These 4 Feminine Gifts Will Instantly Improve Your Negotiating Skills
For decades, women have been told that we’re not good negotiators.
But guess what?
We’re better at it than we realize.
In fact, many of our natural feminine gifts, from our communication skills and sensitivity, to our intuition, are uniquely suited to engaging in effective negotiations.
(It’s important to note that both men and women can nurture these feminine qualities.)
If you’re interested in becoming a better negotiator, here’s what you need to do.
1. Hone your communication skills
Effective communication isn’t only about putting forth your needs and wants in a clear and articulate way.
It’s also about listening intently to the other person or group — and making sure they know you’re paying attention.
Listening is how you learn what a “win” will look like for the other party.
Often, we go into a negotiating setting thinking we know what the other person wants, but we really need to allow them to tell us.
Of course, this also plays into the tried-and-true rule of never putting an offer on the table first.
Once you fully understand their needs, then you can communicate your wishes. When you’ve heard the other side — and he/she knows and feels that they’ve been heard — you can leverage what you’ve learned to move both parties forward to a truly successful outcome.
2. Awaken your sensitivity
Sensitivity is going beyond listening to what the other party says, and paying attention to the subtler aspects of communication, specifically non-verbal cues.
In some situations, and with some people, these cues will be far more important than what the other party is telling you verbally.
If you’re able to pay attention, you may be able to discern what’s important to them — even if they haven’t said it. And that unspoken important thing might just be the key to making this negotiation work.
Maybe you’ll unveil something you’re willing to give up in order to move the process along.
3. Tap into your intuition and set an intention
Intuition plays a role in effective negotiating, too.
In any negotiation, you can use your intuition to set an intention for the process.
Acknowledging that intention before you walk into the room is a major step forward in a negotiation and allows you to work towards a goal.
For example, a close friend of mine was recently embroiled in a challenging lawsuit and asked for me to attend her mediation. In order to better understand where things stood, I asked both the attorney and my friend what they expected the net outcome to be — how much my friend was going to walk away with. I’m not sure the attorney had ever been challenged to think this way.
I had my own number in my mind, which was higher than both of theirs.
I had worked to fully understand the situation. I had set an intention, informed by that understanding but also using my intuition.
And guess what… my number was exactly where we ended up.
Why was my intuition correct? It was a combination of understanding the process, having an end game, and putting the right energy behind it.
4. Choose your battles, agreeably
In a negotiation, you’ve got to know going in what’s worth fighting for and what you are willing to forfeit.
For far too long, “effective negotiators” have been depicted as people who can strong-arm the other person into giving them what they want.
But forcing someone’s hand to gain an extra few dollars is almost never worth it — especially when you may have to negotiate with that party in the future.
If you take that approach, you may “win,” but only because you’ve worn the other person out.
At that point, they’ll never want to negotiate with you again. So is that really a win?
I learned this lesson from a sports agent I met years ago, as I was learning the ropes of being a sports agent myself. I was soaking up information from my “competitors” and especially liked this guy.
He’s a lovely person, and an excellent negotiator.
What he told me years ago is that when he’s negotiating athlete deals, it’s not about squeezing every last penny or concession out of the other party. Instead, it’s about going through a process both parties can feel good about, so he could end in a place both parties felt good about — even if that meant leaving a little bit of money on the table.
If he followed that process, it was always much more likely that his athlete would get another deal in the future, which is good for him, and the athlete he’s representing.
In the long run, that would be a successful long-term negotiation.
Now, “agreeable” is not a word I’d use for most sports agents. It’s a cutthroat industry. Feminine qualities don’t get much airtime. But this agent knew the power of agreeability, and he wasn’t afraid to put it to work.
The idea that feminine qualities are better suited to the negotiation process is a sharp deviation from the dominant narrative that men are more competent negotiators — especially in the workplace.
Of course, this narrative stems from the idea that a negotiation has to involve one winner and one loser — it’s an aggressive, traditionally masculine framework for the process.
However, as the CEO of a successful marketing agency going on its 13th year, I can tell you from experience that the best negotiations are not the ones in which there’s a winner and a loser.
