Many people fail to realize the importance of negotiating basic human emotions in legal agreements at home. For example, your emotions can affect the outcome of negotiations.
For example, if you are feeling angry or bitter that a previous deal hasn’t worked out well for you and your associate, it could affect the way you return to unfinished business with your competitor or even impact your future relationship with your lawyer. The premise is simple: A negotiation is the process of reaching an agreement that meets the people’s needs. If you’re angry or bitter at the outcome of the previous deal it’s not going to be a win-win deal for you.
The other side of the table will be affected, too. No matter what you do, saying “I don’t need anything from them” is not going to get you what you want nor is it fair to them. When you are having a discussion about an issue, you may find that other people on your side have emotional attachments to your rationale or the way you’ve arrived at the issue. If these other people have reason to be transactional, they may feel justified about telling you why something you want doesn’t fit their positions.
Another example is an arrogant person sitting across the table from you may be intent on proving you wrong. That person may think she’s challenging your position by there being a possibility to you that the other party may be wrong. That person may ask you to tell her why her proposal in your position is better than yours. But she’s the one thing that you don’t want to do in the negotiations. Those types of people may disrupt negotiations because they want to interrupt the flow and they will let their emotion get in the way.
There is a way to deal with a pushy and arrogant person. Prior to your next negotiation with this party be sure to get, genuinely, what they say. Ask them what their interest is or what their needs are, whether they believe there is a problem to the negotiation process and what the deadlines are in the negotiations. You’ll want to encourage them to get out the cigarettes, first. While they are getting to know you and us or the other side of the table, you don’t want them to go into the full Compliance mode going into the negotiations. After you’ve concluded talks with the other party, when you’ve reached a deal and you’re going to enter negotiations on that deal, you want them to be sincere and let their emotion become part of the negotiations.
An arrogant person will most likely not acknowledge the emotion around the deal that the other side set forth and they will focus the negotiation on their own personal thoughts and ideas. When you encounter an arrogant person to negotiate with, use the clamp strategy. Clamp is a term that refers to a technique used in negotiations to grab someone’s attention. The way you use the tactic is by placing emphasis on a word or phrase, which is very intriguing to the other person’s brain. They may have no idea what they have just done when you started to do this. If you are speaking to the arrogant person, simply restate the main deal points, and references the major deal points within the agenda to smooth everything over. Just restating the main point leaves them in control and thus you don’t have to go into the details of the large deal points.
The other advantage of using the clamp is that the arrogant person is going to be very excited because they now have all your attention. When they come in the negotiation to your opening statement, they had to think, “How am I going to respond to what just happened with this person?” Most arrogant people don’t like to give a snapshot of their emotions and thus they slow down their speech. If you slow down the speech by restating all the major deal points, they are going to be scratched head to respond. Less control to them because when they finish remarks, it’s a late come back. Psychology 101 underlying every negotiation is the simple Persistence Equation math. Not here to agriculture, grain farming or buzzing, growers want to harvest, plow, planting, get ready and yield. This means you need to delay their efforts and what’s your poison? The phrase, “Not now.”
If you watch one of the great negotiators in play, they fast forward the conversation by restating the key points prior to the last point. If you watch inflation, you will most likely say, “Well, inflation is going to be coming up to five percent this year.” Once you watch a contrived situation put into perspective, you will realize you are extremely refocused and have moved on from the point you are making. Observe the flow of questions and answer the question, “How much” with “I don’t know.”
