Reframing Negotiation: How You Can Use Negotiation to Thrive at Home and at Work

Written by Daniella Kahane, Executive Director, WIN Summit

Many of us view negotiation as a taboo, dirty word that implies those once in a blue moon, scary conversations that often revolve around money and get to the root of our fear of rejection.  In truth, negotiation is a skill that, whether we realize it or not, we use every day, all throughout the day. From our very first encounter with our alarm clock, and the decision to snooze or not, to our first conversation with our child who refuses to get dressed for school or at least put on pants in the winter, to choosing a location for a lunch business meeting, to speaking with your spouse about dinner plans, or who is going to be the one to take out the trash or unload the dishwasher -- whether we realize it or not, we spend most of our day negotiating in some form or another.   

More simply put, every conversation with an “ask” in which we care about the outcome, is a negotiation.   And if we were to zoom out the lens, we would find ourselves with ample opportunity to practice a very important skill that gets to the root of our ability to speak up, ask for what we want, close a business deal, or just get pants on your child in the 25-degree weather.  

Here are 7 ways to improve your negotiations and shift your mindset towards embracing a very important life skill.

1. Develop Self-Awareness

Negotiation is essentially communication.   And communication is something we do all the time, verbally and non-verbally with ourselves and with others.  Before we can alter the way we begin to communicate with others, we must tune in to how we communicate with ourselves. 

Ask yourself:

• Are you consistently using a harsh inner voice?  Do you value your contributions and the things you create or are you your own worst critic?

• Do you validate yourself for how you are feeling or do you push your feelings under the rug?

• Are you impatient with yourself or do you give yourself the time you need to feel, to process, to shift?

• Are you in a growth mindset?  Do you see yourself as fixed in your ways, or can you imagine yourself on a trajectory of growth and improvement? 

These are just a few prompts for you to gain some awareness into how you communicate and thus negotiate with yourself.  This is a critical piece of the equation because if you haven’t yet cultivated (and we know this is a constant journey - not an on/off switch) your own self-esteem, self-worth, and acceptance of self, you will have a much harder time expressing it for others.  

2.  Identify What You Want

Knowing what you want is an imperative tool for knowing how to get there.   But when I say what you want, I don’t mean world peace, an end to global warming, and childhood malnutrition, though those are incredible, lofty goals.  I mean, specific, micro-goals. So often we have amorphous feelings of “I want to be successful, I want to make a lot of money, I want to be appreciated by my co-workers, I want to find true love, etc,” but we haven’t done the work to break this up into more concrete goals.  These larger value goals will come only through the smaller, micro ones. Consider them the destination stations, and the smaller ones are the trains that will get you there. Once you have determined your specific goals, you can then plot the best path to reaching them.   For instance, if you have a salary negotiation coming up, and you know you want to hit a certain number in terms of compensation, think broadly about other aspects of your compensation package that are important to you and why — try and understand what is driving the goal. 

3.  Identify Where You Can Be Flexible

So much of the time when we meet with resistance, we dig our heels in.  This likely creates more rigidity in our partner/counter-party and often escalates into a power struggle or a direct rejection, where power is off-kilter. This makes it critical for you to seize every opportunity to be flexible, WHERE YOU CAN BE. This is not to say that you should be a pushover, and take whatever is offered, or in my earlier example, let your child walk to school in the winter without pants.  What I am advocating here is a more heightened awareness of saying yes when you actually feel that saying yes will not hurt you (or your child), rather than the knee jerk ‘no,’ which many of us are accustomed to giving.  

It will feel hard at first but it will get easier.  For instance, when my 3-year-old daughter refused to get into pajamas after her bath, I tried to understand where it was coming from, and soon learned from her that she wanted to wear her fancy dresses to sleep - you know the poofy holiday ones with the tulle and sashes.  I was about to say no when instead, I said yes - that if she was comfortable sleeping in it, it was fine with me. She looked at me surprised, but then happily got into her dress and soon went to sleep. I avoided an hour of meltdown and she felt like she had some agency over her wardrobe choices.  WIN-WIN. 

4.  Shift Set - Perspective Taking 

Understanding what your counter-party wants, whether that be your boss, the hiring manager, your child or your partner, and beyond what they want, what is motivating their want or rather what is behind their want, will give you the ability to think creatively about how your wants and their wants can potentially be achieved simultaneously.   Being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes is a critical piece to effective communication. Better understanding their motivations, what they are dealing with, and why they are dealing with it, will give you a real advantage in the conversation and will help make them feel like you are not there to bulldoze or take advantage, but are a sensitive, and thoughtful negotiating partner.  You can keep your kindness and empathy intact, while being firm in your objectives and your strategy. 

5.  Prepare 

Preparation is key.  I know you have heard this before but it bears repeating.   Do your research. Do your research. Do your research. The more you know beforehand, about the competitive market, about your counter-party (see number 4), about your other options, the more leverage you will have to succeed. Whether approaching a salary negotiation and being armed with market comparables, competitive offers or approaching a performance review and having a detailed log of your contributions and achievements over the last 12 months at the company, walking in prepared with data and facts will be a game-changer.   

The importance of preparation is apparent both in the content of the conversation but also in your own preparation -- i.e. how you show up.  Believe it or not, 93% of communication is non-verbal, emerging through body language, verbal tone, and pitch. Yet, ironically, most of us barely think about our posture, what we can do to stay positive and open during a stressful conversation, and whether or not we are breathing in a way that will help open our diaphragm and keep our voice from shaking.   In fact, these often overlooked preparatory skills are so important that we have a workshop, Holistic Negotiation, devoted to them. 

6.  Stay Positive 

Even in the instance where you feel that you are not getting anywhere in a negotiation, through a positive growth-mindset, you are more likely to express openness, and view your counter-party in the way in which they want you to perceive them, which in turn can radically shift the energy in the room for the better.  No one wants to feel like you have labeled them or somehow taken one thing about them and generalized it. Through viewing your counter-party with empathy you give them the space to shift themselves, and potentially come around to your perspective and at the very least, you open yourself up to more creativity and paths forward. 

Step 7:  Play the Long Game. 

Remember, you are usually playing a long game… whether it be in negotiating with your colleagues, your boss, or your rebellious teenager -- getting the “yes” is not always the right strategy.  You want to walk away from the conversation with a counter-party who wants to return to it with you. So the “best” deal is not always the one with the biggest bottom line for you. In a world where relationships underpin our negotiations, both parties feeling respected, that a fair deal has been reached, and that you are someone that this person wants to continue “negotiating” with, is hugely important.

So this new decade, I challenge you to change your relationship with negotiation.  Commit to practicing it actively on a daily basis using these seven tips, and I am confident that you will begin to thrive more at work and at home.