Why Knowing Your Alternative Is the Most Important Skill in Any Negotiation | John Richardson

Key Takeaway

Master reciprocity through small gestures. When negotiating, give someone a small favor first—whether it's coffee, a helpful task, or genuine recognition. People have 'accounting insensitivity'—they know they owe you but not how much. This psychological principle, used by FBI hostage negotiators, can turn a sandwich into a hostage release. Start today: do one unexpected small favor for someone you'll negotiate with later.

Episode Overview

John Richardson, who has taught negotiation at Harvard Law School and MIT, breaks down negotiation as a performance skill that requires practice, not just knowledge. He shares tactical insights from FBI hostage negotiation, explains why lying is strategically unsound, and provides practical tools for managing emotions and building trust in any negotiation—from business deals to family discussions.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Knowing Your Alternative Is the Most Important Skill in Any Negotiation | John Richardson from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host Dan Harris. Today we are talking about the psychology and skill of negotiation. You might think of negotiation as something that happens only in a business context, but we are negotiating all day long with our children if we have them, with our romantic partners if we have one, on and on. And there really is a skill here that you can practice. Some of us might think we are bad negotiators, but we can get better if only by 10%.

My guest today is John Richardson, who has taught negotiation at Harvard Law School and MIT's Sloan School of Management. And he's got a new book called Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want. We're going to talk about why lying is stupid. uh all sorts of healthy manipulation tools. That's his formulation, healthy manipulation, how to create trust, how to control your emotions in a negotiation, how to ask for more and when to say no, and much more. This is a great conversation, super super practical.

John Richardson coming up after this quick break. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I highly recommend that you head on over to danh harris.com to check out my newish meditation app 10% with Dan Harris. Right now we're in the middle of this really cool series where every Sunday the legendary Dharma teacher Sharon Salsberg is leading a live session where she does some teachings on the Buddha's eight-fold path. You can think of the eight-fold path as the Buddha's foundational list. It's his cookbook for leading a happy life.

Sharon does some teaching on one aspect of the path. She guides a meditation and then she takes your questions. We're in the middle of it right now, but it's not too late to join. You can sign up at danharris.com danharris.com danharris.com and you can watch the first few sessions on video replay and then join the rest of them live. It's really cool. One of the keys, I believe, and this is an evidence-based assertion. One of the keys to starting a habit or maintaining a habit like meditation is doing it with other people.

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To get your 20% off, text DN to 64,000. That's dan to 64,000. DN to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. John Richardson, welcome to the show. Thanks. Real pleasure to be here, Dan. So, let's start on a definitional tip here. You you have taught negotiation at Harvard and MIT. You've written a book called Never Settle. What is negotiation? negotiation? negotiation? I'd say it's anytime you're trying to persuade someone to change the decision that they're going to make. Um, and I guess you could say, well, okay, that that applies to like a one-way thing like sales, and that's true.

I guess negotiation is you're both trying to do it at the same time with each other or with a larger group. And how often are we negotiating? Because I I think one could take a narrow view of the word negotiation and think, "Oh, well, this is only like in specific business circumstances, but I think you you might take a broader view." view." view." Yeah. I'd say, you know, when are you trying to persuade somebody? You're trying to persuade the kids to do the dishes. you know, you're trying to um get your wife to agree on where to go to vacation.

Uh you know, really anytime that you're working on a problem that affects more than one person and you're trying to get them to see your side of it. Yeah. That's negotiation. You call negotiation a performance skill. skill. skill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean by that? You know, there are a lot of things that you learn at college that are just things, you know, the periodic table of elements, you know, where I was just taking a course, uh, advanced EMT course. There's a million things to know about, you know, okay, if someone has, you know, blood splotches on the outside, you know, on the sides of their abdomen, what does that mean?

You know, there's like an incredible list of things to remember about that. But [snorts] then performance skills are things like, well, how do you intubate somebody? How do you, you know, driving a car is a performance skill, playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, those things, you know, yes, there's there's knowledge about them. There's things to know about how a car works, but that knowing all those things doesn't mean that you can drive. Therefore, something like negotiation or any performance skill requires both learning and practice.

It requires really endless repetition and you know a great deal of drill again and again. And it especially helps to break very complicated big things like negotiation or like say playing baseball down into little micro skills like okay well how do you field the grounder and then how do you decide where you're going to throw it and then how do you decide you know how do you make the throw? All those skills can be practiced individually. And so what we're trying to do in the book is to break down all the different skills you need in negotiation into very discreet little micro skills and then devise ways that you can practice those, you know, by manipulating your family and friends.

Uh and then when you get better at all those things and put them together, then you've got something for negotiation skill. skill. skill. Well, you use the word manipulation. What what is what is the difference between because I think you you you differentiate between manipulation and influence? influence? influence? Manipulation carries a connotation that it's underhanded and that it's to the detriment of the person who's being manipulated. But I think about manipulation like if you have a six-year-old and they get a present from their grandmother for their birthday, you tell them, "Hey, you know, write a thank you note and you get more presents that way." In a sense, that's a manipulation, right?

Both of the kid and of grandma. But grandma doesn't mind at all getting a thank you note, even if grandma recognizes that as a form of manipulation. I think to me the difference is manipulation just implies you are consciously choosing behavior in order to have an effect on the other person. But what makes it good or bad is [clears throat] are you doing that for the benefit of the other person or are you harming them? So I'd say, you know, manipulation can be for good or evil.

And and yes, I want the people who read the book to use it for good, not evil. At least in my mind, the test is if they said, "Okay, hey, what are you doing right now? Why did you say that?" Could I tell them honestly without them getting mad at me and if I can, that I think it's fine to do. That makes sense. There's there's healthy and unhealthy, beneficial, and pernitious manipulation. I buy that. What's the difference though between manipulation and influence? what I guess you could call the moral veilance.

Are you doing it deceptively and maliciously versus, you know, are you doing it in order to benefit the both of you? Um, other than that difference, I I think it's pretty much the same thing. You mentioned something about lying. Is it ever okay to lie in the negotiation? See, okay, so this is tricky because I always say to my students, um, I wasn't hired I was hired to teach you what works and what doesn't. not, you know, I'm not your priest or your rabbi or imam or whatever.

Um, and so I try to stay away from the moral case. Um, but at least I I don't think I need to approach even though I do have strong moral feelings about it. I feel you don't even need to get to that because I think my experience is that lying is tactically very unsound. all the people who are listening now. I'm imagining that at one point or another they were listening to somebody and thought, "Okay, this person is lying to me right now." Most of the time though, we don't say that.

And that causes people who use that strategy to greatly overestimate their success rate. They think they're getting away with it much more than they are. And the price that you pay in relationships and in people being willing to trust you, I think, is enormous. Um, the other thing is I, you know, as I was alluding to before, negotiation is really complicated. I never think that I have enough bandwidth to understand everything that's happening. Even in a one-on-one negotiation, if I have to make up a lie and then keep track of my lies and then try to stay consistent in the future with my lies, that's just so much bandwidth that I could have been using more productively on something else.

And so my main take is like I discourage lying. I think it's bad strategy. I think it hurts you more than it helps you even if you're good at it. Um I was talking with I don't know if you know this guy Chris Voss. He's he's got a master class. He's a former FBI hostage negotiator. negotiator. negotiator. Yeah, I've heard him. Good friend, really good guy. Um but I was we were talking about this one time and I was saying yes. I don't think lying is a good strategy.

And he said, "Oh yeah, we almost never lie." And I'm like almost never? are like, "What are you talking about? How could you, you know, like some guy's robbing a bank and you lie to him to get him to surrender? He could he's going to get out in 5 years and then, you know, you're going to have to talk to him again. What are you going to do then?" He said, "Oh my gosh, we would never lie to that guy." So, I said, "Okay, well, who do you lie to?" He said, "Well, if you go to your ex-wife's house and we think you're about to kill the kids, then we'll say, hey, you know, you wanted a getaway car.

if you come open the curtains in the living room, you can see it out on the curb. curb. curb. Um, but the only lie they'll do, they they won't lie to anybody who their plan is that that person is still in the world tomorrow. world tomorrow. world tomorrow. They'll lie only to save lives and only to save lives by taking one. Oh, I see. I see. Open the open the curtains up. curtains up. curtains up. Yeah. But but they don't want anybody walking around who they've ever lied to because that's that's very damaging to their ability to deal with people in the future.

future. future. Right. And that's true for the rest of us. We This goes to your argument about lying being tactically unsound. Another reason is that that the person you're negotiating with and to whom you are lying, you may have another negotiation with them later or they may have uh influence on other people that you have to do business with. That all redounds negatively. negatively. negatively. Exactly. And you know like when I first started working as a lawyer and this was you know I think the first year that they had email that you could have in like a private company rather than on you know DARPANet but the first thing oh I got a case it's against this guy he went to Cornell in 1996 who knows him you know and and reputation went around even back then really fast but now with social media you know I I got to assume everybody you're talking to knows everything about who you talked to previously.

You mentioned your book again. It's called Never Settle. Let's uh get into some of the practical advice in the book. Uh chapter one is called Give Them a Sandwich. What does that mean? mean? mean? Okay. Well, that also comes from this FBI hostage negotiation stuff. And um so I met Chris when he was taking I think uh a medical absence. He had he had trouble with his knees from the FBI. and he came up to Harvard to see, you know, what he could steal from the um academic people cuz at at that time there were people in law schools and business schools doing negotiation and law enforcement was doing it and there was really no interchange between them and he's the one who really like bridged that gap and got them talking to each other.

I really wanted to attend the course at Quantico and you know the FBI hostage negotiation course but he's like yeah no look that's for international dignitaries but he said when when he retired he got a gig teaching negotiation to the UAE government you know military and intelligence and law enforcement people and he invited me to come along on that. So I learned a lot about hostage negotiation from that. And one of the techniques they use is well there's different kinds of hostage situations, right? But one is what they call an unplanned barricade.

Your plan is to rob a bank or you know a convenience store or whatever it is and the cops show up and so you weren't planning to take hostages but you kind of fell into it. And for that situation, you know, it used to be about 5050 if someone was going to get shot because they would just say, "Hey, you know, you got 10 minutes and then we're coming in, so surrender now." Um, now what they do is they throw you in a phone and they just talk to you as long as you want to talk.

And they because it's unplanned, the guy's in there, uh, you know, in the bank, he doesn't have food or water or anything. Um, they wait for him to get hungry. And when he says he's hungry, they say, "Oh, okay. like let me see if I can figure something out. You know, what do you want to eat? And what they really want is to get the guy to name his favorite sandwich in the whole world. And okay, you tell me what deli I'm going to go to to get it and we'll get it exactly as you like it.

And then they give the guy the sandwich and then they, you know, you call him back and you say, "Hey, you know, the lieutenant here, he's mad at me for giving you a sandwich, but I think you're a good guy. Um, could you do me a favor and let one of the hostages go?" And they almost always do. always do. always do. And what what happens is that people have a very deep psychological need. Um and Bob Chelini talks about in this book uh influence but he calls it the principle of reciprocity that once you do something nice for somebody they feel indebted and they feel like they need to do something nice back.

So, Chielini used to do these experiments like, you know, pick a hundred random names out of the phone book and send them Christmas cards and then see how many he gets back from those people the next year and it'd be like 85 and they don't they have no idea who he is. Like, oh, was he at Janet's wedding? I don't know. Uh, but just send him a Christmas card back. They feel, you know, that they need to reciprocate the same behavior. Um, but people are very, very bad about um figuring out how much they owe.

They call the uh behavioral economists call that accounting insensitivity. They know they owe you, but they don't know how much they owe you. And so when you give somebody a sandwich, they'll give you back a hostage, which is, you know, worth. So like there's this guy um for the NYPD, Dominic Msino, and I he used to every time he gave a lecture, he would start off by saying like, "What is the value of a human life?" And people would say, "Oh, it's infinite." And you there's nothing more valuable.

And he'd go like, "Ah, three cigarettes usually does it." Okay. So, how do we scale this? Give them a sandwich idea into our negotiations both at work and at home. Just always be looking for the chance to do somebody a favor. Um, if you go get coffee before a meeting, get two and bring the extra one. And whoever's sitting next to you, hey, you want a coffee? No, I'm good. Okay. Does anybody else want one? Um, [clears throat] anytime you know you go on a trip, bring back little, you know, snacks from the place where you're going.

And if you constantly give people little things, they feel the need uh to give things back to you. Like for an example, we give this as a homework assignment to students after the first week of negotiation class. And this Japanese student said, "Oh yeah, you know, I was making some traditional soup, so I made extra and gave some to the guys who lived across the hall from me in the dorm." And the next week in Boston, there was a blizzard. And she goes down to shovel her car out and her car is already shoveled out.

and there's a note on her windshield says like that soup was really good. If you do, you know, make an effort to always be doing nice little things for people, um, usually it comes back around to you and they'll very frequently give you much more than you gave initially and that's a great way to start a negotiation. Um, anytime, you know, you don't want to say, "Hey, I'll take 10% off the price of the house I'm selling you, but hey, you know, can I bring you a cup of tea or something?" um you know you I'm sure you've been in car dealerships where they give you coffee right that's what they're doing okay but so that now this kind of brings me back to the question of manip manipulation because um you know I come at things from a Buddhist perspective and you know there's this idea that you know you should do generosity you should be generous because it's you know just good for your own mind um without any expectation of return but what we're describing here really is generosity with some sort of expectation.

And what I would advise people to do is the reason it's give them a sandwich is it's because it's something so small that if you give it away that's fine. [snorts] You they won't always give you something back. And I would recommend only giving things that you're happy to let go of and that you won't feel, you know, any attachment to if they go away and you don't get anything in exchange. I mean, if if what happens is you give somebody a sandwich and he's that person is a little less hungry and more satisfied and maybe is a little bit nicer to somebody else, you know, later in the day, great, mission accomplished.

You know, it's it's like going fishing and the fish takes your worm and you don't catch the fish. That's right. That's fine. It's all part of it. the more generous any individual is that that ultimately that ultimately that ultimately creates the world in which they live that's more filled with generous people surrounding them cuz that behavior is what's the word I want uh infectious doing good to other people tends to make other people do more good and is an end in itself whether or not it gets you anything um if you're really expecting something I think it doesn't work as Well, Well, Well, um, and there there's this other story in the book, my co-author AIA, the guy who lived next door to her, it turned out her driveway was on an easement on his property, and he was really mad about that.

Gave her a hard time about it all the time. Uh, but then she saw him working outside on a hot day, clearing brush, and she went out and brought him a glass of lemonade, and then, you know, he was nicer to her after that, and, you know, she gave him lemonade a couple more times, and he got nicer and nicer. And then they brought him some cherries that they grew on their farm and you know pretty soon he was sweet as pie and then they asked for another easement for a gas line.

Uh and he was like of course no problem. Um whereas he had been you know very bitter about that before. If I understand it right the Buddhist idea of benevolence and wishing well and doing good to everyone. Um, it may be, you know, important as a spiritual discipline in and of itself, but it's also pretty smart advice for life since behaviors and emotions are contagious. Best to create as much benevolence and positivity and mutual trust because uh it's it's not only going to redown to your benefit but the benefit of the world.

And if a negotiation uh should uh uh erupt, um that trust, it will likely grease the skids. Let me give you the next version of it, and you tell me if we're getting into questionable manipulation territory. So, when we first got married, my wife, you know, um they don't like to in her family growing up, they didn't like to ask for things directly. They kind of hinted at things. So she would say, you know, we'd be sitting on the couch watching TV and she'd say, "Oh yeah, the garbage is getting kind of full." And I'd be like, "Sure is.

Does that mean you're going to empty it?" And that, you know, wasn't working well for her. And so then she switched to another technique, which was she'd open the dishwasher and start unloading the dishwasher, the clean dishes out of it. And she knows I don't like to do that. And then she'd say, "Hey, while I'm doing this, do you mind taking out the garbage?" Now, she's very specifically trying and she knows what she wants to get out of me. And then that reciprocity instinct hits me, but my usual defense, which is, well, you got two arms and two legs.

Why don't you do it? You know, it's taken away because she's doing something else. But what she's ended up doing is she did something for the good of the couple and she got something that she got me to do for the good of the couple. So, I would say that's still, you know, benevolent even though it's, you know, very self-consciously getting me to do what she wants. Yeah. I've heard I've heard it argued that if you want to change behavior in anybody, but but definitely in a spouse or a romantic partner, positive reinforcement is a a powerful path and and modeling the behavior you want to see.

You know, whatever you want them to do, you do it first. When my brother Matt and I were children, our dad wanted to teach us about how to uh manage money. And so he created something called a daddy bank. He gave us money, but he didn't actually hand us cash. He had a a large yellow legal pad of paper and he kind of tracked our accounts as they acred interest and we could come look at the yellow pad of paper anytime we wanted to see our money grow.

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Savings provided by Cash App, a Block Incorporated brand. Visit cash.applegalodcast Visit cash.applegalodcast Visit cash.applegalodcast for full disclosures. How do you manage your emotions when you're in a negotiation? I'll tell you a quick story. I was in a protracted negotiation several years ago and I was on a zoom uh and it was me and my counterparties and my brother who was helping me in the negotiation and then lawyers for both sides and it was a multi-hour Zoom and at one point somebody said something that um made me upset.

Uh, it probably wasn't even the other person's fault. And I went on an overly long diet tribe and I could see in the corner of my screen because I had my text messages open that my brother was saying, "Shut up. You're making everything worse." Uh, and so I I muted myself and I didn't talk for the rest of the time, but I was so upset that I for the first time in my life, I I was literally shaking not only on the call, but for hours afterwards.

And so it I I say all of this because I'm curious as somebody who teaches negotiation professionally, how how do we keep our [ __ ] together when we're in these highstakes situations? highstakes situations? highstakes situations? It's a really important point because as you point out, negotiation is kind of an emotional maelstrom for a lot of people. A lot of people are really anxious about it about, oh, am I going to get taken advantage of? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to be too mean and hurt the relationship?

Um, and then you know, mammals in conflict over resources, you know, evol you know, for the last 500 million years, the way that goes is you resolve it through violence. And so your body is kind of expecting that and going into your, you know, parasympathetic fight orflight mode, uh, anytime you're disagreeing. Um, so a couple things that I found really helpful in tamping down my own emotions. The first is just preparation. You know, if you can spend an hour es and if it's with somebody else, if you and your brother can sit down for an hour before this negotiation and say, "Okay, what do we want to get out of this?

What's important to us?" So our interests, what are their interests? What's motivating them? What do they care about? What arguments can we make about what's fair and right? Instead of just pounding the table and threatening them, can we say, "Hey, this is the reason why this is the morally correct resolution here, or at least we would argue that it is, you know, and and be ready for their they'll probably have their own arguments about what's morally right." Um, and then think about how could we invite them into making up ideas together for the benefit of both parties?

because if you can get people doing that that t then really lower the emotional temperature. Um so that kind of preparation I think it's usually beneficial and I think that's in the the last appendix like a cheat sheet for doing that kind of preparation. Another thing is just knowing in advance that you're going to get emotional in the negotiation and kind of having your you know emotional fit first. You know, if you can think about, okay, what's what could they say that would really annoy me and get me ticked off or what am I already mad about them from in the past and spend a little time processing those feelings that will probably make them less intense when they happen.

And then there's another one. Um, I saw in one of your shorts on YouTube, you talked about well recognizing that your thoughts are just thoughts. there are these little, you know, quantum of energy going through your brain and they don't have to, you know, be everything in the world. Realize that your emotions are signals from that unconscious part of your mind that are designed to help you. Uh, in in essence, your emotions are I think of them sometimes as like the dog barking. You know, I I'm a little bit worried any minute now that the FedEx guy might pull up to my house, my dogs are going to go crazy.

Well, you know, sometimes when the dogs go crazy, it is a bear. So, it's a good idea to listen to your feelings and investigate them and see what's causing them, but sometimes it's just, you know, the postman and it's fine. You can say, "All right, thanks a lot dogs for barking and letting me know there was somebody out there, but it's all good." And, you know, that at least for me, that's what um helps me calm down is to say, "Okay, I'm having a feeling about this.

I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling angry. Why is that? Okay. Is that feeling serving me right now? And then that becomes a lot easier to let go of. And that itself is based on one of these FBI techniques. They call it emotion labeling. So in another one of the kinds of hostage negotiation is what they call expressive. You know, somebody's thinking about committing suicide or thinking about hurting somebody not for any rational reason, but just because they're so upset. And what they do there is they say, "Wow, it looks like you're really really angry." And I it's why it works is a great question, but you know, they record everything.

So they've played me all these recordings of them doing this with people, and it's phenomenal how quickly it gets people out of that emotional state. They play me one which is about a Marine Corps sergeant major during the Iraq war disappears from Basra and shows up a week later at his ex-wife's house in Hawaii. And how he got there, nobody knows. And but he's got several machine guns with him. And so the the FBI shows up to his house and like, "Oh my gosh, what's going on?" And the negotiator asks him, "Well, you know, why did you feel like you needed to do this?" and he said, "Well, I I I learned from some buddies of mine that not only was she cheating on me when we were married, she actually cheated on me at our wedding reception, and that's why I have to kill her." And the negotiator said, "So, it sounds like you were an honest and loyal husband and you didn't get that same behavior in return, and that's not okay, and you don't want to live that way anymore, and that's why you're so mad." And the guy goes, "Yeah." And never threatened her again.

You know, because his feeling that he didn't know how to express was heard. Um or at least that's one theory of it is that your emotions are a signaling mechanism, especially anger. You know, if somebody mistreats you, they see that you get mad and so they know you're not going to be rational about it and so it's not a good idea to push you. Um another theory is there's this you know so anytime you get angry or anxious you know that's your parasympa your sympathetic nervous system activating and it takes blood and oxygen out it takes the glucose and oxygen in your blood out of your brain and redirects it to your muscles and so you get measurably less intelligent you go down like I think it's 20 IQ points or something like that and so you wish you had a way to spark up the prefrontal cort cortex where people do their rational thinking, you know, cuz it's basically been shut down or put into power saver mode.

It would be great if there was something like electrodes, you could attach jumper cable to that part of the brain and spark it back up again. But there is a thing called the superior frontal gyrus, which is in your prefrontal cortex, but it's the part of your thinking brain that looks back on your amygdala and is conscious about your own feelings. It's the part of your thinking brain that thinks about your emotions and that's the target because if you get the person thinking about what their emotions now they're thinking again but if you you know if you say hey do this crossword puzzle anything that's not connected to the emotion is going to get rejected but this is connected to the cause of their emotion but it invites their thinking brain to start back up again that I I think that's what does it but all your listeners can try this Anytime somebody's upset, say, "Wow, it seems like you're worried about this or it seems like you're mad about this." And the seems like is very important because you say, "I see right through you.

I know exactly what's going on in you." And you know that that's the story of me and my college girlfriend and that ended about the way you'd expect. expect. expect. I think one of the deepest human needs is to be seen and heard and understood. And if you can give that to people, they will eat out of the palm of your hand. It's it's more powerful than giving them a sandwich. In fact, or Yeah. This is like the ultimate sandwich. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Does emotional connection matter even more than food?

Yes. Okay. Speaking of emotional connection, one of the other uh tactical pieces of advice uh in the book is uh the importance of using the other person's name. That seems so simple. Why is it so important? important? important? Humans are born without being able to speak. I mean, we have the innate capability of speaking a language, but we don't speak a language when we're born. We have to learn it. And the first word that we ever learn is our name. And so it's all the way down at the very foundation of your, you know, post-birth learning.

You know, your mom probably whispers it in your ear the day you're born, right? You know, if you got people in a coma in a vegetative state and you've got their brain, you know, hooked up to some electrodes and you say their name, you will get a reaction in the brain of even a completely unconscious comeomaos person to their name. it's all the way down there in terms of capturing somebody's attention. And so if you use it in a negotiation, that usually gets you their attention more than almost any other method.

Um, and I think it also, you know, what you're trying to do in a negotiation is to establish yourself as a friend. And if you can't get through, at least you don't want to be the enemy. You want to be, you know, better than enemy is to be, you know, an acquaintance and neutral. And then if you can get them to think of you as a friend and ally, even better. Um, but knowing, you know, who uses our names, it's the people closest to us or who we've had use them the most.

And it sort of triggers that kind of reaction. Makes complete sense. There's a I'm sure you've heard of it. Our younger listeners may not have, but there is a classic book in the uh in the early 1900s called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. One of the big pieces of advice in there is use people's names because it's the sweetest sound in the world to everybody who has a name. But I'd say it's it's if you have somebody you're trying to influence, using their name is great.

If I one of [clears throat] the, you know, assignments we give students is so this weekend I want you to learn 10 people's names, you know, and people that you see again and again but you've never had a conversation with and never learn their name. If you go from living in a world of anonymous strangers to living in a world of people with names and who know your name, that's a very different social atmosphere. And if you think about like the isolation of, you know, the Gen Z because they're, you know, they've got this gift of social media that connects them to the whole world, but it can make them isolated from their actual immediate human environment.

if you can open that up for them so that they're, you know, the people around them are as easy to click on and as inviting as a, you know, another Tik Tok video. Um, I think that does a world of psychological good for them. them. them. Another thing you talk about when approaching a negotiation is the importance of knowing in advance exactly what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Say more. Say more. Say more. A lot of people go into negotiations and they know they want to win.

They might know, "Oh, I want a car. I want a raise." But they haven't thought really deeply about all the different things they want and what are the potential trade-offs among them. You know, if you ask recent college graduates, well, would you rather have a job that pays 80,000 and you have to work every weekend or one that pays 70,000 and you don't? they've never even begun thinking about that question. So, if you're thinking about a job, there's a lot of different variables that make it a good fit for you or not and could make your life happy or not.

Uh, but it's really easy. One of them is a number that's all predigested and is right there and you know how long my commute is, who what's the social atmosphere that I'll be working in like, do I feel like the work I'm doing is important and beneficial for the world? You know, we think people don't spend enough time thinking about all those other things and then systematically adding them up to decide if one offer is better than another. So, is there a process that you recommend we go through to figure out exactly, you know, what what it is we want so we're clear going in.

I mean, first thing is just make a list of all the things you can think of and don't worry about the list being right. You know, if you make a list of 15 things and then you say, "Ah, actually four of these don't matter." and cross them off. That's fine. That's all part of it. Then it might help also to think about why you care about each of those things cuz some of them might be reducible to the same variable ultimately. If you think, well, oh, you know, I need to make a certain amount of money because I need to be afford to be able to afford, you know, living an easy commuting distance of, you know, Boston or San Francisco.

Well, that's going to cost a lot. Uh, you know, why do you want that? And if you can get the benefits of that some other way, you might be able to do it with less money. Um, and then I think talking to other, you know, and this of course I'm at the age where my kids are graduating from college and getting jobs. Um, so of course my advice is I you want to talk to older people in that field and you know they'll tell you what you don't know about it and what matters in a job or not.

Um, you don't have to just trust your own level of knowledge. you can start doing some research and learn from other people about what you should be caring about. caring about. caring about. The other side of the coin, and you also make this case, is that we should do our best to figure out exactly what we want so we can negotiate from a position of clarity, but we should also do our best to understand exactly what the other side wants. side wants. side wants. Oh yeah, that's the the silver bullet.

If you know, this is what everybody who teaches negotiation would tell you is that if there was one thing you could know, it's what's motivating the other side because that's what allows you to figure out a way to make them happier by doing what you want than by not doing what you want. You know, the more you know about what their motives are, the more you can figure out ways in which you could serve their motives and ask for something in exchange. What if you're negotiating with somebody who is totally duplicitous?

I mean, like you hear about how Trump negotiated over the years. You just [ __ ] lie to people and um you know, bully them, you know? H how can you a create trust with somebody who is untrustworthy? Uh and b like really get some clarity on what it is they want beyond like total vanquish. Well, see, that's interesting. If the person you're dealing with does have a very strong interest in being the winner, um, a lot of times you can let them officially be the winner and you just take whatever you want.

You say, "Oh my gosh, you just you just beat the hell out of me, man. You are amazing." You know, it's something like that that's just an emotional interest is pretty easy. You know, it might take you some role aids if you you find the person's behavior really annoying. There is a school of thought and uh Jim Camp who wrote a very interesting book called Start with No, which was kind of the anti- getting to yes. It's got a bunch of really good advice in it, but it's also got some other advice that I don't like as much.

And Camp would have said, "You want to find out everything about the other side's interests, but then if they ever ask you about yours, say, hey, look over there, and now let's get back to your interest." And you know, I just am not sure that that's really plausible. Um, I think the reason it makes sense for you to tell the other side what you're interested in is it does give them power. You know, knowing the other side's interest gives you power, but the power it gives you is the power to make the other person happy.

And depending on what your relationship is, you might really want, you know, your business partner, your customers, your I mean certainly your family, you want them to have the power to make you happy. So that suggests you should be completely honest about your motives with them. But I think if somebody doesn't trust you enough to want to share their interests, what I try to do is a couple of things can work. One is um don't make an offer to them. Make two offers and see which one that are different in terms of which interests they serve and then just watch which one they want to talk about.

That's a clue right there about what they what they care most about. Another thing that really helps is, hey, [clears throat] I was thinking about what your motives are, what you want to get out of this negotiation, and here's the list that I came up with. How did I do? Um, and one thing is just showing that you thought about them seems to have a really soothing impact on people. People trust you a lot more if you've thought about what I care about. The other thing is, um, a lot of times you're right about the things that are on your list.

may say, "Oh, well, there's no point lying about it. He already guessed that." Or you might be wrong about it. And especially if they don't like you and don't trust you. When you're wrong about something, it's very hard for them to resist correcting you and for them to say, "You idiot. You got that completely wrong. It's not XYZ, it's RST." And you're like, "Ah, stupid me." Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe you're you argue that there are two parts of any negotiation. Uh value creation and distributive negotiation.

Am I am I am I saying that right? Whim, what what is that? What are those terms mean? That's at least one. There's probably a lot of ways to cut up negotiation, but one way to cut it up is um between value creation or sometimes people say integration integration integration uh which means figuring out how to make the pie bigger is the metaphor that gets used a lot. Well, how can we both be better off by making a deal together? And then there's the distribution part.

Well, sure, we can talk about how um I'm going to work for you on your podcast, Dan. and I've got some ideas of people we can bring on and I think there are some interviews I could do that you're too busy for. Um, let's talk about what would make sense for you and what would make sense for me to make that partnership work better. [snorts] Then distribution is okay but how much you going to pay me. At the end of the day, even if you do a wonderful job understanding both sides interests and making everybody happy, you still have to figure out well who's going to sacrifice how much money or time or whatever it is that has to be divided.

[snorts] And those are different kind of problems. And at least what I would recommend is try to do the value creation one first. [snorts] You don't even know how to price something until you've decided what it is you're pricing. So it makes sense to do the exercise of going through both sides interests and trying to invent as many possibilities that could generate more value for both of us and then we'll argue about the pricing later. It also typically the distribution part is hard on the relationship whereas the value creation part helps the relationship.

So do your relationship building and you've got some relationship capital that then you can rely on when it comes to splitting things up which is usually a less happy conversation. What's your tactical advice uh when it comes to like who should go first, who should uh make the first offer, who should put their cards on the table? I mean some places there's a cultural script for it. like you know in the United States a house always has an asking price whereas in in Australia they just open it for bids and you know buyers go first making offers.

Um but in general I would say well you're familiar with um Daniel Conaman and Amos Tverki got the Nobel Prize for this um anchoring and adjustment. Are you familiar with that? So a okay they did this great experiment where they you know they go into a room full of college kids and they say hey um how many countries do you think there are in Africa and by countries we mean that they're represented at the UN and you know by the way we're in room 12 and the average guess is 15 and then they go do the same thing with another class and they say how many countries in Africa we're in room 49 and the average guess is 45 [snorts] where you know a completely random piece of information totally totally totally changes how people look at something.

And it turns out this is also this is true in a lot of places. It used to be um um um well, for example, in in an election, being listed first on the ballot is usually worth about five points. And so, you know, back in the day, running for mayor of New York in 1890, people would try to change their name to Alfred Arvark or something to be like, you know, listed first on the ballot. That's why they randomized them now. Um but in negotiation, the same way.

First, if you wanted to predict the outcome of a negotiation, the distributive negotiation, the thing that would give you the biggest advantage is knowing the first number that gets mentioned [clears throat] [clears throat] [clears throat] cuz it's going to circle around that. And Conor Tverki said the reason is because people start somewhere and then they ask how much should the number move from that starting point, but they don't move that much and so the starting point ends up having a huge outsiz influence. So, should you go first?

Well, that depends on how well informed you are and how well informed the other person is. So, like, let's say you're an American tourist and you're looking at some rugs in Istanbul. in Istanbul. in Istanbul. Don't go first cuz you're going to say something stupid because you don't know what you're talking about. Um, at this by the same token, you're selling rugs in Istanul and an American tourist comes in. maybe don't go first because you want him to go first and say something stupid, right? But if you both know the market, if you both know what you're talking about, then there's then I'd say go first and get that anchoring advantage.

Uh now, if neither of you knows what the hell you're talking about, you should probably both go home and do some research cuz you know it's just a clown show. But unless there's a very big difference in terms of market sophistication, it's probably the better move to go first. There's a whole chapter in your book around another aspect of negotiation that seems quite important, which is knowing what your alternatives are, knowing like what other moves you can make. make. make. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why is that so important?

I mean, I think we've got a a very topical example right now in this Iran thing. Having an alternative means you know what your play is if they say no. if they don't agree with me and they tell me, you know, go to blazes, what am I going to do then? And that's what I would say is the was the real flaw in the administration's approach there. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the Iranis are the ones who decide whether or not they're going to say yes to us.

And the administration said, "That's no problem cuz we're going to make it so obvious that they're much better off saying yes, that of course they will, but they still get to decide what they want to do." And they said no. and we didn't have a plan for well what if they don't agree with us what if they say okay we'll we'll sit on a closed Persian Gulf forever what are you going to do about it and you know I I think they would have done a lot better if they had started you know a year previously you know building pipelines out to the Red Sea in the Gulf of Oman and you know figuring out well if we can't get them to agree with us how are we going to work around all these things but knowing what you're going to do if the deal doesn't work is crucial both for your deciding whether or not to say yes cuz the alternative so let's say for example Dan if I'm going to buy your car maybe you're going to ask for a totally outrageous price for it before I go in and sit down with you I should know what am I going to do if I can't buy your car am I going to buy some other car am I going to take the bus to work am I going to ride my bike to work what am I going to do if I know what my alternative is then I can always make a wise decision at the table because I agree to something that's better than my alternative or I don't take it.

And that's, you know, when people are wondering like, should I have agreed to that? Did I just get ripped off? That's almost always a sign that they hadn't figured out what their alternative was. X aantie. X aantie. X aantie. Um, so it allows you to make a wise decision in the moment, but it also allows you to figure, well, I mean, is are these even the right people for me to be talking to? I mean, what people tend to think is that if their alternative is bad, then mine must be good.

That it's like a seessaw. You know, that's either up or down on one side or the other. But it's perfectly possible for both sides alternatives to be terrible or for them both to be really good. And if you both have really good alternatives, maybe you should be, you know, in business with somebody else. And if both sides have terrible alter I mean I I think this administration made the mistake of thinking well if we can make their alternative really terrible that means we win without thinking okay well what's our alternative and how good is that for us?

us? us? You mentioned um earlier the word no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At some point in a negotiation no may be the wise thing to say. I would think if you aren't saying no half of the time, then you aren't trying enough negotiations. I mean, if you're only if you're always saying yes, then you're not taking any long shots. It's kind of like in poker, the optimum amount of time to lose is not zero. You know, no is important also. Well, in two ways. Sometimes somebody else wants you to agree to something and you're just absolutely not going to.

And you want to be able to say no in a way that makes them cut it out and go away. But I think you also want to have at your disposal a way of saying no that may invites them to try harder. Now this gets you know tricky obviously in the context of dating where you know we are trying to establish a norm of like look if she says no leave her alone. Um, but sometimes people also in dating will say, "Yeah, no to Netflix and chill, but you know, if you wanted to actually go to dinner, I'd think about it." Um, and you want to, and I think part of it is saying those in different ways and with different levels of explanation.

of explanation. of explanation. If you say, "No, I'm not interested in that." In a way, in usually in a downward inflecting tone of voice, very short and with no explanation, explanation, explanation, that usually makes them go away. But if you say, "Well, I mean, it's it's tricky and the reason I don't want anytime you say the reason I'm saying no," that's an invitation for them to try something else. else. else. Um, so I would say if you really just want them to go away, keep it short and simple.

And the thing is you got that's very uncomfortable for most people. So that's worth practicing and practicing either on people that that kind of thing can be hard on a relationship. So you can do it, you know, with your brother where you can say the, you know, tell him the next day, I was just messing with you, man. And you got a strong enough relationship that'll easily survive. or you know with people who you don't care about telemarketers or whatever just practicing no I don't want to buy that but then if you want them to invite them to make you a better offer you know you you give them a longer version version version say more about the the notion of practice because we we we began this conversation by you know discussing your assertion that that negotiation is a performance skill and therefore we should practice it.

So, how how do we practice negotiation given I think we all agree with you by this point in the conversation that it is an incredibly important skill. So, how do we get better at it? I would say pick one of these skills that we've discussed that you want to get better at and start practicing. Look for situations to do it in for and some of these some of them you have to kind of search out the right kind of thing. Like let's say you want to practice asking for more.

Well, you can, you know, ask go to a restaurant, ask for something that's not on the menu. Go to a retail store and ask them to give you a discount. Um, and all those things will be uncomfortable to do, but by enduring that discomfort, it gets more comfortable to do in real life when you want to when you, you know, want to tell the car dealership, "Yeah, actually, I'd like you to make a better offer than that." And what the book is is just a compilation of what we think, you know, this is not a brand new theory of negotiation.

This is the consensus wisdom of, you know, we've been teaching negotiation for a long time and we know what most people agree on. This is just the basic stuff that most people agree on as good negotiation turned into a bunch of very discreet little skills to practice. So, for example, we talked about figuring out the other side's interests. All right. Well, you've got uh someone you live with. They might be kids, parents, a spouse, roommates, and you've got some kind of argument that you keep having with them.

Make a list of all their interests and show it to them and ask them [clears throat] to tell you if you got it right. If you do that 10 times, you're going to be a lot better at it than you were before. But also, most of these exercises tend to help the relationships that they're in. [clears throat] Um, if your roommate says, "Actually, no, that's not what I care about there." Well, now you know your roommate better. And like you said earlier, the desire to be seen and be known like that exercise really taps into it.

It offers that to the other person in exchange for participating with you. So you both benefit by doing it. Um and then very typically if you express your desire to learn more about their interests and their motivations, it almost always results in them being more curious about yours and you both end up knowing each other more deeply. So [snorts] that's just an example from one chapter, but yeah, there's like I think I counted 37 of those in the book. So yeah, look through it and see which one appeals to you.

You mentioned something about asking for more and I I probably should have asked more about this. Okay. You know, I'm aware of the stats and I don't have them to hand, but I I've heard them at various points in my life about the gender discrepancies when it comes to uh income. It's often argued, and please uh excuse me if I'm screwing this up, but it's often argued that men are just uh in general more comfortable asking for more pay. Um and I don't think that's the only reason why men get paid more.

I think there's, you know, there's kind of a subconscious bias that's at play at large in our society. But but men are are often more comfortable pushing for more. So, for our female listeners, like h how can how can they get better at um especially in a work context saying no, no, I I need to get paid X. I think you're referring to there was uh Babcock and Lee Chevver, I think it was Sarah Babcock and I want to say Christine Lee Chevver had a book back I think in 98 called Women Don't Ask and it was basically about women express more discomfort about distributive negotiation and are less likely to ask.

Somebody had a paper recently that said they didn't find the same thing and so maybe there's a generational change happening or maybe you know there's also a lot of random variance in these studies. At least my experience has been that typically that typically that typically male students I'm more focused on helping them ask more questions and listen better and female students often I I'm trying to push them to be a little tougher on asking for more. Um so I don't find their result implausible. Uh two things I would suggest.

One is um anytime you're approaching a distributive negotiation, if you have a reason why what you're asking for is fair, that typically makes it go better. There's a wonderful experiment done about and and this is younger people aren't going to understand this scenario at all, but um you this was back in the 80s or 90s and it's during exam week kids are standing online by the copier machine in the reserved reading room because they all want to copy the one chart from the chemistry book or whatever and they did an experiment on cutting in line and saying, "Hey, can I cut in front of you?" And you know, typically the the base case is no, you can't cut in front of me.

Back lines over there, pal. But if you say, "Hey, can I cut in front of you cuz I'm working for this professor and he's really mad at me?" People will let you. Or, "Can I cut in front of you cuz I got to fly out for an interview and I and the cab's already waiting for me." People say, "Sure." If you give them a reason why, people are much more receptive to any ask. And for a negotiation, you know, for example, if I was going to buy your car, the reason why I'm offering you a fair price is because that's the Kelly's Blue Book price or the Edmonds price or the Carvana price or whatever it is that I'm getting it from.

You want to have some external benchmark you can point to and that way it's not you being a greedy gold digger trying to get more. You're just going for what everybody knows is fair and right. And I think that helps people. And especially I did um an experiment that I've never actually published, but I like collected the data on it. And if you tell college students to use criteria in a negotiation and give them a bunch of criteria to use, then the women did much better in the negotiation.

But it had no effect on men because and I think that was because men just don't listen to whatever you tell them. They're like, "Yeah, I'm going to do it my way anyway, pal. I don't care what you say." But at least for the the female subjects in the study, it seemed to make a big difference. Um, one other thing that I think helps women a lot because and I think you're right, women are socialized to take care of other people and put other people first.

If you don't think about it as asking for yourself, but as asking for your family or your future family or the other people who depend on you. If you imagine yourself as an agent, you know, because actually I think if you make a woman a negotiator on behalf of somebody else, she's just as tough as men are. It's only when they're doing it for themselves that they feel like, ah, I should be generous. I should be so nice. And so if you get them to think about it in terms of, well, you know, shouldn't somebody negotiate tough, you know, well on behalf of you?

Yeah. So, you know, make yourself the person who's being who's acting on your behalf. I heard this once and I don't know where I heard it and it's always been in my head when it comes to negotiation that the the the right mindset when you're approaching a negotiation should be for everybody to walk away feeling good. Uh, is that is that is that is am I am I just making that up or or is that in the neighborhood of I think that makes a lot of sense at least as a thing to strive for.

I mean, there's some kinds of negotiations that just aren't as happy as others. Let's say, you know, a couple of MIT kids are doing a startup and they're setting up, well, who gets what position and who gets how much equity. Everybody's winning in that. And so, that's going to be, you know, I also use the new bankruptcy law down in New York. And then you're just talking about how much everybody's losing and nobody's going to walk out of that smiling really. Um, but I do think you want to that you will do better for yourself if you think about how to make the other person happy.

person happy. person happy. That the more you think about what can I do for them? What can I do to make this a win for them? A, because of reciprocity, like we talked before with the sandwich, that's going to infect their mind and they're going to start looking for ways to make you happy. But the happier you make them, then the more it makes sense for them to make concessions. Oh, this deal could be really good for me. All right. Well, now I'm I care more about making sure it works.

So, the more you can think about generating a better outcome for the other person, they have both psychological and, you know, practical economic reasons to want to make you happy as well. Yep. And and you may well end up in a negotiation with that same person or somebody that person knows and and uh so it makes a lot of sense. Two final questions I always ask. one, is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to? A lot of times, a lot of podcasters, all here's what I want to talk about.

I'm like, okay. And you don't do that. So, I thought, well, I'll just see what Dan wants to talk about and whatever he wants to talk about will be fine. I because I I was also watching a lot of your content before this and so I was trying to get myself into that, you know, like Buddhist like meditation relaxed mindset about it. I appreciate I appreciate you're trying to understand my needs before this negotiation. [clears throat] Um, final question. Let me just get you to please plug your new book and anything else you want uh uh viewers and listeners to know about.

It's called um never settle [snorts] and it's by uh Aia Curesi who is a colleague of mine at MIT uh and me and it evolved out of the homework that we gave our students to do because you know there's never enough time to do as much practice in a university class. We get them for three hours a week and you can explain the ideas and get them started on a little practice, but how much practice do you need to actually get better at these skills? Quite a bit.

And so we would devise, you know, we want you to go learn 10 people's names this weekend. We want you to have a fight with your roommate and then afterwards try to explain to them what their interests were and let them correct you. Like that kind of stuff. And you need to do a lot of that before you get better at this. But getting, you know, I love the title of your podcast because like getting 10% better at this stuff has an enormous payoff. And I think looking for those little marginal changes that accumulate over time, you know, that have are kind of compounding in interest is what you have to do.

And the good thing is even tiny improvements in the skills we've been talking about make a big difference, but they also will get you I guess addicted isn't the right word, right? Because addicted means that the outcome of the behavior is harmful for you. But you will find it so rewarding when you start getting more success in influencing other people that you want to going to you're going to want to keep doing it. So I just really feel like I need to get people started on it.

John Richardson, thank you very much. Dan, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you. you. you. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go.

Remember to sign up for my new app which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, adfree access to the full expertise expertise expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads. Exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week. Robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy.

Peace.