MasterClass is spending millions of dollars on YouTube ads promoting Chris Voss’ course, The Art Of Negotiation. According to Chris, “Everything in life is a negotiation. When you cross the street, it’s a negotiation. Getting your coffee at Starbucks is a negotiation. You’re probably in three to seven negotiations every single day,” he says. So the punchline is this: change the way you negotiate, change your life.
What makes Chris Voss qualified to teach you about negotiation? He was the FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator for much of his career. “My role as a hostage negotiator was to connect authentically with the victim, the victim’s family, and with the hostage taker,” Chris explained. “Everybody really deserves to have somebody hear what they have to say.”
What does Chris Voss teach, exactly, in his MasterClass? He says you’re going to get all the strategies and tactics that he developed as one of the top hostage negotiators in the world. “You’re gonna learn everything from bargaining, to reading body language, to the neuroscience that you can use to literally bend people’s reality,” Chris said.
He continued, “You know, negotiation is letting other people have your way. So mirroring creates the opportunity for them actually to present you with your deal, only they thought it was their idea. It’s just a simple repetition of the last one to three words of what somebody said. People love to be mirrored. They love to be encouraged to go on.”
Bottom line, this particular Chris Voss MasterClass will equip you with a set of skills that you can use, daily, to improve your life. And if you think this is all about manipulating people, or forcing the other party to “lose” so that you can “win,” think again, Chris says. That is not the case. In fact, great negotiation is a byproduct of great collaboration. So you’re learning to work with people.
No matter how good your life is now, you can always do better. Chris Voss’ The Art Of Negotiation MasterClass can help with that. There are 18 video lessons totaling just over three hours of class content. To unlock, you’d need to become a MasterClass member. The cost is $180 per year. They have a 30 day money back guarantee. Subscribers get access to more than 100 other classes, covering topics such as cooking, leadership, photography, writing, and more.
In terms of reviews, the majority are quite positive. They say Chris Voss is not only an authority on the subject of negotiation, but an effective teacher, which is important. (Just because you know something doesn’t mean you’ll make a great mentor.) Supporters say his lessons are engaging, easy to understand, memorable, and actionable.
The main recurring complaint I came across was that some MasterClass members who had taken Chris’ course felt as though this was just a dumbed-down version of his book, Never Split The Difference. Additionally, several Reddit users said that the mock negotiations in Chris’ MasterClass were too staged and therefore, not very realistic.
Overall, I’m a fan of what MasterClass is doing. They’ve made it accessible and affordable for almost anyone, anywhere to gain wisdom from true masters of their domain. For $180, I don’t see how you could go wrong. Unless, of course, you spend all your time bouncing from one MasterClass to the next, never really applying what you learned. So promise me you’ll execute. Okay?
