The Negotiators Secrets

Greetings Communicators!

Have you ever watched a kid play with legos or for those of you who are as ancient as I am, Lincoln Logs? They will spend hours fascinated by what comes out of their…what? What is the operative process in what a child or adult is doing when they put two or more legos together? Connection. Where does the connection first occur? Inside the child. How does the connection occur? Asking a resourceful question. What is the result of the connection? I don’t know. That is the mystery and the magic of communication. When your communication creats a connection for yourself - often times we might refer to this as talking out loud. What do we call it when it creates a connection for someone else? Wisdom, insight, intuition?

How does it work? This might be the only real lesson you’ll ever need to achieve Mastery in Communication and Negotiation. It works just the way it did when we are kids. The child sees the different colored Legos and ponders (by Asking a Resourceful Question) what the result might look like, then confirms that result by making the connections.

I was at an after-work part recently with some friends and more significantly some friends-of-friends. The group was a mixture of genders and ages, coupled and single. They were mostly in the sub-business-culture of marketing, internet marketing and sales. The first thing I “did” to make the connections was to interview anyone that would let me. Most people actually like being interviewed, it’s a chance for them to get undivided attention and feel significant to someone else. My interview starts like a cocktail party conversation:

1. What’s your name?
2. Where are you from?
3. What do you do?
4. How are you connected to this group (or the person that sponsored the party)

Who can’t do that, you ask? People who are in bed sleeping. Everyone CAN DO THIS. Ok so what makes my cocktail questions different from any other shallow smoozer? I’m the kid who can’t put the Legos down. I immediately start making connections not only in my mind - but out of my mouth for the interviewee. Here’s a sample of some follow up questions from the above four:

1. Wow that’s an interesting name where does that come from? (asked that at the party)
2. I’ve been to (name place person is from). Do they still have “Rodeo Day” every year? (show you that I know where your from and entertain you with some local trivia)
3. That’s fascinating (what they do), I once (tell a short story or related life fact about their business)…(if you don’t have a story or fact then reveal a personal or secret interest in something that really relates to what they do) When I went to college I really wanted to go into law but..
4. If you’ve heard about them through friend then say so “Penny has mentioned you a few times - I always wanted to connect the name with a face.” If you haven’t heard of them then at least feign disappointment that you hadn’t met sooner “I’m going to tell Penny she’s been hiding you for herself!”

Still cocktail party you say? Yeah, though a good one. Imagine though if for every (of the original 4)cocktail question that gets answered, you generate 10-50 new questions. Think back to a family get together or even just babysitting a relative’s child. What does a child do before about the age of 8? Do they ask a lot of questions? “where do babies come from” ad infintum. They are making connections in their mind. They are mapping out relationships for the first time that we old, slow, stuck-in-our-ways adults take for granted.

Do you have some fear on asking 200 questions to one person at a party? I can appreciate that. It’s been my experience that about 1 in ever 50 people or so don’t like to be interviewed to that degree. So that means the next 49 people will let you ask 200 questions while that 50th person might only let you get away with 10. Lets break that down. 49 x 200 = 9800 + 10 (from #50). So do you think you can come up with something amazing with 9810 answers? That is an enormous amount of information.

The party I went to consisted of about 15 or 20 people. I talked to about half of those. I even found #50 in the group I spoke to - which I thought was funny. I don’t badger the #50s but when I come across them I still smile. After 3 hours, I had made several appointments, 2 future get-together dates with a larger group and had circulated my phone # and my website shamelessly. Oh here’s another fact - of all the people I did speak to about 90 percent of them had already heard of me. Here is the irony - the person that put the party together is also a #50. She won’t even let me ask questions of her boyfriend questions (though he and I talked anyway). The lesson there is just because a #50 mind find you annoying doesn’t mean they don’t see your value - I still get invited to parties.

So let me wrap up this construct for you with some value. The difference between a child making a lego pyrmaid and any human making the connections with other humans is that once you’ve inventoried their map (the interview) then you share your map and finally you build a new map with the two existing maps. Connections build the bridges between your map and theirs. Those bridges are a map unto themselves and allow resources and opportunities and possibilities to pass back and forth.

If you’d be interested to know more about making connections or just have questions, feel free to write me at justask@yourownbestgood.com. I’m available for private consultation and training.

I’ll see you at the cocktail party or perhaps the Negotiating table!

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!

Greetings Negotiators!

This weekend I spent an entire day with a client. He was managing many major changes in his life and it requires him to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. While I happened to be in ear-shot he received a call from an irate customer. I knew some of the back story to this particular customer and I suspected the call might be a defining moment in my client’s relationship with his client.

10 minutes later after some rather intense phone time with the irate customer my client was unhinged. He like many Negotiating Clients wanted to validate his “point of view” with me after having gotten off the phone. Me, like I am when it comes to Negotiating, wanted to TRAIN TRAIN TRAIN my client to appreciate the phone call like a Negotiator.

In the first few minutes of the conversation between my client and his client “blame” surfaced. The irate customer blamed my client. My client’s response to that was to defend the blame and talk about what he “didn’t do”. After the phone call had ended and some cool-down time had passed, I addressed these areas with my client.

Here’s what I said:

1. You can’t prove a negative.
2. When a client blames you for something unfairly if you can manage to keep your center and remember you are a Negotiator you can actually turn that event into a great advantage.
3. Blame or being a victim is a Negotiating Position. The position looks like “I take the position of a victim with all the victim monologue”
4. When you start “reacting” in a Negotiation you’ve lost the Negotiation. If both parties are reacting, the Negotiation is simply “done”.
5. The key to managing someone who is taking a “victim” Negotiating Position is to challenge the position through Asking Resourceful Questions. Most “victims” will change their tune when they discover there is a)absolutely no pay-off or b)a potential loss for taking such a Negotiating Position to begin with.

My client wanted sympathy and to focus on the drama of what his client had said while he and I were working through his experience. This is a very important distinction to make in each potential Negotiator’s mind. You can either get lost in the drama of a Passionate Negotiation or you can appreciate the value of a Passionate Negotiation and navigate through it to even greater rewards than a standard non-passionate Negotiation.

By challenging a “victim” Negotiating Position effecitvely, the Negotiating Complement often times will regret having been a baby and try to make up for the self-realizing humiliation by Overcompensating you in a Negotiation. Who doesn’t want $ in terms of overcompensation?

If you’ve ever been faced with Blame in business and would like to ask questions or just have a comment then feel free to comment or you can write me directly at justask@yourownbestgood.com.  To hear more about how to Negotiate, sign up for my newsletter on the right hand side of my site and receive a free copy of The Negotiator’s Checklist.  If you would like to dive deeper into the world of Negotiations then you may want to consider my (currently free) Apprenticeship Program.

I’ll see you at the Negotiating Table.

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!

In some sports a false start is enough to disqualify a contender. The same is true in the human discourse often referred to as Negotiation. One error the ill-trained Negotiator makes before she ever gets to the Negotiating Table is to attempt to second guess or assume things about the yet undelved world of the Negotiating Complement’s side of the Negotiating Table. This bad habit is often the result of attempting to prepare for every variation of the anticipated negotiation. Such obsessive preparation is often the result of a Negotiator who is worried about what other people think and intends to “look good” at the Negotiating Table.

Knowledge is Power to the Negotiator on a scale like no other profession. Your words equal an increase in profit, position, opportunity, alliances, options and every other word that represents Resource. If you never learn anything else about Negotiating then please please hear this: A Negotiator’s duty is to inspire the Negotiating Complement’s information to flow and flow and flow. Get your Negotiating Complement talking by any means necessary. The metaphor that helps me remember what I’m doing in this part of a Negotiation is to think of myself as a Safe Cracker. My function is to get the Negotiating Complement to reveal his entire combination so that when I begin spinning the tumblers - the question of accessing all his resources is only a mater of how long I wish to draw the Negotiation out, nothing else.

I wish to qualify the point earlier about any means necessary. I don’t intend to arm any of you with ugly negotiating tools. The only time that I pull out my lumber-jack Negotiating tools is when the context is instantaneous and the rules of the game are already dirty and unforgiving - like catching the car thief hot-wiring your car or the guy that cuts in front of you at the movie theater. Hostile Negotiations are an essential element in the vast array of tools and resources needed by The Excellent Negotiator! that we will cover another day.

The opposite of an assumption in a Negotiation is Asking a Resourceful Question.  If you find yourself thinking in terms of an assumption or if the next thing out of your mouth is derived from an assumption - STOP!  Take a little more time and Ask a Resourceful Quesiton.

In my youth - I remember learning one thing and the excitement and the power of knowing one thing - like how to change the oil in my car was so great that it helped me halucinate the following logic: I know one thing and I learned that thing.  Therefore - I can learn anything and the knowing of all things is simply a mater of learning it.  Therefore I know all things though a few of those things are as yet unlearned.  (which gets shortened to) I know all things.

Today I am 43 years and 1 day old.  I’ve learned enough to know I hardly know anything at all.  In my Negotiations I amp up my own ignorance.  I want my Negotiating Complement to feel the great rush of vast knowledge and shine his rays upon my dull self…so I can then open up his safe and take what I wish.  By the way - each model of car requires you to learn how to change the oil all over again and oh my god that’s such a great way to spend my time.

If you have a story about someone who Negotiates through Assumption (including yourself) or have a question about how to deal with assumptions, asking resourceful quesitons or anything else I may have covered, please feel free to leave a comment or write me at justask@yourownbestgood.com.

If you are interested in hearing more about Negotiations and would like to receive my Newsletter please fill out the form under my picture to the right.  If you wish an even deeper grasp of Negotiations you might wish to sign up for my currently Free Apprenticeship Program.

What would happen if every time you opened your mouth you got exactly what you wanted?  Have you Negotiated to your Own Best Good Today?

Bruce Burns the Negotiator!