Relationship Negotiation Exercise

1. Determine your outcome.

2. Develop as many options as possible to achieve that outcome.

a) Avoid fixed position

b) Define upper and lower limits of range.

3. Identify potential areas of disagreement.

4. Identify issues to be resolved and plan how to discuss them.

5. Determine the best alternative to an agreement.

B) During the negotiation

1. Establish rapport with your partner. Match and mirror your partner's body language and sitting posture.

2. Ensure that you are in a resourceful, calm state.

3. Be clear about your own outcome and the evidence for it. State your highest positive  intention for desiring a particular outcome to your partner. Elicit outcomes of your partner together with their evidence for it. Ask for your partner's highest positive intention for desiring their outcome.

Evidence of outcome concentrates on clear specific details. In particular how will you know when you have attained your outcome? What will you see, hear and feel?

4. Frame the negotiation as a joint search for a solution.

5. Clarify major issues and where there is a disagreement, obtain agreement on a large frame. Dovetail outcomes, step up if necessary to find a common outcome. Check that you have the congruent agreement of your partner to this common outcome.

6. Break the outcome down to identify more specific areas of most and least agreement.

7. Starting with the easiest areas, move to agreement using these trouble-shooting techniques:

Negotiation going off course Conflicting outcomes ...Relevancy challenge.

Conflicting outcomes ... Stepping up and down to common outcome.

Uncertainty ... Backtrack.

Lack of information ... As If and clarification questioning.

Stalemate ... What would have to happen?

Backtrack as agreement is reached in each area, and finish with the
most difficult area. Backtracking means to review, paraphrase and summarize using your partner's words. Backtracking ensures that you both are on the same page in terms of understanding the message that was conveyed..

More Tactics

1.   Do not respond to a proposal with a counterproposal.       

Restate, validate, clarify and probe.

2.   Invent options for mutual gain - win/win - dovetail outcomes. In a win-lose outcome, all lose in the end.

3.   Avoid attack/defense exchanges. Use "negotiation Aikido".

• Treat their proposal as one option. Probe for the outcome behind it.

• Treat your proposal the same way. If attacked, probe for the
outcome behind the attack.

4.   Use strategies that can keep you in a calm state (eg nlp anchoring).

5.   Avoid "irritators" - value judgments and statements which glorify the
options you favor. eg: "I can't believe you're saying something so ridiculous."

6.   Separate your partner's intention from his behavior. Ask what is his highest positive intention behind what he is doing. Then see if the same positive intention can be served by another solution.

7.   Label suggestions and questions.

"Let me offer a suggestion."
"I'd like to ask a question."

8.   Use "I" language rather than accusing.

"I'm having trouble understanding this," rather than, "You're not making yourself clear."

9.   State your reasons first before making a proposal.

1) Reason

2) Explanation

3) Proposal

Not the reverse

10.  Anticipate Objections - Handle in advance. 

11.  Adopt flexibility in your behavior, be willing to change communication strategy if it does not produce required results.

12.  Minimize the reasons you give when stating an option. Multiple reasons give the other the opportunity to select the weakest and make it the basis for rejecting the option.

13.  Test understanding and summarize.

"So you think that..."
"Your main concern is..."

"Then it seems that we both think the idea is worth a trial period."
"Let me be sure I understand where we are now."

14.   Tell the other your feelings.

"I'm having trouble with your proposal for home-schooling Carla. We've agreed that Carla needs exposure in her education. And yet I feel that this will only prevent..."

"I get the feeling that we're jumping into, and from issue to issue. Which one would you like to discuss first?"

15.   If you get stuck:

a) Stop doing what you're doing.

b) Generate at least three options for doing something else.

c) Choose the best and go with it.

 16.   Use the "As If" frame for creative problem solving.

Pretending that something has happened in order to explore possibilities. Start with the words, 'If this happened . ..' or, 'Let's suppose that . ..' There are many ways this can be useful.

Another way of using the idea is to project yourself six months or a year into a successful future, and looking back, ask, 'What were the steps that we took then, that led us to this state now?' From this perspective you can often discover important information that you cannot see easily in the present because you are too close to it.

Another way is to take the worst case that could happen. What would you do if the worst happened? What options and plans do you have?'As if' can be used to explore the worst case as a specific example of a more general and very useful process known as downside planning.

Handling Objections Strategies

1.   Restate and validate the objection.

• I appreciate and...
• I respect and...
• I agree and...

This process is a form of verbal aikido, redirecting force rather than attempting to overcome it.

Do not use a positive statement followed by a "but", because it invalidates everything that you said before it.

2.   Ask your partner what their idea or objection is intended to accomplish. Keep asking step up questions (...and what will that get for you?) until you arrive at an outcome each can agree on.

3.  Ask clarification questions.

- "What are your fears and concerns?"

- "How exactly do you want me to communicate with you better?"

- "How exactly do you want me to be a better spouse?"

4.  Some options to resolve:

• Exaggerate                                '

• "What would  happen if could solve this concern?"

• Devise an acceptable option that handles the objection.

4.  Options when the objection hasn't been resolved after five minutes.

• Go on to other issues.

• "Act as if you were me."

• Ask your partner what will happen if you both don't reach an agreement. Use this option only if your partner is being uncooperative or argumentative 

1. Backtrack.

2. Test agreement and test congruence (match of partner's verbal and non verbal communication, ie voice and body language).

3. Future pace, where appropriate eg put yourselves in a specific situation in the future and determine if this agreement would be carried out willingly by both.

Credits:

- An Introduction to NLP, Joseph O' Connor & John Seymour