Building and exercising negotiation skills
Building and exercising your negotiation skills is much like building and exercising your body. After lots of exercises and working out you think you are in shape.
Then an occasion arises that forces you to start using those lesser-used muscles and, Whoa, where鈥檚 the deep heating rub?
How can an Olympic weightlifter possibly race with a sprinter? How does the sprinter compete in bench pressing?
They鈥檙e both athletes, they both train hard and they both develop their bodies. Yet they still come from different worlds.
So it is with negotiations. We can鈥檛 be negotiating (or even arguing) in a different world from the other party. We need to find commonality, starting from a position of at least understanding each other鈥檚 position.
We don鈥檛 have to agree, but we still need to appreciate the perspective of others if we hope to influence them to thinking our way. Others will only listen to us if we listen to them and can react intelligently to their positions or concerns.
So the first dispute resolution muscles we have to work on are those skills that keep us fully focused. Those skills are silence and listening.
More bluntly stated, 鈥渟hut up.鈥� Many arguments are won when you stop opening your mouth.
That鈥檚 a lot harder than we realize. Can you sense the pending ache of those unused muscles that are about to get a workout?
We鈥檒l talk about the use of 鈥渟trategic silence鈥� in a future column. As for 鈥渟trategic listening, it is an incredibly powerful tool once you learn to master it.
