How to negotiate with someone more powerful than you

From below $18 to $483 - shares of the company GameStop rocketed when WallStreetBets, the Reddit army of retail investors took on hedge funds – and won! One loser, Melvin Capital Management, a hedge fund, has lost 30% of $12.5bn under management on exposure to GME. A modern-day David-and-Goliath battle between regular people versus financial titans. How do you negotiate with someone more powerful than you? What do you do if the other side is richer or better connected? I mean, have you ever tried to work out a win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the messiah? As a negotiator, you’re going to run into guys who lie to your face and try to scare you into agreement. Dealing with aggressive jerks and serial fabricators is something you have to do. In the Chinese martial art of tai chi, the goal is to use your opponent’s aggressiveness against him. A repetitive series of “what” and “how” questions can help you overcome the aggressive tactics of a manipulative adversary. “Here are some great standbys that I use: “What about this is important for you?” “What is the biggest challenge you face?” “How am I supposed to do that?” Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why did you do that?” is an accusation, in any language. How you negotiate (and how you prepare to negotiate) can make an enormous difference, whatever the relative strengths of each party. Of course, no matter how skilled you are, there are limits to what you can get through negotiation. The best negotiator in the world will not be able to buy Buckingham Palace. How do you enhance your negotiating power? There is power in developing a good working relationship between the people negotiating. It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective mean to increasing your negotiation power. Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to become less defensive and more willing to listen to other points of view. This is listening as a martial art, to gain access to the mind of another person. Negotiation serves two distinct life functions – information gathering and behaviour influencing. Your career, your finances, your reputation, your love life, even the fate of your kids at some point all these things hinge on your ability to negotiate. Negotiation is nothing more than communication with results. In my Effective Negotiation training program, I draw on my more than two-decade career in sales to distill the principles and practices I deployed in the field into an exciting new approach designed to help you negotiate a lower car price, a bigger raise, and a child’s bedtime. You’ll learn to use your emotions, instincts and insights in any encounter to connect better with others, influence them and achieve more. It works for one simple reason: it was designed in and for the real world. It was not born in a classroom or a training hall, but built from years of experience that improved until it reached near perfection. I’ve always thought of myself as just a regular guy. Hardworking and willing to learn, yes, but not particularly talented. But with the skills I’ve learned, I’ve found myself doing extraordinary things and watching people I’ve taught achieve truly life-changing results. Your goal at the outset of a negotiation is to extract and observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators – they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover. In my negotiation course, I tell my students to try to understand the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and to hearing what is behind those feelings. It’s emotional intelligence on steroids. Most of us enter verbal combat unlikely to persuade anyone of anything because we only know and care about our own goals. But the best sales people are tuned in to the other party – their audience. They know that if they empathize, they can mold their audience by how they approach and talk to them. Negotiate in their world. And so I’m going to leave you with one thought: Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, ask them questions that open paths for your goals. It’s not about you. It will get you the best car price, the higher salary and the largest contract. It will also save your relationships, your friendship and your family.