Sublime

You can learn almost everything you need—and a lot more than other people would like you to know—simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your mouth shut.

What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy.

“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”

What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.

Tactical Empathy.

Every engineer, every executive, every child—all of us want to believe we are capable of the extraordinary.

The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want.

Early on in my hostage negotiation career, I learned how important it was to go directly at negative dynamics in a fearless but deferential manner.