Negotiating From the Heart by Lani Reagan
“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”
~Jackson Browne
When we fear rejection or have stress about closing the deal, any deal, it’s easy to obsess about the facts, figures and people. We’ve all been there, whether it is stress about getting the right price, earning the best grade, or having a tense conversation with our beloved, no one likes being told “no”. Let’s face it, rejection does sting, if only a bit, it can often sting a lot. It can be especially challenging if we are not using the power tool we each have located in the area sitting just off of the chest: the heart chakra.
The next time you’re in a bind communicating or struggling to inch the needle into your favor, consider using this powerful tool and employing some “energetic technology”. When you use the heart chakra, so much more becomes apparent as Jackson Browne wrote, “Sometimes the heart sees what’s invisible to the eye”. With the kind of discernment that comes from the heart chakra, you can improve in your negotiating skills by staying grounded without getting too charged or triggered, and stay in your heart about getting to a win-win situation.
For Win-Win Outcomes, Try Empathetic Listening
In an NIH study, research by Jónsdóttir, I. J., & Kristinsson, K. has shown that empathetic listening (considering body language, tone, pace of speech and facial expressions) instead of deliberative listening (only the words and content) creates better connections and promotes better outcomes. Empathic listening involves the use of the Heart Chakra but we employ energetic technologies to help create win-win outcomes.
The first step in using your heart chakra to enhance empathic listening is to practice being aware of your heart area and then move out from the center of your chest into the space in front of you, 3-6 inches. This is the exact location of your heart chakra. The chakras are not on the body, but located in space with a thin rooting system that anchors it into your spine. The activated part of your Heart-Chakra will automatically begin to widen and activate when you combine your awareness on it, along with your breath as you move your breath rhythmically. I recommend using an inhale of 6 counts, hold for 3 and then exhale for 6 counts and hold for 3.
When to use this practice
So the first step is to practice throughout your day and doing this while you find yourself in conversations. This will give you the practice of activating the heart chakra before any conflict emerges. Of course, this is also a great preliminary step before you meditate. Yoga teachers commonly start their classes with this practice. Making it a daily waking practice, however, is the way to bring your heart space into the other areas of your life to produce better outcomes. Once you get used to this, then you’re ready for the second step.
Listen with the Heart
The second step involves using your power-tool in your conversations. Listening with the heart, (placing your gentle awareness on the Heart-Chakra while you are listening) will help you to take in the whole experience and intend to truly “listen” without letting yourself get charged by your judgments, without falling into a trigger of being offended, or feeling reactive. Certainly any feelings that might arise are valid, only from the standpoint of the definition of feelings: they are never wrong, they just are. However, when we get a charged feeling and move from that feeling instead of listening empathically, we can easily lose our ground, crash the deal and lose out on the goal of win-win outcomes.
Stay calm and communicating clearly
Instead, play with the use of your heart chakra. When you are talking to someone you’ll do the first step, breathing slowly into your heart space rhythmically, while asking yourself the question, “What is this person, wanting me or needing me to know about them right now?”. In this there’s often difficulty, because in charged situations we are prone to thinking the content is important and in charged situations the other person or we ourselves can be blaming or insinuating something wrong or bad of another. The natural ego-human based tendency is to move into a charged negative emotion and act out or speak out from there, but when we are empathic-listening we will hear not just the content of the words but the feeling of what someone is trying to say to us, about them that they can’t express clearly.
For example, if the words you hear are “That’s just not going to work for me”, you may hear that as a “no”. But listening from your heart chakra, will help you slow your neural network down, because a part of your mind might be making those words mean “no”, and what you heard through your filter, might sting. When you are listening with the heart-chakra, it might lead you to say, “Ok, did I hear you correctly that you said it’s not going to work for you?”, to which they might even say in a charged way, “Damn, straight it’s not going to work for me” with an accusatory tone: another opportunity to take offense, begin an argument or shut down and leave. But your heart chakra will help you to hear beyond the words.
Likely the person is having some sort of discomfort and is not knowing how to express what it is that they do want. They are likely in their own charge around things not having to do with you because, saying “No thank you, I’d prefer this instead” is the clearest and simplest path to getting what you want out of a negotiation. If they had to use an emotional charge to express themselves, without articulating what it is they want, then they are likely not aware of their discomfort or displacing it non-consciously on you.
In a case like this your awareness and breathing into your heart chakra will keep you steady, helping you identify yourself with being valued and important, (not taking on their assumptions of you or the issue) helping you to remember that although there might be some blame energy coming at you, that you are kind, caring and wish to help; helping you to remember to slow things down by breathing into your heart chakra, in order to proceed to the next step.
Seek to Understand
The third step after breathing into your heart chakra is proceeding with inquiry. A line in the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi states, “Grant, that I may not so much seek to be understood, as to understand”. Since you’ve just confirmed mutual understanding, by asking something to the effect of “Let me see if I am understanding you correctly?”, you can move deeper into the inquiry state after they respond affirmatively. When the Heart Chakra is open and activated it’s natural state is, curiosity.
Here are a few examples that the Heart Chakra can help you become available to using, as you move deeper into your heart: “Are you telling me you mean this?” and then explain how you understood what they said; “Does this mean you are absolutely opposed to this and what can I do to make it workable?”; “I hear you saying this, and might this be because you are thinking I mean that?”; “If you are not feeling good about this communication, what can we do to change the tone or the direction of it? How can I help you to and us to find resolve?”. When we are in an emotional charge of our own (that we may not yet be conscious of), these words are usually far from available. It’s all too easy to forget how powerful our heart chakras are until we lean into a practice of experimentation with these simple and effective energetic technologies.
Express Your Concerns and Desires
Only after we’ve established more clear grounds will you have cultivated an openness on the part of another, to have your words or concerns, received and met. So the fourth and final step to completing one section of a negotiation is to express your own concerns and desires without needing to assign or express blame or accusation in the verbal expressions. If you ask for express permission to speak to ensure their full attention is even better: “Ok so now that I got you correctly, are you open to hearing my thoughts on the matter?”; “Ok so if I got you correctly do you have space or bandwidth for me to speak?”.
Doing this creates a pact or agreement by which the person sits in greater attention to what you’re about to say. Then, make sure to use words that speak to how you personally feel, instead of what you think they should have done instead; starting with describing how you want to experience them or the situation, for example, “I notice I’m experiencing this and I’d like to experience that with you instead”. These sentence structures (speaking to what you experienced and want to experience instead) will empower you to speak clearly to what you need and how you’d like to create your shared experience. After all, both parties are responsible for the quality of the interaction. It will keep you connected to an open Heart Chakra, because of your awareness and your practice and your open heart chakra will keep you connected to your enhanced negotiation skills.
Using the powerful tool that your Heart Chakra is can make the biggest shift in how you move forward creating new realities and generating new opportunities. First, the practice of getting used to breathing into your heart space on a regular basis, primes you for using it during conversations. Second, using it in conversation, helps you stay grounded as you ask for clarification on what you heard them say. (Bonus point: the brain gets especially calmed down when it hears the exact words that it said, so when you use the specific wording someone speaks, by speaking it back to them, it generates connection and ease). Third, after you hear them clarify that you got them correctly, you can extend that curiosity to asking them more about how they like it to be, instead. Then fourth, you can ask if they now have space for you to share your thoughts, in order to have their full attention before you start speaking (and give them time to get to that space of full attention). Remember that you’ll practice to express from a space of personal experience instead of blame or accusation, no matter how hard it is to sit with the judgment you might be feeling activated within you. I did say it was a practice right? We are all in the same boat, trying to get our needs met and strike win-win scenarios. Be patient with yourself as you move into your heart space cause we all forget now and then, but with this tool at your disposal using these “energetic technologies” is bound to be a game changer for you as it has been for me.
If you find you need help to remedy a negotiation that’s been off you can always book an online session with me so we can see how your chakras can become a more powerful tool to bring about win-win scenarios for you and yours.
Jónsdóttir, I. J., & Kristinsson, K. (2020). Supervisors’ Active-Empathetic listening as an important antecedent of work engagement. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(21), 7976. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17217976
