Jaemin Frazer is an award-winning life coach and author. He is the founder of The Insecurity Project and specializes in helping entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners eradicate insecurity so they can show up to life unhindered by doubt, fear, and self-limiting beliefs.
One of the most valuable elements of maturity is the ability to negotiate with others in the heat of battle. This means bringing all your adult resources to bear on the conflict situation to ensure a win/ win outcome by all means possible.
As a mature adult, you have the ability to be responsible, creative, flexible, empathetic, understanding, negotiable, patient, focused, intelligent and rational. To show up this way certainly guarantees a better result than if you were to descend back into a childish response to the issue and become irrational, emotional, closed, impatient, inflexible, ignorant, self-absorbed, self-righteous and scattered.
If you and the other person can talk about the important issues as adults, things become possible that previously weren’t. That is the wonder of the win/win scenario. The best outcomes are those that didn’t exist before the negotiation started.
Marriage is all about compromise?
You may have been taught that successful and lasting relationships are built on a series of compromises, but that is only because there is a lack of leverage. To compromise is to settle for what you don’t want. That also means the relationship is no longer held together on the basis of intimacy, but rather arrangement.
When you compromise, either you win and they lose, they win and you lose or, worse still, you both lose.
Compromise says: if I can’t get what I want, then neither of us will. Negotiation says: it must be win/win. We will continue until we both get what we want.
As Jennifer A. Williams says; “Compromise is only necessary when we don’t exert the effort to truly understand ourselves and others.”
What happens when two people want different things?
Most people assume that when two adults want different things, it is a disaster, and that the resulting conflict will be a terrible experience.
This is not true at all. When two adults want different things at the same time, this is where the fun begins! You’ve just got to know how to bring some skill to the game and negotiate rather than compromise.
The reason why most people are so terrible at negotiating conflict in their key relationships is that they have never developed any skill in this area. They are not equipped with the best tools and have no confidence in their ability to win. This is why compromising seems like the only option.
Negotiate, don’t compromise
In my marriage, neither of us do a single thing we don’t want to do. True story. You may imagine that would lead to terrible conflict, but this is not the case at all. When a situation arises that we disagree about, the onus is on each of us to negotiate from a point of strength, never to show up needy, unsure or stubborn.
Pitch to me! Change my mind. Give me a good reason to see things your way. I think I’m right, but so do you. Let’s dance. Be clear or be quiet.
This means that when we both want different things, we will be in conflict, and there are three options for the outcome of this conflict:
Lose/lose: Neither person gets what they want. If I can’t get what I want, then I will also oppose you getting what you want. I will make myself your enemy.
Win/lose: The stronger/more dominant person gets what they want while the weaker/less dominant person does not. Instead, they give in and give up.
Win/win: Through honest, clever, adult pitches from both parties, a third way emerges whereby the intention of each person’s desire is satisfied entirely while the stated vehicle may have been altered.
Compromise always leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It pollutes the space between you and the other person and leads to resentment, bitterness and sometimes even the desire for revenge.
Compromise also highlights insecurity, lack of clarity and reduced integrity. The only reason you would walk away from a conflict situation having given in, backed down and settled for what you can get rather than what you want is that you are not convinced of what you deserve. You are unclear about what you desire, and you’ve not been wholehearted about your own pursuit of excellence. Quite simply, if you value having a clean space between you and those you love, there is no place for compromise. Instead, negotiate from a place of internal strength and you’ll get great outcomes for yourself and those in your world.
You are supposed to change each other
‘Don’t change the people you love’ may the single worst piece of relationship advice ever given. The stark reality is that if you don’t find a way to change those you love, they’ll annoy the shit out of you, and you’ll end up hating them.
Researchers from LG Electronics interviewed 2000 couples in the UK to see how people perceive their loved ones and found that one-third of people in relationships listed their partner as the most annoying person they know!
Incredible! Imagine that. One in three people wake up each day beside the most annoying person in the world.
More incredible is the fact that there is no possible way these relationships started this way. No-one falls in love with the most annoying person they can find. That is not how romantic relationships work.
The issue with these couples is that they have not improved each other nor eradicated each other’s annoying traits as the relationship has progressed. As a result, the LG Electronics survey data reveals: ‘These individuals spend as much as five hours every day being frustrated with their significant other because of “snoring, passing wind, loudness, messiness and rudeness”.’
While this concept is obvious in romantic relationships, it applies equally to your relationships with your children, parents, friends, work colleagues, or boss.
To prevent any of these relationships descending into maximum-level annoyance, not only is changing those you love appropriate, it is essential. And you will need leverage to do so. However, using leverage without earning the right first is to demand change in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and with the wrong tools.
Create change for the right reasons at the right time with the right tools
This ability to change those you love appropriately comes from the combination of these 5 steps in this order:
Security
It is essential to first overcome your own insecurity and become deeply secure in your own value and worth. Before fighting for change in your relationships, you must know that you deserve to be loved for who you are. If you come to the table trying to improve the quality of your relationships with unresolved insecurity, you may as well stop now. You’ll show up needy and desperate, which only guarantees you’ll lose and get hurt in the process.
Clarity
Once you are secure about the fact you deserve love and happiness, now your job is to be clear about exactly what it is that you desire for your life and specifically your relationships. Be clear about the stuff that matters and the things that don’t. Be clear or be quiet. It really is that simple. Without clarity, you’ll end up nagging and complaining about anything and everything.
Integrity
Before you go anywhere near demanding change from those you love however, you must first demand change from yourself. Worry about the BBQ sauce stain on your own shirt before pointing out the mess down someone else’s front. The integrity that comes from going first means that if and when the pushback comes, you will not back down. You know that you are not being selfish or arrogant, but that this is the best of you speaking to the best of them for the survival of your relationship. You know that is true because you’ve done the work on you own life before asking them to work on theirs.
Maturity
The next step is to develop the maturity required to navigate conflict in a way in which both parties win, not just you.
Maturity means bringing your best adult skills to the game to negotiate win/win outcomes instead of compromising or doing conflict in messy and childish ways. Adults have the ability to be creative, responsible, understanding, gracious and self-aware in ways that children do not. Maturity means you show up as the adult not the child.
Authority
No one comes this far to only come this far. If you are secure in the knowledge that you deserve to be treated beautifully, have clarity about what is most important to you within these loving relationships, have the integrity of someone who has demanded change from themselves before demanding it from anyone else, and the maturity to negotiate rather than compromise, – Authority is having the power to see things through to the end and see the space between those you love genuinely clean again.
When you have leverage, it means you can pitch with confidence and skill. You can be clear about what you want and believe you deserve what you want, just as others do. You bring some skill to the game, and you can change each other’s minds when you pitch properly.
Healthy relationships are definitely the exception not the norm. These 5 steps are the only way to clean the space between two people who love each other so that you can always negotiate win/win outcomes.
This article features excerpts from the book Leverage: How to Change the People You Love for All the Right Reasons and Get the Relationships You Deserve.
Jaemin Frazer, Author, Speaker & Coach
Jaemin Frazer is an award-winning life coach and author. He is the founder of The Insecurity Project and specializes in helping entrepreneurs, leaders, and business owners eradicate insecurity so they can show up to life unhindered by doubt, fear, and self-limiting beliefs. He is widely recognized as one of Australia's best personal development coaches and a leading voice globally on the subject of personal insecurity.
