Deal Me In

When you negotiate with others, how should you deal with your emotions, both theirs and yours?

As hard as you might try to ignore emotions, they won't go away. They can be distracting, painful, or the cause of a failed agreement.

They can divert your attention from an important issue that ought to be resolved now. And yet as you negotiate formally or informally, you have too much to think about to study every emotion that you and others may be feeling and to decide what to do abour it. It is hard to manage the very emotions that affect you.

Emotions Are Powerful, Always Present, and Hard to Handle.

What is an emotion?

Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition.

Then, it seems, no one knows.

As we use the term, an emotion is a felt experience. You feel an emotion; you don't just think it. When someone says or does something that is personally significant to you, your emotions respond, usually along with associated thoughts, physiological changes, and a desire to do something.

Emotions can be positive or negative. A positive emotion feels personally uplifting. Whether pride, hope, or relief, a positive emotion feels good.

In a negotiation, a positive emotion toward the other person is likely to build rapport, a relationship marked by goodwill, understanding, and a feeling of being "in sync." In contrast, anger, frustration, and other negative emotions feel personally distressing, and they are less likely to build rapport.

Ignore emotions? It won’t work.

You ignore emotions at your peril. Emotions are always present and affect your experience. You may try to ignore them, but they will not ignore you. In a negotiation, you may be only marginally aware of the important ways that emotions influence your body, your thinking, and your behavior.

Emotions affect your body.

Emotions can have an immediate impact on your physiology, causing you to perspire, to blush, to laugh, or to feel butterflies in your stomach. After you feel an emotion, you might try to control the expression of that emotion. You might hold back from a smile of excitement or from crying in disappointment. But your body still experiences physiological changes.

And suppressing the emotion comes at a cost. A suppressed emotion continues to affect your body. Whether an emotion is negative or positive, internal stress can distract your attention. Trying to suppress that emotion can make it harder to concentrate on substantive issues.

Emotions affect your thinking.

When you feel disappointment or anger, your head clogs with negative thoughts. You may criticize yourself or blame others.

Negative thinking crowds out space in your brain for learning, thinking, and remembering. In fact, some negotiators become so wrapped up in their own negative emotions and thoughts that they fail to hear their counterpart make an important concession.

When you feel positive emotions, in contrast, your thoughts often center on what is right about you, others, or ideas. With little anxiety that you will be exploited, your thinking becomes more open, creative, and flexible. You become inclined not to reject ideas but to invent workable options.

Emotions affect your behavior.

Virtually every emotion you feel motivates you to take action. If you are exuberant, you may feel a physical impulse to hug the other side. If you are angry, you may feel like hitting them.

Usually you can stop yourself before you perform a regrettable action. When you feel a strong emotion, however, careful thinking lags behind, and you may feel powerless to your emotion. In such moments, your ability to censor your thoughts or reflect on possible action is severely limited. You may find yourself saying or doing things that you later regret.

5 core concerns that evoke strong emotions

1. Appreciation

2. Affiliation

3. Autonomy

4. Status

5. Role

The difference between having a core concern ignored or met can be as important as having your nose underwater or above it. If, for example, you are unappreciated or unaffiliated, you may feel as if you are drowning, alone, ignored, and unable to breathe.

Your emotions respond, and you are prone to adversarial behavior.

On the other hand, if you feel appreciated or affiliated, it is as if you are swimming with your head above water. You can breathe easily, look around, and are free to decide what to do and where to go. Your positive emotions are there with you, and, as a result, you are prone to cooperate, to think creatively, and to be trustworthy.

Your brain immediately asks 2 questions every time someone starts negotiating with you 

1. Is this a person worth listening to? Do they understand how the world works-in other words, are they capable?

2. And what is their agenda in talking with you—are they friend or foe?

If you don't see that person as both strong, in the sense of having a grasp of the issue they're talking about, and warm, in the sense that they are on your side, you will discount everything they say accordingly, if you even bother to listen at all.

It turns out that any time we are in the presence of others we are making a judgement of their level of strength and warmth. Strength is a person’s capacity to make things happen with abilities and force of will. When people project strength, they command our respect. Warmth is the sense that a person shares our feelings, interests, and views of the world. When people project warmth, we like and support them.

A persons auditory levels have a large impact on your emotions in any negotiation.

Your voice conveys a great range of depth of feeling. We rely heavily on vocal cues to discern how a person is feeling. Your vocal range can be broken down in 4 levels:

1. Pitch - how high or low your voice is

2. Volume - how loud you are

3. Rate - how quickly you speak

4. Tone - the musical quality of your voice (how melodic or non-monotone your voice sounds like)

Related to both tone and rate is a quality known somewhat alarmingly as “attack.” This means how quickly the sound reaches its full volume. Does the speaker spit our words abruptly, in staccato fashion, or do words flow together smoothly?

Lastly, while each of these levels contributes to your vocal range, there is more to it, because most of the talking we do in any negotiation is with others. Therefore, it is important to factor in turn-taking in conversation. Your vocal variability while conversing with others signals either openness or closeness to others ideas and speaking time.

Your emotions are always there, and they will be involved…

These emotions can ruin any possibility of a wise agreement. They can turn an amicable relationship into a long lasting fight where everybody gets hurt. In a negotiation, they reduce your ability to act wisely. They can also be a great asset. They can help us achieve our negotiating purpose, whether to find creative ways to satisfy interests or to improve a rocky relationship.

Negotiation involves both your head and your gut - both reason and emotion. Negotiation is more than rational argument. Human beings are not computers. You are part of the negotiation. Your emotions are there, and they will be involved. So, too, will the emotions of others.