Anxiety is prevalent in negotiations. What can we do about it? How do we deal with anxiety? It turns out, it's not just negotiations. When I've talked about anxiety to groups of people, I'm shocked. If I ask people, how many of you feel anxious on a daily basis? The vast majority will raise their hands. People feel anxious all the time in all kinds of situations. At work, in social interactions, even at home. What can we do to deal with anxiety? Now, for negotiations, I'll focus on a couple of ideas. One is the idea of practicing, we talked about that before. That is, with practice, we're going to build our self-efficacy, our self-confidence. That self-confidence buffers us from feeling anxious. I also mentioned planning ahead. The more preparation we can do, the more prepared we are going to feel, the more confident we'll feel, and the less anxiety will harm us. Patience matters. Time pressure makes us feel anxious. If we can figure out how to be patient in that moment, we've planned our timing for the negotiation. We've planned a location for the negotiation so we can be patient. That's going to help us feel less anxious. I want to talk about two key strategies in this module, reappraisal and rituals. I'll say more about each of these. The first is reappraisal. I want to think about emotions. There's an affective circumplex, a model or a map of emotions. Imagine, we were to characterize emotions along two dimensions. The first is valence, how pleasant or unpleasant is the emotion. Happiness is very pleasant, anger is very unpleasant. But there are many pleasant emotions like happiness, contentment, being excited. There are many unpleasant emotions like fear, anger, sadness. They're all different. We can think about other dimensions. One other key dimension is activation. How activated are you? How fast is your heart beating? If you're excited, your heart is beating fast. If you're calm, your heart's beating slowly. Let's think about four emotions that vary along pleasant, unpleasant, high activation, low activation. High activation emotions, anxiety is high activation and negative, excitement is high activation and positive. At the very bottom, a pleasant low activation emotion is calm, and the flip side of that is boredom. Hopefully, I haven't placed you in this low activation, unpleasant domain of bored, but I suspect that many of my students spent a lot of time in that space. We have high activation and negative anxiety, high activation and positive excitement. We have low activation and pleasant, calm, and low activation, negative, bored. Let's think about this for a second. If you tell a friend, 'Hey, I'm feeling anxious about this presentation. I'm anxious about this negotiation.'' The common advice you'll get is, 'Hey, just calm down.'' What they're saying is you want to go from high activation unpleasant to low activation pleasant. That's about as far as you can go on the affective circumplex. They're asking you take a very far trip, just calm down. Maybe they'll add on one other piece of advice like, "Just take a deep breath." What I want to suggest is that that advice is worthless. That is, there's no way to go from anxiety to calm with a deep breath. It just doesn't work. In fact, following that advice, I go, I take a deep breath. I still feel anxious. Why isn't it working can actually rile some people up. We want to be thinking about something a little bit different. What I want to suggest is, "Hey," imagine I said, "keep your heart rate high. That's fine." We'll leave it up there. What I want you to do is reappraise from anxiety to excitement. They're both high activation. I want you to reframe what's happening from a threat to an opportunity. You're negotiating, and you're focused on the way things could go wrong, how you might be harmed by the negotiation. Hey, I want you to focus instead on the way things, if they go right, you could be helped. Imagine, how great the outcome could be. There are all these opportunities in here. Focus on the opportunities rather than threats. Get excited rather than anxious. The idea here is that it's actually surprisingly easy to move from anxiety to excitement. That is, we're reappraising the situation by focusing on opportunities. In studies that Alison wood Brooks ran. Just asking people to say, I am excited before they do something triggers the idea that this is an exciting opportunity that begins to shift how people feel and whether they're saying I'm excited, even when they're told to do so. We did this looking at a series of different things. Singing performances, doing math tests, people change how they feel, their self-efficacy is higher and their performance goes up. I'll show you one fun task. We did this with speaking, like public speaking, singing, math tests, and it's important for negotiations. We did this with a weak karaoke machine. People had to sing and it scored their singing, accuracy, and pitch. Telling people to say, I am excited before they do it in an anxiety-provoking situation, they end up scoring significantly better. Reappraising things from anxiety to excitement is one idea. Before a test, get excited, before negotiation, get excited. The second idea is rituals. I think of rituals as a way to contend with anxiety. I want to suggest that religious rituals are all about this. As we go through transitions, a birth, a death, a marriage, any change is accompanied by a set of rituals. Rituals we do in concert with others can be very powerful in reducing our anxiety. In athletics, every major athlete has rituals that they do, those rituals are particularly intense right before some act. When the play stops, everybody's eyes are on one player. Say like a tennis player before they serve, a basketball player, before they take a free throw shot, they engage in a ritual that gives them a sense of control and diminishes anxiety , and improves performance. People who are anxious about time falling asleep, rituals improve our ability to fall asleep. What I'm suggesting is that rituals before negotiation can be quite helpful. Here's a study that I cannot do with some co-authors. We had people, we told them, hey, you're going to sing this week, karaoke machine, it's going to score you. You're going to sing, don't stop believing. I'm not going to sing it for you. I will save you that but don't stop believing it's a very popular song. Many people know it. We give people the lyrics and then we put them in a room and they're going to sing in front of us, we karaoke machine. In this study, I'm going to show you what happens with heart rate and rituals. Now, remember before I said that reducing heart rate is hard and it is, rituals though can do it. We used pulse oximeters. We had people close their eyes and breathe deeply when they first walked in before we told them they were going to sing so just their heart rate. We took that. Then we said, here's the experiment you're going to sing and we're going to score you. Then we ended up doing, was bringing people into the room. We had them first, either do nothing. Second, we said, hey, calm down. Do your best to calm down before you sing. That's your friend's advice. The third condition, we have people engage in a ritual that we made up. We said draw a picture of how you're feeling. Sprinkle salt on the drawing, we add salt shakers. Count up to five in your head, crinkle the paper for the paper in the trash. They engage in that ritual. Now, here's what's really cool about it. You can see people walk in, they have a low heart rate. We tell them they're going to sing and get scored. Everybody's heart rate goes up. Then we either say try to calm down, that doesn't do much. We do nothing. That doesn't do much. Or we give them a ritual. That's the one intervention that really drops the heart rate. I'll suggest that rituals are often a very effective way of reducing anxiety. I'll just follow up and show you. This is true across many different domains. But in terms of singing performance after the ritual, people actually sing better. The same is true in negotiations where what I want to suggest is when we feel anxiety, we want to plan ahead, want to recognize how we're feeling so we can reappraise that emotion, recognize what we can do to change it. We want to boost our self-confidence with practice. We want to get excited, focus on the opportunities and imagine things going well and what that could mean. I want to engage in rituals that help us contend with anxiety.
