Throughout your entire life you will constantly be in situations that require negotiations.   And you don’t have to be a merchant or even a business person in order to find yourself in heavy negotiations.  You may not necessarily call it a “negotiation”, but in essence you are negotiating whether you are trying to get your kids to bed on time, get your spouse to do the dishes, or convince a friend to give up a golf outing to go shopping with you.

If you want to be successful, you need to learn how to negotiate.  There are lots of books and training classes on improving your negotiating skills, and many of them cover the basics, such as understanding what is important to the person you are negotiating with, knowing what you willing to give up to get what you want, and trying to achieve a win-win situation.

The art of negotiation is a vast subject that requires hours of study and preparation.  We are only going to scratch the surface on this article, but we want to touch upon two concepts that are so critical to successful negotiations that anything else becomes secondary.  We want to hit on the big ones, the ones you absolutely must master in order to be successful.  So without any further ado, here we go.

Understand How Bad You Want the Deal

You have to objectively decide how bad you want the deal.  This may seem like simply common sense, but is absolutely critical.  And the reason is that there is a fundamental law of negotiation that you absolutely must understand and take to heart in every negotiation:

All other factors being equal, the party who is the least interested in making the deal is in the strongest negotiating position.

So why is this fundamental law that sounds more like common sense so important?  Because the less emotional attachment you have to the deal, the better your chances of being successful in your negotiation.  Be very, very wary of going into any negotiation where you are in love with the deal.  Even if it is true that you absolutely love whatever it is you are negotiating for, try to the best of your ability to become emotionally unattached.  Don’t think about how great it would be to close the deal – worse yet, don’t ever start imagining what it would feel like if you won the deal.  In your head you need to treat the deal for what it is: another negotiation just like the thousands of other negotiations you have gone through in your life.

Since you have gone through so many negotiations in your lifetime (you have been practicing since you were a baby!) you should already be master at it.  And as a master you know better than anyone else the fundamental law stated above.

Time can be Your Best Friend or Your Worst Enemy

So here is another fundamental law of negotiation.  If you want to have a chance of coming out of a negotiation with a positive outcome, don’t ever go into it in a hurry.  Understand and embrace this second fundamental law of negotiation:

 All other factors being equal, the party who has the least amount of time to close the deal is in the weakest negotiating position.

You can’t go into a deal showing that you are in a hurry to close.  That is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when negotiating.  If time is one your side, you have a very strong position.  If time is against you, be prepared to be eaten alive. 

The element of time is so fundamental that it can be used by master negotiators in many different forms to get an edge.  You have all seen the ads that say, “Hurry, this offer will end soon!”  That is the element of time being used against you.  Or more succinctly, be wary of going into a negotiating meeting where you have to be somewhere else by a certain time – if a master negotiator knows you need to be somewhere else they will drag on the negotiation until the last minute.  Worse yet, don’t ever walk into a negotiating room on a empty stomach, or needing to go to the bathroom – you will be anxious to be done, and time will be working against you.

These are the two most fundamental weapons master negotiating warriors carry with them:  Apathy towards the deal (or at least the illusion of it) and Time.   Walk into a negotiating room without these two critical weapons at your own peril.