Episode 158 – Hijack A Negotiation Using Emotions

After last week’s interview with Chris Voss, Kurt and Steve dive deeper into negotiations and how emotions can hijack them. This has a negative connotation with most…but why not be the hijacker here? Emotions can be a powerful tool in negotiation.

Worry
When your prospect is worried or preoccupied with something occurring now or could happen in the future. The wrong type of worry can hinder persuasion. Worry is feeling anxious, uneasy, or concerned about something that may happen, or has already happened. Worry creates anxiety which creates tension—a fear that occupies our thoughts, which if encouraged will grow and continue to dominate our thoughts. I have heard worry referred to as “negative goal setting.”
You can combat worry in your prospects by modifying their anxiety. Bring them back to reality by having them realize we can’t change many things in the past or forecast the future. Stress that most of the things we worry about are those very things we can’t change or control and which won’t likely ever happen in the first place. Help your prospects replace their negative mental images with positive ones. Worry can also be caused by indecision. Get them to make a series of minor decisions and their worry will decrease.

Anger
Anger is a secondary emotion. A prospect’s anger is usually an indicator that something else is askew and that he needs or wants attention. When we are angry – we want attention or action now. You can assist in diminishing his anger by determining the key issue he is upset about. It is also often effective to ask for his help, opinions, or advice. This will usually diffuse his anger or even change his attitude and demeanor completely. In some circumstances, you may want to use anger to make a certain point or to evoke a certain reaction. However when someone is angry they are more likely to blame someone else. In their mind it is not their fault. When they are sad they will usually blame the situation.
When people become angry they tend to rely on intuition or an educated guess. Anger triggers non analytical information processing. Anger causes us to use mental shortcuts to decide if the argument is right. An experiment was done that induced anger. The participants that were angry tended to discriminate between weak and strong persuasive arguments more than those in a neutral mood. In other words, those that were angry tended to be more influenced by heuristic cues (intuition) than those in a sad or neutral mood.