The Negotiation Book

CHAPTER 1 So You Think You Can Negotiate?

“It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.”

Claude Bernard

SO WHAT IS NEGOTIATION?

Negotiation is a necessity, a process, and an art. It evokes complex feelings that many seek to avoid and yet it is fundamental to how business gets done and takes place millions of times a day around the world. If you can take control of yourself, your values and prejudices, your need for fairness, and your ego, you may start to realize the best possible outcomes in your negotiations. The biggest challenge here is not in educating you in how to be a better negotiator, but motivating you to change the way you think about negotiations and yourself. Of the many thousands of negotiation workshops I have provided at The Gap Partnership, the greatest change I see clients make is that of self-awareness. Learning about negotiation is an exercise in self-awareness because understanding yourself and what effect a negotiation can have on you, enables you to accommodate the pressures, dilemmas, and stresses that go with it. Self-awareness helps us to recognize why we do the things we do and the effect this has on our results. It also helps us adapt our approach and our behavior to suit each negotiation rather than trying to make one approach fit every situation, simply because it suits our personal style.

Why bother negotiating?

Just because everything is negotiable doesn’t mean that everything has to be negotiated. The value of your ...