Negotiation Skills: How to Beat Anxiety and Boost Results
Strategic opportunities, economic value, and relationships are at risk when people struggle with underconfidence at the bargaining table. Here’s how to improve your own skills and your teammates’.
News
- DeepSeek Pushes Open-Source Math AI to Olympiad Heights
- Telecom Firms Flag Gaps in DPDP Rules, Seek Sector-Specific Guidance
- SAP Taps TCS to Overhaul Internal IT and Cloud Stack
- Deepwatch Sets Up Bengaluru GCC to Power AI-Driven Cybersecurity Push
- Reliance, L&T Make $13.5 Billion Push Into AI Data Centers
- India’s Hardware Startup Boom Faces Roadblocks Despite $296 Billion Potential
Anxiety and low confidence are two of the most common feelings people experience during negotiations — just the thought of negotiating can send many people spinning. These reactions can cause people to preemptively throw in the towel and engage in behaviors that end up being self-sabotaging, including making lower first offers, responding too quickly to offers, and settling for too little, research shows. A lack of negotiation skills means missed chances and missteps, both for the individual and their company.
If you ask a random sample of people what makes someone a successful negotiator, many of them will add what are typically seen as traditional “male” traits to the list: strength, dominance, assertiveness, and rationality. Feeling like you lack those traits can lead to self-doubt. But research shows that when negotiators appreciate communication skills, listening skills, and insight as strong and effective tools, it raises their level of performance. This understanding can help unlock an underconfident negotiator’s true ability to be successful.
Overall, the goal is not to embody some other vision of a great negotiator: It’s to take advantage of the skills the novice negotiator already has and cultivate new ones. Leaders should encourage people to identify and reflect on their strengths and then explicitly map out how those traits are effective tools for successful negotiations.
You may be an anxious negotiator, or you may work with colleagues who are inexperienced and underconfident (as so many people are). How can you improve your own negotiation skills or most effectively coach your employees to boost theirs? Direct observation of negotiations is one option, but other strategies can help anyone level up to not only reach mutually satisfying deals but also strengthen partnerships.
Based on our research, teaching, and consulting work, here are evidence-based techniques to upskill and improve your own negotiating strategies and empower inexperienced or underconfident negotiators.
Three Fundamental Negotiation Skills
1. Get Comfortable Making Requests
Encourage underconfident negotiators to make proposals in situations where the likelihood that they will be rejected is high. Two insights emerge from engaging in this way. First, people generally get more yesses than they expect — fodder for the old chestnut that you get half of what you ask for and none of what you don’t! Second, people need to learn that, in the end, having your idea shot down isn’t that big a deal.
In the words of one student learning to negotiate, “Hearing ‘no’ isn’t failure; it’s valuable feedback. The fear of rejection limits opportunities more than rejection itself, and every ‘no’ can bring you closer to understanding people’s boundaries and interests.”
“Every ‘no’ can bring you closer to understanding people’s boundaries and interests.”
Once new negotiators find that a rejection won’t flatten them, they can develop the ability to retreat in the situation instead of from the situation. People rarely just say “no” to questions or requests; it’s psychologically uncomfortable to look someone in the eye and refuse them. So the explanations they provide regarding why they cannot comply offer new angles for discussion. Asking the question “What would it take for you to be able to say yes?” is another tool for broadening the conversation beyond constraints and into opportunities. When one employee used this tactic after their request for a raise was rejected, they were given a specific goal to shoot for (a signed contract by year-end). The “no” was effectively turned into a reasonable “not now,” complete with an action plan.
Once someone masters this skill, confidence in initiating requests explodes accordingly. This is a very clear win for being an effective negotiator, which requires both being unafraid to ask for what you want and being willing to chase down a lot of maybes. That’s why some people believe that negotiations don’t even start until you’ve heard the word no.
2. Get Comfortable Focusing on the Other Side
Negotiations are almost never a zero-sum game: The two sides may actually want some of the same things.
3. Get Comfortable With Negotiation Preparation: Five Key Questions
What am I hoping to achieve here? Be clear on what a good deal looks like. Then start out the negotiation aiming for that optimistic target because, as the saying goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
What will I do if this deal falls through entirely, and how attractive is that option? Only by understanding the alternatives can a negotiator assess their power. How badly do they need this deal with this other person? At what point would they be better off walking away instead?
What do I think the other side will do if I walk away? Power is relative. A negotiator may feel desperate to get the deal done because their other options are weak, but if the other side similarly has no good recourse if the deal falls through, the power imbalance may be neutralized.
What can we add to this deal to get each side what they care about most? Negotiations are almost never a zero-sum game: The two sides may actually want some of the same things, even if they prioritize different issues. Put yourself in the other negotiators’ shoes and identify the list of things likely to be important to them. Deals with multiple issues are more complicated to negotiate, but negotiators can often unlock superior value here by creating the possibility of conceding with purpose — that is, not giving things away but rather selling or trading them for other things of greater value.
How will I justify our requests? Of course, nobody shares every bit of information — the maximum budget, for example, is probably something that should remain private. But many people, especially when underconfident, hesitate to say anything at all, fearful that if they say the wrong thing, it will somehow be used against them. Instead, sharing why a particular issue is important and the relative preferences and priorities among the potential outcomes can unlock the possibility of crafting better deals. As an added bonus, sharing information prompts the other side to do the same, leading to a virtuous cycle of optimization for the deal.
Post-Negotiation Reviews and Feedback
It’s too easy for underconfident negotiators to write off tricky negotiations and suboptimal outcomes as either a global problem (“I’m just not good at this”) or a situational constraint (“The other side was unreasonable”). Both of these explanations limit skill improvement.
Leaders should seek to counter such responses by creating learning opportunities through open-minded reviews and timely feedback. Together with colleagues, build a habit of reflecting on the specifics of what happened and why. How did this negotiation go? What was expected or unexpected? What should happen differently if the same situation were to arise again? How did the outcome compare not just to the goal but also to the alternative option(s) available?
