Black Belt Negotiating: Become a Master Negotiator Using Powerful Lessons from the Martial Arts

Principles of Overcoming Fear

Experienced martial arts instructors help white belts overcome fear by allowing them to experience success very early in their training. You wouldn’t want to have newbies out there trying to break bricks during their first lesson; they would never come back for a second. Instead, you give them plastic practice boards they can easily break and then move them up to soft pine boards. This gives them faith in their technique and confidence in their teacher. Eventually they will graduate to harder boards and then to thin bricks. All the while, their technique is improving at the same time their confidence is growing. Eventually, they can increase the thickness of the bricks to an impressive level.

In the same way, the ...