Negotiating Dance

You have to persuade yourself that you absolutely don't care what happens. If you don't care, you've won. I absolutely promise you, in every serious negotiation, the man or woman who doesn't care is going to win.

Felix Dennis

Negotiating scares people and yet it can be a thoroughly enjoyable interaction with others. 

If we wish to drag our relationship with money out of the dark ages, the discovery of negotiation as innocent fun will play a central role. The so-called "win-win situation" is a ghastly cliche that has deteriorated to new ways of pulling the wool over people's eyes.

Zero-sum mentality is outdated. The idea that one must lose for the other to win, leads to everybody's guaranteed loss. In the context of negotiating it is impossible for one person to win and to walk away genuinely happy. There is no grace in it. Winning based on losing is shameful no matter how it is explained. 

Change it. It's easy: make sure you accept the outcome only when you are 100% certain that all involved are satisfied with the result. If one person leaves the negotiation with the experience of having lost or with resentment, there is no true winner and all have lost.

The truth about win-win situations is that there is no real alternative. Win-Lose does not exist because it equals lose-lose and nobody is interested in that. Win-Win is a tautology, obviously. Winning suffices. Unless both or all participating parties win, negotiating is a disgraceful waste of time.

So, when you become the guarantee that any negotiation you will engage in has only participants who will emerge as winners, what would stop you from negotiating all day every day for fun and profit?

'Instant Gratification, the latest newsletter issue and blog post stirred up additional questions about negotiating. A friend of mine responded with these questions that I think will be of interest for many who want to discover elements of pleasure in their communications with others in the context of money and business transactions. In case you didn't receive a copy of that particular newsletter issue, you may look it up here: http://bit.ly/1yK8ueg

I hope you'll enjoy contemplating these thoughts as well and I further hope you'll have as much fun with the implementation as I do:

Q: You have said that asking high value from clients is to enable them to experience their prosperity consciousness should they be ready for it. 

A: I didn't use the term 'enable' in particular. By asking high prices, you are giving your clients an "opportunity to discover" their prosperity. Whether they take advantage of your offer and seize their opportunity or not, is not under your control. Great if they are ready for it, as you said, but they may not be and it is not necessary for you to meet your objectives.

Q: However, I have observed that very few see it as that. Most people see it as pain. 

A: Exactly, hence my newsletter. What they see, think, or feel is not your concern. It's theirs. Most people on the seller's side buy into their clientele's pain theory because they have not clarified it for themselves. When you, as the selling party, merely BELIEVE that paying and giving are rewarding, it's not making much of a difference. Only when you, the seller, have brought yourself to EXPERIENCE that giving money is joyful, something "snaps" in your practice of negotiating. You no longer buy into other people's 'pain myth' no matter what they say or believe, and you naturally project the potential of prosperity into your clients while they may continue to hold on to their belief in their own smallness.

Your experience-based confidence that the pain theory is a myth wherever it may be evoked, tacitly or verbally, removes your emotional hesitation from asking for anything you want.

Whether you actually ask client X for anything you want or not, is up to you. There is still no necessity to ask for all you want but it has become an option, freed up from emotional drawbacks. As long as the negotiator on the seller's side vaguely believes the buyer may be right with his/her claim of pain, this option is NOT available and the selling negotiator will be timid. 

When the seller projects pain into her buyer's perspective, she strengthens the buyer's position and weakens herself, the seller. Believing or "buying" your buyer's pain becomes an act of self-sabotage for you, the seller. This type of false empathy ends all negotiations. It creates an imbalance of respect for each other and you don't have two equals left at the table. One of them now seems to have a handicap, a disability even, and the seller begins strangling her own desire. The 'Fog of Resentment' takes over, for different "reasons" on each side, and chances are that both parties will emerge from this emotional mess as unhappy losers. 

Buyer's pain will become the seller's pain because the seller projects it as such. When the seller knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the specter of pain is a mere bluff of the prospective buyer, perhaps unconsciously used, the seller can silently laugh off the "demon" that the client "sees." The seller can now approach the buyer's pain, poverty consciousness, or limitations as a form of 'phantom pain' and proceed with the negotiation because there is no factual obstacle. Depending on the nature of your business, you as seller may choose to address this issue as an additional opportunity to serve your client.

Q: Somebody told me recently, "The most difficult thing in the world is to get somebody cut a cheque for you."

A: Well, that is a common experience but it is based on corresponding beliefs and projections. Such experience expresses his or her belief in pain as the ruler of business transactions. This belief will guarantee that he or she finds clients who will prove the theory right. It is a subjectively chosen reality. Nevertheless, it is objectively false because checks are being cut everyday, all around the world. Some individuals must have chosen to receive them.

Q: Given that scenario, my offering the buyer an opportunity to pay handsomely is not going to enhance his prosperity consciousness at all. It will only enhance his pain consciousness. Nor do I believe that I, seeing him as prosperous, is going to elevate his prosperity consciousness simply because I see him that way.

A: Again, your prospect's or buyer's prosperity consciousness is not your concern. Your prosperity consciousness gives him the option to discover or expand his prosperity consciousness but he has the right to choose as he pleases, including but not limited to, pain and poverty consciousness. It would be a potentially disastrous idea to threaten somebody else's preference of feeling pain and poverty, as I mentioned in the beginning of my newsletter.

When you give your buyer the freedom to go into emotional contortions but you are not energetically linked to his game, your strategy and tactics of negotiating are unburdened from emotional ballast. You can sit there, be "highly pleasing to yourself" (thanks, Leonard!), and genuinely smile. Your awareness converts his pretty real looking expressions of despondency, pain, poverty, and belief in impending gloom and doom into an act, into a show that you can see through. Pain is not real. It's being used by individuals against themselves and their own interest but also as a smoke screen for the purpose of intimidating others. In our context, pain is used to intimidate sellers, "evil money grabbers," who inflict superfluous pain on poor people.

Q: In most B2C products no vendor has the time and feasibility to educate every client that the deal is empowering for him and not debilitating.

A: Correct. That type of education is unnecessary and may even be counterproductive. Knowing what your client refuses to know can be another trump card in your hand. A trump not for the purpose of exploiting the situation and win while the other person loses, but for the purpose of moving the negotiation swiftly along toward a conclusion that serves your client as well as yourself. "Reading" your clients is fun and the better you are at it, the more entertaining will the process of negotiating be for both of you. Unless it's fun, it's a loss from the start.

There is a phenomenon that I refer to as the 'Power of Weakness'. A client's display of pain is his attempt of gaining power over you by appealing to your empathy. He uses pain as leverage. The seller's perception of the buyer's weakness turns into the buyer's power over the seller, under the disguise of weakness. 

To confuse you completely, when the buyer believes he wins by convincing you of his painful limitations, he cuts himself off from what he wants. If you buy your client's pain, you have failed him. If your client "wins" with his defense of his poverty, you both lose. If you win with your conviction that your client is sufficiently prosperous to pay and he'll discover the joy of doing so, you both win and each of you will be happy with the outcome.

Calling your client's pain bluff is important for you and sometimes you don't want to give away immediately that you have noticed anything at all. Trying to "educate him" will make you look silly because it proves that you didn't understand his game. Still, there is no need to call his bluff verbally. Knowing that what he is doing is a show, is crucial for your next step.

Q: So the whole thing becomes a one-way street where my perception of the clients prosperity consciousness doesn't translate into his prosperity but rather just reinforces his pain and poverty consciousness? 

A: You want to make a sale that is enjoyable during the negotiation and eventually satisfying for all involved but without detours that could limit the buyer's freedom to choose. Trying to force somebody into expanding his prosperity consciousness against his will, is probably going to backfire as an unpleasant experience and as an attempt on his freedom of choice. If you feel the need to control the exact experience that your negotiation partner ought to gain from negotiating with you, you have already lost. His prosperity consciousness is his business, just as he is free to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Evaluate the type of satisfaction that he is willing and able to receive in connection with your product or service and allow him to choose it freely.

Q: You seem to operate from the sandlot-consciousness that you often mention. Maybe you are coming from GIVING consciousness. And this kind of thinking creates greater possibility of the money coming by. 

A: As you said further below, "Sometimes I feel like giving them for free and receiving whatever I am given with love. Sometimes I just turn it on its head and ask a fair price..." Exactly, I follow my gut level feeling. No rule book. No better or worse way to go. However, I have absolutely no clue what the term 'fair price' means. Between a $4 dollar burger at McDonald's and a $60 dollar burger at the 'Wynn' in Las Vegas, the fair price would be how much? If you find a buyer who happily pays the price you negotiate, it is fair, non? 

Outside of negotiations, you and what you really want will never be considered 'fair'. Public opinion will always take the position of you wanting too much.

Since you brought up my affinity to sandlots: fairness may have its place in the sandlot. The concept of fairness helps when you explain things to 4-year old kids. In the adult world, you better be aware that fairness and freedom exclude each other. Arbitrary ideas of fairness suppress freedom. Fairness is a fairy tale. Life is not fair and neither is freedom. People shy away from intensity. They will agree that freedom is a nice concept but the practice of freedom is unpleasant business for most and they'll walk away from it with their tails tucked between their hind legs.

What you really want will always be considered to be impertinent by somebody. Get used to it or, if you prefer to succumb to a life of self-castration in fairness, there will be nothing left to negotiate about. 

For me, temptation is life and

I have a gargantuan appetite for everything. 

Felix Dennis

Q: When you mentioned a particular concept, you suggested that should I choose to share it with somebody, I should get him to pay a hefty price. Aren't these approaches kind of contradictory?

A: What I say is meaningless. What people choose to do with it, matters. I said it that way to single out a particular thought as a "product." Had I not pointed it out, the reader would have rushed past it as if it were just another thought. This product contains one of THE keys to guilt-free wealth. You could sell it for a hundred bucks, for $1,000 dollars, or for a nickel. You are free to give this idea away as a gift. If it has no value whatsoever, like another dime-a-dozen thought in this inflationary 'information age', you cannot even use it as a gift because it's worthless. No contradiction here.

Q: I often get confused while pricing my products. Sometimes I feel like giving them away for free and receiving whatever I am given with love. Sometimes I just turn it on its head and ask a fair price in accordance with the prosperity rules. What's a better way to go about it?

A: Do what pleases you. Do it this way and then, try another way. Sooner or later, you'll know what you don't enjoy at all and what you prefer (without any guarantee to always get it).

Q: How to interpret the rule of accepting what one is ABLE & WILLING TO PAY? I guess it comes from EMPATHY (which itself is out of sync with the prosperity rules). From the context that you are telling, maybe everybody is able to pay. There is hardly any need to offer discounts. In regard to willingness, maybe the front line salesperson requires to educate every prospect about the value for money aspect to increase their willingness. 

A: I'd assume you know the most powerful trump during any negotiation? Of course, it is the freedom "to walk away" from the table at any given time or at any milestone of a particular negotiation. Walking away without anger or regret is a demonstration of freedom from "need" and an expression of your prosperity. You are independent from the outcome of this negotiation.

Perhaps the other party will come running after you, eager to get you back to the table, to offer concessions etc. When you give up interest in the outcome--other than that all parties win with grace and joy--you gain first of all attention and possibly a greater power over a favorable outcome for both or all negotiating parties.

"From the context that you are telling, maybe everybody is able to pay. There is hardly any need to offer discounts." Absolutely. When you give your clients the freedom to pay according to their ability and willingness to pay, you are gaining power in two ways: a) you are walking away from their negotiation games and their 'pain myth' collapses like a house of cards and b) you are also "walking away" from your own emotional attachments to the outcome of this particular transaction.

This strategy frees you instantly for all that is truly important to you. Otherwise you'd keep yourself engaged in a wasteful energetic struggle over peanuts and nobody has a remote chance of winning that. Even if you would eventually win the dollar amount you originally wanted, you'd have wasted energy and life.

'Ability and Willingness to Pay' is a concept with multiple layers of reality. It does not always mean the same and it is your job, as the money receiving party, to come up with an exegesis. The gentle implementation of your interpretation ought to be satisfactory for your client as well as for yourself. Listening to your client is one thing, reading your client is quite another. 

Sometimes when multiple individual negotiation partners are present in the same room, I may choose to spend 90% of my time with one person only because everybody else's guards are down when I do not address them directly and I reach them easier and faster by NOT negotiating with them openly. They may "buy me" and convince themselves because I seemingly walked away from their fears, worries, and resistances before they had a chance to activate them. Last but not least, they may learn more about themselves by observing another person interacting with me than if I confronted them directly.

No rules. Rules are for the dead and oppressed. It's a dance. When you dance with a woman you love, the importance of any outcome disappears, time disappears, the meaning of numbers disappears, you disappear, and only the movement matters. 

Frustrations and insecurities don't fare well with a beautiful woman in your arms on the dance floor. Negotiating begs to be discovered as a joyful dance of giving and receiving, as a fun way of being with people, rather than as drudgery or as part of the four-letter-word 'work'.

Dance cannot be won. Negotiation can be danced.

Egbert


P.S.: Cetero censeo, hourly wages ought to be eliminated. The crude practice of time based compensation insults human intelligence and is embarrassing for a society that considers itself civilized. Check out EndWages.com and on Amazon.com you'll find Paperback and Kindle editions of my book How to Better Hate Your Job. Of course it's also available for the Nook and on iTunes.

For seminars and speaking engagements, please contact me via email.

The next book title on the workbench, Paid to Die: The Linear Cynicism of Time-Based Pay will be available in a couple of months, hopefully. You can pre-order your copy through EndWages.com.

In suggesting gifts: Money is appropriate, and one size fits all.

William Randolph Hearst