First Step Marketing

Negotiating and stress go hand-in-hand. You’re anxious that you will lose; you don’t want to be ‘taken for a ride’ or ‘ripped off’ by an aggressive and manipulative opponent who’s out to get his or her needs answered at your expense. You’ll get upset, frustrated, put out if you don’t get what you want. Even when things are going well, you can feel frustrated because the other side is slow to respond to your proposals or because they are unable or unwilling to acknowledge or recognize the compromises that you’re making. All of these emotions are perfectly natural. After all, you’re a human being and human beings do have feelings.

But having these feelings can lead, almost without you being aware of it, to you losing control of your negotiation. For when you’re stimulated in these ways — when, as they say, your buttons get pressed — it can easily lead to you becoming angry. And when you get angry you start that slow insidious slide down the slope that leads to failure. Some of us (me included!) have short fuses, we react quickly and then subside just as quickly. Others have long, slow burn times that terminate in explosions of words and actions that last for quite a while. It doesn’t matter which you are, the result is the same. For when you lose your cool — you also lose control.

Cool ways

Stress — and its close cousin anger — are your body’s reactions to external events. These events can be obvious and ‘in your face’ — such as when somebody is rude and aggressive or doesn’t listen to you — or subtle and insidious — as when someone won’t answer your questions or you get the feeling that someone’s not being honest with you. Few of these external events are under your control — neither you nor I can make people be polite or honest. When things like this happen you start to get stressed.

So what can you do about it — how can you de-stress yourself or, better still, how can you stop yourself getting stressed in the first place? The answer, of course, lies — like the stress itself — within yourself. But it doesn’t lie in ignoring your feelings. Quite the contrary, it lies in your becoming more aware of your feelings and emotions. You need to watch the ways in which these feelings wax and wane, you need to get better at recognizing their early onset. You need, most importantly, to find ways that enable these feelings to be used to your benefit — rather than being driven by them.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Cool Ways to Wipe Conference Nervous part 1

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Business Management, Business Plans, Career Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.