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The Future Is Bright

The future is as bright as you make it. I know it sounds cheesy and I know it sound cliched but it’s true. I never truly understood the power of belief and focused effort until I started my own business. Henry Ford is credited with saying, “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.”. I always thought, “Sure, that’s easy for Henry Ford to have said!” How wrong I was.

Belief is a powerful thing in life, not just in achieving life goals like starting your own business, but also in your daily negotiation practice. So much of negotiation comes down to actually believing that you can get a deal. A positive outlook and belief that a deal is possible is sometimes the separating factor between closing and not closing.

I can personally attest to this because there have been many circumstances where I have negotiated a deal and believed that the deal was at a stalemate and that there was no way that I could close. The problem with that kind of limiting belief is that it closed me down to finding creative ways to make the deal work. Eventually after trying to force my way through to getting a deal and getting nowhere, I would take those deals to my supervisors to tell them the deal was not possible and that there was no way that we could close. I told them that I had look under every rock, turned every table, and tried absolutely everything I could to make the deal work.

Fortunately I had amazing supervisors that were very, very patient. To my surprise, most of the time, they were able to find creative ways to look at the deal differently to make it work. Instead of asking, “How can we look at this differently to make this deal work?”, I was saying, “There’s no way this deal can work.” I let me pride, my ego and my experience (by the way, when we’ve been around for a long time we sometimes let this get in the way too instead of going in with a beginner’s mindset) get in the way of my belief and my creativity.

Negotiation is mostly, if not all, mental. Not just in your execution of strategy and tactics, but in your own mental state as well. Don’t fall into the trap and the destructive pattern of self limiting beliefs about what is possible and what is not possible.