002 Trusting Your Natural Negotiation Style

In this episode, Cindy discusses:

• Coming from your feminine, not your masculine in negotiation.
• Lessons from childhood and law school simulations in negotiation.
• Fundamental principles of negotiation.
• The power of relationships in negotiation.

  Key Takeaways:

• Negotiation doesn’t have to be a take-no-prisoners situation. It can be about rapport building, empathy, and authenticity. 
• Negotiating and living outside your natural style can lead to feeling disconnected and changing how you act in other aspects of your life.
• Consider the zones of potential agreement in your negotiations. These zones do often exist if you are willing to look for them.
• There is a power in balance. Knowing when to back off and knowing when to push should be a deliberate choice and action, not reaction. 

 

 "One of the basic teaching points on the art of negotiation is to always set a reservation price or a resistance point, basically a bottom line. Without that anchor to hold you, you were sliding past your point of no return." —  Cindy Watson  Click here to get your free E-Book "No F.E.A.R. Negotiations" How to negotiate effectively without Fear, Ego, Attachment or Reactivity to get what you want from the boardroom to the bedroom  CONNECT WITH CINDY:

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Full Transcript below:

Trusting Your Natural Negotiation Style: You Don’t Always Need to Go for the Jugular

What if I suggested that coming from your feminine makes you instinctively and intuitively better negotiators than coming from your masculine? Would you balk? Reject the idea? At a minimum, I’m sure you’d ask, “So why do women still make less money than men? Why do they ask for less than men? Why do they hesitate in speaking up?” All good questions.

But first, let me share my story.

I grew up in a low rental apartment complex in a tough neighborhood. My dad worked shift work in a factory. I remember those early mornings or late nights if I was up and able to catch him alone as he got ready to go to work. Watching those strong worker’s hands pull the laces taut on his tan work boots, or watching his man-stance as he squatted to see himself in the hall mirror, combing his hair back in that Elvis style pompadour (or whatever they were called). I loved those stolen moments. But I also remember the struggles. The fighting between my parents. There was never quite enough money to make ends meet, even though he’d come home day after day from the factory, exhausted, with nothing left, but still put on a brave face for my sister and I.

My dad was a guy’s guy. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, big voice, big laugh, filled every room he ever walked in. He trained inner-city boys how to box. I suspect he wanted boys himself, but he got stuck with my sister and I. He never taught us to box. Well, I remember once when I asked, and he had me assume the position and proceeded to sneak inside my Swiss cheese fist frame to tap me on the cheek over and over again, showing me how easy a target I was. I’m sure that wasn’t his intention, but that’s how it felt to me. Like an indictment. I wasn’t a boy. I wasn’t enough.

My paradigm shift came in grade 2. I won an ‘academic’ award. Maybe you remember them – those little badges they handed out for exceptional achievement. A light went on. Maybe I could achieve as a girl. And I became driven to ‘succeed’, to have more – more space than that little apartment, more money, but mostly, more respect.

So I went straight through high school to university to law school, shooting for those straight ‘A’s.

And in law school, I took a negotiations course. Our entire grade was based on these simulated negotiations – the class would break into assigned pairs and negotiate against each other – the highest negotiated settlement got the highest mark (no credit for creative win-win solutions – just a straight column from highest settlement to lowest settlement amount). If you didn’t get a settlement you got a zero. You can imagine how those negotiations went with a highly competitive top law school student body. At the end of the year, the professor approached me and said he’d never seen results like mine in all his years of practice and teaching the course. I won virtually every single negotiation. And you can imagine how hard that got as the school year went on and everybody was gunning for me, expecting this hard-core negotiator that they had to bring their A-game for, coming expecting to be screwed over.

I don’t share that to brag, but because of the epiphany, it gave me – not at the time, sadly, but much later in life, when I realized that I hadn’t approached those negotiations with a take-no-prisoners approach at all. Back then, I was still using my natural, instinctual – dare I say – more feminine negotiation style. I came at every negotiation from a place of rapport building, empathy and authenticity, working to find out what the other side wanted, what they needed, working with them to find a way to have them walk away content with the results. And as the year went on and I kept winning each negotiation, suffice it to say that trust-building got harder and harder. But somehow I was always able to win them over, to build that relationship, to find a win where they walked away happy (at least until the grades were announced).

But then I started the actual practice of law – initially in an all-male-partner firm, and later in my own firm, but still in a male-dominated environment – where I got positive feedback and reinforcement for tearing people apart. I still got great results, but I’d lost my intuitive female style. They called me ‘barracuda’. I made people cry on the witness stand. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I felt disconnected. It didn’t feel good. Or right.

And then it began to spill over into other areas of my life. I found I brought my ‘tough’ negotiator to every problem. Crappy hotel room? Look out, I was down at the front desk giving them what for. Phone company over-charging? Internet not working and the provider trying to blame the router provider? Hide your children, I was not letting them pull one over on me. And forget the ‘get more with honey’ approach. I’d convinced myself that people invariably tried to take advantage if you showed any sign of weakness; that the only way to get quick fulsome results was bringing my badass to the table. The little girl whose dad didn’t teach her to box was Muhammad Ali in the ring of life.

But then one day I was having what I thought was a simple discussion with my son. I saw his frustration mounting and at some point he finally exploded.

“For God’s sake, Mom! Does every conversation with you have to be a debate that you win?”

And just like that, my world changed. I felt my heart torn from my chest as I saw the angst and hurt on this face. And my world view changed in an instant. My sense of self shattered into little pieces on the floor in front of me. And in that moment of profound connection, my perspective on effective negotiations flipped. I realized I’d been duped into negotiating ‘like a man’ (and yes, I’m putting air quotes around the phrase). And I realized that I didn’t have to. And neither do you.

You Don’t Have To Go For the Jugular In Negotiations

Let’s start with a few fundamental principles. One of the basic teaching points on the art of negotiation is to always set a reservation price or resistance point – a bottom line. Without that anchor to hold you, you risk sliding past your point of no return. There are any number of tactics the pundits advise you employ to hold firm on your reservation price or point. Making pie in the sky demands, presenting a first and final offer, providing an ultimatum or walking away are just a few examples.

An equally important, but often overlooked principle, however, is to consider the zone of potential agreement – the area where both sides can get what they want if they each go to their respective reservation or resistant points. If there is no overlap, then there won’t be an agreement unless one side budges from its reservation or resistance point. But typically, there is a range of possible settlement options that fall within both sides’ bottom-line positions. We’re conditioned to believe that an effective negotiator will always push to the absolute limit of the other side’s resistance point, and beyond if possible.

And therein lies the rub. The myth that strong negotiators need to chafe against the opposing standpoint, to create friction to burn through the opposing view. You don’t always have to go for the jugular, leave nothing on the table, leave blood on the floor, or whatever other apt cliché comes to mind. You don’t necessarily have to push the other side to their drop-dead bottom line. Let me give you an example to illustrate the point. When I was younger, I fell in love with Mexico. I loved its people, the food, the culture, its nightlife. Everything seemed alive, vibrant and sharper. I loved to haggle on the beach with locals peddling their wares. And I was a great haggler. I seemed to have an instinct for knowing the outside limit to which I could push. I let them walk away, somehow knowing they’d come back. Friends always thought my ‘reservation price’ (although we didn’t call it that – didn’t even know the term or concept except instinctually) was ridiculous and unattainable. But I virtually always got what I wanted at my bottom line price (which was sometimes as little as 20% of asking price). I was proud of my bargaining prowess.

 

As a starving student, that was forgivable. But later in life, it suddenly struck me that I didn’t need to get the rock bottom price the peddler was prepared to accept. That there was a power imbalance and maybe my insistence on beating them down to the bottom line and beyond was actually a little exploitative. I was embarrassed about my past negotiation ‘victories’. Because ultimately isn’t negotiation often about relationship? Would you want to take advantage of bargaining power as against your child? Or an aging parent? Or a trusting lover?

 

It’s important for a seasoned negotiator to consider these factors in determining how far and how hard to push in any negotiation: (i) your goals and objectives (not just short-term, but long-term as well), (ii) your power compared to the other party’s, and (iii) your desired relationship with the other party. Ironically, these are all factors that most women intuitively consider when they come at negotiations from a place of natural feminine energy. If you’ve heard me talk about my A.R.E F.I.T model of bargaining, you’ll know that of the key skills necessary to be a great negotiator, assertiveness is only one factor. The others are rapport-building, empathy, flexibility, intuition and trustworthiness. Knowing when to back off and accept a deal somewhere in the potential zone of agreement, without pushing the other side to their edge, can be effective to build rapport and trust. It requires empathy and intuition. It takes flexibility in the heat of a negotiation. In other words, knowing when to back off employs all the key ‘feminine’ attributes of a great negotiator. Use them. Trust those instincts.

 

Does that mean you should never bear down and push to the tissue-paper thin edge? Of course not. The key is knowing when … and why. The trick is to be intentional in those choices. Learn to control the essential skills so you can adopt them at will. So you can use them strategically. If you need to establish primacy, credibility and/or control in a particular negotiation to set the tone for future negotiations in a relationship, or to make a point, or example of someone who tried to take advantage of you or your ‘team’, then you may well want to step down hard and not let up.

But ensure your approach is deliberate. Don’t be reactive, governed by emotion. And don’t be motivated based on stale-dated myths that negotiation is all about the bite or that giving is a sign of weakness. Sometimes, generosity in negotiations can be your greatest show of strength.

I hope some of that resonated with you and gave you some value. If so, make sure to subscribe to the show and share it with your friends.

Feel free to grab the script in our show notes if you want to review this content another way.

That’s a wrap for this episode. Until next time, go forth and negotiate your best life so you can stop missing out and start getting more of what you want and deserve … from the boardroom to the bedroom.