A LETTER FROM CHRIS SUAREZ

DON’T BE SUCH A GOOD NEGOTIATOR

I've been really hung up on a quote  from Keith Cunningham that someone shared with me last week:

“The quality of your life is a direct result of what you decide to make non-negotiable.”

First immediately I realized this is true when thinking about the quality of our life or the quality of our business.

The statement takes on real weight and real meaning the clearer we get around the definition of non-negotiable. When something is non-negotiable, it is “not open to debate or modification.” A non-negotiable is something that you are unwilling to adjust. It’s a contract you are unable to break. There is nothing more to talk about. 

The problem for many of us is that we are expert negotiators. We negotiate for a living. We negotiate every day for our clients. 

Unknowingly, we may also be negotiating for ourselves and against ourselves.

We negotiate away the work we committed to.

We negotiate away the calls we were supposed to make.

We negotiate away the activities we said we were going to do.

We negotiate away the promise to make the phone calls we needed to make.

We negotiate away showing up to the office...because we "are allowed" to work from home.

Every day we are slowly negotiating away our preferred futures.

Why do we do this? It could be that we don’t see or feel any immediate negative effects from the negotiations we made with ourselves. It could be that we feel  nervous or unprepared to do what we had said we were going to do. It could be that we are just less committed to our futures than we actually think we are.

But the real reason we negotiate with ourselves?  

Simply, because we can. We don’t have any immediate consequences when we negotiate with ourselves. No one is there to call us out or force us to do what we said we would do. There is no disciplinary action, and no one is there to fire us for not keeping our commitment. Sadly, if most of us were hired by ourselves, we wouldn’t last a single week. You would fire you. And because that doesn’t happen, it means we can negotiate with ourselves. And so we do.

Just for a minute though, think about your first job or your last job. The job where you worked for someone. The job where you started at 9 and left at 5. The job where you had the morning shift, or afternoon shift, or evening shift. If you decided to come in at 10:30am and leave at 4pm, what would happen? If you missed your morning shift and instead decided to come in for the evening shift, what would happen? You’d lose your job pretty quickly. And by quickly, I mean immediately. And so we show up. We make that schedule non-negotiable, because someone asked us to, we agreed to it, and we know that if we don’t show up we will lose our job.

If we think back to our first jobs in retail or food service, many of us are more willing to live a non-negotiable schedule and life for managers and missions that meant nothing to us personally, but are unwilling to keep a non-negotiable schedule for ourselves and our own mission. 

We won’t commit to showing up at the same time every day. 

We won’t commit to making the calls we committed to make.

We won't do the activities we know we need to do in order to hit the goals we set for ourselves.

We negotiate with ourselves every day for more comfort and for easier.

In all honesty, if you hired you, you’d fire you.

Stop negotiating with yourself and start living a life with some clear non-negotiables.

Each of us will have a slightly different list of non-negotiable activities based on where we are and where we want to go.

Perhaps you’ll make starting your day with exercise a non-negotiable. Perhaps getting to the physical office no later than 8:30am is a non-negotiable. Perhaps having 10 sales conversations a day is a non-negotiable. Perhaps reading 10 pages of a book each day is a non-negotiable. Perhaps dinner as a family is a non-negotiable. 

This week take some time to figure out:

What does your non-negotiable day look like?

What does your non-negotiable week look like?

What are you committed to making non-negotiable in your job and business?

What are you committed to making non-negotiable in your personal life?

If the quality of our life and business is a direct result of what we decide to make non-negotiable, is there anything more important to work on?

The quality of your life depends on it.