The Conversation Factory Negotiation with Compassion
Today I have a deep dive conversation with the magnetic Kwame Christian, Director of the American Negotiation Institute and a respected voice in the field of negotiation and conflict resolution. Kwame also hosts one of the world’s most popular negotiation podcasts, Negotiate Anything. Kwame and I dig into how to be confident in the face of conflict: Confident during a difficult conversation, and confident in yourself, before you step into the conversation. As he points out, it doesn't make sense to give recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen! So confidence is critical.
This is one of the most fundamental points that many people miss about negotiating - they see it as a series of tips, tricks and tactics, but it’s really about a way of thinking. But before you start any negotiation with another person, you have one with yourself. You convince yourself that you deserve more than you are currently getting, you resolve to speak up. In Negotiation-speak, this is sometimes called the aspiration value - what you aspire to get. But often there’s another part of ourselves that tells us exactly the opposite - we don’t deserve what we want or we shouldn’t bother asking, or that we’ll never get it, no matter how hard we negotiate. These parts need to have a conversation and negotiate an approach that feels right to ourselves.
Kwame’s book, Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life spends a great deal of time on this inner negotiation and the tools to help you step up, including mindfulness and self-compassion.
What I love about Kwame’s approach to negotiation is that the patterns to shift a negotiation with another person are the same tools he suggests to shift a negotiation with yourself: Compassionate Curiosity.
Force and coercion are not effective long-term negotiation or conversation strategies with another person...and they don’t work very well when we apply them to ourselves, either. Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do...it usually backfires, right?
Kwame suggests applying a 3-step process to be compassionately curious with difficult conversations - a way through challenging disagreements with others or ourselves.
- Acknowledge emotions
- Get Curious with compassion
- Joint problem solving
About halfway through our conversation, Kwame talks about how it’s hard to force yourself to not worry and what to do instead: It’s better to admit that we DO feel worried and seek to understand why. Like in any negotiation, get curious about what data there is on the other side of the table...in this case, what there is to worry about…and then start problem solving. How likely are those scenarios? What can we do about each? It’s much easier to negotiate a time-boxed worrying session with yourself than it is to push it off. Leaning into difficult conversations is always more rewarding than avoiding them - this is doubly true with yourself.
Enjoy the conversation as much as I did, and make sure to check out Kwame’s resources on ways to transform negotiation, resources for learning negotiation, and useful meditation techniques: check out Kwame’s TEDx talk, the negotiate anything podcast and The American negotiation Institute.
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The American Negotiation Institute
Kwame Christian’s TEDx talk, "Finding Confidence in Conflict"
Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life by Kwame Christian