Skip to content

UXL Blog

“Creating Successful Leaders”

Tag Archives: Life Coaching

November 21, 2012 The Strength In Skillful Negotiation

When you hear the word “negotiation,” it’s easy to think of those painfully long meetings between two or more stubborn parties, where everyone walks away unhappy. Take recent events in Congress, for instance. No matter what side you fall on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree that the seemingly endless battles over legislation get frustrating, to say the least.

But Stuart Diamond, Wharton Business School professor and author, thinks that negotiation unfairly gets a bad rap, yet is a crucial tool to achieving success in our daily lives. “It’s just a conversation,” he points out. “You don’t have to give anything up by just talking to someone.”

And that’s just it. Negotiation doesn’t have to mean drawn out, exhausting exchanges. It can be as simple and pleasant as a chat with a server at a restaurant, or a polite conversation with a co-worker. In his book, Getting More, Diamond provides some basic ways to master negotiation skills.

1. Keep Your Goal at the Front of Your Mind. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the middle of negotiation, as many tend to get distracted by emotional impulse. Yet staying close to your goals during negotiation makes things easier for both parties. You’ll be clear-headed and better able to express yourself with clarity and efficiency.

2. Reverse Roles. “You can’t persuade people of anything unless you know the pictures in their heads: their perceptions, sensibilities, needs, how they make commitments, whether they are trustworthy.” You need to have at least some idea of who the other person is. Minimize your own needs and pretend that you’re the least important person in the room. This shows that you are in tune with other people’s needs, and willing to make compromises.

3. Be Constructive, Not Manipulative. “Don’t deceive people.” Building trust is key. You might not get everything you want right away, but being open and honest while negotiating cultivates long-term relationships that yield greater results. If you cut corners, lie or hide your cards, the other party will begin to be suspicious (and rightly so), which is a big problem for good negotiation.

Diamond also makes it clear that negotiation is a flexible, situational process, and that good negotiators are those who know how to utilize their personal strengths to achieve their goals. We shouldn’t act like someone else, for instance, because “people will detect it and you will lose your credibility.” He sees good negotiation skills as tools to help you “learn how to be yourself better.”

Try these ideas out and see what works for you. Become aware of what types of negotiations take place in your standard day, and where. Keep a mental log of how you tend to handle these, and use Diamond’s ideas as reference. See where you could improve, implement a plan, and take action. Good luck!

Stuart Diamond, Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 6, 7, 19.

Tags:

October 3, 2012 Getting Ahead With Good Habits

We all know that good habits reap goodness in our lives and that bad ones do the opposite. As many of us have experienced, bad habits can have lasting, damaging effects. But like many things, forming good, healthy habits is easier said than done. It’s easy to resolve to change things for the better, but it’s much harder to stick with it over the course of time. The dilemma, it seems, is finding ways to sustain a lifestyle of healthy habits.

In “The Power of Focus,”  authors Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt (all three successful businessman and entrepreneurs) offer a formula for habits. Let’s take a look at the three points they lay out for us:

“1. Clearly Identify Your Bad Or Unproductive Habits”

Canfield, Hansen and Hewitt stress that the key to identifying bad habits is being honest about long term consequences, not necessarily things that would show up tomorrow. “The real impact could be years away,” they point out. It’s easy to ignore bad habits that don’t have immediate consequences, but that’s exactly where their power takes hold of our lives. We must instead look ahead and see how the choices we make now will impact the future.

“2. Define Your New Succesful Habit”

In the same way we looked to the future when identifying bad habits, we’ll also look forward when we implement good habits. Looking forward “helps you create a clear picture of what this new habit will do for you. The more vividly you describe the benefits, the more likely you are to take action.” Again, this is the way we stay strong with good habits: picturing the rewards and aiming for them. Take the time to sit down and map out your new set of good habits, thinking about the great things you will achieve when you adopt them. It’s good to start small, so don’t overwhelm yourself with tackling multiples habits at once. After all, the brain can only handle so much! Focus on one habit at a time, only moving on when you feel that you’ve successfully installed it into your routine.

“3. Create A Three-Part Action Plan”

You’ve honed in on areas in your life you want to improve, deciding to take different (usually opposite) courses of action to beat out bad habits. Now, you’re ready to get the ball rolling. Take the time to “make a decision about which specific actions you are going to implement.” Each person’s three-part plan will be slightly different, and it is up to you to determine what works best for you. Some people’s three-part plans might actually have five parts to them, since the number of steps isn’t really what’s important. The important thing is that you visual specific actions. How can you really realize your goal of implementing a new habit? What actions will boost chances of success? The action plan will propell you from visualizing changes you wish to see, to actually feeling empowered to make them. What’s more, having a written copy of your plan works great as a visual reminder or reference for those days you’d like to slip back into bad habits.

Vital to the success of your action plan: setting a start date.

Canfield, Hansen and Hewitt use the example of someone who takes too much work home on the weekends. They look honestly at the consequences of this habit (“Family time restricted, feeling guilty, important relationships become polarized”), visualize the benefits freeing up the weekend completely (“more relaxed, reduced stress levels, create unique family experiences”), and make an action plan to get there:

1. Design my work better by not overcommitting.

2. Delegate secondary tasks to staff to free up my time.

3. Have my family keep me accountable. No golf if I don’t follow through!

Start Date: February 3rd

As with any change we make in our lives, repetition is key. To make better habits, you’ll have to keep fighting the brainless tendency we have to continue the bad habits we’ve created. This may be annoying at first, but if you stick to the action plan and keep your focus toward the future, you’ll soon find that you’re actually doing the good habits without having to think about them. Think about how good that will feel!

Canfield, Jack, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt. The Power of Focus. Florida: Health Communications, 2011.

Tags: ,

September 19, 2012 How To Manage Perfectionist Tendencies

Last post’s emphasis was on procrastination, but also touched on how perfectionism comes into play. I figured going more into perfectionist tendencies would be a good idea, as I see it as a negative force in many people’s lives.

Our society greatly emphasizes perfection, or striving toward perfection, so it’s very common for people to feel that they need to do everything without flaw.

The perfectionist thinks in all-or-nothings. If something they do doesn’t live up to perfect standards (which, if you read the previous post, translates to impossible standards), then they believe they are a failure and their efforts were a complete waste. This becomes a vicious cycle: the perfectionist sets unrealistic goals, fails to achieve them, feels that they failed utterly, and becomes discouraged and less confident in their ability to succeed in future endeavors.

Even when a perfectionist does great work, they have trouble seeing it as success, because their work will always appear sub par alongside the unrealistic expectations they set for themselves.

In fact, perfectionism hinders productivity as a result of this mental cycle. Those who set realistic goals are more able to perform because their goals are strategic, manageable, incremental. On the flip side, perfectionists are often so overwhelmed with their need to get everything perfect that they have trouble getting started. Perfectionist paralysis.

A few ways to get past this paralysis are:

1. Breaking down your task into bite-size chunks. Even breaking it up into one component per day works well. If you make a list to coincide with your breakdown, you’ll also have the pleasure of being able to check off accomplishments as you go.

2. Giving yourself some space from your work. This helps you keep the task in perspective. It is only a task, whatever it may be, however important, and you are not the task. Your value as a person is not tied to how well you perform.

3. Providing ample time to nitpick. If you know that you fuss over the details, break your work into two general categories: the “just getting it done and not thinking” work, and the “going back over and obsessively getting it right” work. This way, you’ll be able to move forward without worrying about how perfect it is, since you know you’ll have time to get it great after it’s all thrown together.

4. Knowing when to let it go. At some point, you’re going to need to stop your task and turn it in if it’s an assignment, deliver it if it’s a speech or presentation, or finish it in whichever other way you finish it. It will never be perfect, since nothing is perfect. You must learn to let go and trust you’ve done your best.

If perfectionist traits apply to you, remember: you simply cannot be good at everything. Some people will always be better-suited for particular skills than you. And this is okay! This is okay because your value is not determined by doing things perfectly, and if you tend to think this way, you’ll only continue to feel disappointed in yourself. This is also okay because once you accept your weaknesses, you’ll be able to know your limits, set more reasonable goals, and hone in on the areas in which you thrive.

Tags: ,