NLP

by Tom Hoobyar

  Negotiation Tips

  As you walk into the room, you want to stop and gather yourself. As with any interaction, you want to bring your energy into a relaxed, calm, welcoming state before you go into the room because you’re probably going to go into a room with a bunch of people. Maybe they’re “suits,” maybe they’re union organizers, maybe they’re family members. It doesn’t matter who they are, but they’re people with an agenda—and you have one, too.

  Although you need to be really clear about your bottom line, your agenda and approach must be flexible. Because you have no idea where the negotiation is going to go, you have to accept that you cannot control the outcome. In fact, there may not be an outcome. You may decide that you have to walk away and say, “Thanks, but no deal.” You need to own all the possible outcomes so you can be comfortable when those options arise. That way, you’re never desperate—which is critical.

  In any negotiation, there are four assets at play and on everyone’s minds: time, money, energy, and emotion. The more time, the more energy, the more emotion, and the more money that are spent during a negotiation, the more valuable that negotiation becomes, and this makes the outcome exponentially more important.

  If you understand that these aspects are playing a part in a negotiation game, then you realize that if you’re not in a rush or in a hurry—you’ve already got one of the big variables on your side. If you can take as much time as you want, the other side will feel squeezed by that.

  Besides time, there are two other key elements you may be able to optimize. Number one is the amount of information regarding the issue. Who has the most information about it? How can you gather additional information? It’s always advantageous if you (or people working for you) have done a lot of homework to accurately and thoroughly understand everything about the issue—the various ways it could be worked out and the associated costs.

  The other big element, and this is all perceptual, is who has the power. What’s that mean? What does power mean? In this case, it means the power to make a decision—so who has the power in this situation? The answer to that may flip back and forth—partly because they may not want you to know who has the power, and partly because different players may be vying for power during the negotiation.

  Generally, the person who’s in position to win is the individual who has the most time, the most information, and the most power or personal authority on their side of the table. The power to walk away at any time is one of the greatest advantages you can have.

  And even though you want to win, you’ll do better if you do everything you can to be a charming, friendly, sincere, collaborative, and understanding communicator. You do best if you use all the same skills with people you’ve just met and with people you love. This approach is more humane and it’s easier on you.

  By the same token, you should understand that in a negotiation, your beginning position is one of no compromise. Ultimately there will be some accommodation. You want to have room to make concessions. So start with your end in mind and leave yourself sufficient flexibility. You may be presented with a variety of ways to get where you want to go, and won’t have to give up much of what’s really important to you.

  I don’t like playing hardball and I try not to do it. But when negotiations get tough, I’ve been known to say, “Let’s do this: Imagine there’s a hand grenade on the table. I’m going to pull the pin—then I’m going to put your hand on it to hold it down and I’m going to put my hand over yours. Now we’re going to negotiate until we’re both satisfied with the outcome—or until we get tired enough to let go of the hand grenade and it blows us both up.”

  People have laughed about that, but they got that I was completely committed—that I would spend as much time as was needed to make a deal. I wasn’t desperate; I was just willing. The thing is, the more willing you are, the more it shows that you have control of time.

  Additional Benefits of Using Meta-Outcomes in Negotiation

  As you might imagine, meta-outcomes, which are the vital parts of the “Conflict Integration,” can also be very useful in negotiation. Although these principles could apply to a negotiation with a teenager about using the family car on a weekend, let’s use a business example where there are two or three things on the table.

  Maybe we’re talking about speed of delivery versus pricing, versus bundling other products if they buy enough quantity. So they’ll make a demand and I’m looking at that, and what I’d say before I give anything away, before I say yes to anything at all—in fact, I usually don’t say yes to anything until I see the complete deal—what I would do is to say, “And if we did that, how would that benefit your company?”

  Why am I asking? Because I want to hear them talk some more and I want to see their body language. And if there’s more than one person representing their company’s interests, I want to watch whether they look at each other or whether somebody is surprised by what the other person says. But even more important than all of that, I want to know what their meta-outcomes are.

  Meta-outcomes aren’t simple things—discovering them requires that you listen carefully and ask relevant follow-up questions. If, in response to my question about how that would benefit their company, they said, “Well, if we get a lower price, that’s important because we have this internal policy that we can’t spend more than this without getting some sort of special committee approval, which would slow down the rate at which we can buy your products,” I’d have learned something, right? But I still need to know more. So I’d say, “And if you get the fast delivery, what’s important to you about that? How does that work?”

  And they tell me, “That means we can order it later in our process and still get it into our project,” so now I know one of them is just a convenience factor, ordering later. The other one is a bureaucracy factor. If I can get them a slightly lower price and maybe a longer delivery, that will work for me.

  Because I’ve found what their meta-outcomes are, that’s something I know and they don’t. I’ve found out why they’re demanding certain things. And even though it may sometimes feel like they’re putting me over a barrel, they’re demanding things for a specific reason. Everybody always does. It’s a game with a lot of unknown variables at play and at stake. Part of your job is to uncover those elements.

  One of the NLP negotiation courses I took was taught by a great guy, an attorney with quite a sense of humor. He went up to the blackboard and he said, “Negotiation is win-win.” Then he wrote a quote mark and I thought, “Oh, this will be interesting.” Then on the board he wrote “win-win” so it looked like this: “WIN-win.”

  He said, “Negotiation is a game and the goal is to win the game. It’s fine to call the other person a partner in the negotiation because they are your partner in a game, but they’re also an adversary in terms of the negotiation.” When you can be realistic about this fact, you can still be very humane and fair-minded. And when you can keep this is mind, you’ll remember that you’re not trying to get everything they’ve got and that you must never humiliate them, make them feel bad about themselves, or rob them of face.

  I got a great piece of advice from a mentor of mine who was the chairman of my company. He always said to me, “Put it the other way around. Walk in their moccasins.” Because I was always so focused and intense when we worked together, I needed him to remind me to put it the other way around, to look at it from the other person’s point of view.

  So many of the skills in NLP are about that, aren’t they? They’re about looking at it from the other person’s point of view. Now it doesn’t mean you live the other person’s life or you do their job. It doesn’t mean that you have to agree with their point of view. It just means you develop an understanding of and appreciation for their position. It gives you insight, empathy, and more clicks on your dial in terms of how to satisfy their needs—and yours.

  When you’re negotiating, it’s as important to learn about the other person as it is when you’re talking
with a friend, loved one, or colleague. We live in a world surrounded by other humans. The more we can learn about them, the less concerned we become about ourselves and the more effective we are.

  Powerful Emotions: How to Facilitate Discussions

  with People Who Are Upset

  In earlier chapters we touched on how to deal with difficult people and situations; let’s explore this a little further now. Every once in a while, I need to deal with people who are angry. Maybe I made them angry or maybe they were angry when they got on the phone or in the room, but it doesn’t matter to me. I could accuse them of waking up on the wrong side of the bed or of not getting enough love lately, but that wouldn’t be helpful. Regardless of what made the person angry, you have to work with the human being in front of you.

  So, when I’m interacting with someone who is in a bad mood or was angry—or angry with me—the first thing I want to know is how they feel. I don’t feel attacked when somebody’s angry; I just feel they’re angry. And I want to know how they feel. How angry are they?

  So I might say, “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re feeling really angry. It might be because I was late on that phone call two weeks ago,” or if I have no clue, I’ll say, “It feels like you’re really angry. Can you tell me about it?” and let them go. Remember, we want to help people exhale. Until they exhale, until they relieve the pressure, there’s no listening or real communication anyway, so you let them exhale.

  When they seem to run out of steam, you can say, “Tell me more,” or you can ask the question “Is that because of . . .” and let them go. Then you can say, “How upset are you?” and let them tell you that. Next you say, “Is there anything I can do to contribute to changing the situation?”

  “Well, no. I just wanted you to listen—that’s all. I just had to blow off some steam. Thanks a lot.”

  Once they’ve been heard, they’re probably ready to let you be heard. Or they’ll say, “Yes, you can. You can keep your damn promises. When you say you’ll call me at a certain time, call me at that time.”

  I wish I could say that I’ve never responded defensively to getting feedback. I’ve been guilty of blasting back with “Well, you’re no better,” or “Look, I had this going on. If you’re not adult enough to understand that . . .” I’ve done a lot of that kind of reactive behavior and it’s cost me.

  So when we’re interacting with someone who’s emotional or people who are generally kind of difficult, it’s important to remember that they’re the ones who are uncomfortable. They’re involved in something that’s hard for them; so don’t respond with discomfort of your own. Just get what’s happening there and that these are the folks who are really in pain, not you or me.

  So before you can have a communication with them that’s in your own self-interest, you need to do something to help loosen that up. The key here is you can’t label them in advance, “Oh, that guy’s just another pain in the ass. He wants everything in the world.” You can’t do that. You can’t say, “Oh, they’re lazy. If they had taken the time to do X earlier, they wouldn’t be in this trouble right now.”

  Drop all your judgments. Most of us live in glass houses, right? If you can just accept that, it doesn’t matter that you’re not as imperfect as some other poor slob. For the moment, we want to be in league with this person. Because we want to work with them, we want no defensiveness at all on our part. We’re just there to be of service and to listen.

  In my own mind right now, I can hear a voice saying, “Oh right, you’re just going to lie down? You’re going to be a doormat? You’re going to be a punching bag? They won’t have any respect for you.” That dialogue comes from an old map of the world. It’s simple to understand, but it’s not true.

  For almost two decades, I’ve been practicing fairly sophisticated communication with people, and I’ve learned that sincerely seeking to understand them makes their respect for you go up and your stress level go way down. When you don’t have the need to defend yourself or to get even or any of that stuff, you can be much more humane dealing with other people. The most powerful position is the one you don’t need to defend.

  Now, is it a lot of fun to be yelled at or to be abused or even to hear somebody’s emotional baggage? Of course it’s not; but so what? If you sign up for the job of communicating with your fellow humans, you have to take them as they come. Sometimes that includes bad breath or bad manners, and sometimes that includes pretty bad feelings. It is whatever it is. You’re going to care about them anyway because all these conditions are temporary.

  When someone’s upset, they’re a lot like a patient in the emergency room. Because they’re in the grip of some kind of pain or emotion, they’re in fight-or-flight mode. They’re not thinking; they’re feeling. So, when you’re with them, don’t focus on being mad, afraid, or defensive. Instead focus on them. The more resourceful you can be, the more helpful you can be, and the more appreciated you will become.

  So, if after you’ve let them completely vent, you’re clear that there’s nothing you can do about this—if this is just something that they had to get off their chest and they thank you for it—you can move on or you can say, “I’m curious: what’s impossible about this that you really would want?”

  This does two things for them. First, you’re still talking about something “out there.” In fact, as I hear my own language, I’d probably say, “What’s impossible about that?” because that would put it even further away in their physical mind. Then let them tell you what’s impossible about it. Next you could say, “Okay, what would make it possible?” That’s a very simple and very powerful question: “What would make it possible?”

  Asking these kinds of questions—“What would it be like if it did? What would it be like if you could? What would it be like if we worked this out?”—shifts the entire basis of thought from impossibility to desire. I find that sharing Nelson Mandela’s wisdom often inspires people to embrace possibility. He said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

  As you know, these kinds of questions create a significant physiological response in the human brain; they actually engage more neurons. Then people truly have more brainpower to work with because when it’s impossible, it’s impossible. It’s like having your foot caught in a trap. All you can do is tug on the trap and feel the pain.

  But if you imagine what it’s like for something to be possible, now you’re not focusing on the impossibility, you’re focusing on: “Wow, what would it be like? And what would make that possible? Hmm, I wonder what things need to be rearranged? Maybe there’s a little more wiggle room over there than I thought.” It just starts to loosen up the mind, so it can move forward and entertain options.

  The Unexpected Strategy:

  An Approach to Consider When You’re Upset

  What if you’re the person who’s upset? Perhaps there’s someone in your life who’s been a problem for you, disappointed you a bit, or hasn’t stepped up. This person might be a family member, a coworker, a client, or a vendor. For me, I found more of these challenges at work than at home. And when somebody who worked for me dropped the ball, I used to call them into my office and say, “What’s your problem?” Not an ideal response, right?

  A better thing to do—and this is something I tried only a few times before I retired, but it worked like magic—is to call them in and say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about you and about the demands I place on you. And I think I owe you an apology.”

  Because the other person’s expecting to get called on the carpet, this really throws them for a loop. They’re thinking, “Huh?”

  I say, “Yeah, the more I think about this, I imagine that you must feel like I don’t take you into consideration, I just impose things on you. I give you unrealistic deadlines—I have no sympathy for your personal issues—and you must feel like you can’t get it done and, even if you do, you’re not going to be appreciated. I want you to know I’m really sorry for creating a situation like that for y
ou. I apologize and I’m going to do better.”

  The person’s waiting because they’re thinking, “This is one of those psychology sandwich things.” You know, the kind of sandwich where you give them a compliment, then you give them a criticism, then you give them a compliment.

  What I’m recommending is a different kind of approach. This is where you don’t give them a compliment, you give them an apology of substance—and then you thank them for their time. In other words, you just did the unexpected and you made them feel heard. You made their feelings feel felt, and you didn’t demand anything from them. You left it with that.

  When people have this kind of experience with you, it’s like a “reset”—and they’ll return to being their best self. If they have more they’d like to talk with you about, you’ve just made it safe and inviting for that, too.

  Whether an opportunity is internal to you, with one other person, or with a group, you now have several new, effective ways to facilitate creative collaboration and “Conflict Integration.” Although these strategies are useful with most people, I recommend that you consider using these approaches with people who are occasionally difficult, but not with people who are just plain toxic. This will help you maintain your personal integrity and control of your life.

  Whenever you’re interacting with others, you, and they, have a more positive experience when you are curious and creative. Creativity is about multiplying choices. Most of what we’ve talked about throughout this book is about increasing your choices.

  When you think about your life, the things that pinch and the things that hurt us and the things we regret are usually limitations, occasions and places where we believed our choices were restricted. NLP is all about creating more choices so you can have more of what you really want.

  Key Ideas

  • Having expectations or being on autopilot filters out information—which limits thinking and options.