The Negotiators Secrets

Greetings Negotiators, Daters and Couples!

Within the framework of Negotiations, the most consistently passionate Negotiations that I see in my work daily is that of Negotiating in a Relationship. My wife and I have been watching an amazing new show on HBO: Tell Me You Love Me. Suzanne and I are TV-Talkers – most people can’t stand watching TV with us. We were laughing the other day that we need two remotes so that either one of us can pause a show and discuss what we are thinking, feeling and wondering. The show is very provocative, very adult-thematic and had Suzanne and I wearing out the pause button discussing what we were seeing.

(A couple on the show in therapy lying to their therapist)

Here is the jist of almost all intimate-relational negotiations: 1) Negotiator becomes tunnel visioned in their desired outcome, 2) Negotiator shapes huge passionate intent and blurts it to their Negotiating Complement (usually the love interest), 3) Negotiating Compliment doesn’t experience being involved in the blurted intent, can’t find personal connectivity to the blurt and neutralizes the Negotiation by erecting an emotional and psychological wall and in some cases a physical wall that looks like a door shutting in your face.

Most Romantic Negotiators loose hope and experience a huge drop in self-worth and self-esteem at this point and return to the lonely-I’ll-always-be-lonely frame that they tried to escape from in the first place. The Key to understanding what is happening is that Negotiating for love and companionship is almost always done out of a state of desperation. I’m not speaking for every couple or single-wanting-to-be-coupled person of course – I am speaking to all of you who experience a huge disconnect between what you want and desire and what you currently have in your life.

If I never share another post or thought with you about intimate relationships then know that my answer to this equation is my answer to everything – Ask Resourceful Questions! If you wanted to simplify and sum up what your job is in a relationship then I just told you: The most important duty in any form of relationship, especially an intimate one is to continue to ask the Negotiating Compliment (your significant other) questions. Pretend you don’t understand, ask questions that help you understand, reiterate your understanding (calibration) and evaluate creatively what you can do with your new found understanding.

The greatest gift you can ever give any intimate relationship is the gift of understanding! If you want to piss off your companion, then misunderstand them and you are there.

The question I get asked every day is How do I formulate my Resourceful Questions? This of course is a very resourceful question. Here is my answer:

Get real still. Get real focused on the subject of your Negotiation. Imagine all the dialog that is going to occur between you and the Negotiating Complement or anyone you are going to Ask Resourceful Questions of. Take every concept you wish to convey, every position you wish to demonstrate, every feeling, every insight, every doubt, everything and translate it into a question. That’s the formula, here’s an example …

[situation]:Single woman taking her car to the dealership for an undetermined repair. [thoughts of a single woman]“Last time I went to get the wiper fluid refilled, they replaced my radiator and charged me $2800.00! I think that place is a rip off! I wish I could just get them to fix what’s wrong with the car instead of turning loose steering into a major car drama. I’m going to go to another dealership if they try to rip me off again! I wish I had someone who understood cars to talk too or even go with me and ask all the questions I don’t even know to ask! ” [translation into Resourceful Questions]:1)How does a dealership stay in business when refilling the wiper fluid turns into a $2800 repair? Is it the policy of the dealership’s owner and management to find major things wrong with a car even when someone’s just coming in to get an oil change? Has this happened to other customers? Where would such an event be recorded if it had? If I called another dealership and explain my frustration to them, would they treat me better – would they want to earn my trust instead of burning it up like the initial dealership did? Next time I’m flirting with some fellow at a club (remember single woman)I wonder if I could remember to to ask him what he knows about cars? I wonder if I could even set up a first date as him riding with me to the dealership to at least listen to the “lines” the repair shop gives me? What would have to happen for me to get treated honestly at this dealership if I went back? Who would I have to speak to, what questions would I have to ask them to ensure that I wasn’t duped into paying for things I don’t need?

This is just the beginning of all the Resourceful Questions the single woman could ask not only herself but all the other players that might be involved. It takes practice to convert what you are thinking into questions. Once you develop a habit of thinking in questions instead of emotional blurts though, you suddenly can think of hundreds of questions to ask in any situation and I promise you that Asking more and more Resourceful Questions creates more and more choices and resources for you NOW!

What would you do next if you found someone who could teach you how to get exactly what you wanted just by opening your mouth and speaking? If you’ve found any of the material on today’s post interesting and would like to know more about Negotiations or any elements of Negotiating feel free to leave a comment or you can write me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com.

You can also receive my FREE Negotiator’s Checklist just by signing up for my newsletter on the right-hand side of this page.

I’ll see you at the Negotiating Table!

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

Later this morning I’m giving a one hour Tele-Seminar to a group of business professionals who are seeking to grow and refine their business practices, especially in the arena of closing the deal. So, I decided I would get fully associated with the topic by returning to my own starting point of consciously working with my outcomes and the outcomes of others through an interventionistic model that I was trained in by Anthony Robbins.

In Tony’s first book (that I read) Unlimited Power there is a 5 step technique for asking. The one step that still sticks in my mind today is Ask Until. Tony tells a story about Colonel Sanders, the man who started up Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’ll save you the story and race to the punchline. The punchline is that Colonel Sanders asked 1009 restaurants to try his recipe in exchange for a cut of the profits they would get when the sales went up as a result of his delicious chicken.

My challenge for each of you today is to consider this: If you knew you would eventually succeed as long as you continued to re-engineer your approach and were willing to give of yourself for as long as it took to succeed – would you still find a reason to quit or would you play full out and accomplish your dream? Colonel Sanders lived in his car and traveled all across the U.S. asking different chicken restaurants if they would try his recipe in return for a share of the increased profits they would make. How many of you have stayed with a dream where you had to present your vision 1009 times? Would you like to inherit KFC? Do you think the owners of KFC are grateful that the Colonel didn’t stop at 1008?

Here is the mistake that many of us, including myself often make at some point in our life experience. We REALLY need something, perhaps we are even desperate for that something and we ask for help, or we ask for resources to turn our desperation around or we ask god to change our situation but whoever and whatever we are asking for – we ASK for it! And the magic solution doesn’t come, the resource doesn’t seem to appear. THEN we shriek in agony and often we blame THE ASKING, the process of asking itself, which leads us to a very very unresourceful belief system asking doesn’t work. Do you think on the 490th time or the 756th time or the 999th time that Colonel Sanders might have had these doubts, fears, disappointments and frustrations? I don’t for certain but I suspect he did. He proved your doubts, my doubts and his doubts wrong in a time before self-help was part of our pop culture.

So, I give this today – The Art of Asking Resourceful Questions! If you spent the next 5 years mastering this one technique and you did in fact master it – I guarantee that you would transform the quality of your life and many lives of those around you during and after that 5 year period. This doesn’t mean that you have to wait 5 years to see a powerful result, I simply mean if you gave it 5 years to master and you did indeed master it. On the Tele-seminar I’m about to dial into I’ll be talking about this.

If you are interested in receiving more information about Negotiating you can sign up for my newsletter and RECEIVE THE NEGOTIATORS CHECKLIST FOR FREE!  If you want a strong dose of my techniques you might want to consider looking at my apprenticeship program.

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

Although I am passionate about my Negotiating material, insights, strategies, etc., I do my best to shy away from controversial topics for my blog. I differentiate between controversial and sensational. Sensational draws clicks to my site, gets peoples’ voyeuristic side engaged and is a great marketing tool. Controversial on the other hand usually divides the readers literally in two, which is to say – those who agree and those who disagree.

Today, I wish to share my insights and experience with the seldom-thought-of, greatly devalued resource that is in my opinion THE resource of all the resources a Negotiator has available. The reason that I share this with you today is that I would use my blog to inspire and compel any of you who read it to find any way you can to preserve this resource. Before I tell you what the resource is, I want you to see the following:

I suspect by now you are clear on the resource I am referring too. I’ve seen this video about 8 times now and I would think after a few times of watching it I might become numb to the reality that video represents. Fortunately that is not so. The intense passion and the depth of the seriousness that I feel for being free and being able to express myself freely does not chill so easily as I feared.

I’m neither for nor against John Kerry, I have no idea what he was speaking about. I know though if I was someone who won the presidential vote even if I lost the election and I cared about freedom of speech – I would never allow local police to arrest anyone for asking me a question – no matter how much I might hate that question.

One form of speech inhibiting that occurs in our society today, especially in the U.S. is the Matrix-esque political correctness. The whole idea that you are “not supposed to say that” reflects how far the average citizen has been mislead by the mega-conglomerate mass-media and their owners. The mere fact that the police were standing right behind the microphone for the question and answer session suggest to me that the whole production was done with the repression of freedom of speech in mind.

If you ever find yourself in a situation similar to this – my advice to you is to challenge the information. You ask as many resourceful questions as you can possibly think of. Challenge everything they do if it’s about inhibiting your right to speak. Regardless of the “investigations” or even potential trial outcomes that might occur as a result of this event between the social dissenting college student and a should-have-been president – those cops were breaking many laws. The fat white one even had the mindless pride to look up and smile right in the camera. If our children who we send to college to learn more about life and the world might be arrested for asking the wrong questions – where have we come to?

In almost every case when someone lies – it is because the challenge to their information is so strong that they are afraid of the truth. The truth being in most peoples minds a relative thing is the most accurate portrayal of any person’s right-minded understanding of whatever context is being challenged. Are you afraid to ask hard questions? Are you afraid of being asked hard questions? If you are afraid then challenge your own information! Discover the source of your fear and Negotiate to Your Own Best Good in order to transcend it.

I encourage responses to today’s video and my take on it. You are as always welcome to challenge the information! You can leave a comment or send an email directly to me at justask@yourownbestgood.com. You may also sign up for my newsletter and receive the FREE NEGOTIATORS CHECKLIST on the top right-hand side of my site.

What would you be willing to learn now if every time you opened your mouth, you got exactly what you asked for?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

In the late summer of 2001 I had the habit of working at night and sleeping during the early hours of the morning. After having descended into the blissful oblivion of up-all-night sleep at about 6 am on September 11th, I was awakened sometime after 8am by my wife. She said the following things to my still nearly comatose brain:

“Cheryl just called and she said that the Pentagon has just been hit and the World Trade Center has been taken hostage by a Jet Airplane.”

I thought I was in a Saturday Night Live skit or something. Since the information didn’t make any sense – I had the urge to tell my wife to turn the lights off and go back to sleep. I love my wife so I asked a question to her Peter Pan/Tinkerbell story: “What?” She repeated the comment and I told her as I was coming back to consciousness “That doesn’t make sense.” She was very upset and had probably been up for hours. She replied “It’s what Cheryl said”.

So I asked a few more questions which led me to believe that something had happened to get two women spreading stories that had a Twilight Zone element to them. My wife was wanting to know if I thought “we” were safe. I explained to her how far away D.C. was from Austin and reminded her that we probably aren’t high on any target list. She likes to walk when she wants to clear her head so I asked her if she would walk our newly acquired puppy, Smooches and I would watch CNN and sort it out.

Smooches Reaction to 9/11 (and everything else)

I did sort it out and of course the “reality” was far less believable than the wake-up story my wife had told me. Like most Americans that day I watched the TV trying to grasp what I was seeing and hoping that some “explanation” would help it make sense.

In the 6 years since that day my life has been shaped by the 9/11 Events in many ways. For those of you who follow my blog closely you know that I’m a big fan of Asking Resourceful Questions. I also train my clients and apprentices how to and when to Challenge the Information. I suppose the biggest transformation that’s occurred to myself as a result of the 9/11 attacks was-is a greater and more focused sense of understanding my place in the complex country we live in, both philosophically and literally (two very different pictures of course). In short I’m 500 percent more civic-minded now than I was before that morning.

Today, children born in 2001 are now old enough to start school and learn to read and write. How many years from now will it take them to grasp all the changes that 9/11 brought into their world (our country). They will mostly like think that:

1. Terror Drills and Lock-Downs at Elementary Schools and Above are normal
2. That anyone with a police uniform should be detaining them, asking them questions, requesting they discuss what their parents do at home, if they have guns, and how many guns is normal.
3. Being stripped searched at Airports is normal.
4. Having an hour of gym a week at school and not being able to “get excited” on the play yard is normal.
5. That every 200th kid they might randomly meet has Autism is normal (there’s never been a report of Amish Autism)
6. That news about war and an existing war is just how the world works.
7. That the biometric “chip” that’s coming down the pipeline in a few years which will implanted somewhere on their body is “normal” and even “cool”.
8. That using a camera or video camera in NYC is a crime.
9. That the right to free speech can only be “allowed” in “free speech zones” is normal
10. Mandatory Civil Service is normal
11. Food scares, local terrorism and FEMA camps are normal.
12. That the word used by the media to represent any ill-defined villain is called Al-Keda
13. That the current “outcasts” of society are Muslim in faith or are of obvious middle-eastern descent but the 4-6 new Hispanic kids in each class each year that can’t speak English are normal.
14. That going to the doctor for most things is an absolute waste of time is normal.
15. Seeing a tape of Osama every year that never seems to change in appearance or content is normal.

Not all of the above is directly related to the attacks of 9/11 however they are a “normal” for these post-9/11 children. I remember what life was like for the 38 years I lived before 9/11. Do we just “get used to it” or do we choose to challenge the information? What each of us as parents and adults living in the post-9/11 society choose will determine what our children believe is “true” and “real” about the world we raise them in.

I wish to say to all those who love someone who died on or after September 11th, 2001 as a result of what happened that day on the South End of Manhattan – I am truly sorry for your loss. For those who were marred by those events directly or indirectly who still are among us – please forgive me for not contributing sooner, for not listening sooner, for not doing something to make a difference sooner – I have no excuse.

If you have been touched by 9/11 or related events and wish to comment or share a story you are welcome to leave a comment at the bottom of this article or send it to me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com. Even if you disagree with me, your comments or emails are welcome.

I’ll see you at the Negotiating Table!

Bruce Burns, the Negotiator!