Academic-Capital

Negotiation is something we do every day of our lives but we may not be overtly aware of it. We often think of negotiating contracts, wages and other business related concepts but we also negotiate for many small things like household chores and car maintenance. Learning negotiation skills in college or through your own personal reading can make a large difference in helping you get what you want while not compromising your values. American society doesn’t provide enough daily experience negotiating like you might find in Europe or other parts of the world. People that go to the grocery story may negotiate the price, find deals, and look for other ways to save money. Even though just about anything can be negotiated Americans don’t often see it this way; the stated price is the only price. This is partly the problem with a nation accustomed to large department stores. Despite 66% of people trying to negotiate big ticket items in the past 6-months, negotiation skills are still

The world of negotiations requires subtle use of verbal and body language to effectively meet objectives. According to a paper by Yuxian Zhang (2013) negotiations is a process of coming to mutual benefit and reducing borders between sides. What we say and how we say it can impact the success of getting people to understand our point of view. Negotiations are all about sharing perspective and understanding each other’s needs.  Language is the primary method of negotiating in business. A famous negotiator by the name of Cohen Herbert argues that negotiation is not about “winning by defeating the other party, but winning by getting what both parties want”. This is not possible if the language doesn’t draw people into a shared perspective.  Robin Lakoff argues that there are three main principles in social linguistics that help to create politeness and shared perspective that are beneficial in negotiations: -Don’t impost your beliefs or rewrite the affairs of others. -Pro