Building and exercising negotiation skills

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’s the deep heating rub?

How can an Olympic weightlifter possibly race with a sprinter? How does the sprinter compete in bench pressing?

They’re 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’t 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’s position.

We don’t 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, “shut up.” Many arguments are won when you stop opening your mouth.

That’s a lot harder than we realize. Can you sense the pending ache of those unused muscles that are about to get a workout?

We’ll talk about the use of “strategic silence” in a future column. As for “strategic listening, it is an incredibly powerful tool once you learn to master it.