Negotiate with Confidence or Don’t

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You will face many negotiations in your life, whether for a pay raise or the terms of a car purchase. What determines whether a negotiation is successful?

Skill enters in. So does relative bargaining position.

But ultimately, when negotiations are prolonged, your willingness to continue is based on your level of self-confidence. No matter what your other advantages might be, you will end negotiations faster if you lack confidence, which means you’ll settle for a less advantageous resolution.

Robert Gottlieb has spent a life working with writers, ultimately becoming editor of the New Yorker after a lifetime in publishing. His criticism is sought by renowned writers such as Joseph Heller and Toni Morrison.

He has negotiated everything about a piece of writing from the payment to the punctuation. He even told Joseph Heller that Catch-18 wasn’t as good a title as Gottlieb’s suggestion, Catch-22.

His theory of negotiating is simple: “If you’re saying, ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe. What do you think?’ that’s not helping. You have to be able to say what you believe in an unaggressive and uncontentious way. You have to believe it, then negotiate as if it were so. Whereas if you do not believe yourself, you cannot help. You have to be forceful.”

Lower self-worth translates into 37 percent less willingness to negotiate and use of 11 percent fewer negotiation strategies. Increased self-worth correlates with greater willingness to incur the risks of prolonged negotiation and greater adaptability. In short, the less confidence you have in yourself, the faster you will give up trying to get what you want.