Your Emotional Prep Checklist
A quick word first
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Managing your emotions
The first article I posted here was on Negotiation Phobia, the anxiety that many people feel going to the bargaining table. Here’s another collage by one of the subjects in the ZMET study I described in that piece. It represents his conflicted feelings about negotiation, with the elevators going up and down, the tentative touch, and yes, a dissected brain.
Perhaps your feelings don’t run so deep, but what can we do proactively to deal with emotional baggage? How can we perform at our best?
I recently posted several threads about preparing yourself emotionally to negotiate. Here I’ll weave those pieces together. If you’ve had a chance to think about the questions I posed, great. But if you’re new to Jazz of Negotiation, they are:
What do you want to feel going into a negotiation?
Why do you want to feel that way?
What can you do before sitting down to get in that state?
What can throw you off balance in negotiation?
What can you do regain your balance?
What do you want to feel when you’re done?
If you haven’t seen the questions before, pause for a moment and think about how you’d answer them.
Contrary responses
I’ll take these out of order. When people answer that last question, the most common answer—by far—is “relief!” Maybe that’s not you, but’s true for most of the people whom you negotiate with. And the stress that they feel can hamper your own success, especially if their anxiety makes them suspicious of your motives and trustworthiness. For them, the glass is half-empty. Don’t exacerbate their doubts.
Jumping back to the first two questions. When I ask students in class what they want to feel going into negotiation, the initial answers tend to be “calm, relaxed, poised” but then others jump and say they want to be “excited, pumped up, alert.” The contrast is reminder that people have different personalities and different needs.
As a class digs deeper, other dualities emerge. Some students say that they want to be patient, while others want to be proactive. There’s a split, as well, between people who want to be practical, with their feet on the ground, while an equal number want to be at their creative best.
All of that seems right to me, but that means that successful negotiators must be simultaneously:
Calm and alert
Patient and proactive
Practical and creative
This balancing act isn’t a matter of switching from one to the other at different times during a negotiation. The key is being all of these things at once. Nor is it a matter of trade-offs. The goal isn’t being a little calm and somewhat alert. A closer look at each of these dualities shows how to reconcile them.
Walking and chewing gum at the same time
Start with poise. It’s essential when negotiations get heated. It gives you the emotional wherewithal to defuse tense situations. But vigilance is just as important. It helps you spot early signs that the negotiation is not turning out as hoped.
You likewise need a rich brew of patience and initiative. The former is a well-trumpeted virtue: good things come to those who wait, and haste makes waste. Those adages apply in negotiation, of course. Building trust takes time. Rushing the process can backfire in cultures where what seems like small talk is an important social ritual. And making proposals prematurely, before laying the groundwork, can spur rejection.
But initiative is a virtue too. The thesaurus likens that word to a plan, inventiveness, and having the upper hand—all of which are decided advantages at the bargaining table. Only by probing do you learn how high up the value ladder you can climb or when it’s time to switch to plan B. If you fail to take the lead, the other side will set the tune.
Then there are the dual goals of practicality and creativity. Master negotiators are hard-headed realists. They realize when they’ve been stuck with a lemon—but they also know how to make lemonade. When parties are deadlocked over price, for example, a resourceful seller might provide financing to bridge the gap. Or maybe forming a joint venture could create profit all around.
On the other hand, being grounded is a plus too. Practical recognition of the other side’s needs and constraints helps negotiators focus on workable solutions instead of flights of fancy. It signals when half a loaf is the most you’re going to get. Pragmatism also inoculates you against falling in love with a deal and paying more than the top dollar you set initially.
Ideally, you’d like to have all these virtues in full measure, but each pair seems a contradiction. How can you remain calm if you’re also on the lookout for danger?
Embracing paradox is not some fanciful New Age notion, however. You often rely on other professionals to do exactly that. If someone in your family needs a coronary bypass operation, for example, you’d want a heart surgeon who’s both calm and alert. Likewise, you hope your children are blessed with teachers who are simultaneously patient and proactive. And if you’d been on board the crippled Apollo 13 moon mission, you’d have wanted the NASA mission control crew to be practical and creative to the max.
Self-assurance
I’ve seen the same qualities in master negotiators. While each of these three dualities (calm-alert, patient-proactive, practical-creative) is important in its own right, they rest upon and express a deeper pairing of assurance and humility. Those attributes aren’t emotions. Rather, they represent a more fundamental way of seeing oneself in relation to others. The assurance part of the equation is confidence that you can handle the task at hand, given what’s reasonably possible. In turn, the humility element accepts that not everything is knowable or subject to your control.
Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi, author of the influential book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, says that the mark of strong individuals is an abiding confidence in having the personal resources to determine their own fate. “In that sense, one would call them self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent; they are not self-centered.” He says that “their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously.” It requires recognition that “to succeed, one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer.”
Now let’s take questions 3, 4, and 5, as a bundle: how can you get yourself in the right emotional state for negotiation; what can throw you off; and how do regain your balance?
Once again these are personal questions. Some people have told me that they take a few minutes of quiet reflection before they negotiate. Others have a play list that pumps them up. People’s hot buttons vary, as well. You need to know what your own are, and the right thing to do if one yours is pushed. Same thing for regaining your balance. Be ready to call a time-out or, if that’s not possible, shift the discussion to another topic.
That brings us back to question 6: what do you want to feel when you’re done? Whatever your answer, I suggest you add “reflective” to the list. When you do your post-negotiation review of what worked well and what you’d do differently, strategically and tactically. But don’t stop there. Also ask your self about how well you managed your emotions. Track moments that you handled well and that you can build upon. And be honest with yourself. Flag other times when you should have used a different approach.
You’ll always have emotions. The key is not letting your emotions help you.
Housekeeping
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Many thanks!
Mike