Top 180 Chris Voss Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you.”

— Chris Voss

52. “Effective negotiation is applied people smarts, a psychological edge in every domain of life: how to size someone up, how to influence their sizing up of you, and how to use that knowledge to get what you want.”

— Chris Voss

53. “You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation – and of life.”

— Chris Voss

54. “This happens because there are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Commitment, Confirmation, and Counterfeit.”

— Chris Voss

55. “The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask.”

— Chris Voss

56. “The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport: a way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together. Which is why when you think of the greatest negotiators of all time, I’ve got a surprise for you – think Oprah Winfrey.”

— Chris Voss

57. “Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.3 Man, he wrote, has two systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast, instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative, and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it guides and steers our rational thoughts.”

— Chris Voss

58. “The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.”

— Chris Voss

59. “Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door.”

— Chris Voss

60. “When he spoke again, the kidnapper seemed shell-shocked. But he went on. His next offer was lower, $10,000. Then we had the nephew answer with a strange number that seemed to come from deep calculation of what his aunt’s life was worth: $4,751. His new price? $7,500. In response, we had the cousin “spontaneously” say he’d throw in a new portable CD stereo and repeated the $4,751. The kidnappers, who didn’t really want the CD stereo felt there was no more money to be had, said yes.”

— Chris Voss

61. “The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations. Our culture demonizes people in movies and politics, which creates the mentality that if we only got rid of the person then everything would be okay. But this dynamic is toxic to any negotiation.”

— Chris Voss

62. “It comes down to the deep and universal human need for autonomy. People need to feel in control.”

— Chris Voss

63. “I’d love to help,” she said, “but how am I supposed to do that?”

— Chris Voss

64. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.”

— Chris Voss

65. “The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it.”

— Chris Voss

66. “Every case is new. We must let what we know – our known knowns – guide us but not blind us to what we do not know; we must remain flexible and adaptable to any situation; we must always retain a beginner’s mind; and we must never overvalue our experience or undervalue the informational and emotional realities served up moment by moment in whatever situation we face.”

— Chris Voss

67. “No matter how much research our team has done prior to the interaction, we always ask ourselves, “Why are they communicating what they are communicating right now?”

— Chris Voss

68. “Even something as harsh as “Why did you do it?” can be calibrated to “What caused you to do it?” which takes away the emotion and makes the question less accusatory.”

— Chris Voss

69. “What is the biggest challenge you face?”

— Chris Voss

70. “If you feel you can’t say “No” then you’ve taken yourself hostage.”

— Chris Voss

71. “Why would you ever do business with me? Why would you ever change from your existing supplier? They’re great!”

— Chris Voss

72. “The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.”

— Chris Voss

73. “Negotiation is the heart of collaboration. It is what makes conflict potentially meaningful and productive for all parties.”

— Chris Voss

74. “Even changing a single word when you present options – like using “not lose” instead of “keep” – can unconsciously influence the conscious choices your counterpart makes.”

— Chris Voss

75. “Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I took it to someone else,” I said.”

— Chris Voss

76. “The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation.”

— Chris Voss

77. “Effective negotiators look for pieces of information, often obliquely revealed, that show what is important to their counterpart: Who is their audience? What signifies status and reputation to them? What most worries them? To find this information, one method is to go outside the negotiating table and speak to a third party that knows your counterpart. The most effective method is to gather it from interactions with your counterpart.”

— Chris Voss

78. “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.”

— Chris Voss

79. “People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”

— Chris Voss

80. “They were the economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Together, the two launched the field of behavioral economics – and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize – by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking.”

— Chris Voss

81. “A few years ago, I stumbled upon the book How to Become a Rainmaker,3 and I like to review it occasionally to refresh my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel decisions. The book does a great job to explain the.”

— Chris Voss

82. “By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How” questions will convince them that the final solution is their idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s theirs. That is simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called “the art of letting someone else have your way.”

— Chris Voss

83. “Never be mean to someone who can hurt you by doing nothing.”

— Chris Voss

84. “Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict.”

— Chris Voss

85. “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo.”

— Chris Voss

86. “It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing. Psychotherapy.”

— Chris Voss

87. “If you want to increase your neural resonance skills, take a moment right now and practice. Turn your attention to someone who’s talking near you, or watch a person being interviewed on TV. As they talk, imagine that you are that person. Visualize yourself in the position they describe and put in as much detail as you can, as if you were actually there.”

— Chris Voss

88. “Kevin Dutton says in his book Split-Second Persuasion.”

— Chris Voss

89. “We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation. We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to them.”

— Chris Voss

90. “People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested. They fold, they grow bitter, and they grow apart. We’ve all heard of marriages that ended in divorce and the couple never fought.”

— Chris Voss

91. “Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.”

— Chris Voss

92. “Sentences like “It seems like you strongly value the fact that you’ve always paid on time” or “It seems like you don’t care what position you are leaving me in” can really open up the negotiation process.”

— Chris Voss

93. “To successfully gain a hostage’s safe release, a negotiator had to penetrate the hostage-taker’s motives, state of mind, intelligence, and emotional strengths and weaknesses. The negotiator played the role of bully, conciliator, enforcer, savior, confessor, instigator, and.”

— Chris Voss

94. “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.”

— Chris Voss

95. “In my short stay I realized that without a deep understanding of human psychology, without the acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught, shifting interplay of two people negotiating.”

— Chris Voss

96. “We learned that negotiation was coaxing, not overcoming; co-opting, not defeating. Most important, we learned that successful negotiation involved getting your counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of control while you, in fact, were the one defining the conversation.”

— Chris Voss

97. “Then say, “Okay, I apologize. Let’s stop everything and go back to where I started treating you unfairly and we’ll fix it.”

— Chris Voss

98. “It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.”

— Chris Voss

99. “The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out.”

— Chris Voss

100. “I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.” Andy jumped in his seat as if he’d been stung by a bee. “Damn!” he said. “That’s what happened. I had no idea.”

— Chris Voss