Greetings Negotiators!

Last night I had the great fortune of speaking with a woman named Kelly for the first time who had read The Attractor Factor by Dr. Joe Vitale. She was in alot of emotional pain and after reading a part of the his book she was inspired to contact him. Her call was eventually directed to my office. We spoke for over 2 hours and the topic of our conversation was RESOURCES.

If Negotiation is my strong right arm, then Resource Coaching is my other strong right arm. The first challenge when someone needs Resource First Aid is to re-direct their attention. When people are in a resource-depraved state – so is their attention. If you ask them what they notice about what’s going on around them and their life – they will tell you all that is wrong, broken and missing. I asked Kelly if she would be open to some training from me over the phone and she agreed.

Resource Coaching is a step-by-step technique. You must train the eyes to see where the feet need to go and get everything working in concert step-by-step. I was taking the first step with Kelly when she balked. She went from listening and wanting help to a long dreadful story about her life. I thought “We’ve slid off the road and now we are back in the ditch she probably called me from. I don’t like being muddy, so I washed my brain down and refocused to get Kelly and I back to the smooth clean road of Resources.

We stumbled up the incline to the road again and I put our “car” into gear and headed on back down the road trying to complete the “first step”. We were approaching the first step when suddenly she reached over (through the phone) and steered us right back in the ditch. It was like 8 or 9 pm when this was happening and I had already had a full day. I was “trying” to be “happy” about Kelly and I being in the ditch again.

This time instead of climbing back up the incline of our experience – I just stayed muddy with her as long as I could to “get” how she kept recreating the ditch result. I asked her lots of RESOURCEFUL QUESTIONS. Guess what I learned? She hated the word “resource”. I use the word resource in about every other sentence when I’m sleeping – you can imagine how often I might use it when I’m awake. So now I have to keep from laughing at the potential Mad TV skit that is arising from this experience: A woman in a resource-depraved state contacts me so she can really hike up her resources and I start giving her the Resource Remedy but she can’t stand to literally hear the word “resources”.

Would you have quit at that point? I did briefly think of hanging up so I could go eat dinner before 10pm but I decided since I had already uesd the words “Play Full Out” with her – that I had to be a model for those words or look like a snake oil salesman.

Staying in the ditch with Kelly (nice and muddy), I began to ask her questions about things that made her happy. Her level of resource-depravity was so strong that we had to sort through about 3 stories before I finally actually found a happy one. (The mud was starting to dry) On the third story of her son eating doodle bugs as a child – I discovered the word “doodle” made her laugh so much she could hardly think of what to do next – so I substituted the word “resources” with the word “doodle”.

We spent the next 30 minutes or so doing some “Doodle Coaching”. We quickly climbed out of the mud, got back on Doodle Road and I discoverd that the Resource Coach’s Fast Car was now a Doodle Bug (pun intended). Near the end of the conversation Kelly asked me if I knew anyone that did Energy Work. I have another client who I do Resource Coaching with and lo and behold at that moment (almost 10pm) she called me on the other line. I took the synchronicity as a sign I could finally have dinner so I networked the two women together and got off the phone.

In a Negotiation sometimes you have to be willing to either a) speak someone else’s thought-language or b) invent a new language in order to Manifest your outcomes. If all forms of communication are a negotiations then communication itself is the most prized negotiation-resource there is.