After exploring tactical empathy in my Never Split the Difference Growth notes, I became more careful about one habit in particular: treating someone’s first stated position as the whole story.
A demand, complaint, refusal, or rigid sentence may tell me what a person is saying. It does not automatically tell me everything that matters underneath it.
The change for me was simple but demanding: stop trying to decode people and start asking better questions.
I noticed how quickly I wanted to interpret
When a conversation becomes tense, my mind wants to finish the sentence for the other person.
“They are being difficult.” “They do not respect the situation.” “They only care about getting their way.” The interpretation can arrive so quickly that it feels like a fact.
What I learned from practising a more deliberate kind of listening was to slow that process down.
A strong position may be connected to a concern, a constraint, a fear, a value, or simply information I do not yet have. The important word is may.
I do not actually know until I ask.
Curiosity worked better than mind-reading
The most useful shift was moving from “I know why they are saying this” to “What am I missing?”
Questions such as “What’s most important to you here?” or “What makes this difficult?” changed the quality of the conversation because they created room for information instead of forcing my interpretation onto the other person.
Sometimes the answer confirmed what I suspected. Sometimes it did not.
That second outcome was especially useful. It reminded me that empathy is not accuracy by intuition. It is attention plus verification.
I started listening for constraints, not secret motives
There is a temptation in negotiation advice to imagine that good listening lets us uncover someone’s hidden truth.
My experience has been more modest and more useful.
Better listening helps me notice possible constraints: time, risk, workload, reputation, family, uncertainty, fairness, autonomy, or a need to feel heard. But those are hypotheses, not diagnoses.
The next step is not to announce what the other person “really feels.” It is to test the possibility gently.
“It sounds like the timing may be the bigger issue. Is that right?” leaves room to be corrected. That room matters.
The pause became part of the conversation
I also became less eager to fill every silence.
Previously, a pause could feel like a problem to solve. Now I see it as useful space. If I ask a real question, I need to give the other person enough time to answer it.
This sounds obvious. In practice, silence can feel surprisingly long when I am waiting for an answer I care about.
Allowing that pause helped me listen to the answer instead of preparing my next argument while the other person was still speaking.
Understanding did not require agreement
Another important experience was learning that I could understand someone’s concern without accepting their position.
Those are different acts.
I can acknowledge that a deadline feels risky without agreeing to move it. I can understand why someone wants a particular term without accepting the term. I can reflect what I heard without surrendering my own boundary.
That made empathy feel less like giving ground and more like improving the quality of the information available to both sides.
What changed in me
The biggest change was not a clever phrase or negotiation technique. It was the order of operations.
I became more willing to understand before persuading.
That reduced the urge to push immediately against resistance. It also made me more aware of the difference between a position and the concern that may be shaping it.
Not every conversation becomes easy. Some disagreements remain disagreements. Some boundaries stay firm.
But even then, listening first gives me a better chance of responding to the actual problem instead of the story I invented about it.
What I carry forward
When someone takes a strong position now, I try to pause before reacting to the surface.
I ask myself: What do I know? What am I assuming? What might matter here? What question would help me verify that instead of guessing?
That is the part of tactical empathy that stayed with me most.
Listening is not a way to magically read another person. It is a disciplined way to discover what I do not yet understand.