations is “Fair.”

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

In theory, leverage is the ability to inflict loss and withhold gain. Where does your counterpart want to gain and what do they fear losing? Discover these pieces of information, we are told, and you’ll build leverage over the other side’s perceptions, actions, and decisions. In practice, where our irrational perceptions are our reality, loss and

THE POWER OF HOPES AND DREAMS Once you know your counterpart’s religion and can visualize what he truly wants out of life, you can employ those aspirations as a way to get him to follow you. Every engineer, every executive, every child—all of us want to believe we are capable of the extraordinary. As children, our daydreams feature ourselves as

Experience will have taught them that they are best served by holding multiple hypotheses—about the situation, about the counterpart’s wants, about a whole array of variables—in their mind at the same time.

while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.

“Let’s put price off to the side for a moment and talk about what would make this a good deal.”