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Reason to Study Negotiation #6: Every Human Interaction Is a Negotiation
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easier to get a date with her two weeks later when she breaks up with her boyfriend and is crying behind the school bleachers alone wearing a dirty pair of sweat pants. Great negotiators know how to manipulate time to their advantage and know that positions change as time moves on, and a stalemate today is a deal tomorrow.
As a graduate of a post-secondary institution and having spent sixteen years in school, I learned many things, but very few important things for getting I wanted out of life. In fact, no one ever asked in elementary school, middle school, high school, or university anything about what I wanted.
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me
that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked
me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’.
They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them
they didn’t understand life.”
—John Lennon
It wasn’t until four years after graduating from post-secondary education and in my pursuit of becoming a professional real estate investor did I discover that negotiation was even a subject! I was shocked at the difference between what it took to become a smart negotiator versus what it took to succeed in school and get A’s.
To be a good negotiator you must be defiant, know what you want, assert your position, ask, question, challenge, validate, and get what you want. It is a completely opposite skill set from anything taught in traditional schools, and I can see why. The traditional school system was designed in Prussia long ago. In fact, Prussia is no longer a country, but the school system that originated in Prussia still exists. The system was designed to create obedient soldiers and employees, and the last thing that the masters of society want are an army of children who know how to negotiate. If the children knew how to negotiate in schools, there would be riots and anarchy. Best of all, the school system would have to reform because it is
STEFAN AARNIO
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an outdated dinosaur that needs to die for our society to move forward. I am not attacking education; in fact, I am a huge supporter of education. Education is one of the most important investments a society can make to elevate itself. However, the current school system does the complete opposite by failing to teach people how to negotiate.
Learning to negotiate is one of the top skills for financial success in the modern world. The average college graduate today in 2016 will change careers on average every four years, and as time passes and technology accelerates, I anticipate that careers will become even shorter. The children of today and of the future will need to be more entrepreneurial than ever, and it is no longer enough to go to school, get a job, work until retirement, and then live while the government and your company pay for your lifestyle. In fact, that plan today in 2016 is virtually impossible. To survive and thrive in the modern world, we are returning to a time that is reminiscent of 1910 where everyone was an entrepreneur and very few people had corporate jobs. There were many micro entrepreneurs—people baking bread, people farming, people making clothes, and so on. And everyone had a small business. This is the age of the small business owner, and arguably the most important skill for business is your ability to negotiate. Without negotiation, the businessman cannot earn a profit or survive.
What is more important than ever in today’s market economy are your soft skills: your personality, ability to lead, communicate, and—most of all—negotiate! Regardless of your profession, your career, or your business, learning to negotiate is one of the most imperative skills and one of the most transferrable skills. I thank you for taking the time to invest in yourself and learning this very important skill set!
Visit Xnegotiation.com to claim your valuable bonuses.
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Part II:
The Ten Commandments
of Negotiation
The Ten Commandments of Negotiation
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The Ten Commandments
of Negotiation
T
he more things are different, the more they are the same. There are no two negotiations that are identical; some are complex, and some are simple. Some are long processes that take years; some
are short and are done in minutes. What remains the same are the fundamentals and undying truths that form a basis of all negotiations—big or small. They say that professionals practice the basics, whether it’s free throws in basketball or long tones when playing the violin or trumpet. Professionals always have a firm grasp of the fundamentals and masters have internalized and implemented them. The following section outlines ten fundamental commandments of negotiation that when followed will likely produce a successful outcome. Over time strong fundamentals and good technique will outperform luck, chance or talent which is how most people attempt to negotiate and ineffective over time. The strongest negotiators win bigger and win more often because they have strong fundamentals and weak negotiators are typically improvising. Studies have shown that no matter how favorable or poorly a negotiator performs in a transaction, he will always think that he did his best. When negotiating, many times you can never know if you could have done better or not, but if you stick to the following ten principles, you will surely be effective in getting what you want.
The ten commandments are loosely based on the top three traits desired by CEOs for top negotiators. Years ago, 150 CEO’s were contacted and were asked for the top three personality traits desired for the company’s best negotiators. The top three desired traits were indeed surprising:
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1.) Personality
2.) Knowledge of human nature
3.) Ability to organize information
The ten commandments as I have written them, can be broken down into those three desirable traits. Of the ten, all of the commandments can be classified into personality commandments, human nature commandments, or ability to organize information commandments. Most books on negotiation are very long and very technical with multiple charts, lists, data, matrices, and so on to make the study of negotiation more complex than it needs to be. If you can obey the ten commandments of negotiation as they are laid out as guideposts toward your negotiation
