Christopher Voss

There are three kinds of yeses. There's commitment, confirmation, and counterfeit. People are most used to giving the counterfeit yes because they've been trapped by the confirmation yes so many times. So the way you master no is understanding what really happens when somebody says 'no.' When yes is commitment, no is protection.

Successful negotiation is not about getting to 'yes'; it's about mastering 'no' and understanding what the path to an agreement is.

Every job that you take, the term that you should always include is, 'How can I be involved in the strategic projects that are critical to the future of the company?' You ask that question. It's a great 'how' question.

How you use your voice is really important, and it's really driven by context more than anything else, and your tone of voice will immediately begin to impact somebody's mood and immediately how their brain functions.

If your first objective in the negotiation, instead of making your argument, is to hear the other side out, that's the only way you can quiet the voice in the other guy's mind. But most people don't do that.

Salary negotiations shouldn't be limited to just salary. Salary pays your mortgage, but terms build your career.

Price doesn't make deals, and salary doesn't control your career.

In a job negotiation, the implementation of that deal is your success that also causes the company to succeed.

I was on the SWAT team in the FBI, and I had always wanted to be in SWAT.

The sweetest two words in any negotiation are actually, 'That's right.' Before you convince them to see what you're trying to accomplish, you have to say the things to them that will get them to say, 'That's right.'

People typically only believe they're in a negotiation when dollars are involved. And maybe sometimes they're smart enough to see if there's a commodity that you can count being exchanged. And, of course, the commodity that we most commonly exchange is money.

As human beings, we're powerfully swayed by how much we feel we're being respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they've been treated fairly and lash out if they don't.