to Use This Book
You can use the inner yes method in a number of ways. One is to review the six steps before an important conversation or negotiation—ideally a day in advance to fully prepare, but in just a few minutes if you are in a jam. Reviewing the six steps will help ensure that you do not show up as your worst opponent, but rather as your best ally, when you interact with the other person. As you read this book, in fact, I encourage you to keep in mind a challenging situation or problematic relationship in your life. You will not only learn more and derive more benefit from your reading by applying the six steps to a specific situation, but you will also emerge better prepared to reach a mutually satisfying agreement with the other side.
Of course it will be a lot easier to get to yes with yourself in preparation for an actual negotiation if you have practiced the six steps regularly beforehand. Just as athletes train consistently in order to perform their best in a competition, so can you. Getting to yes with yourself is a daily practice, not just reserved for special situations. Every single day, we have multiple opportunities to listen for our underlying needs, to take responsibility for meeting those needs, and to change our stance from win-lose to win-win. In this way, we can head off unnecessary conflict and make our daily negotiations far easier. For those who are unaccustomed to looking inside themselves, the internal homework may feel like a bit of a stretch. It’s okay to take it slow. As a lifelong hiker and mountain climber, I am a strong believer in taking long journeys in small steps.
Ultimately, the inner yes method offers a way of living your life and conducting your relationships with anyone, at home, at work, and in the world. Many readers may remember the insightful and useful book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by my late friend Stephen Covey. Like The 7 Habits, Getting to Yes with Yourself aims to offer you a set of life skills, a successful and satisfying way to live and work well with others that comes from learning to live and work well with yourself.
While Getting to Yes with Yourself seeks to improve your ability to negotiate effectively, it is designed with a much broader goal in mind: to help you achieve the inner satisfaction that will, in turn, make your life better, your relationships healthier, your family happier, your work more productive, and the world more peaceful. My hope is that reading this book will help you succeed at the most important game of all, the game of life.
From Self-Judgment to Self-Understanding
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
While I was writing this book, I was approached for help by the wife and daughter of Abilio Diniz, a highly successful and prominent businessman from Brazil. Abilio was involved in a complex and protracted dispute with his French business partner, fighting over control of Brazil’s leading supermarket retailer, a company that Abilio and his father had built up from a single bakery. While Abilio had sold controlling shares to the French, he remained as chair and major shareholder. A partnership that had started well years earlier had turned bitter. Two major international arbitration cases were in process as was a big lawsuit. The battle was the subject of constant speculation in the media. Who was winning? The Financial Times called the dispute “one of the biggest cross-continental boardroom showdowns in history.”
Trapped in a conflict from which he could see no way out—a fight that consumed his time and resources—Abilio felt angry and frustrated. The general expectation was that the fierce battle, which had lasted for two and a half years, would go on for another eight years, by which point he would be well into his eighties.
After studying the case carefully, I had a chance to talk extensively with Abilio and his family at his home in São Paulo. As complicated and difficult as the conflict with the French partner seemed, I sensed that the first and fundamental obstacle lay within Abilio himself. A man of dignity, he felt very disrespected and ill-treated by his business partner. He did not know what he really wanted most, to fight or to settle. In and out of the boardroom, he often found himself reacting out of anger in ways that went contrary to his interests. Like most of us, he was his own worthiest opponent.
The first step in resolving the dispute, it seemed to me, was for Abilio to figure out his true priorities. So I asked him, “What do you really want?” His first response was to give me a list: he wanted to sell his stock at a certain price; he wanted the elimination of a three-year noncompete clause that prevented him from acquiring other supermarket companies; and he wanted a number of other items including real estate. I pressed him again. “I understand you want these concrete items. But what will these things give you, a man who seems to have everything? What do you most want right now in your life?” He paused for a moment, looked away, then turned back to me and said with a sigh: “Freedom. I want my freedom.” “And what does freedom give you?” I asked. “Time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life,” he replied. “And freedom to pursue my business dreams.”
Freedom then was his deepest need. Freedom is important to all of us but it had special resonance for Abilio because of a harrowing experience in his past. Years earlier, while leaving his home, he had been kidnapped by a band of urban guerrillas. Confined in a tiny cubicle with two pin-size holes for air and assaulted by intensely loud music, Abilio thought he would be killed at any moment. Fortunately, he was rescued in a surprise police raid after a week in captivity.
Once Abilio and I had clarity on his deepest need, freedom became the “north star” for our work together, orienting all our actions. When my colleague David Lax and I were able to sit down to negotiate with the other side, we were able to resolve within just four days this bitter and protracted dispute that had gone on for years. The solution was surprisingly satisfying for everyone, as I will recount later in this book.
We all wish to get what we want in life. But the problem is that, like Abilio, what we really want is often not clear to us. We may want to satisfy others in our lives too: our spouse or partner, colleagues, clients, even our negotiating opponents. But the problem is that what they really want is also often not clear to us.
When people ask me what is the most important skill for a negotiator, I usually respond that, if I had to pick just one, it would be the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Negotiation, after all, is an exercise in influence, in trying to change someone else’s mind. The first step in changing someone’s mind is to know where that mind is. It can be very difficult, however, to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, particularly in a conflict or negotiation. We tend to be so focused on our own problems and on what we want that we have little or no mental space to devote to the other side’s problem and what they want. If we are asking our boss for a raise, for instance, we may be so preoccupied with solving our problem that we don’t focus on the boss’s problem, the tight budget. Yet unless we can help the boss solve that problem, the boss is unlikely to be able to offer us a raise.
There is one key prior move, often overlooked, that can help us clarify both what we want and, indirectly, what the other person wants. That move is to put yourself in your own shoes first. Listening to yourself can reveal what you really want. At the same time, it can clear your mind so that you have mental and emotional space to be able to listen to the other person and understand what he or she really wants. In the example of the raise, hearing yourself
