The beauty of Negotiating is that it’s not a skill set that you have to ‘wait’ to apply. You don’t have to be in a certain situation or with a certain person or clocked in…to use it. Once you start using it for all the benefits it will bring you at some point you just don’t want to put it down. Negotiating to Your Own Best Good benefits everyone – even people you might never know personally.

Today I was multi-tasking more than my male-hunter genetic programing typically allows. I wrapped up one thing and decided to catch up with a friend who I sometimes help in business. This friend has a great “need” to be heard and has mastered a technique I like to call “talking over people”. I’m sure no one needs an explanation of that phrase. My standard response for people I deal with regularly for this behavior is to ask a resourceful question. “Did you hear what I said about blah blah blah?” – they will often times admit they did not (probably because they know I will ask more questions if they ‘pretend’). When they admit this I will make a very clear commit that it is because they were talking over me.

Before I get to the punchline of this post – I will go ahead and share the moral of my story. Sometimes the most effective form of negotiation is silence. Sometimes that silence can be coupled with time to enhance it’s impact. Being silent through time requires your negotiating complement to consider the various impacts of his or her words and to slow down enough to change course for the next round.

So, my friend became belligerent and started a rant full of explicatives. In this particular instance he took offense to me calling him on his behavior. As we entered into sentence two of his rant – I hung up the phone, left my office and had dinner with my family then watched a movie with my wife. Hours later when I returned to my phone I saw that he had left a message. I reluctantly listened to the message but only for a moment – when he began to apologize and make fun of himself and take responsibility for his outburst. He had time to cool off and think about what he would offer next. He offered an apology.

Personally, I think the second highest form of respect you can ever show yourself or anyone else is ownership. Ownership is the opposite of blame. If you are wondering what the highest form of respect is (in my mind) then it is offering someone a choice.

I accepted my friends apology and even raised the bar of his character in my opinion that he took ownership.

I’m off to my family’s country estate to visit my Dad. I’m setting him up with some countrified broadband internet – so I’ll be blogging from the boonies as well! If you know someone who talks over others and have any negotiating questions for me, feel free to leave a comment or email me at justask@yourownbestgood.com. How can you Negotiate to Your Own Best Good?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!