The best position you can be in in a negotiation is if you don’t mind if the deal doesn’t go through.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t care. You do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be wasting your time negotiating.
You want the deal to go through. But if it doesn’t, you’re not in a terrible position.
Any time you care too much about a deal going through, you’re in a compromising position.
You would be driven by emotions and fear subconsciously.
Never enter into a negotiation if you’re not comfortable walking away.
Of course, you won’t always have this privilege. In the early beginnings you’ll need to pay your dues.
The problem with this is the following:
- Desire: you want something badly, and fear losing it
- You must learn to lower your desires. Practice stoicism. Do a fear setting exercise (what’s the worst that could happen?).
- Need: you need the deal to go through
- Reassess your position: if you need something to go through, you’re not in a good place
- in a business context, if you’re serving a great product/service, then you pretty much don’t need anything other than your customers paying you for such product/service (assuming it’s financially sound)
- in a personal context, it’s a lot more complicated, since most people in this day and age don’t own their freedom. If you’re financially free, you don’t need anything. If you’re not, then needs definitely kick in. This post is more catered towards business negotiations, but you can apply it anywhere
As a business, it’s somewhat easy (yet very hard) to not need the outcome of a deal/negotiation to go through.
Beyond the most basic negotiation between you and your customer to pay X price, you own your freedom. You win that former negotiation when you provide your customer with a much better product or service than what they can get elsewhere (better, faster, cheaper). Of course, this is way easier said than done.
You do this once, and then everything else should gradually become easier: you enter into negotiations not worried to walk away.