6 Quick Negotiation Tenets You Need To Know To Gain The Upper Hand In Any Situation

5. Humanize Yourself

Simply put, negotiation is a huge part of life and every interaction.

Maybe you want to negotiate a salary.
Maybe you’re having a debate with a friend.
Maybe you want a specific project to move in a different direction.
Maybe you’re trying to say no to something.
Or maybe you’re just trying to discuss with your significant other what you guys should eat for dinner tonight.

Learning how to tackle these situations is absolutely essential to your success and your future anywhere. Influence and persuasion are essentially the lifeblood of business, interaction, and getting the things that you want to be done whether you notice or not. Now negotiation and persuasion shouldn’t be thought of as a manipulation tactic, it’s simply just a way to generate fairness and understanding between opposing parties.

In order to gain the upper-hand in any negotiation, argument, or discussion, you’ll need to know the specific strategies to use, the cues to look out for, and the psychological tactics to bend the reality of your counterpart(s).

Renowned FBI negotiator, Chris Voss, lays out the following useful negotiation tenets beautifully in his book, Never Split the Difference. Here are some of the most useful insights that I’ve extracted from his book:

If correctly used, these types of questions are both gentle and graceful ways to say “no” to an offer and instead guide your counterpart to develop a solution of their very own.

This puts the ball in their court and forces them to rethink what they are asking of you and to carefully consider and explain exactly how they imagine the deal would be implemented. It convinces them the final solution was their idea, and when they think it’s their idea, your counterpart will most likely put more effort into implementing that idea and making it work, thus making them more involved in the whole process.

The whole point is to get your counterpart to define success in their own way and to…

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This blog was originally published on PA Consulting website on 18th May 2017, and quoted in The Sunday Times on 27th May 2017. It’s just two weeks until yachting’s biggest and oldest contest, The…