How to relax and put your negotiations on autopilot

You are in the middle of an intense negotiation for a large contract with a large company. If you can work out a deal, you’ll get one of the biggest commissions you’ll ever make. You’re almost there, and then your negotiating opponent makes you lose control by asking for a last-minute concession on price.

What do you do for a living?

If you have a proper trading system, it will be easy for you. It will simply react based on the predefined rules that you have already established before starting negotiations.

You have a set of rules and a system, don’t you?

If not, it’s time to put one in its place.

First, you will need to define the desired outcome of the negotiation. What is its ultimate mission and purpose? What does a successful result look like to you?

Within that framework, there will be many smaller deals to be struck before the big deal is done. Therefore, you will need to draw a map, at least in your mind and preferably on paper.

Start at the beginning and list all possible forks in the road. What decisions might you have to make during the course of the negotiation? If you are offering consulting services, for example, you might think about some of the following:

How many hours are you expected to spend with this client?

Will you be working on-site or off-site?

Will you be the only one working on the client project or will there be a team available?

Are you offering a guaranteed level of performance?

Will you bill upfront, after the job is done, or in small increments throughout the process?

For each of these questions, you should already have an answer. Once one of these elements comes up in the negotiation, you won’t even have to think about your approach, your system will kick in and the answer will be there for you.

The same applies to a fighter pilot. If the pilot has lost control of the plane, there will be a certain protocol to follow that will eventually lead to the pilot being ejected from the plane. Because the pilot has trained beforehand and knows the sequence of events leading up to this decision, he can calmly eject.

If you or I were in that situation and had never trained and thought about our judging system of when to eject, we would panic. We would not know if expelling is the right thing to do or not. We would question our own sanity. What is missing is a simple and automatic decision-making protocol.

So before you go into your next negotiation, consider all the possible scenarios and decide in advance how you will handle them. Will it be something you can continue with, or will it be an obstacle that will prevent the continuation of the negotiation?

Once you have this system in place, your trading will be on autopilot.