It’s February. Already. I’m still trying to reach resolution. In my life. At work.
I really think that’s what life is all about. Our (my) attempt to reach a resolution. It’s easier if I think this applies to everyone else as well.

I negotiate for a living. Friends would often ask me how I can do that. “Don’t you have to be smart?” I think the question was meant to be about themselves not me. So I would answer, “No. You just have to know where to find answers.”

I used to want to be the smartest person in every room. I was in a gifted program in grade school, had a great memory for a lot of useful (less) thing and I pretty much annoyed my folks with my specific responses to their questions. “Didn’t I tell you to clean your room?” “Actually you didn’t say I had to do it today.” That sort of specific response.

But then, I think I did actually get smarter by accepting that I really wasn’t. When I would give training seminars, the audience would let me know they thought I was the expert. I would assure them I really wasn’t, I just knew where to find the answers. And I then would tell them where to find the answers. I guess I was sort of an expert, but I found I didn’t have to always be the smartest.

So back to negotiating. We all do it but most of us don’t want to think we do. So I call it reaching resolution. Negotiating sounds pretty serious. Intimidating even. It’s not. At least I didn’t think it was. Once I saw that each party to a negotiation was trying to accomplish the same thing – reach resolution, it became easier for me. The trick is to understand that and look for ways both sides can accomplish their end goal.

Neither side will get everything they initially proposed but maybe each side can get some of what they want while giving up some things that aren’t as important. That’s the trick, right there.

After spending over a quarter century learning this trick, I wrote a book to “de-mystify” negotiations. I never believed the “experts” that told me negotiating was so hard I’d have to hire them to “handle” it. I always thought they might have an ulterior motive as well. Not to say others, consultants like me, shouldn’t get to offer their negotiating services, I just wanted to dispel the myths I saw and offer what I considered to be the Rules one would need to successfully negotiate.

Wait, I meant to say the Rules one would need to successfully reach a resolution.

And so I wrote “Reaching Resolutions 10 Rules for Success.”
Available very soon on Amazon.

JT

Check out the vid (it’s long) below!
Maybe this is how negotiations should be settled!