Negotiation is all about opportunities.

How do you negotiate through your life? Do you take risks and opportunities that come your way or do you avoid jumping at those opportunities or taking those risks? Success doesn’t happen unless we take a risk. That is part of the challenge of going for a goal and making it come to fruition.

One of the number one things people need in order to be a good negotiator in any area of their lives is confidence. Confidence in negotiation comes from learning how to negotiate. Often times it has nothing to do with actually sitting down to negotiate, it is sometimes the other things you do to build your confidence that carries over into your negotiations or anything else in your life.

Here are 4 things you can do to build your confidence and become a better negotiator and seize the opportunities as they come your way.

1. Get a mentor or coach to help you discover if anything is blocking your confidence and help you work through it. Or if maybe you just need that mentor to hold you accountable for achieving your goals. No one is an island and can do it by themselves. It’s important to find the right mentor for you that will help you achieve your goals. I have more than one mentor and have been with them for a few years. Many times people start with a mentor and the results aren’t fast enough so they hop to the next ‘bright shiny object” that promises to create instant results. Nothing is instant. People that you think are an overnight success worked for months or years to achieve their goals and went through many failures before that “instant” success.
2. Train to improve your skills. I have been a speaker for many years and I’m still training and drilling my skills constantly. If I needed to I could be given zero notice and go on a stage in front of thousands and give a dynamite presentation. I have been training enough as a speaker and know my content well enough to do that. However, there are still many areas I can and need to improve on. I didn’t get to this level overnight and neither did anyone else. Not the athlete, the musician, the CEO of a company, the high ranking General in the military or even the President or Prime Minister of a country. You have to continually train to be able to jump at an opportunity when it comes your way so that you are ready to go when the time comes.
3. Take a risk. Sometimes those opportunities come and we aren’t completely ready to take them on. That’s the time to say yes and figure it out later. There are many stories of rapid success from people who jumped at an opportunity when they weren’t completely ready or felt they weren’t ready to take it on. In those instances it’s great to have a mentor to call to ask how to best capitalize on the situation. Taking a risk is sometimes scary and sometimes seems like a big mountain to climb.
4. Do something on your “dream” list that is challenging or scary. You probably have something on your list like skydiving, rappelling, zip lining, river rafting, of something challenging like that. Maybe you are petrified to speak in front of people like I once was and that’s a challenge you want to take on. Maybe you want to run a marathon, sing, dance, write a book, enter a contest of some kind. Maybe being a negotiator really scares you like some of my clients. Whatever it is on your list that you want to do, go do it, or whatever that thing is that you are afraid of, the only way to get over the fear is to face it by doing it. This will build confidence that will not only make you a great negotiator, but will also give you confidence in every area of your life. I learned how to ride a motorcycle almost 20 years ago and the level of confidence it has given me has spilled over into all areas of my life. What is that thing you are going to do to boost your confidence?

You won’t get to where you want to go by standing still where you are. Confidence is built through action. Taking action towards your goals and dreams and having the experiences along the way helps build confidence in more ways than you can imagine. Dreams without action are just fantasies. If you don’t take action, you might as well not even dream it. We live in a time of instant gratification. The internet gives us instant access. We can get things shipped overnight. Online dating and social media make connection instant but mostly takes out the work of building the relationship. All of this makes us want the instant success button but it just doesn’t work that way.

Whether you want to be a great negotiator or achieve your dreams in life, remember, the power is in the work. You do the work, you will have the power. I am only able to share a short bit of information here and always strive to give you as much value as I can in a short space. For those of you who want to take it further, please reach out to me at Eldonna@thinklikeanegotiator.com for a complimentary strategy session. Also visit the TLN Live event page for information on how you can take your skills to the next level. I have special packages available that include mentoring along with tickets to TLN Live. Email me to find out more.