By O’Leary Logan
“What!?” I exclaimed at the table when I was asked for money. Without knowing it, I had just executed a classic tactic in negotiation known as “The Flinch,” where one simply balks at a price to inject emotion into the “space of negotiation.” Like others in the seminar, I had paid a handsome fee that day, and yet the instructor was asking for an additional $1 to speak. “He’s not going to get my buck,” I declared to myself silently. He squinted at me, while collecting, counting and pocketing several persons' money. He eventually returned everyone’s dollar bill. “Very cool,” I thought. I had just learned my first axiom of negotiation: “Don’t Ask--Don’t Get.”
“What!?” I exclaimed at the table when I was asked for money. Without knowing it, I had just executed a classic tactic in negotiation known as “The Flinch,” where one simply balks at a price to inject emotion into the “space of negotiation.” Like others in the seminar, I had paid a handsome fee that day, and yet the instructor was asking for an additional $1 to speak. “He’s not going to get my buck,” I declared to myself silently. He squinted at me, while collecting, counting and pocketing several persons' money. He eventually returned everyone’s dollar bill. “Very cool,” I thought. I had just learned my first axiom of negotiation: “Don’t Ask--Don’t Get.”
This was many years ago when I was a young man, stretching out into the business world. Though newly minted and degreed like many of my peers and colleagues, I found my education lacking in the area of negotiation. Like others, I had learned negotiation the traditional way: From parents, supervisors, mentors and by reading books and listening to CDs. Most people perform negotiations by following their intuition, which is taking action based on history and personal feelings. People also use trial and error--at best a hit and miss method that is not always repeatable.
Surprisingly, most negotiating has nothing to do with money. Studies show that people negotiate between 10 to 15 times a day. You’re negotiating when you’re influencing your team, debating with your kids and friends, justifying resources for a project to your boss, requesting a better seat at the theater, having a conversation with DMV personnel, and, of course, when requesting a raise. The examples of negotiation are countless because everyone has different interests.
Anytime you’re having a conversation toward agreement with someone who has a different interest than you, you’re negotiating. Simply: Negotiation is the brokering of conversations to come to an agreement to meet interests. From a pragmatic sense, we are negotiating almost all the time. Hence, training in negotiation would not only benefit you in the pocketbook, but also in everyday life. Unfortunately, negotiation is seldom emphasized, if at all taught, in school (even for MBAs), yet it is everywhere in our lives. Most people, independent of scholastic background, lack critical negotiating skills.
There are many great benefits in choosing to educate yourself in the art of negotiation. The obvious benefit is in the category of money retention, by either saving money or landing a more lucrative deal. Practicing in a workshop or with a trained mentor provides a good starting point for laying a foundation to master negotiating. In practicing, consider this: Practice does not make perfect; practice really makes a “habit.” What habits do you want to take away today? A sure way to accelerate your habit creation and money retention is to invest in yourself by getting professional training in classes with an experienced mentor or professional coach. For now, let me offer three negotiating skills that have served me well and have provided bottom line results for my clients: 1. Holding In 2. Listening For 3. Creating Questions
Holding In means to maintain a negotiating posture in the middle of uncertainty when you can’t see any viable answers and the going gets tough. When the negotiation gets really messy or the person you’re talking to is resisting, blocking, or striking out at you; or when you feel you’re going through a mental meltdown, you Hold In. Holding In means to stay in that alien, uncomfortable place for as long as you can… and then 10 minutes longer, and even for another 10 minutes. You Hold In as long as it takes to discover unseen resources in the “space of negotiation.”
Most people flee the scene or end a negotiation before developing the biggest possibility for both parties. For example, you might say, “Lets split the difference,” just to end the turmoil and perceived waste of time. Harvard studies show that the “zone of possible agreement” (ZOPA) is much larger than what is conventionally negotiated. In essence, most people leave value - money - on the table! This is because we as humans are wired to desire certainty and to stay in the middle of our comfort zone, away from what we have learned to label as uncomfortable. Yet there is a natural tension that is created in a negotiation because other people have different interests than you. It takes practice to learn how to Hold In. Next time you feel yourself lost in the middle of uncertainty in a negotiation, ask yourself this question: “If the person I wanted to be was here right now, what would they say and do?” And then proceed to be that person.
Next is Listening For. Negotiation is about the brokering of conversations; specifically your internal conversations. In negotiation, as in life, you are always having a conversation with yourself and sometimes it involves other people. (Note: Please read the last sentence again). The words spoken by a negotiating party are always in competition with your internal dialogue. Your internal dialogue constitutes the conversations that are relevant to you in the moment. Even as I write, I know that my words are in competition with your conversations. There’s nothing strange in this--it’s just the way it is. What matters is not what you hear, but what you Listen For. Imagine your listening is like your personal high-performance, fighter-jet radar. It’s always on and Listening For whatever you have the dials automatically tuned to at any given time. Most people don’t know they have radar and that it’s always on. Those who are aware they have radar may not know how to operate it. Continuing with this metaphor, what are your listening dials tuned to right now?
Practice this: Switch your dials now before this sentence ends! Did it work? Are you now listening to something new? One way to bring resource into your negotiations is to begin to learn to listen to your own listening. Learn to listen to where your radar dials are set – you can always change them, but you have to find them first! What’s coming up on your screen during a negotiation? Are you listening to your own agenda? Are you listening to create value for the person you’re talking to? Are you listening to your weaknesses or strengths? What are you Listening For right now as you read? Are you trying to make the negotiation easy, like the last one? What do you Listen For? What you Listen For with your radar will determine your thinking in the moment, which will determine your behavior and thus determine your results. It happens almost instantaneously. In essence, what you Listen For will drive the outcome of your negotiations.
Finally, we arrive at Creating Questions, or as I like to frame it, “Living in an inquiry.” There are basically two kinds of questions: Questions that open up possibilities (future-oriented) and questions that have diminishing or narrowing returns (past-oriented or scarcity-bound). Create Questions to open up the biggest possibility when you are negotiating. Generally speaking, “No” is a block to possibility and “Yes” moves possibility forward. If you want to get past “No,” you get to invent questions to find the “Yes” to proceed forward along the path of interests. Consider making questions more inclusive. For instance, “How do we fix that?” is not as powerful as, “How can we together make this happen?” Likewise, “I don’t understand how you got those numbers?” vs. “Help me understand how you came up with those numbers” (a request in statement form). Every day, practice asking questions you wouldn’t normally ask in order to stretch your comfort zone. What you desire the most is normally outside your comfort zone; otherwise you wouldn’t be negotiating for it.
You can’t score points in life if you’re not on the field playing. Reading a book on negotiation or listening to CDs is a great way to add knowledge. However, you’re unlikely to fully assimilate what you’ve learned until you actually practice in real life with people who have different interests than you. You can read about landing a plane, but until you’re landing in a variable crosswind low on fuel, you won’t really know what it means to fly! Practice your new negotiating knowledge! Experiential practice is the way to get what you know into your bones, so that concepts become permanent items in your tool belt, ready to use any time you want.
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O’Leary Logan is a certified master coach and a transformational trainer. He teaches negotiation workshops that encourage participants to discover the automatic assumptions that influence decision-making powers through real-time, hands-on activities, and instructs them in new conversations that help them create empowering possibilities. You can find out more about his company, Renaissance Works, Inc. by visiting http://www.ren-works.com/. He can be reached at http://us.f565.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=o.logan@ren-works.com.
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