In Chapter Three we looked at Nick, the overstretched MBA student, who successfully ended the dispute with his wife over his playing basketball on Sundays by offering to give her a night off once a week in exchange. You may recall that this agreement was reached quickly and harmoniously after a number of failed attempts, which had created growing discord between the couple. What had changed? Nick had gone from thinking in terms of either/or (either I get my way and play basketball, or you get your way and I stay at home) to both/and (I can both play basketball on Sunday, giving me the break I want, and take care of the baby one night a week, giving you the break you want). He had finally understood that his wife would be more open to his desires if he also was open to hers.

Would Nick have been more of a winner if he had simply pressured his wife to give him free rein to do what he wanted on Sundays without taking on additional family responsibilities of his own? Perhaps on certain weekday nights, when he faced a crying baby and a looming homework assignment, he might have felt that that would have been the case. But looking at the big picture, it's hard to see how he would have been better off. By giving his wife something she needed—a night away to recuperate and reconnect with friends—he not only achieved his top priority (Sunday basketball) but also had a happier wife to come home to each night, a closer bond with his child, and a stronger marriage.

While the benefits to be gained from helping others get what they want may be obvious in a personal relationship, those benefits may be less readily apparent in a professional setting. Nevertheless, the same formula applies. Let's look at the case of Jamie, an attorney in a community "storefront" law firm, who was wondering how she could successfully negotiate with the firm's senior partner to reduce her work hours.

Jamie enjoyed her work and relied on the income, but as the single mother of a special-needs child who required frequent visits to the doctor, she was finding it increasingly difficult to juggle both responsibilities. She had calculated her expenses and found that with the child support payments she got from her ex-husband, she could get by if she cut her hours down to twenty a week (the minimum load to retain her medical insurance and other benefits). The problem—a serious problem—was that the idea of part-time work was not accepted among her legal colleagues, who had to be ready to handle major cases as they came in and to go to trial at any time. Part-time work had never been approved at her firm.

Anticipating considerable resistance, Jamie knew that she would have to come up with more than a personal appeal to back up her request. Therefore, she considered what the partners of the law firm might want that she could offer them or what problems they faced that she might be able to solve. Jamie understood that she would have to give up the status and excitement of handling the big cases if she reduced her hours, but she was comfortable with trading off work challenges temporarily for the even greater challenges she faced at home. Maybe the answer lay in taking on the important but less prestigious work that the other attorneys consistently grumbled about. Chief among these was the after-hours walk-in desk.

As a neighborhood firm, the law office stayed open for walk-in clients until 9:00 every night plus 10:00 to 6:00 on Saturdays. From 9:00 to 6:00 on weekdays, a secretary monitored the walk-in desk and referred each new client to a lawyer. However, after 6:00 p.m. Monday to Friday and all day Saturday, the lawyers had to take turns manning the desk, an assignment that caused loud complaints across the firm. Removing this source of chronic discontent, Jamie realized, might very well be something the law firm's partners wanted that in turn could help her get what she wanted.

As Jamie had suspected, when she met with the firm's senior partner to negotiate her new contract, he initially denied her request to reduce her hours, for all the reasons she had anticipated. From his point of view, having a lawyer who wasn't in the office when the work needed to get done would only create problems, with no benefit for himself or the firm. However, instead of taking no for an answer, she was ready with a route designed to solve one of their problems. What if she were to handle the walk-in desk from 6:00 to 9:00 four nights a week and all day Saturday? She could personally deal with any cases that came in that didn't require court work (wills, contracts, legal advice, and so on) and pass on the litigation cases to the full-time lawyers after doing the preliminary interviews and collection of documents. That way, she said, the firm would have dedicated coverage for the walk-in desk, faster turnover of the small cases, and most important, increased morale among the lawyers.

Jamie hadn't come up with this idea on the spur of the moment. She had asked her colleagues what dissatisfied them with the current setup and had thought long and hard about the partners' concerns and the possible trade-offs she could offer to alleviate them. She'd talked to a neighbor to ensure that she would be willing to be on call to manage any emergencies the regular caregiver couldn't cope with. She'd even planned how she was going to present the idea: simply setting out the facts and her proposed solution, careful to avoid the extremes of coming across as a supplicant, on the one hand, or a pushy salesperson, on the other.

Although she was confident going into the meeting, Jamie was still surprised at how quickly the senior partner responded to her idea. After a short discussion of how the system she proposed would work, he made the counterproposal that she instead work five nights a week and only half a day Saturday, since the partners had been thinking of reducing the weekend walk-in hours. As this gave her the same number of total hours (her primary goal), she was prepared to be flexible. Although the boss was not willing to make an immediate commitment, explaining that he would have to sound out the idea with the other partners first, it was clear he was ready to back her plan. By the end of the week, Jamie learned that she was to become her law firm's very first part-time lawyer.

Finding a win-win solution doesn't always call for routes as creative as Nick's or Jamie's, of course. Some negotiations, such as selling your car, are limited in scope and involve little or no onward relationship. Nevertheless, even in onetime price negotiations with immediate implementation, there are at least a dozen ways you can give people more of what they want. You will gain tremendously in any negotiation by

Some skeptics have objected that people expect negotiators to come across as tough. My reply is that to give something pleasing unexpectedly makes it even more appealing. In response to those who have asked me whether this doesn't make one seem weak, I ask when was the last time that you felt someone was weak because they were courteous, knowledgeable, and open?

This is another concept that has long been appreciated in the better-developed sales field but has not yet achieved the same level of awareness among negotiators, to their disadvantage. Faced with opposition, negotiators tend to settle for less: offering discounts, giving up demands, compromising their goals. Salespeople, in contrast, have mastered the art of reducing resistance by offering more.

Even the most prosaic sales pitches now include inducements designed to respond to a range of customer desires, aspirations, and concerns. To overcome your resistance to purchasing a product you have never seen or touched, for example, you are given a "free" set of Ginsu knives when you buy a set of pans from the TV shopping network. If you charge $200 on a certain credit card over the next month, you are told that you will be entered into a lottery that might win you a free vacation in the Bahamas. A health insurance company offers to throw in a year's gym membership if you sign up with their plan. The idea is that vendors gain less from price-cutting than they do from maintaining their profit margins by offering an incentive that is attractive to customers but of lower value to the vendors. The same practice can be applied by negotiators to maximize the value of their relationships. The difference—and the challenge—is that whereas the sales team has been provided with a set of prearranged mass-market offers, negotiators have to base each route and trade-off on the other side's specific interests. There is no generic negotiation.

Fortunately, this isn't as daunting as it sounds. By taking time ahead of the negotiation to imagine the other side's goals, putting in the effort to verify or modify that picture within the negotiation process, and doing a little creative thinking, you can nearly always find potential trade-offs that will give every party more of what they want, creating a higher-value deal for both.

Let's look at an example of a negotiation I conducted on my own behalf. Several years ago, I was approached by a national law society (bar association) to conduct a two-day workshop on negotiation for lawyers. I was very pleased to take on the project, believing that the world would be a far less litigious place if more lawyers practiced relationship-based negotiation. However, we soon encountered a roadblock. When I quoted my fee to the society's head of professional development, she replied with embarrassment that normally they did not pay their speakers. That was patently unacceptable from my perspective, as we were discussing a two-day workshop that would involve flights and a hotel stay, not a short talk by a local member. When I replied that I couldn't take on a project of this scope on a pro bono basis, she said that perhaps they could make an exception if I would agree to do the seminar for one-quarter of my usual fee.

This could easily have turned into price haggling, but I didn't see how that would lead me either to a profitable arrangement for myself or to a sustainable relationship with the law society. Instead, I began probing for trade-offs. I asked the professional development director whether the objection to paying speakers was based on an organizational rule or overarching principle. No, she replied, it was because the professional development division's budget covered only advertising and administrative costs; all of their speakers up to that point had been either lawyers or service providers who were willing to speak for the exposure or prestige. I then asked if the society normally charged an attendance fee for their talks. She acknowledged that they charged a small fee to cover venue and refreshments.

These two questions had opened up a route. If there was no policy against paying speakers and it was possible to charge a fee, then it was clear by extension that if the fee was sufficiently high and enough people attended the workshop, it would be possible to pay a reasonable speaker's fee. The concern of the law society wasn't price; it was risk. Because the head of professional development had a very small budget and she didn't know how many people would pay a higher-than-usual fee to attend the workshop, she was afraid to commit to a figure for a speaker's fee that could put her department in the hole. In contrast, I was sufficiently confident of the level of interest (and of the generous expense accounts of law firms) to be willing to bear that financial risk in exchange for a higher potential payment. The door was open for a mutually satisfying trade-off.

After a little more probing on numbers, I made my counteroffer. The speaker's fee could be assessed on a per-person rather than a per-day basis, with a minimum number of eight registrations required to run the program. The law society would price the course at a rate that, at that minimum number of participants, would cover all direct expenses, including my travel and hotel. Thereafter, for every registrant beyond eight and up to sixteen, I would take home 75 percent of the revenue, which if we reached sixteen, would bring me my usual fee. For all additional enrollments up to the maximum number of twenty-four, I would collect 25 percent, with the remaining 75 percent going to the law society to cover future programs. In other words, above sixteen registrants I would earn more than my usual fee, while the society would come out even further ahead—which I had calculated would encourage them to market the program energetically.

We reached an agreement on these terms in one congenial phone call. By trading off the professional development head's concern for eliminating risk with my desire to earn a reasonable fee, both of us felt that we had gained what we most wanted. We also came away as partners in developing this project. That partnership paid off for me many times over. Not only did the initial training go well (with twenty-one participants), but over the years I have been invited back to give a number of additional trainings (at my usual daily rate). How differently the story would have turned out had I refused to budge in my fees or accepted a deeply discounted rate the first time around.

In relationship management, trading yields a far higher rate of satisfaction than cutting everything in half. Imagine that we share an apartment and want to divide the housework and expenses fairly. We could split everything down the middle: you do the chores one week, and I do them the next. But if you hated washing dishes and I made a mess of the ironing—or if you preferred to do less housework altogether and I wanted to get out of paying my half of the utility bill—wouldn't we both be better off (and happier with our living arrangement) if we traded obligations?

Trading can also mend a strained relationship. A commercial writer I know was asked by a friend of hers, a computer graphics designer, to partner on a website project for a large international company. Initially, they agreed to split the fees fifty-fifty, but after a few weeks the designer complained that the agreement wasn't fair. He should get a premium as he had been the one to bring in the client, he said. At first the writer was annoyed, both at the designer's reopening the agreement and, even more, at the implication that she had somehow cheated him. She knew that she was within her rights to refuse outright, as they had already signed a project contract, but she felt that to do so would seriously damage their relationship and maybe the project itself. Moreover, once she had gotten past feeling offended, she conceded that the designer did deserve something for bringing in the business. On the other hand, she was strongly opposed to renegotiating the fee split, because she didn't want to feed a bear or feel like a less-than-equal partner.

Instead of offering him a kickback, therefore, she acknowledged that the designer had brought more than she had to the project and offered to balance his contribution with one of her own. Knowing that the designer detested the business end of the project, she offered to take over all administration: collating expenses, sending out invoices, responding to client queries, producing printed prototypes, and so on. The trade-off gave the designer the recognition he had sought while releasing him from a job he found onerous; the writer retained her sense of equal partnership while staying on top of work that she feared might not get done otherwise.

As with giving in order to gain, trade-offs bring benefits even to onetime price negotiations. A few examples of possible trades that could raise mutual value include

True, it takes a lot less mental energy to cut prices, raise your offer, or even drop the whole thing, but the cost of taking the easy road is high. At best, you minimize your loss. Finding trade routes, in comparison, is the best way to maximize your gain.

The basic purpose of negotiation is to establish a more desirable state of affairs than the current one, be it having more cash and less inventory, getting a needed car at an affordable price, dividing office responsibilities more effectively, or resolving a tense and costly international water dispute. By logical extension, then, the more desirable you can make that new state of affairs, the better.

Of course, one way to get more of what you want is to grab the whole pie and leave the other party with nothing but crumbs. But as we have seen, that brings only fleeting rewards. Because it creates a more desirable state of affairs for one party only, it's simply not sustainable. Far more effective is to expand the size of the entire pie so that when it comes time to divide it, there is enough to satisfy everyone.

Here's a great example of expanding the pie, from a former participant in one of my seminars. In the negotiations for selling her upcoming crop of organic heirloom tomatoes, Dawn was unhappy with the price she was offered by her wholesaler, given the premium that gourmet tomatoes were commanding in the stores. When she raised her objection, the wholesaler, Jerry, explained that the price was deceptive. Because Dawn's tomatoes were picked ripe, they also spoiled considerably faster. He showed her figures to substantiate that he was losing around 25 percent of his earnings on her produce from having to buy back rotten tomatoes from the stores.

In the past, Dawn said, she most likely would have backed down, accepted the reality of the market and the limitations of the product, and taken the reduced price the wholesaler was offering. She admitted that she was not much of a fighter. It was easy to justify the lower price when she considered that the economy was weakening; what would she gain from fighting to increase her price by passing on the difference to the store and its customers? That would just eat into sales. However, after learning the GRASP method, she said she began searching for ways to expand the pie.

She started by talking to other organic growers in the area to see how they could collaborate to benefit both the growers and the consumers. To get Jerry's help in this effort, she looked for routes that would benefit the wholesaler as well. The breakthrough came when she learned that the wholesale processing system of collecting, cleaning, sorting, and packaging the produce took five to ten days before it was ready to be delivered to the stores. This was not a problem for bulk produce, which was picked green and so could withstand weeks in a warehouse, but for tomatoes that were already fully ripe at picking it was a recipe for disaster. Dawn suggested to Jerry that if they could work together to speed up the process, they would both lose less in spoilage—and therefore make more money.

Building on the ideas she and her neighboring farmers had come up with, Dawn proposed that the local organic tomato growers could clean and sort their own produce right at the farm under the guidelines of one of Jerry's quality inspectors, package it under a "really, truly, genuine vine-ripened" label, and have it ready to be collected and delivered straight to the stores by the next day. Dawn proudly recounted that everybody loved the idea. The wholesaler benefited from reducing his labor costs in processing this niche product, while being able to get the tomatoes onto the shelves before they started to perish. For the growers, although the new arrangement meant more work, it earned them the price premium they wanted and the personal satisfaction from getting their produce to market when it was at its most delicious. The stores had less moldy produce to deal with. And the customers benefited from being able to enjoy vine-ripened tomatoes at their peak. What an example of expanding the pie for everyone!

Another important way to expand the pie is to broaden the perspective. Remember that the central question in every negotiator's mind is "What's in it for me?" If the other parties feel that your proposals benefit them only marginally, they will be less willing to accept than if they feel they stand to benefit in a more significant way, even if not immediately or directly. It's the same thinking that gets the vendor to offer more flexible terms to a regular customer than to a one-time shopper, even when they're placing identical orders. To move the perception of the negotiation beyond immediate issues and onto aspirations will greatly increase your impact as well as your chances for success.

Here's an example of an impasse that was resolved solely through broadening the other party's perspective. Malina, a former international student of mine, had been accepted into a one-year diploma course at a well-known art institute in the United States. She had chosen the diploma in interior design, a part-time program, not because she wanted to take only three classes (nine hours) per quarter—she would have liked to take more—but because it was the only course at the institute that could be completed in a single year. Timing was the deciding factor. The advertising agency she worked for said it would grant her a maximum of twelve months of unpaid leave, and she had saved only enough money to pay for a year of school.

All was on track for Malina to attend the course when she got a letter from the art institute's head of admissions saying that because of changes in U.S. visa regulations, she was no longer eligible for the part-time program. The new regulations, a response to the attacks on the World Trade Center, limited visas only to those students enrolled in full-time programs (defined as at least twelve hours of classes per week). The admissions director suggested that she change her enrollment to the two-and-a-half-year full-time associate of applied arts program. Unfortunately for Malina, that was out of the question.

Desperate not to lose her chance to study at the institute, Malina wrote the director of admissions asking if it would be possible for her to earn a diploma by taking one year of the full-time associate program. The director said no, as the syllabi of the two programs were entirely different: a year in the associate program did not cover all the core subjects needed to earn a diploma. Malina then proposed that she take an additional art class or even a course in English composition on top of the nine-hour diploma curriculum, in order to raise her class-time commitment to the required twelve hours. The director replied that that also wasn't possible, as all the art classes fed into specifically designed, progressive programs of instruction. Students could not just take classes willy-nilly, she said, nor could they create their own courses that were not part of the regular curriculum. The only option available, she insisted, was for Malina to change her registration to the two-and-a-half-year associate program.

As a last-ditch effort, Malina called her old negotiation professor for advice. After hearing her story, I felt sure that the problem was that the administrators at the art institute just didn't see enough in it for them to go to all the effort it would take to enable one student to get a diploma. What we needed to do was expand their view of the pie.

As an interested party on Malina's behalf, I wrote a letter to the admission director to appeal the decision. Rather than wasting any ink on the merits of this one student, I widened the focus of negotiation to include all international students and, most significantly, the rich revenue stream they provided to the school. "Your policy as it stands now bars any foreign student from taking the diploma course," I wrote. "Is that your intention? Certainly such a policy would act as a barrier to international enrollments, both narrowing your pool of qualified applicants and limiting the diversity of your program." I proposed that they could prevent this costly loss of foreign students by adding a single elective to their diploma program each term, allowing students who needed visas to take four courses instead of three, and thus giving them enough credits to attend the institute.

I sent the letter less in optimism than in the spirit of "it never hurts to ask." Bureaucracies are notoriously difficult to move. I was unsure whether my unsolicited letter would even get a response. Well, it did and it didn't. Personally, I never heard back from the director of international admissions or anyone at the art institute. However, three weeks later Malina received an e-mail that read, in part:

Coincidence? Perhaps. We will never know if it was that big pie that tipped the scale. What we do know is the result—and that was good enough for Malina.

Is it possible to expand the pie in a one-time buy-sell negotiation? Of course. In sales it's known as bundling. For example, I will sell you my car for a certain price, but for slightly more I will throw in the custom-designed roof rack. For you, the price of the roof rack is a bargain; as for me, I am relieved of the hassle of advertising and selling the roof rack separately. Similarly, in a negotiation to take over my office lease, you might ask whether I would be interested in transferring the photocopier and broadband contracts to you as well. That way, you could get a deep discount on the service contracts while I am spared getting stuck with an early termination penalty.

Remember, the goal of relationship negotiation is to maximize mutual gain.

Although negotiations will always be dynamic, requiring flexibility and considerable on-the-spot thinking, the skilled negotiator nevertheless must prepare ahead insofar as possible. By entering the negotiation with a mental list of several potential routes or pieces of routes that would take the parties to their goals, you are far more likely to control the flow of the discussion, to avoid making panic-driven concessions, and eventually to emerge with a favorable settlement.

After brainstorming a list of routes, the next step is to rank them according to how well they would achieve your goals: from most desirable to the least acceptable. (Don't bother listing options you would find unacceptable.) I find it useful to jot down the advantages and disadvantages of each potential route, which helps me to clarify my own rankings and, more important, further prepares me to advocate a specific route under the pressure of the negotiation.

In a multiparty negotiation, where you have to bring a lot of competing parties with separate interests on board, it's wise to spend some time ahead of the formal negotiation, meeting privately with the various parties to solicit their ideas and test out their receptivity to routes you have come up with. This helps to fine-tune your proposals, while giving everyone a sense of ownership over them, so that they will be more readily accepted by all. People are far more likely to agree to and implement solutions they feel they had a voice in or will get credit for developing. In fact, one of the most valuable and least costly incentives a negotiator can give to his or her counterpart is credit for the outcome.

Just as if you were planning a group trip, once you have decided which route you like the best, that's the one you advocate at the start. Don't mention any of the other routes until your first choice has been completely ruled out. Why present only one route when you have gone to so much effort to think up many? First, because that's the outcome you most desire, you don't want to immediately open the door to less attractive alternatives. Second, if you present more than one idea at the outset, you stand a high chance of overwhelming the other negotiator, confusing the discussion, and bogging down the whole process. Negotiation is not a challenge to see who can come up with the most clever ideas. It's an attempt to settle on the best one.

Even if the other party rejects your initial proposal, you mustn't just drop the idea and move on to your next route. This is a rich opportunity to achieve a closer understanding of the person or institution you are dealing with. You need to ask open questions to uncover precisely what they find objectionable and to probe for modifications, if any, that would make the proposal more acceptable. Through this open questioning process you will learn much more about the other side's goals, which until now you have only been able to guess at. With that knowledge, you will then have a clearer idea of which of your secondary routes are most likely to appeal to the other side, so that you can work more confidently toward a mutually satisfying outcome.

That said, not all people respond well to open questions (those that cannot be answered with a single word, such as yes or no). They may look on open questions from someone outside of their intimate circle as invasive and suspect a trick to get them to give away valuable information. These tight-lipped souls may reject a proposal as unacceptable, but when you ask them what specifically they object to, they refuse to tell you more. This can be pretty frustrating in a negotiation. One effective method for getting guarded negotiators to open up is to ask them choice questions instead. An open question ("What are your priorities?") may make them feel too exposed. If so, a choice question ("Are you more interested in maintaining the current wage level or minimizing layoffs?") will more likely get a useful answer. By asking a series of choice questions, building one on the other, you can often reach a sophisticated understanding of the other party's preferences, which will allow you to work toward an agreement.

Let's put all of this together by returning to the Empire Hotel room-rate negotiation introduced in the last chapter. As you may recall, the procurement head of Company A was generally happy with the hotel but expressed an interest in improving the speed and efficiency of the service. In particular, he mentioned having internet access set up and ready in the rooms on check-in.

This negotiation was looking like it would be relatively easy: to lessen any resistance to the price increase, the hotel would simply have to offer Company A the incentive of the higher level of service the procurement head had asked for, including having internet access preinstalled in the rooms. Both sides would come away with something they wanted. It seemed such a simple solution that it was doubly shocking when the hotel's general manager dismissed the idea out of hand. "We can't give free internet!" he said. "Our parent company doesn't allow it."

What was wrong with his reply? First, he hadn't even stopped to think about how it could be done before jumping to no. Second, he made no attempt to verify his understanding of the policy with the parent company. Third, and most fundamentally, no one had said "free." Company A's procurement head wasn't asking for a giveaway; he simply wanted an easier check-in experience for the company's employees. (Happily, once this final point was made clear to the general manager, he dropped his opposition.)

The general manager's initial response may have been unhelpful for the negotiation, but it is helpful as a lesson in what not to do in a negotiation. In fact, it teaches us three lessons:

What was the cost to the hotel of arranging to have internet access set up in the room whenever an employee from Company A was due to check in? Nothing. The hotel already had the internet cables and the technicians to install them. The solution simply called for a different procedure: installing the cable in advance of the guest's arrival instead of after. From Company A's perspective, however, what was the value of hassle-free service to the exhausted traveler who had been crammed into a crowded airplane for untold hours and just wanted to go to her room, be left alone, and check her e-mail in peace? Enough, in the end, to make Company A feel that the hotel was worth 32 percent more per night.

We had found an effective route for achieving both the hotel's and Company A's goals, but Company B called for a separate strategy. As you recall, their head of procurement hadn't shown the least interest in speed, efficiency, internet access, or even the end user. Her concern was about the way she and her team were treated. The three procurement staff who booked hotel rooms for the company wanted to feel that they were highly valued customers. To reach this unique goal called for a very different route.

How could the hotel management make Company B's procurement team feel more valued? The hotel's marketing department had a regular entertainment budget, which they primarily used to fund several gala events held throughout the year for key corporate clients. Why not peel off part of that budget to host an exclusive tea party for their single biggest customer to help repair the damaged relationship?

The sales director invited the three procurement staff from Company B to a private viewing of the recent renovations, followed by high tea. When they arrived, they were greeted warmly and by name, not just by the doorman but by their account manager, the sales director, and the general manager. The sales director and the account manager then led them on a personalized tour of the new facilities, soliciting their opinions throughout on what they liked, didn't like, and would like to see more of. This gave the hotel sales team indispensable information on how they could better please their major customer, while at the same time demonstrating how much management valued the booking agents' opinions. Afterward, the Empire's general manager treated the guests to a sumptuous tea fit for a queen.

Company B's procurement team came away from this event feeling valued as never before. They were gratified to learn that the hotel management appreciated the amount of business they provided and listened seriously to their ideas. Having repaired the damaged relationship, the Empire Hotel was now in a much better position to negotiate with Company B collaboratively rather than as enemies. What was the price to the hotel of giving their biggest customer a tea party? Only a little time on management's part. They already had the budget...and the tea. What was the value to three midlevel corporate employees who spent their days booking five-star hotels that they probably could never afford to stay at themselves? I'll let you decide. In the next chapter we will see whether these routes brought the hotel any closer to achieving its price increase.

There are many ways to reach a destination. You can plow straight ahead, forcing your way, making others yield, perhaps ending up in a rut, and most certainly leaving bruises that will be slow to heal. Or you can find a creative route that will attain both your material and your relationship goals by helping all sides come away feeling that they have gained something. The latter route takes more mental effort, but the payoff is exponentially higher.

In the next chapter we will look at how you build trust and confidence using Arguments for your case, that is, justifying your proposals to the other party.