“Dread only last as long as you sense it’s there. When negotiating, get over your dread and your dread will be dead.” –Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert
“How To Rebound Right From A Dreadful Negotiation”
Everyone has a dreadful negotiation at some point in their life. Good negotiators know how to rebound right from dreadful negotiations, which makes them better negotiators in the long run.
Consider the following mental agilities when you’ve been confronted by a dreadful negotiation. They’ll quicken your pace to the road of success.
- Assess what happened compared to what you expected to occur. In your assessment, consider the thought process that went into the plan you developed for the negotiation, what components you overlooked and why you did so, and lend special attention to how you’ll prevent the dreadful outcome you experienced from occurring again. Everyone has bad negotiation days and one negotiation outcome does not a negotiation career make.
- Get through the following psychological stages as rapidly as you can. Doing so will be mentally uplifting, which will keep you away from the mental dragons that might attempt to slay you and your thoughts about your negotiation abilities.
- Grief/Denial: I don’t believe this happened to me; that may be the first prominent thought that attempts to plague you. Cast it aside. In order to move past your grief/denial stage, you must accept the reality of the situation for what it is. At that point, you may be able to seriously consider alternatives to either reopen the negotiation and/or to reposition the understanding you had about its outcome. Doing so will also accelerate the acceptance phase of this process.
- Anger: You may be justified in being upset about the outcome of the negotiation, but don’t let that rob you of your mental thought process. Also, don’t be overly angry about what the other negotiator did during the negotiation or to you. Again, the sooner you can obtain a clear mind the sooner you’ll be able to think coherently. Plus, the other negotiator was doing the exact same thing that you were attempting to do, maximize the best possible outcome for her side. Remember, people will only do to you what you allow them to do.
- Acceptance: Once you’ve embraced the outcome for the reality that it is, you can begin to grapple with it. At that point, you can formulate a plan of action to address the outcome of the negotiation. You’ll also be in a better frame of mind to seek insights from a negotiation advisor that may be able to offer solutions that you’d not considered.
- Be happy you experienced the dreadful negotiation outcome you had. Say what! That may sound contrary to what you think you should feel. Let me explain.
There were a few aspects that led to the outcome you experienced that you’d not considered. Hopefully, since you survived the outcome, you can learn from the exposure of that experience and allow it to serve as a lesson learned from the school of hard knocks; we tend to remember those lessons more fervently than those that don’t gut-punch us. Learning such hard lessons will also be more prominent about teaching us to avoid them in the future.
When negotiating, you don’t have to let dreadful negotiation outcomes define your future negotiations. You can rebound better from such letdowns and be better prepared and positioned to engage in future negotiations. Once you wrap your mind around the actions highlighted above you’ll be more mentally prepared for your future negotiations. Setbacks will be viewed as setups for future negotiation wins … and everything will be right with the world.
What are your takeaways? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com or at (609) 369-2100.
Remember, you’re always negotiating!
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