Over the many years I've been working in this field, I've seen a pattern where people can negotiate well on behalf of their employees, but have difficulty negotiating for their own salaries. I've seen people negotiate well in a business setting, but feel like utter failures in their negotiations at home.
The conclusion I've come to is that the hardest negotiations are the ones that hit closest to home, where people's emotions get wrapped up in the negotiations and they no longer think rationally. In these cases, people become overwhelmed by their emotions, and even if they have the knowledge and skills they need, they lose the ability to negotiate effectively.
The most important skill in such situations is to recognize what is happening to you as it happens, to become more self-aware in real-time. If you can not recognize your emotional responses, you have no chance of modifying your behavior. You then need to develop tools to slow the negotiation down so you can manage your emotions as you negotiate, with the goal of staying deliberate and strategic rather than reactive.
This is not an easy thing to pull off, especially since you will be under emotional stress at the time, but given time and practice, you can learn to manage your emotions and negotiate more effectively even when the negotiations are highly personal and trigger strong emotions for you.
Add Comment
 
 
I'm sure you've heard the question before - are you a pessimist or an optimist? The important thing to realize is that your approach to situations, whether pessimistic or optimistic, is in your hands. It is your choice whether to put a positive or negative framing on things, and choosing to be optimistic is often the most valuable choice you can make.
Take looking for parking, for instance. You might be going downtown, where parking is notoriously difficult, but unless you start off with the point of view that finding a space is possible and that you are going to try, you will definitely not get a space. Being optimistic does not mean unrealistic - I can be optimistic about my chances of improving my swimming while not expecting to go to the olympics.
Optimism is a framing, an approach, the lens through which you filter the world. If you fancy yourself a "realist" and say that an optimistic approach is too rosy, I'd say to you that everyone sees the world through filters, and that your choice of a "realistic" filter might be just a mask for a pessimistic approach.
By choosing to look at and for the positive, you create opportunities for yourself that others don't see, you recover more quickly from setbacks, and in general, have a much better time in the process. So next time, confronted with a daunting challenge or a bad day, remember that you can choose to focus on the positive, and that your optimistic approach is likely to be self-fulfilling.
Add Comment
 
 
Each of us negotiates all the time, every day, whether at work, at home, on the street, or with our friends. We negotiate over petty stuff such as what to order on our pizza or who has to clean the office fridge and really big stuff such as long term relationships and career options.
Some of these negotiations will come more easily to us and others will cause us grief. Moreover, each of us brings different skills and a different personality into the mix. The problem is that because the way we negotiate is just part of the overall picture of how we interact with others, we learn how to negotiate from our experiences and generally have a hard time seeing ourselves as we negotiate.
Without this self-awareness, we are likely to act on impulse rather than strategy and more more likely to be influenced by the other party's tactics. Negotiations involve preparation, strategy, dialog, and follow-though. While each of these pieces can be modeled in frameworks and outlined as step-by-step processes, negotiations are ultimately highly emotional activities in which our ability to behave strategically is impacted by our emotions.
Without emotional self-awareness, we will have a hard time seeing when the other side has made us anxious and caused us to lose sight of our strategy. Without self-awareness we won't notice when we have angered the other party and damaged a relationship over a relatively minor issue. Only by becoming self-aware negotiators can we be effective at following our strategy and employing our skills.
Add Comment
 
 
Negotiations would be much more manageable if we weren't primarily emotional creatures. Read any book on negotiation strategies, and the fundamental assumption that lies beneath the surface is that the people employing these strategies are largely rational. If you have no emotional reactions to a negotiation, or if your emotional reactions are minimal, then indeed you can act strategically as you negotiate. The problem is that very few people are rational all or even most of the time. Anything the other person says or does is likely to provoke some emotional response in you. Sometimes they don't have to do anything at all - something about the circumstances of the situation itself makes you nervous, or angry, or anxious, or something else. Whatever your emotional reaction, the issue is that you have one and it dominates you.

Under such circumstances, the assumption that you are going to be rational is untenable, but there are some things you can do to help yourself along. The first and most important is to slow down the negotiation and to develop a higher level of self-awareness regarding your emotions. Some people do this naturally, and have a good sense of their emotions in real-time. Many other people are unclear at best about their emotions and have great difficulty identifying what is happening with them at any given time. Fortunately, self-awareness is something you can develop with time, through the simple act of paying attention and writing down what you notice about yourself. With time, you will become more comfortable understanding and using your emotions as you negotiate.
Add Comment