Negotiation: What Does Love Have to Do with It?

Negotiation and Love seems to be mutually exclusive, but are they really? Can you bring a spiritual dimension to negotiation that transforms dog-eat-dog confrontations into co-creative collaborations? See how Love has the power to motivate people, build bridges of understanding, and melt unyielding positions.

Love – As I write this, I wonder what you might be thinking when you see “negotiation” and “love” in the same title. What the heck is this all about? What does love have to do with negotiation skills? Isn’t negotiation about eat-or-be-eaten competition, jockeying for the slightest edge over an opponent, playing hardball?

Conventional wisdom places negotiation in a category of calculated, strategized, and rational behavior, whereas love is a passionate or compassionate irrational pursuit of our innate feelings and desires. There is little overlap between the two. If loves belongs in the category of the sacred, negotiation would belong in the category of the profane. The two seem mutually exclusive: we don’t negotiate about matters of love, and love gets in the way of driving a hard bargain.

We love our children, our partner, our parents, our lover, our friends, and our heroes. We also love chocolate, flowers, ice cream, a song, a movie, a book, or a favorite poem. We use the term constantly, but what exactly do we mean by it? From the spiritual perspective, love is the essence of oneness; it is the experience of the moment in which the space between “you” and “me,” “us” and “them,” is dissolved and separation ceases. It is the expansion of our sense of self as it embraces and becomes integrated into a greater Self. Love is when the success and joy of another elates us just as if it were our own success and joy, and also when the hardships and sadness others experience makes us reach out with compassion.

In enlightened negotiation, mindfulness of that state of oneness enables you to feel connected and secure, not threatened. The space between “you” and “me,” “us” and “them,” is dissolved and separation ceases. It establishes a framework for cooperation, opens you to new opportunities for mutual benefit, increases the efficiency of the process, and expands your relationships. Love has the power to motivate people, build bridges of understanding, and melt unyielding positions.

Keeping love out of negotiation misleads us away from our true nature and down a path of separation, competition, and blind self-interest. The myth that negotiation must be heartless only promotes the fallacy of zero-sum outcomes, dismissing the possibility that win-win outcomes also have validity. Myopic vision sets in; defensiveness and fear and greed surface.

Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego, points out in his book The Tell-Tale Brain that East Indian and Buddhist mystics believe there is no real difference between self and other, and that true enlightenment comes when we penetrate the illusory barrier separating the two. He says, “I used to think this was just well-intentioned mumbo-jumbo, but there is a neuron that does not know the difference between self and other. Are our brains uniquely hardwired for empathy and compassion?”

Recent research in evolutionary biology and psychology has even found neural and possible genetic evidence of humankind’s predisposition to cooperation. In addition, there is the physiological feature: the oxytocin hormone that affects our ability to bond and feel a sense of belonging in a social group. Oxytocin was found to be present during interactions between a mother and a child, between lovers, and also in gatherings of people with a common purpose.

There are many legends and stories about the power of love, its triumph and victory over the forces of darkness. Such stories resonate with us, and yet we treat them as fantasies or lore, not the sort of thing we experience in our everyday lives, in contemporary society. Border wars on the other side of the world, the value of the Euro, and celebrity scandals, on the other hand, seem somehow pertinent to our daily life.

Using the Power of Love in Negotiation

Between 2000 and 2008, the United States experienced an average of five mass shootings every year, according to the Justice Department. In 2013 there had already been twelve mass shootings by August 20, the date a gunman walked into a packed elementary school in a suburb of Atlanta armed with an AK-47.  He fired at the floor to make his presence known, and stormed into the office of Antoinette Tuff, the school’s bookkeeper. If her instincts told her to try to get away or try to fight him off, she chose, instead, to talk to the troubled gunman in a loving way.

She connected with him by describing hard times she’d experienced in her own life. She told him she sympathized with him: “We all go through something in life . . . It’s going to be all right, Sweetie.” Antoinette let him know she’d been down the same road before herself, but she had picked herself up and was living a happier life now.

“I thought the same thing, you know, I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband of 33 years left me,” she told the gunman. “I have a son with multiple disabilities.”

An FBI hostage negotiator said her performance was a study in drawing a dangerous person back from the brink. At one point Tuff even told the gunman, “I just want you to know I love you, though, okay?”

Antoinette was eventually able to persuade the gunman to surrender, and there was one less massacre in a year plagued with shooting tragedies. She used no weapon, no tear gas, no threats or bluffs or deceptions. She armed herself only with the power of authentic love, compassion and sympathy. Once she was able to tap into that source of power, she had everything she needed to disarm a disturbed man with an AK-47. She did not “outsmart” or “outplay” him; there was no calculated strategy guiding her method. Antoinette simply did what came naturally to her—feeling love for a suffering human being.

This article was excerpted from: Enlightened Negotiation: 8 Universal Laws to Connect, Create, and Prosper, SelectBooks, 2016