What makes negotiation difficult

- [Announcer] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Interviewer] Misha, I have to ask you, does negotiating make you nervous or has it ever? - Oh, totally. - [Interviewer] Oh, okay. - [Misha] So you see, I think there's two kinds of people that come to do what I do. Some are people who have never had difficulty negotiating and they portray themselves as experts or master negotiators. And their take on things is, "I'm wonderful at this. Let me show you what I do. "If you do what I do, you'll be good, too." And then there's people like me who say, "I've struggled with a lot of this my whole life, "and I've learned a few things along the way, "so let me share them with you." - [Interviewer] Was there a specific negotiation that made you feel like you were a bad negotiator? - [Misha] No, just my own conflict aversion. I think that, you know, I have good skills, but in my heart of hearts, I'm a conflict diverse people person, or people pleaser. And when you're not comfortable with conflict and trying to make people happy, it's really hard to negotiate for yourself. - [Interviewer] I mean, I think you just nailed it. I would also add, when you have fear of rejection, conflict avoidant people pleaser who fears being rejected, above all, it's kind of like a bad recipe to get an outcome that you want. - [Misha] And yet, what I discovered is that you're not predestined to have a bad experience or get bad outcomes. A lot of the stuff you can learn, and in particular, what I've come to was the idea that you have to learn how to manage your emotions simultaneously with using your negotiation skills. And if you can balance the two of those things, I don't care who you are, you can do pretty well. - [Interviewer] Learning to manage your emotions while doing anything else is, to me, the ultimate skill of adulthood. - [Misha] It's not easy.