3 Counterintuitive Hacks That Increase Your Negotiating Power - Part 3

When you’re feeling a bit insecure during one phase of a negotiation, the last thing you’d want is for someone to mention it, right? Like this: “It seems like you feel insecure about this issue.” Wouldn’t that just make you feel more insecure? So, should we avoid talking about negative emotions?

No.

Because they get in the way. They can stall or derail your negotiation, or they lead to polite no-thank-you’s, also not your desired outcome. So, surprisingly often, ignoring them does more damage than calling them out. You just need to know how.

The good thing is: anybody can learn how. Just few simple rules, really.

Let’s imagine that your counterpart’s negative emotions are ‘vampires’, sucking the life-blood out of your negotiation. Using that image, I’ll show you how to

1. recognize the vampires
2. use a mirror to direct some sunlight on them
3. turn them to ash

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1. Recognizing bad-vibe ‘Vampires’

Labeling emotions doesn’t start with you speaking. It starts with listening and observation.

Pay attention, and you’ll hear ‘vampires’ in a person’s voice and discover them in post-stress pacifying behavior. These are the two truest indicators of bad vibes in your negotiation – and yes, there are other clues, but none as true as these two.

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Pacification: How people wordlessly tell us when they’re stressed or unhappy

Pacification? If you’ve never heard of it, it may sound abstract at first. Or you might think: why not just look at facial expressions? Don’t they tell us what we need to know?

No. They don’t. Research shows that we all overestimate our ability to read emotions on people’s faces, because:

• ‘True’ facial expressions are fleeting (milliseconds) and therefore difficult to catch and interpret accurately (you have to be a ‘natural talent’ or trained, like Paul Ekman)
• Longer-lasting facial expressions lie just as often as they tell the truth – might as well play roulette!

As one of my favorite mentors said: Hands lie less than faces, and feet lie less than hands. The problem with feet: they’re stuck in shoes, they’re hidden below a desk or table, and they almost never pacify.

Most people ‘self-pacify’ hundreds of times a day, almost always unconsciously. Some touch their face or neck. Some run their palms along their thighs (typically while seated, under the table, so you only see upper-arm movement). Some may straighten a tie or play with a necklace.

But what does that have to do with stress?

Imagine the triggering process like this:

1. Every second of your life, your brain strives for homeostasis – a complex, balanced state that prolongs life and avoids fatal threshold crossings.?
2. Psychological stress (e.g., an uncomfortable part of a negotiation) causes your brain to experience a small chemical imbalance, which it strives to correct.
3. Your brain requests calming movements, often from your hands. Your body responds to the request. Maybe you run your hand through your hair.
4. Sensory nerves in your scalp send signals into your brain which it, from experience, interprets as calming or ‘pacifying’.
5. This pacification helps your brain to correct the stress-induced chemical imbalance and achieve homeostasis again – its ‘happy’ state.

In short: people ‘self-pacify’ in stressful situations because their brains demand it. Conversely, when you can see pacifying behavior, you can assume that something has, seconds earlier, stressed out the person doing it.

Pacifying habits are very individual, but once you know what to look for, you’ll see a personal pattern emerge quite quickly during a negotiation. Hand movements are a good starting point.

One caveat: every person’s pacifying habits also have an individual baseline – a normal or routine occurrence. So the clues to look for are

• repeated pacifying (over a short period of time – within a minute or two)
• increasing in intensity or duration (above the baseline)

Again, you might think that you can tell more from facial expressions or body language, and if you are an expert at either (or both), definitely use those skills! But don’t disregard pacifying – it might give you clues that facial expressions don’t. That they’ve suppressed.

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Prosody – the color of a voice

There’s a part of your brain – many millions of neurons strong – that pays attention to only one thing: the emotional ‘color’ of a person’s voice. People’s feelings are transported quite accurately by a combination of

• speaking speed
• pitch (high or low)
• pitch variation (melodic or flat)
• volume (loud or quiet)
• resonance (full or nasal or tight) etc.

All this information gives your voice – and the voices of the people you negotiate with – a ‘color’. It’s almost impossible to fake (most people’s vocal ‘color’ reflects their true feelings) and our brains are very finely attuned to observing it. Pay attention and trust prosody.

I rate these two – pacifying and prosody – as the truest indicators that will alert you of ‘negative affect’, i.e. all the kinds of bad vibes you don’t want in a negotiation. In our imagery: the vampires. But what do you do once you’ve recognized the presence of vampires in your negotiation?

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2. Mirror and Sunlight

In ‘Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity’, Matthew Liebermann comes to the conclusion that ‘shining a light’ on emotions (with words) defuses their negative power (by disrupting amygdala activity). Great stuff – but experience tells us: Just telling someone what you think they’re feeling won’t necessarily do the trick.

So let’s have a look at how to handle the mirror like a pro.

Rule 1: Compassion. If you can’t bring yourself to be compassionate about the bad vibe vampires that you’ve discovered affecting your negotiation counterpart’s emotional state, it’s better not to say anything. Why? Because it’ll come across critical or testy or patronizing.

Remember what you just learned about prosody? That’s right. Can’t fake it.

So the greatest stumbling block is a lack of compassion and we cannot demand compassion from negotiators in every situation, so it’s a good point to have on your checklist.

There are ways to train compassion, ways to achieve scientifically measurable results (where self-reported emotional states align with brain scan data, i.e. hard science). But if that’s not your thing, then at least don’t forget this point on your checklist.

Rule 2: Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly & center yourself. Take another. Speak calmly. Excitement does not show compassion, it shows emotional contagion. The difference? Excitement is like birthing your own bad vibe vampire, rather than shining the light of reason on your counterpart’s vampire. So you want to label the other person’s emotion c-a-l-m-l-y.

Rule 3: It’s not about you. Don’t start with “I sense …” or “I can tell that …”. You’re not important; your counterpart is. Begin with “It sounds like …” or “It seems like …”

Rule 4: Be precise. The more precisely you can label your counterparts feelings or reservations, the better. “It seems like you’re surprised by my request.” Or: “It seems like you’re uncomfortable with this part of the contract.” Or: “It seems like you’re taken aback, and you might prefer another approach.” ?

Rule 5: Keep it short. (Don’t explain yourself.)

And then? Just wait for the label to do its work. I promise, it will. Vampires will burn.

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3. Ashes

The skill of shutting up after you’ve said your bit is one of the greatest and most important skills for emotional labeling.

More often than not, your counterpart will feel caught off guard, so formulating a reply may take them longer than you expect. Please endure this silence, even if it feels uncomfortable. This silence is the sunlight at work.

Formulating a brand-new, unprecedented thought takes the brain up to 1000 times longer than superficial, defensive verbal reflexes like “no, no, it’s fine” or “well aren’t you the observant type, ey?” So silence means that your counterpart’s brain is working harder to give you a real answer. A thoughtful answer. The kind of answer you want.

If the answer comes out to fast and reflexive, beware: it means that it didn’t engage the brain areas that cause your counterpart to cognitively reflect the negative emotion and thereby defuse it. No ashes.

Also, if your counterpart corrects you, stand corrected. Don’t ever argue about another person’s emotional experience. Just note whether the correction came out like a flash, with lightning speed (that’s a defensive reflex, so you may have been right, but the vampire’s still alive & kicking), or if there was a thinking pause and the correction comes out calmly – in which case you may not have been spot on, but whatever thought processes your statement induced killed the vampire anyway (i.e. changed your counterparts state of mind into something calmer, more reasoned).

This is the most amazing experience. I’ve been there a few times, and the magic of not knowing what’s going on in your counterparts mind in those few seconds but still having achieved the goal of ridding him/her of the bad vibe vampire – that’s a strangely mysterious thing.

Only one thing: Please don’t ruin the moment by asking for an explanation. What if it’s too personal? ?Exactly, then you’ve just given that vampire an extra life. Not what you wanted.

As you see, successfully labeling emotions is – well, it’s not rocket science but it does need to be trained and you do have to watch out for some pitfalls. When you do it right, it’s a very powerful tool to dispel negativity in a negotiation, turning bad vibe vampires to cold ashes.

And then you can get on with negotiating the nitty-gritty details of your deal, collaboratively and connected.

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This was the last part of the mini-series series 3 Counterintuitive Hacks That Increase Your Negotiating Power. If you have any questions about negotiations or “what to do when XYZ happens”, please feel free to ask me in the comments or in a direct message.