Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations

For every stage in life, you discover books that speak to you, that help you change, to become the version of yourself that you need to be. It’s so very difficult to choose one book. But, if I must, it will be The Power of a Positive No by William Ury. It allowed me to understand the reasons why I was saying yes to things I did not want to do. More

If you are going to walk away without agreeing, you need two things. First, you need to explain why you are walking away. What interests and concerns are not met by the solutions you’ve been discussing?

Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it. “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti “Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it real

If we can hear the need behind a “no,” we can continue the conflict resolution process—maintaining our focus on finding a way to meet everybody’s needs—even if the other party says “no” to the particular strategy we presented them.

Negotiating with yourself to shift your purposes can lower the threshold of how risky the conversation is likely to be and improve the odds of a constructive outcome.