The real power is pure neutrality, in any aspect of negotiation.
When you want to achieve “good,” you can’t get there by resistance to evil. When you want to achieve “right,” you can’t get there by resistance to wrong.
You win by realizing that hot and cold are the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of temperature. Win and lose are essentially the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of the experience of the game. In and out are the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of movement within or movement without.
In a good negotiation, you’ll learn to give up the resistance and the judgment of the opposite of that which you seek. You’ll accept the opposite and incorporate it into your own position.
But neutral means neutral. You just don’t care if no deal is made. You’re not striving for one of those frantic, win-lose deals in which you give away the farm in your desperation for success.
People who do that don’t realize that attaching to a certain outcome pushes that outcome away.
Remember, neutral is the attractive force. (They called it “playing hard to get” in high school.) The neutral position is always the most effective.
Once you become neutral, positive and negative then become the balancing forces. When you are neutral, you’re automatically attached to the positive, if you look at it from a nuclear physics perspective. The negative is brought in to create the balance, but the link between the neutral and the positive is where the power lies.
The problem is that we don’t accept that. We keep trying to make the negative go away.
But that’s akin to trying to iron the waves in the ocean to make the ocean smooth. Or cutting the positive pole off a bar magnet so that you just have the negative.
Futile.
The balance of all three forces reflects the nature of life. But in order to get the positive, most managers go out and fight against the negative, and wonder why more negative keeps coming in.
We do this trying to manage our society, too. We hire more police to oppose gangs, and wonder why we have even more gangs. We create more government programs to fight poverty, and wonder why poverty continues to grow. The very things we fight against become the things our attention goes into and empowers. What we resist persists. What we oppose grows stronger. Consider that your attention is the fuel of change. What you pay attention to is the fire that you are adding fuel too. If you truly want a positive outcome, focus on the solution and not the problem.
There are other ways to deal with gangs and poverty that address the whole, balanced system instead of just addressing what’s “wrong”; with the current system.
New solutions show up as whole systems.
What you resist will always persist
A gifted chiropractor we know (we’ll call her Judy Smith) became a corporate business consultant, and she was terrified that she would have no credibility with clients because of her limited background in business. She feared being perceived as a “mere” chiropractor. Because she was so focused on getting rid of the negative (her perceived lack of credibility), she took the technical doctorate she had earned as a chiropractor and put it on her business cards and Website. She was now “Dr. Judy Smith.” Clients just assumed she must be a PhD in organizational development, which was what she hoped would happen.
But it didn’t take long for the word to get out that the “Dr.” Judy was using was for being a chiropractor, and she was made fun of. The very negative she was trying to avoid came back at her in a bigger, more vicious form. What she opposed grew stronger, and what she resisted persisted.
Later she stopped resisting, and told clients up front about her successful chiropractic practice. She dropped the “Dr.” from her name. She told wonderful stories about her work as a chiropractor and the lessons she learned that she could apply in creative ways to business. People loved it. So by not resisting reality, reality became her ally. By no longer feeling negative about her former profession, she could return to a powerful neutral position.
In the workplace, the old-school micromanager is obsessed with eliminating the negative. And by doing so, he himself becomes negative, judgmental, and non-trusting, focusing only on problems (thereby making them bigger than they are). Ignorance of neutrality leads managers into a world of deception, dispute, and control. None of those attitudes is an aspect of neutrality.
This is why managers who are controlling and micro-managerial get so much push-back from their people. Their people feel paranoid and judged.
But when they give up dragon-slaying the negative, managers become hands-off managers. And from that place without judgment, they can focus their attention on that which they wish to create. What a relief to everyone.
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In every person, even in such as appear most reckless, there is an inherent desire to attain balance.
—Jakob Wassermann
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