Negotiate Like a Ninja

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Let me start be being perfectly frank, no ninjas were consulted during the writing of this blog post. It’s a shameful attempt by me to hop on the speeding bandwagon of ninja love that seems to be sweeping the Internet in a feeble attempt to pull some traffic toward my Life Coaching blog.

Not only that, but I have no idea what a real ninja negotiates like. In fact, they may not do a fat lot of negotiating, preferring instead to attack under the cover of darkness and rip the spleen out of any person bold enough to question their undoubted authority, I really have no idea.

So this is a guess, that if a ninja were to negotiate he (or she), would probably proceed a little bit like this.

Note: If you yourself are a fully fledged  ninja and this is all hopelessly wrong please let me know in the comments. It’s much more civilized than swinging through my bedroom window with a knife between your teeth in the dead of night swearing to wreak your vengeance. If  you do I’ll just set my dogs on you and then we’ll see how hard you really are.

Negotiating like a ninja really means looking for win/win situations. Now you may think ninjas didn’t give a shit about win/win situations and win/dead is the only solution they were looking for,  but let’s presume that was just some bad press they received by an over zealous journalist 500 years ago.

For the purposes of our demonstration let us also presume you’re a less than ninja-like balding guy (or if you’re a lady you can flip it) who’s having a bit of a midlife crisis and you just know the best way out of it is to buy yourself a new BMW Z4 with the family savings.

Obviously that’s just a random hypothetical situation and not one I have ever been through myself, but it works well for our example.

You decide to tell your wife that you need this new car and that it will be the answer to all your mid-life problems and make you eternally happy.

Your wife is less than convinced because she is in touch with her Zen side and knows that happiness only comes from within, unless of course it’s a Tiffany necklace, a Coach handbag or a pair of Jimmy Choo’s.

Then and only then, it can be external.

You could get into the typical backwards and forwards debate that swiftly moves into heated argument closely followed up by banging of doors, shouting of insults and careful instructions as to where you can place your new car.

You may eventually get your own way, or you may not, but to coin a military phrase, you’ll not be winning any hearts and minds and you may well end up sleeping on the sofa.

When you have a stalemate like this it’s necessary to look at the big picture like a ninja would. Start to find out what both parties really want at a much more general and higher level, so ask the following question.

What do we both really want from this situation?

It’s doubtful asking that question alone will get you to a situation where you hug each, declare undying love and drive off into the sunset with the roof down on your shiny new car.

By utilizing the word ‘both’ you immediately shift the emphasis of the discussion. Up until that point it’s likely that both parties were only really concentrating on what they wanted and thinking the other person was being a sad jerk.

If you were looking to remove overwhelming feelings associated with thinking of a big goal or important task, you do so by breaking it down into bite sized portions. In NLP this is something called chunking down and can be very useful.

However,  we’re going to do the complete opposite here and chunk up by making each chunk more general and less specific.

The more we do that, the more we are likely to gain agreement. Arguments are often conducted around the detail and if you can remove that, you reduce the likelihood of confrontation.

Let’s take a look at some possible answers and see what we difference chunking up can make:

Him: I want a BMW convertible
Her: I want to save some money

Chunk Up:

Him: I want a sports car
Her: I want financial security

Chunk Up:

Him: I want to feel young again
Her: I don’t want to worry about the kid’s future

Chunk Up

Him: I just want to be happy
Her: I just want to be happy

You can see at each stage we are taking the argument to a higher level. Nobody wants a sports car because it’s the best method to get them from A to B, Equally nobody normally saves money because they like looking at it.

So when we are negotiating we want to find out what the end game is, what the people involved think they will achieve by reaching their goal and see if we can achieve that by other means.

If you keep going at some stage you will always meet in the middle. Hostage negotiators may have to chunk up to something as basic as “We all want to get out of this alive” to find common ground, although in this day and age, even that may not be high enough.

The moment you come to an agreement of what it is you really want, life becomes a lot easier. At that stage a lot of the emotion and the confrontation of the event will evaporate because you have established common ground.

In our example we can see that both sides just want to be happy, so it’s imperative that both parties keep that in mind as we start to chunk back down with an occasional sideways chunk thrown in for good measure.

Him: Having that new car will make me happy
Her: Having money in the bank will make me happy

Chunk Down

Him: I suppose I’d be happy with an almost new car if that made you less concerned
Her: I guess if we could spend a little less and as long as we promise to re-pay it back into the bank that would be ok

Chunk Down (and a bit sideways)

Him: I suppose I could lease a car and that way we don’t need to actually spend so much cash up front
Her: I could stretch to that as long as you drop your subscriptions to a gym you never visit, a sports channel you never watch and sell the jet ski you never ride

Chunk Down

Him: I’ll go for the cheaper model if I can keep my gym membership because I’ll need 6 pack abs to go with this baby!
Her: Ok you’ve got a deal and anyway that Pilate’s teacher is gorgeous and he’ll love my, er I mean our, new convertible.

Chunking is a skill and as such needs to be practiced if you want to get good at it.

The easiest way to think about it is, imagine you put in the address of your favorite pizza company on your phone in a town you don’t know. As if my magic a map pops up with a little marker showing you where the said fine eatery is located.

The only problem is your GPS isn’t working and you have no idea where the pizzeria is in relation to you because it’s too localized, so you zoom out (chunk up).  As you zoom out it becomes much easier to get your bearings and for you to see that the place is north east of you and about 2 miles away.

Then when you get the sense of whereabouts you are in the city you can start to zoom back in (chunking down) to see the individual streets and plot a route.

Now for some reason best known to you and for the sake of this rather contrived example, you realize that you want to know what the 2 streets to the west and east are called. What do you do? You scroll left and right and that’s chunking sideways.

So Grasshopper now you know how ninjas negotiate go and you can put your new skills to work!