The Negotiators Secrets

Greetings Negotiators!

How many times a year do you download something or open some file on the internet then wham! your computer stops working or works with a significant degraded capacity? I do it about ever six months.  One of my skill sets is that I custom build computers, develop LANs and am fairly masterful at tweaking a computer.  The advantage to me is that it only takes me one long night to re-install everything.

Yesterday I apparently asked my computer to perform an unresourceful task.  Last night I re-installed everything.  As I began to reinstall all the big programs “essential” to my daily tasks I was inspired to try something new.  I decided that I would load up on all the open source programs I thought I could manage and still run my businesses.

Once in a while I’ll watch CNN or some other mainstream news source.  It seems to me that this election cycle has a greater lather than ever before in my 43 (my birthday is in a few weeks) years of living in the red-white-and-blue-vote-for-someone sensation.  When I laid my head on my pillow this morning at 4am I was thinking about what’s wrong with politics and government.  Then as I thought for sure I was going to pass out from exhaustion I asked myself a fun question.  What would happen if we had an Open Source Government?  And suddenly what I thought was the error of our government was that it wasn’t open source.  I think it’s ironic that we (the people) require an ‘act’ to know what are government is doing that is “public”.  I refer to the Freedom of Information Act.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what open source is: Open Source refers to software that has a public license and is usually free to the public.  Because it’s code is open people who use this software all over the world are able to improve it and do so all the time.  The value of the “open” aspect is that each software product has hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands maybe even millions of volunteer programmers around the world improving any given software product daily.  Contrasted by Microsoft who only codes as much as it needs to in order to make a profit and look at the bottom line.

Open Source asks the question “Where, truly, is the balance between healthy competition and healthy cooperation?”  What aspects of your life are open source?  Are those parts more fulfilling or less fulfilling?  The Art of Asking Resoruceful Questions relies upon the open source-ness of your negotiating complement to reveal/share enough information with you that you can apply the appropriate Negotiating Response.  Sometimes a negotiating complement isn’t so “open”.  Turning a Negotiating Complement into an Open Source Negotiating Complement is very much a part of the power of a Negotiator!

If you would like more information on how to open up a Negotiating Complment or you have a question or comment, please feel free to email me at justask@yourownbestgood.com or leave a comment.

What would happen if you were to Negotiate to Your Own Best Good today?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Powered by ScribeFire.

One of my most active clients has requested Negotiation Training for the specific use of courting his future-life-mate-to-be. Of course I start out by illiciting the ideal picture of my client. I then illicit the current “real” picture based on results and self-defined criteria of the client himself. One of the hardest things for any client to hear is what they are doing that sabotages their intentions. Usually a process that sabotages an intention is the result of a very passionately held belief that may have once served you but is currently a limiting belief.

His situation is that he’s had several unfulfilled relationships in the last 8 or 9 years. He really wants to step-up the quality of his mate-choice process and discover someone that is willing to commit for the long haul. As we began our training for this aspect of his life - I do what I always do - ask resourceful questions. When someone asks you a resourceful question, what they are really doing is examining your life. A resourceful question is almost always a question that you ask someone else that they themselves have refused or not known to ask their own self. Thus the essence of The Art of Asking Resourceful Questions is revealed by the relative significance of any question to the person being asked.

As I began my barrage of resourceful questions I soon discovered that my client had a low frequency of flirting as a result of having a vast array of rules governing his own process of flirting. I challenged his information and instructed him to practice every chance he was offered. This was quite challenging to him and he of course showed me his resistance. His resistance was-is a form of anxiety that is defined by unresourceful questions such as “What if I’m wasting my time? What if she’s not the one? What if she states on her myspace account that she’s not looking? What if she’s wearing a ring and I’m not sure if it’s a wedding ring or not..” His list was endless.

We have all played the “what if” game. When adults play it to prevent taking action - they can become self-oppressing. When I find a client has this much resistance to new information then the new behavior I help them install must be easy and simple - something they can do all the time in any situation without alot of thought. For this client the prescription was this: 1)Ask any woman you meet thoughtful questions and 2)Make her feel good. Of course he had a million questions and “what ifs” and so on. He didn’t like the specific instructions - he wanted to “get there himself” so he asked me for a metaphor as a guide. My metaphor was “Treat flirting like golf. When a woman appears before you in any situation think of the golf rule of “playing the ball where it lands”. So if you are in a restaurant, on a subway, walking your dog, jogging, parking your car, etc. that is the right place to flirt. He had another wave of questions for this of course. Resistance is as resitance does not.

The purpose of my instruction was for him to become masterful at flirting so that if he ever did meet the one he’d be ready for it instead of getting overwhelmed by his emotions and choking. Have you ever been in a situation where you knew what you wanted in a relationship but you had no idea what to say next to get it? Feel free to share your thoughts and comments or even your questions in the comment section or you can write me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com.

What would happen if you were able to flirt for your own best good?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

My wife, Suzanne is a very devoted entrepreneur. When she’s managing her home-based business and I “pop-in” her Ignore Quotient is quite high. This morning while I was showering I thought I might negotiate through her high Ignore Quotient by creating a pattern-interrupt (see #10). I was looking in my shaving mirror and thought - What would happen if I removed my mustache but kept the goatee? then laughed knowing I had found a way to negotiate thru the Ignore Quotient.

After turning myself into a dead-ringer for the Stone Temple Pilot Singer:

I went into her office and snuck up behind her. I began giving her a shoulder massage and talking to her quietly they way you might speak to an animal that’s about to bite you. Then I told her I had to leave so I walked away from her desk and picked up one of her girly office pillows and covered my face from the nose down real quick. She looked at me a few times kind of the way you look at the person in the left-hand turn lane that has a green light but isn’t turning.

Finally I asked her some benign question with the pillow down. Her Ignore Quotient was strong and unfettered. I asked the question again and the part of her wife-censor that detects annoyance began to wake up. After asking the same boring question a third time she stopped working and looked at me. “What did you do? Did you cut your hair? Something’s different…” It was at that moment that I made a kissy face at her.

Then she made the face. She saw the missing mustache and said not-so-sweetly “That’s scary”. Now considering I was about to go out into the world and deal with people - this was not the wife-will-boost-your-confidence comment I was hoping she’d make. Nonetheless, I did pierce her Ignore Quotient. I’ve been reaping the rewards of my shaved-mustache gambit all day now. Everytime she sees me - we talk about how I need to shave the chin-brow now that the lip-brow has departed.

I was going to shave it but when she compared me to the Stone Temple Pilot singer I changed my mind. I might be bias so you be the judge:

I think there will be some negotiating post I make in the near future that relates to “holding out” for your own best good. How many days do you think I’ll go without shaving the scary chin-brow? What will Suzanne ultimately offer me to do so. Stay tuned…find out!

If you’ve had someone attempt or even succeed to do something with you that put you in shock and changed the entire dynamic of any kind of communication and would like to share a story - please feel free to leave a comment or write me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com. What can you do right now to Negotiate to Your Own Best Good?

If you enjoyed this post and would like access to more information - please join my newsletter group on the right side of the screen. If you would like personal help with anything to do with Negotiations I’m currently offering Free Apprenticeships to a limited number of people. You can sign up for the apprenticeship at the right-side of the page as well.

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

One of my busiest clients happens to also be my most challenging client. Challenging in that there are circumstances in his personal life that influence his state (see #9) so greatly that each time I deal with him I never know what page we’ll start on. This of course requires an extra measure of calibration when dealing with him. This weekend I was trying to arrange a meeting and work through some business with this client of mine. At first I thought - “Oh boy - it’s going to be a real doosy” We were communicating through cell phone and it was just like that cell phone commercial where the woman receives flowers from her boyfriend at work and it’s such a big deal she wonders if he did something. She’s telling her girlfriend about it on her cell phone and at the moment she nervously asks “You don’t think he did…” they loose the connection and she assumes the worse.

I hate to admit I was acting like a woman on a cell phone commercial… Anyway I finally got a good connection with him and discovered my assumptions about his state were completely false. This guy never stops working. He was taking the day off and by the sounds of his “share” he was really enjoying himself. He was so easy to work with that I thought to myself “How can I help him duplicate whatever needs he’s getting met right now? What would happen if he was always this smooth to work with?”

I don’t doubt my resourceful questions will inspire my subconscious mind to create a result. And I also acknowledge that his states really are in general beyond my control. I could of course influence and even steer sometimes but it his life. What I have learned from this might be ideal times to negotiate with him. I’ve learned a new flag that might indicate a greater likelihood of rapport between us. Perhaps the opposite of rapport between he and I would be the opposite of the apparent needs he was getting met this weekend.

Do you deal with someone in your personal or professional life that is nearly impossible to predict day to day in terms of his or her current State? If you have a thought or comment or even a question please feel free to leave it here in the comment’s section after each post. Or you can write me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com. Can you imagine what it would be like to Negotiate to Your Own Best Good today?

If you enjoyed this post or any others and would like more information please feel free to sign up on the right side of the page for either my newsletter or for more in-depth and up close Negotiating Training you could sign up for my (currently) free Apprenticeship.

I’ll see you at the Negotiating Table!

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!