What is the other person feeling? How do they perceive the situation? What are the pictures in their heads?” Thinking from the other person’s point of view often turns up surprising results. Your outcomes will be improved once you start thinking from the other person’s perspective. What are their needs or fears? How are they approaching the situation? These are critical pieces of information for any successful negotiation.

Understanding The Other Person

Making an exception requires the other person to candidly reflect on whether or not they have treated someone differently in the past, and often, they have. Once they realize this, it’s more likely that you’ll become one of the exceptions as well.

Making An Exception

Standards are especially effective with hard bargainers. With difficult people, use standards. It is a fundamental tenet of human psychology that people hate to contradict themselves. So if you give people a choice between being consistent with their standards—with what they have said and promised previously—and contradicting their standards, people will usually strive to be consistent with their standards. Knowing that people hate to contradict themselves is a key part of understanding the power of standards and why you should leverage them.

The Power Of Standards

'Do I trust this person? Before I put my life, and my family’s life, in their hands, without recourse, who are they?’ This is the question that is asked by most of the rest of the world. It is not a question that appears to be asked by most people in the United States. The United States focuses more on punishment and contracts than on relationships. And this hampers the United States and its citizens in their negotiations with the rest of the world.

The Power Of Relationships

People do some of the most important things in life not for money, not for rational benefits, but for how it makes them feel.As much as economists want us to believe that people are hyper-rational actors that consider all angles of every decision they make, they’re not. Most of the things we do are because of some feeling we have, not because we have weighed the rationality of a particular course. More often than not, we rationalize our decisions after they’ve been made.

Emotions Have More Value Than Rationality

A key to getting other people to give you what you want is to value the other party.People like to give things to others who listen to them, who value them, who consult with them.Listen to and value the other party. It will improve your outcomes.

Value the Other Person

It is much more persuasive to let others make the decision, instead of telling them what the decision should be. You want to lead them to where you want them to go, through framing and by being incremental.  Framing and being incremental are two of the hardest things for people to learn. Most people want to rush ahead, and find it hard to break things up into smaller steps. Also, it takes time to get just the right framing; many people don’t have the patience. But great framing can immediately conclude a negotiation in your favor.

Frame and Be Incremental

In much of business, money is not the most important item of importance to either side, regardless of what they say. The price has to be reasonable, but so much more is required. Intangibles can bridge the gap between seemingly inflexible positions. It’s rarely just about maximizing the monetary outcome. Look for trades of unequal value. There are things that I have that cost me very little, but that you value highly. Identifying these levers is essential for maximizing the value of the negotiation for both parties.

The Intangibles

The best negotiators are dispassionate, and continue to ask for information.  Emotion destroys negotiations and limits creativity. Focus is lost. Decision-making is poor. Retaliation often occurs. Your goal is not to be “right;” it’s to get the outcome you desire. Leave the emotions and ego at the door, and you will make fewer bad decisions. You’ll keep your eye on the prize.

Be Dispassionate

With persistence comes self-confidence: the belief that you can do it.It doesn’t matter how many times the other person says no, or disagrees with you, or gives you a hard time. Keep asking, stay focused on your goals (without making yourself the issue). Persistence, after all, is a focused effort, over time, to meet your goals.In negotiation, persistence is key. Keep finding ways to get more information and unlock new value levers for both parties. Your persistence will pay off in the long run.

Persistence

You make small talk. Not just because you read somewhere that it’s smart to make small talk. You do it because you are interested in them. Because you want to try for a point of connection with other people. It’s a way of approaching life.”Small talk helps open up and deepen connections. Don’t be above it.

Make Small Talk

When someone is interrupted, the tapes are still playing in their head. It’s so easy to interrupt someone once you understand what they are saying or have your response ready to go. But it’s a terrible habit. Because once you interrupt someone, they aren’t listening to you. They are thinking about finishing the point they wanted to make.

Don’t Interrupt Someone

Ask how the company retains, trains, and promotes people in their careers. Ask about the company’s philosophy of work? The answers to these questions will give you invaluable information about the culture of the organization and whether or not it’s a fit for your needs.

Essential Question for All Job Applicants

Contextualize the argument, no matter how heated, with the following: “Hey, we’ve been friends for x years—over 1,000 or 2,000 days. Do you really want to toss everything out over one bad day?” This will help put things in perspective and diffuse the issue.

When Arguing with A Friend

Trust is a feeling of security that the other person will protect you. With some trust, another person will help you until it’s too risky for them or a better opportunity comes along. With a lot of trust, the other party will help you even if it harms them. It is very important to understand the trust dynamic.”Trust can carry you further than most other things.

Trust

Perhaps the biggest cause of negotiation failure, worldwide, is communication failure. And the single biggest cause of communication failure is misperception.This means that their perceptions are more important than your proposals; that is, if you want to persuade them.Most communication failures stem from misperception. So before jumping to conclusions, do your research and try to understand the other party as best you can.

Misperception and Communication

We all think that everyone else has the same thought processes, set of experiences, and perceptual framework that we do.We all imagine that others think like we do. They don’t. We also attribute people’s behaviors to their identity instead of recognizing the importance of the specific events happening in their lives at the moment. This is the fundamental attribution error at work, and it leads us to make poor judgments about people’s motivations and character.

Understanding The Fundamental Attribution Error

The more you tell them to calm down, the madder they get. That’s because telling them to calm down devalues the legitimacy of their emotions. And when people feel devalued, they become more emotional. Good negotiation requires valuing the other party and their needs. Telling someone to calm down fails to recognize the person’s perspective as legitimate, and more often than not, it will do more harm than good.

Don’t Say “Calm Down”

With compensation, it is especially important to know what the other party is thinking before asking for something specific.Knowing how your company makes compensation decisions and what your boss values are important pieces of information before you ask for anything specific in a compensation discussion.

Compensation

Negotiation is at the heart of human interaction. Negotiation is not a battle. It’s a process of better relating to people in all kinds of circumstances.Common enemies bring parties closer together and make the negotiation easier.Some legitimate common enemies in business relationships are loss of profit, loss of time, failure to retain good people, and inability to capitalize on opportunities.

Negotiation: A Primer

A fantastic introduction to negotiation and learning how to get more as a way of life.

Explains how to interact with real-world, unpredictable people in order to achieve desired goals, providing coverage of such topics as avoiding miscommunication and making unequal trades.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

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Marketing & Sales

teamwork

Teamwork

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Books

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Learn the negotiation model used by Google to train employees worldwide, U.S. Special Ops to promote stability globally (“this stuff saves lives”), and families to forge better relationships. A 20% discount on an item already on sale. A four-year-old willingly brushes his/her teeth and goes to bed. A vacationing couple gets on a flight that has left the gate. $5 million more for a small business; a billion dollars at a big one.   Based on thirty years of research among forty thousand people in sixty countries, Wharton Business School Professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Stuart Diamond shows in this unique and revolutionary book how emotional intelligence, perceptions, cultural diversity and collaboration produce four times as much value as old-school, conflictive, power, leverage and logic.   As negotiations underlie every human encounter, this immediately-usable advice works in virtually any situation: kids, jobs, travel, shopping, business, politics, relationships, cultures, partners, competitors.   The tools are invisible until you first see them. Then they’re always there to solve your problems and meet your goals.

Don’t Say “Calm Down”

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