Negotiations — How to Excel

Your most important sale is to sell yourself to yourself. Maxwell Maltz

When someone says negotiation, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Maybe it’s salary negotiation with your new employer OR asking for a promotion OR raise in salary from your manager OR two people negotiating on their differences OR asking more monthly allowance from your parents OR selecting what to watch on movie night with your partner OR anything that you relate more to.

To be honest, everything in life is negotiable and we need to choose what is worth and what is not. You may be in situations where you think you are not winning or getting that YES you think you should get it.

Sometimes even before negotiating, you are selling that negotiation to yourself. And if you are not able to convince yourself, often you drop the idea to even go forward and have a conversation in reality.

For example — you are in a mall and you see a person not wearing a mask, are you going to go there and tell that person that they should wear a mask in public places. I might think about 5–10 minutes. Negotiate with myself — whether I should go or not and ultimately I will decide not to go and later, judging that person for a while without any reason.

See I failed to negotiate with myself here. It just takes a little bit of courage to go, say it, and keep everyone around us safe.

There can be a hundred such scenarios in your day, where you might take the easy road and think this is for the better.

Negotiation is a difficult conversation for sure. It mostly depends on our personality type and how you view and perceive yourself alone and around people.

You might have two completely different personalities at work and at home. And it’s not only you. As we play various roles in our life, we are bound to have different personas associated with each role.

Recognizing the ability to handle yourself in a difficult conversation is a skill, not a talent and it can be developed with time and persistence.

But before you start expecting people to say yes or to agree on what you have to offer. You should know your self-worth and what you are going to bring to the table.

It’s not necessary to have a high sense of self-confidence in every area of your life; there are naturally some things that you will not be very good at, and other areas in which you are excellent.

Negotiations are not always linear or bi-directional transactions where you give and take. So now the question is how we can navigate the negotiations in your favor — get what you deserve and come out strong from difficult situations.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

1- Deep clarity on the Goal- If you are clear on what the goal is. You can use this strategy — that is to use is the five whys technique. And so you just ask yourself, why five times, it goes from something that’s kind of surface level and materialistic to something that’s really deep and personal.

2- Self Assessment and boost on self-esteem — No one is perfect, you might have heard zillions of times in your life and when you don’t get something, you just think maybe you don’t deserve it.

Having a sense of self-worth means that you value yourself, and having a sense of self-value means that you are worthy.

You can be perfect in your own way by identifying your strong points.

Maybe you are good with people, you might have good listening skills or you can lead initiation without or minimal help or just let’s say you are a good cook.

The key here is to assess yourself and identify the points you are good at and what are the things you can improve on.

Once you know your strong points, you can move the negotiations flow in your direction. It will boost your confidence and self-esteem.

Never underestimate your self-worth.

3- Build Confidence — There may be moments when you feel guilty or selfish for asking for what you know you deserve. Believe in your abilities and your own potential. Sometimes people can surprise you.

You entered a room with 10 pages negotiation counter replies to ask for a raise but your manager just gives it to you without even asking anything in return. And you come out from the room, wondering why you didn’t ask earlier.

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” — Peter T. McIntyre

When you downplay your self-worth, you greatly affect your ability to claim value in negotiations. You may be losing some of the great opportunities and blinding yourself to new horizons.

Self-confidence is not an overall evaluation of yourself, but a feeling of confidence and competence in more specific areas.

Try to have a positive state of mind, a sense of self-confidence can influence yourself to act and influence great opportunities.

The important thing is to have self-confidence in the activities in your personal life that matter to you and a high sense of self-worth overall.

If you want to start thinking in a new way, there is an exercise from “Kwame Christian” to identify your personality trait.

It is like this, With the big five personality traits, the acronym that’s used is OCEAN. It stands for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. And so it’s not an either-or type of thing. Usually, it is it’s a spectrum of one to five in each of those.

So you’re either high or low, or somewhere in the middle, when it comes to this. Based on your understanding of your personality style, that’s going to dictate and give you the direction of which negotiation approaches work really well for you.

That’s the first thing and then based on somebody else’s, it helps you to anticipate where and how you are going to be resistant, and then what approaches you should do in order to avoid that resistance and, and make it more likely for you to succeed.

I took the test and my score looked like this —

Having said all that, lastly what you can do is become our own best advocate and establish boundaries of what we say “Yes” to.

This may sound basic and simple, but to know your worth, and to own your worth, is crucial to know your own self-worth and how you can use it for your own good.

Healthy Negotiations are not a bad thing where you can lay out all the pros and cons before making a final decision in all aspects of your life.

Hope these points are going to be helpful when you go for your next negotiation. Either it’s your new job or a new car or anything for that matter.

To know more, I suggest reading this book by Kwame Christian — Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life

Be Bold

Be Courageous

Be Your Best

Note: This story is inspired after I read the book. Some of the references I used are from the book.

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