We are headed into an economy controlled by the collective who have an infinite store of wants. The collective economy is controlled by government employees, unions, corporate tribes, etc. Inside this economy each individual must learn to negotiate with people who are motivated by their wants not their needs . The leverage you have over any member of the collective is that most of what they want you do not need. So you can give them what they treasure in bulk while you gain from them the few things that you really need.
The challenge for many individuals is the increasing rate of inflation, interest rates, unemployment, foreclosures, regulations, fees and charges. The new skill individuals need in is the ability to negotiate. Learning, applying, and perfecting your negotiation skills is an imperative for you to survive and thrive in uncertain times.
Way back in 2013 I was asked to convene sessions on negotiate skills for a client. I refused the gig time and time again because the type of training I envisaged was so far from what all my professional colleague offered. You see much earlier in my life I had learnt a new method of negotiation while coping with the everyday needs of my five year old son, Albert.
Eventually I agree to run a short course to a select group of participants around Europe. I construct the first thirty minute session based on a novel idea and draw lots of laughs. In the Q&A portion of the session the whole thing becomes deadly serious. With ten minutes left on the clock for my session a participant decides to test my method and so he outlines a problematic negotiation, with a national contractor, that had persisted for five years. I decide that this is a teachable moment for the twelve people in the room. I stride to the whiteboard and in the space of the next forty five minutes we solved the problem together using my simple rubric. Two week later I am informed that this issue has been fully resolved. I am not surprised [although delight] by this news because for a decade I had been successfully leading teams of people to conflict resolution with this basic method.
The context here for me was that this negotiation skills gig was a throwaway supplement to my three day workshops on culture change. The success of this thing was unexpected and something of a nuisance for me. My sessions became longer because there were more participants. However because I placed a strict limit of thirty two on the size of these groups [four sets of eight] the numbers of session doubled, tripled, etc.
Twenty years later I wrote a little book that lays down what I know about negotiating skills. I threw the contents up on Amazon publishing and have rarely looked at the thing since. I did not promote it. I did not do anything that might bring it to the attention of those who need it most. I figured that one, or two people, around the world might glean some useful insights from it and those folks would find it through their own efforts.
Here is the rub.... You must find a way to develop your negotiating skills or you will struggle to survive and thrive over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. Each of you must harness your unique talent as a negotiator and then work extra hard on this aspect of your life. You can begin your journey at the local flee market where you haggle over prices. If you have children or teach you can negotiate with them. If you have troublesome work colleagues you can begin a process that results in a negotiated peace settlement. If you have a problematic mortgage, business debt, credit limit, student loan, etc you can resolve it using the core idea presented in my little book. The message is free and perfectly clear in the description of the book on Amazon. The cost to own the book is about the same as a cheap cup of coffee.
Richard.
The mind of a minimalist is developed on a unique sense of you which, in turn, is based on individual needs not collective wants. For instruction on how to establish your sense of you: go to minimal-you.com and hit the "become a minimalist" button in the banner heading. This will take you to a payment scheme for a 10 day programme that will teach you how to design, enforce, and live with mind filters: these help you to be the best person you can be.
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