Read the full transcript of author Cash Nickerson’s talk titled “The Seven Tensions of Negotiation” at TEDxHartford 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
CASH NICKERSON: Have you ever negotiated at a car dealership? Yeah? Yeah. If so, you know how it works. You go into a little cubicle, you haggle a little bit, reach some kind of preliminary deal, and then what happens? They stand up and they leave. They leave you alone. Where’d they go? Where do they go?
The Dealership Experience
And what do you do? You grab your phone and you answer some emails, maybe play some video games. Look at TikTok or Facebook. How do you feel? Well, you feel like leaving, but you don’t. That pretty new car needs a home, yours. And you already invested two hours in that dealership, right?
Maybe you should go find that salesperson. So where are you going to go? It would also violate the last instruction they gave you before they left, “Sit tight.” You know, after an eternity, they magically reappear, clutching a marked up contract in their hand. “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but I got you $599 a month with only $5,000 down.” You’ve already told him, and he knows it, five times.
You need less than $500 a month in a monthly payment, and you got $3,000 for a down payment. How do you feel? Do you feel the tension? You don’t much like the salesperson by now. He’s abandoned you four times, and you still don’t have what you want. It’s got relationship tension.
You got to sit in a chair, and he gets to come and go as he pleases. You’ve got power tension. You’ve been in this dealership for two hours, still don’t know if you’re going to get the deal you want.
You’ve got outcome tension. You know, since you got to that dealership, come to think of it, you’ve done absolutely everything they asked you. “Follow me, sit here, stay.”
You were even offered treats like a dog. You have process tension. Two hours of your day gone already, it’s your precious day off. Who knows how much longer you need? You’ve got timing tension. You’re alone. You got no agent.
The Tensions of Negotiation
You got no team. They are an agent, and boy, do they have a team. What you’re experiencing are the seven tensions of negotiation: relationship, power, outcome, process, timing, agent, and team.
So what’s next? Again, you could walk, but we seldom walk away. We want that car badly, and they know it. Regret? Yeah. When that first monthly bill comes due, and you’re trying to figure out what not to pay. Regret? Yes.
You know, when you spent the $5,000 that you didn’t have, you spent your vacation money that you were going to use to go to Barcelona. Regret? You betcha. When you wonder every day thereafter whether you got scammed. You know, we live with these tensions, and we accept these regrets, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Physical vs. Human Tension
Human tension and physical tension are very similar. Physical tension comes about when force is applied to an object. I want you to imagine a piece of string, and let’s put force on both sides of that string. It stretches. It elongates. Until what? Yeah. It snaps.
Humans are the same way. When subjected to the tension of a negotiation, they stretch until they snap. There’s three really horrible consequences of human tension.
First, when we’re under tension, we don’t think as clearly. And the greater the tension, the less clearly we think. Second, tension over a long period of time causes inflammation and disease. And third, tension often leads to a blow-up or a give-up. You know, we can measure physical tension.
Well, how are we going to measure human tension? One accepted way is self-reporting. How do you feel? You know, the problem is we’re subject to so much tension in our lives, we kind of lost touch with it. It’s become background noise. We don’t feel it anymore. We often carry tension in our neck and shoulders. That’s why when you go to an airport or maybe a shopping mall, what do you see?
Well, people working on your shoulders and neck, right? Giving you a little neck massage. I invite you to do something with me just to test this hypothesis, all right?
Breathing Exercise
What I want you to do is breathe along with me, all right? We’re going to breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth. Ready? I’ll just follow along. Breathe in, and breathe out through your mouth. Wow, that was good, all right.
Now what I want you to do is isolate tension in your shoulders so that as you breathe in, I want you to tighten your shoulders as much as you can, but just your shoulders, and as you breathe out, relax them, okay? Let’s try that, okay? Breathe in, and release.
Okay, let’s start with our neck, but only our neck. Breathe in, and breathe out. If you feel different before and after that, you have tension. Yeah, everybody. Well let’s take that.
Well let’s go back to that dealership. Let’s go right back to that point where the salesperson comes in and says, “Well you’re not going to believe this, but I got you only $599 a month with just $5,000 down.”
Now I want you to cleanse, calmly stand up and say, “I’m leaving and I’ll be back tomorrow. And when I come back, I only want to deal with the sales manager.” In two short sentences, you have taken control of the relationship. You’ve taken control of the power. You’ve taken control of the outcome, the process, and the timing. Let’s move to another area of life: relationships.
Relationship Tensions
Anybody consider a relationship a pretty much non-stop negotiation? It is. Imagine a couple that live in Manhattan and they work in Manhattan. One of them gets a tremendous job offer, career changer. The problem is, it’s in Los Angeles. Can you feel the tension? Imagine? I got a real life story for you based on that same scenario.
Paul and Jane lived in London. Paul’s in a band. Jane’s an actress. They got engaged. How wonderful. Paul thought, if they got engaged, maybe she could not be an actress anymore and just follow the band around. Yeah, selfless, right? Jane would have none of that. They argued and argued and argued.
Paul decided to take it public. He said, “Try to see it my way. Do you hear the outcome tension? See it my way? Do I have to keep on talking until I can’t go on? Ooh, process tension. I’m going to talk you into it. While you see it your way, run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.” Wow, power. “I’m going to not love you anymore. It’s going to be gone.” Timing. “Soon.” Any of that sound familiar?
Some of you know. Those are the lyrics from the Beatles song, “We Can Work It Out.” Paul McCartney wrote that to convince Jane Asher to follow him out on the road. Spoiler alert, they couldn’t and they didn’t work it out. You know, in relationships especially, instead of focusing on the actual one of the seven tensions in play, we often just always revert to the relationship.
Resolving Tensions
Let me give you another example. He wants pizza. You want steak. It’s an outcome issue. But it doesn’t take very long for someone to say, “We always do what you want,” right? Right at that relationship. You know, when you’re dealing with relationship and tension, take a beat.
Figure out what tension is really at risk or at play. So we talked about buying things. We’ve talked about relationships. How about something work-related, okay? A negotiation that’s job-related, like a raise. Anybody here ever feel underpaid?
Come on, maybe you do right now. You know, when you work your way through a tension like this, feeling underpaid, I use a process I call FACE. Feel it. Assess and analyze it. Cleanse it like we did with the breathing. And then evaluate and execute on a plan around the seven tensions.
Let’s just run through that. All right, relationship. Look at your boss. You may not like him. You may not be happy with him. But you know what? You’ve got to respect the relationship. Why? You might need a reference someday.
Power. When do you have the most power? Do you have another job? Did you just do something great? Are you about to do something they need? Outcome. What if they say they’ll give you a bonus? What if they offer some other benefit? What outcomes are you open to? Process. What are you going to do? Are you going to call, Zoom, have a meeting? What are you going to do for a process?
Timing. When’s the best time to ask for this? Certainly if there’s a budget cycle, you want to stay ahead of the budget cycle. Agent. Hey, is there anybody that can help you, HR, or somebody else from the organization? And team. Look, they won’t be in the room with you, but your family and friends should be a virtual team for you. You know, negotiation without regret.
Conclusion
To negotiate with tension, it takes, you know, face these seven tensions, segment them out, figure out which tension you’re dealing with. Are you dealing with a relationship issue, a power issue, an outcome issue, process issue, timing issue, an agent issue, a team issue?
Figure it out and address the actual tension and come up with a plan. Face the seven tensions for negotiation success. I’m going to leave you with a quote. It’s from my favorite character in Star Wars, Yoda. Yoda, and I make one slight adjustment here, Yoda said, “Tension leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.”
Doesn’t that describe our modern negotiation state? Face the seven tensions and let’s create a better world.
