Most Important Negotiation in Your Life
The Most Important Negotiation in Your Life
Harvard Business Review, September 2013
Life is a series of negotiations.
You negotiate all day, every day, from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep.
Contract terms and conditions. Hiring, managing performance, and firing. Defining deadlines, scope, and
deliverables. Collecting fees. Seeking alignment about business strategy. Enlisting stakeholders. Creating
partnerships and joint ventures. Dissolving them. You make offers, counteroffers, and agreements to settle. You
say yes. You say no. You stall for time.
Finally, lunch.
When you go home, the negotiations continue. Overbuying a new car, switching carpool days, or how much
screen time the kids are allowed. The stakes of negotiating at home can feel sky-high: which medical advice to
follow; how much to spend or save; how long your aging parents can live at home; whether to stay together.
From the major to the mundane, negotiating is the way we get things done. One of my clients told me, “my
toughest negotiations are with my dog.”
If you’re like most people, when you think about negotiation, you picture people talking to “the other side.”
Whether they’re pitching to a customer in an office, brokering a peace deal at Camp David, or arguing over
curfew at the kitchen table, negotiators are people trying to persuade other people of their point of view.
That’s only half the story.
After nearly 20 years of teaching negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the same years spent advising and
training thousands of executives, public sector leaders, consultants, and lawyers from all over the world, I see
things differently.
Actually, the most important negotiations we have — the ones that determine the quality of our lives and the
impact of our actions — are the ones we have with ourselves. Learning to communicate well and to influence
other people are essential skills in business. But even more fundamental to your success is learning to negotiate
effectively with yourself.