Negotiate and Win: Proven Strategies from the NYPDs Top Hostage Negotiator

When we first started talking about writing this book, I considered devoting an entire chapter to the need to stay cool under fire. I truly think it’s the most important element of successful negotiation. The problem is, there’s not all that much to write about. The chapter would have gone something like this:

Stay cool.

Stay really cool.

No, I’m serious—stay very cool.

It is what you have to do, but it’s also the sort of thing you can’t learn how to do by me telling you to do it. Staying cool during negotiations is a little like staying cool under fire: You really don’t know what’s going to work for you until you’ve been there. And all the advice and checklists in the world are useless if they don’t match your own personal style.

But staying cool is important. And it’s usually when the door is in sight and all you have left are the alligators that it becomes almost impossible. I think maybe if I were into Zen, I could come up with a fancy one-mind-fits-all koan to clear the emotional clutter from your mind at the moment of crisis. But I’m not a Buddhist, and if I were, I would have already come up with a koan that would make me rich. So the best I can do is throw out a few things that help me remain relatively calm when I’m staring down the barrel of a gun:

• Laughter is the best medicine. Thank you, Reader’s Digest. But a sense of humor really does help you stay loose as the ratchets get tightened. Joking can help break the ice with the other side during a negotiation, though frankly, it’s the sort of thing that if you have to think about, it isn’t going to work for you.

• The power of pizza. No, it’s not a metaphor for life. It’s a literal reminder that you have to feed yourself and keep up your fluids during an all-night or all-day or whatever negotiating session. Now don’t go getting cranked on coffee or too relaxed on booze; caffeine will make you even more uptight, and alcohol will make you agree to just about anything. But as we said in Chapter 2, “Position Is Everything,” negotiating is a physical as well as a mental process, and it’s important to remember that when the body gets hungry, it starts kicking up a fuss. Our bodies were designed hundreds of thousands of years ago when hunger-induced stress was a good thing; it got us out of our trees and into the hunt. It was very useful then and can be useful today, but it tends to distract the mind during a negotiation. Eat, drink, and negotiate.

• Time-out. R&R is one of the most underused tactics in business negotiation today. Think about it. How many corporate bosses have walked up to their negotiation team and said, “You guys have a big negotiation coming up next week. Better get ready for it—here are some tickets to the Riviera”?

Not gonna happen. But it should, and not just because I want to be on the negotiating team that gets those tickets. The mind needs occasional breaks to remain sharp. It’s the way God put it together. Teams often take vacations after a tough negotiation to celebrate and relax. That’s good; we need time to unwind. But in a lot of cases the negotiation would have gone smoother and easier if the team hadn’t pulled two back-to-back all-nighters right before jetting out to L.A. for the marathon negotiating sessions.

Breaks in the middle of negotiations are also important. If you can, do something that has zero to do with negotiation or the situation you’re dealing with. And I don’t mean pulling out the cell phone and arguing with your spouse. Tell jokes, argue sports—better yet, get out and play some hoops, take a walk—the more you can use your body and mind in a completely different way, the more effective the break will be.

Hostage negotiators have breaks in their sessions all the time. I used them first to have a roundtable with everyone, figuring out what was up, making sure we were all on the same page. Once that was done, I’d tell a funny story about something that happened to me, something ridiculous, anything—get a few laughs going. Breaking the tension, enforcing a little R&R, even if only for a few seconds, helped a great deal.