Make Someone You Love Happy This Valentine Week, Negotiate with Them
Often I meet people who make that old joke about counting fingers after they have shaken hands with me. Before they join a Scotwork course people often feel that negotiation is somehow a process of taking a one-sided advantage of the other party. It’s no surprise that almost unanimously the uninitiated say they would never negotiate with their loved ones. On the contrary, negotiation is a process which cultures relationships; we recommend negotiating with people to whom you are closest… if you care about someone I would go as far as to say that it’s the conflict resolution approach that is most beneficial to your relationship.
Disputes large or small occur more often with those very few people that are closest to you for the simple reason that in close relationships there is an abundant opportunity for dispute. Co-existent relationships that are friction-free may be relationships that are stagnant, that are not progressing, conversely conflict is bound to occur on occasions as a bi-product of healthy growth and positive change.
At any level of conflict, irrespective of whether the people with whom you are in dispute are those who you love the most, or those people with whom you dread dealing (you know who they are), the truth is that for a successfully concluded negotiation certain elements are far simpler in intimate relationships than in estranged commercial dealings. In any dispute the irrefutable fact is that if you need to preserve a relationship (in commercial dealings that is not always the case), unless both parties get something from the imminent dialogue, which is an improvement for both of you greater than the status quo, then some rather unhappy baggage is likely to accrue.
In a commercial relationship there are many “possible” means of resolving confli