The Basics, Step-by-Step

As I travel around the country giving lectures and classes on hostage and business negotiating, I find a lot of similarities between the two. Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not recommending you hire a SWAT team to back you up when you go to negotiate your next raise. But you should have what the SWAT team represents for a hostage negotiator: a viable alternative in the negotiations, even if it is not the best possible result.

What we’re going to do in this book is walk through the basic outline of my program. We’ll talk about hostage negotiation, real stuff from things I’ve been through, and we’ll put it into play in “normal” situations, the kind of stuff you face every day. I’ll show you how to use my approach when you buy your car or negotiate the family vacation. It’ll be just like one of my seminars, except without the bad jokes.

All right, without some of the bad jokes. But once we get into it, you’ll see it’s not exotic at all. Whether you face some hard cases holed up in a bank or just have to talk your wife out of another weekend at Mom’s, you can work it out. You can get what you want and not blow up anyone in the process.

Seriously. Even if you’ve never thought about negotiation before, a lot of this will start to sound familiar. I call it “applied common sense”—taking what we all know to the next level. Because we’re always negotiating, every day of our lives.

Which brings me to one last point: Always be a Boy Scout. Always be prepared.

Myself, I’m not a Boy Scout, but I do love their motto. You just never know when you’re going to find yourself negotiating with your life—and maybe a lot of other lives—on the line.

This hit home for me—literally—one night on a bridge. My partner and I responded to a call of a jumper up on the tower. When we got the call, it was still light, but with traffic and contingencies, by the time we started up the sun had set.

Let me tell you this about bridge towers—they are higher than high, and the ladder rungs seem to move away from you while you’re climbing. It takes a long time to go up. By the time we were about a hundred feet up that evening, we were in total darkness.

Neither my partner nor I had brought a flashlight. Even a little key chain light would have been helpful. We climbed another two hundred feet or so in total darkness, skinning knuckles and bumping our heads on the side of the ladder. God must’ve been smiling on us, because somehow we made it to the top, and in this case talking the jumper down went fairly smoothly. But it could easily have turned out differently; one of those bumps could have turned into a disastrous slip.

So now I keep a pocket flashlight on my key chain.

And one in the glove compartment. And another under the seat. And another in the trunk.

Of both cars.

Hey, there’s no such thing as too prepared.