So, what's the Rush?

This is meant to be a recap of my negotiation competition. But I feel like opening it with what my mom was doing when we spoke a few minutes ago.

She said, "I'm lying on the grass n watching the clouds move fast across the deep blue sky." She was up in a Tibetan mountain with a school of kids in their summer camps. "If I'm not feeling a little tired from the work, it would be better." she answer my envy. She was helping with the filming in addition to her other duties as the guide, the organiser, the cultural ambassador, which in turn were additional to her official duty as an ordained nun.

You certainly view the situation a little differently if you got a lot on your mind.

"Mina, you need to take a breath." The last judge told me. I knew full well that we could have lost, even if not for this particular reason. In that round, I responded to ( imaginary?) tricks and evasiveness and dominance with fear, tension and not-so-well-hidden aggression. None of these worked. The very thing that the other side wanted I gave without a condition - the loss of my mental peace. Little wonder that even the judge sensed something in my breathlessness. Even though I thought that I'd held up pretty well. But the cruel reality is that that was all I did. I failed to move beyond it.

I may very well congratulate myself on identifying all the tricks in the world. But the one thing that I fatally failed to recognise in the heat of the moment was that the very reason to apply tricks or evasiveness was usually to disrupt the other side's self-control and control on the process.


"A confident tone is part of the art of persuasion. Don't hide it. Use it from the beginning." The round three judge told all of us. I knew that I was speaking very softly from the beginning. But as we entered into the mad rush of the last ten minutes, everyone raised their voice a little bit to talk over each other. It was collegial, nonetheless. But the judge got a point. There is no reason to hide your confidence before friends or foes.

"So, what's the rush?" Our unimpressed first round judge threw these cold words at us. "Don't get me wrong. I'd say the same thing to the other side, too." he added. We'd forgotten the basics. In real life, there are a range of alternatives if no outcome is reached at a particular meeting: another meeting, agreement in principle, etc. There really is no need to conclude the matter on the spot unless, I guess, you are a crisis negotiator who is talking to someone that has stood on the windowsill of his 40th storey home for the past twenty minutes. Even in that case, you can't afford to lose your calm, your pace, and your rhythm. The moment you rush may be the moment he jumps.

I met him again a few days later. He said we won that round nonetheless, but we could have done better without the rush.