Business Book Summaries

Beyond Reason

Using Emotions as You Negotiate

By

Roger Fisher & Daniel Shapiro

The Big Idea

Emotions matter.

Beyond Reason offers straightforward, powerful advice for dealing with emotions in even your toughest negotiations, whether with a difficult colleague or your angry spouse. You will discover five “core concerns” that lie at the heart of most emotional challenges. The advice builds on previous work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, the group that brought you the groundbreaking Getting to Yes. World-renowned negotiator Roger Fisher teams with psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation, to bring you this indispensable new classic.

Why You Need This Book

This book will help you discover how to use emotions to turn a disagreement, big or small, professional or personal, into an opportunity for mutual gain.

Emotions Can be Obstacles to Negotiations

None of us is spared the reality of emotions. They can ruin any possibility of a wise agreement. What makes emotions so troubling?

They can divert attention from substantive matters. Your attention shifts from reaching a satisfying agreement to protecting yourself or attacking the other.

They can damage a relationship. Strong emotions can overshadow your thinking, leaving you at risk of damaging your relationship.

Careful observers of your emotional reaction may learn how much you value proposals, issues, and your relationship with them. In an international or everyday negotiation, positive emotions can be essential.

Positive emotions can make it easier to meet substantive interests. With positive emotions, you are motivated to do more. Things get done more efficiently as you and others work jointly and with increased emotional commitment.

Positive emotions need not increase your risk of being exploited. Avoid inhibiting positive emotions; rather, check with your head and your gut before making decisions.

Address the Concern, Not the Emotion

The core concerns are human wants that are important to almost everyone in virtually every negotiation. Rather than trying to deal directly with scores of changing emotions affecting you and others, you can turn your attention to five core concerns: appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role.

You can use them as levers to stimulate positive emotions in yourself and in others. If you have time, you can also use them as a lens to understand which concern is unmet and to tailor your actions to address the unmet concern.

The core concerns are simple enough to use immediately, and sophisticated enough to utilize in complex situations. A negotiation that involves multiple parties and high stakes requires an advanced understanding of the five core concerns.

Express Appreciation

Appreciation is a core concern. If people feel honestly appreciated, they are more likely to work together and less likely to act hostile.

You can appreciate by:

Understanding a person’s point of view;

Communicating your understanding through words or actions.

Build Affiliation

With enhanced affiliation, working together becomes easier and more productive.

Structural connections. You can strengthen structural connections by finding links that you have in common with someone or by creating new links.

Personal connections. By talking about personal matters, you can reduce the personal distance between you.

Acknowledge Status

With a little self-preparation, you can identify your areas of high social and particular status and work to improve or develop new ones so that you can approach your negotiations with a sense of confidence.

Since every person has multiple areas of high status, there is no need to compete with others over status. Appreciate the high status of others where relevant and deserved, and feel proud of your own areas of expertise and achievement.

If you truly appreciate your own status, you need not worry about what others think of you. In turn, you can acknowledge the status of others without cost. and treating others with appropriate respect often makes them respect you.

Choose a Fulfilling Role

You are free to expand the activities within your conventional role. In almost any role, you can focus your attention on aspects that are boring, dull, frustrating, and time-consuming.

Time and again, you also are free to choose temporary roles that empower you and foster joint work.

Reshaping your role can take effort. Over time, you can modify your role to your liking.

Soothe Yourself: Cool Down Your Emotional Temperature

Here are some suggestions of things you can do to soothe escalating emotions:

Slowly count backward from ten.

Breathe deeply three times, in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Pause. During the break, relax. Think about how to move the negotiation forward.

Visualize a relaxing place like a sandy beach, a sunlit forest, or a symphony performance.

Change the subject, at least briefly.

Adopt a relaxed position: Sit back, cross your ankles, let your hands rest on your lap or the table.

Let upsetting or offensive comments fly by and hit the wall behind you.

Call to mind a good walk-away alternative that you have prepared.

On Being Prepared

Preparation improves the emotional climate of a negotiation. A well-prepared negotiator walks into a meeting with emotional confidence about the substantive and process issues, as well as with clarity about how to enlist each party’s positive emotions.

There are two important activities involved in effective preparation:

Establishing a routine structure of preparation. You want to prepare in terms of the process of the negotiation, the substantive issues, and the emotions of each party.

Learning from past negotiations. Experience is of little future value unless you learn from it. After a negotiation, review the interaction in terms of process, substance, and emotions.

Conclusion

We all have emotions all the time. We become so busy thinking that we let our emotions take care of themselves.

Most negotiators treat emotions as an obstacle to clear, rational thought. As a result, we do not realize the opportunity afforded by positive emotions.

Although the Declaration of Independence emphasizes the “pursuit of happiness,” there seems to be remarkably little organized common sense about that pursuit.

Using the core concerns wisely will improve the quality of your relationships at work and at home. You can turn a negotiation from a stressful, worrisome interaction into a side-by-side dialogue where each of you listens, learns, and respects the other.

You improve your outcome.

And instead of inspiring resentment, the process inspires hope.

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