Uncommon Negotiation Advice Part 1: Intent Before Goals

Series introduction & how to not lose before you start

You are already negotiating every day.

Doing a boring budget with your partner, starting a business, convincing an ally to join your righteous cause all involve many negotiations.

Some negotiations, though, are high-stakes.

The advice you read in a best-seller or see on shark tank might lead you to think that negotiation is a cartoonish game of chicken where everyone makes demands at each other until someone blinks.

I spent about ten years working with founders, executives, and investors on business exits and fundraises. I’ve also been in my own high-stakes negotiations, with my own money and feelings on the line. I now advise executives on negotiation and sales as a part of my work.

I’ve seen people at every level fundamentally misunderstand what negotiation is, and how to play to win.

This is the first piece in a series on uncommon negotiation advice. It’s advice I wish I’d been given sooner. This piece covers how you can avoid the most common mistake that can cause you to lose before you even start a negotiation.

The mistake is simple: having polluted intentions

Intentions are stronger than goals

Most people who lose negotiations don’t lose at the table.

They lose weeks or months earlier, in the private story they’ve constructed about what they want and why. By the time they sit down, they’re running on a set of motivations they haven’t honestly examined.

The most common negotiation advice you will read is “figure out what you want”, and this is good advice I’ll cover later in the series.

But before you do that, you should get very clear about your intent. Your intent is upstream of your specific goals. Your goal might be “get as much money as possible” but your intent might be “win against these assholes”.

Without dedicated investigation you may not know your own intent. Your true intentions may be petty, vindictive, self-protective or just counterproductive.

Intentions quietly shape your decisions.

In a high stakes negotiation, if you don’t align and realign your intent with your goals, they will very likely conflict with each other in ways that hurt your position.

Navigating Polluted Intentions

A friend of mine went through a long protracted negotiation with a former employer.

She’d spent 20 years serving a family-owned business faithfully. She was unceremoniously fired when the failson took over. So she sued for wrongful firing. She had lots of receipts.

But along the way, as the settlement offers got higher and higher, she kept saying no. The whole way, her lawyer was beside her whispering big numbers in her ear.

When I talked to her though, it became very clear: she wanted to hurt them. She was on a quest for vengeance, not just money.

This is an example of polluted intentions: aims that are real but actively damage your position if you let them run the show.

The problem is that this desire is exactly opposite to the strategic goal. There was a real chance she’d lose if the case went to court. There’s a real chance she’d have to pay the other side’s legal fees. She also needed the money, and going to court pushed out the resolution by years. Letting the case go to court was a strategic blunder.

In a high stakes negotiation, your most emotionally compelling options are often your most expensive ones.

When I help friends or clients in high-stakes negotiations now, I see this constantly. It’s a loaded foot-gun sitting under their pillow while they sleep.

Polluted intentions make you vulnerable to bad advice and cracking under pressure.

They also cloud your decision making with unrealistic expectations. To win a high-stakes negotiation, you will have to make concessions. If you accidently make your win-condition “get what I deserve” or “inflict as much pain as possible” - you’re cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

So the first step to a successful negotiation is to identify your REAL intentions, including the dark ones hiding in the corner you’d rather not say out loud.

By the way, the court session got scheduled for 2028.

Internal Chess Game

You must be willing to make sacrifices to your self-perception to win.

You will want to be validated. You will want to take credit you can’t take. You will want to say true things you can’t say. You will want to tell a story that feels good. You will want to be honest with people who will use your honesty against you. You will want to hurt someone who hurt you.

In order to achieve your goals, you will have to set all that down repeatedly. Feeling good is not the goal. Indulging yourself is costly.

This isn’t about adopting a machiavellian world-view, or contorting into permanent self-denial.

Winning requires being clear-eyed enough to know which of your wants and desires are driving you and which are traps.

It also requires treating your intuitive sense of right-and-wrong with more skepticism than is comfortable, over and over again until you get the best outcome your situation affords.