Negotiate with Confidence, or Don’t

You will face many negotiations in your life—whether for a pay raise
or over the terms of a car purchase. Ultimately, your willingness to
continue negotiations is based on your own level of self-confi dence. No
matter what your other advantages might be, you will end negotiations
faster if you lack confi dence, which means you’ll settle for a less advantageous
resolution.
ROBERT GOTTLIEB HAS spent a life working with writers, eventually
becoming editor of the New Yorker after spending a career in publishing.
He is noted for being sought out for his critical insights by renowned
writers such as Joseph Heller and Toni Morrison.
He has a lifetime of experience negotiating everything about a piece
of writing, from the payment to the punctuation. He even told Joseph
Heller that “Catch–18” wasn’t as good a title as Gottlieb’s suggestion,
“Catch–22.”
His theory of negotiating is simple: “If you’re saying, ‘Well, I don’t
know. Maybe. What do you think?’ that’s not helping. You have to be
able to say what you believe, in an unaggressive and uncontentious way.
You have to believe it; then, negotiate as if it were true. Whereas if you
do not believe yourself, you cannot help. You have to be forceful.”
Lower self-worth translates into 37 percent less willingness to negotiate and
using 11 percent fewer negotiation strategies. Increased self-worth correlates
with greater willingness to incur the risks of prolonged negotiation and
greater adaptability. In short, the less confi dence you have in yourself, the
faster you will give up trying to get what you want. (Greno-Malsch 1998)