A bit of anxiety…
…over this afternoon’s negotiation. Well, it’s not really a negotiation that I’ll be engaged in this afternoon in the Negotiation Workshop. It’s a difficult conversation.
I have actually been in a situation eerily similar to that of my character in the role-play, and what ended up happening in the real-life difficult conversation was not satisfactory to me at all. I felt so guilty about how the circumstances were affecting the other person emotionally, that I completely forgot about defending my own feelings and focusing some attention on myself and my needs – so I ended up caving.
To me, one of the worst feelings about these kinds of conversations is the frustration afterwards with an unsatisfactory outcome: the clear-headed vision that appears when you’re not mired in a heavy-duty emotional converation, the feeling that “I should’ve said…” On the other hand, I can’t remember a single difficult conversation in my whole life when I have been able to both remember and articulate every single thing that I had wanted to say.
We’ll see what happens this afternoon. This role-play might not be a bad place to try out an aggressive and defensive style… although the very notion of using that approach frankly terrifies me.