Negotiation begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin. Be prepared to suspend your own agenda (but not to put it entirely to one side), so that your opponent feels you are attuned to their needs, and prepared to let them be heard.

Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathise and bond with you. Voss encourages us to repeat back the last three words someone says to us, with rising intonation in our voice, so framing what they hear as a question. This will keep people talking ('vomiting information' as he viscerally describes), buy you time to think and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.

Giving someone’s emotion or perceived intention a name, described by Voss as 'labelling', enables you to invite response and gather information without asking specific questions around factors you know nothing about.

Labels tend to begin with expressions like: “It seems like …”, “It sounds like …”, or “It looks like …”. Or you could try "I'm noticing..."

When reacting to your label, your counterpart will likely give a longer and more revealing answer than just a“yes” or “no" that they have may have done in response to a specific question. And it's not a problem if they disagree with what you've labelled. You can always respond by stepping back and say something like, “I didn’t mean that's what it was definitively, it just felt like that.” Of course the good thing about expressing feelings, is they can't be entirely disputed.

A key skill to master with labelling is that of silence. Once you’ve put a label out there, be quiet, wait and listen.

“No” provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want. Voss explains that for good negotiators, “No” provides a great opportunity to clarify what you really want by eliminating what you don’t want. His belief is that once we hear a No, a negotiation can really begin — and that 'solution-based questions' will be key in moving things forward. For example: “What about this doesn’t work for you?” “What would you need to make it work?”. And indeed that we can return to the tactic of 'labelling' to draw information out too: “It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.”

An accusations audit is an exhaustive list of all the negative things the other side of a negotiation may think, feel, or say about your side. Compiling an accusations audit helps you get ahead of the objections that could hinder the successful completion of your deal. Performing a thorough accusation audit will help prepare you for any negotiation and provide you with a list of effective counterarguments before you even take your seat at the bargaining table.

Calibrated questions are thought provoking, intentionally framed and have the power to educate your counterpart on what the problem is rather than causing conflict by telling them what the problem is.

Good examples of calibrated questions include: What about this is important to you? How can I help to make this better for us? How would you like me to proceed? What is it that brought us into this situation? How can we solve this problem? What are we trying to accomplish here? How am I supposed to do that?