The Transformative Power of NEGOTIATION

Negotiation as a Act of Service

When Bob Dylan wrote Gotta Serve Somebody I understood him to be in his born-again Christian stage, one with which I’d flirted at 14 and abandoned at 15. A crush brought me to Jesus as “my personal Lord and Savior” and like all teen crushes, it had an extremely short shelf-life. So I ignored Serve Somebody, figuring Dylan’s conversion wouldn’t likely outlast my own.

Sobriety, on the other hand, tends to have staying power. Dylan and I “got sober” in the same year, 1994, and as far as I know, we’ve both had a productive, long-term relationship with the freedom to “serve somebody” that sobriety brings.

The First Step

I was ten years sober when I signed up for my first mediation training. Because I’m a trial attorney (or was) I tend to arrive at any assignation early. I’d been burned by Judges too many times for being late to their sacred space, the Courtroom, a place where their power to give rewards and exact punishment was unconstrained.

So I arrived early to yet another antiseptic conference room in yet another upscale hotel, where I sat alone in a folding chair under fluorescent lights nursing a cup of bitter coffee from the serving table to my right. Other than rows of metal chairs and the table groaning under morning pastries and a two coffee urns, the room was empty. Empty of anything other than an easel hosting Gulliver-sized post-it sheet bearing the admonition, BE CONSCIOUS.

That was unexpected. I was a corporate litigator who’d been trained to BE STRATEGIC, BE SECRETIVE, BE ADVERSARIAL, BE TOUGH and, frankly, BE AN ASSHOLE if that’s what it took to achieve that which had been my only goal for a quarter century: TO WIN.

I’d never seen the word “conscious” let alone an instruction to “be it,” in any legal setting anywhere at any time.

You don’t sign up for mediation training because you’ve decided to roast marshmallows, purchase crystals, improve your [then non-existent] spiritual life or, like Miss America contestants, yearn for world peace. You take a mediation course because you’re tired of fighting. So my response to “be conscious” was neutral. I was willing to be willing to learn something new.

You also don’t study mediation - the practice of facilitated negotiation - to transform your life.

But after a period of resistance, which in my case required brushing some remaining chips off my shoulders, transformation is precisely what mediation delivered. And it delivered a transformative experience not simply because it requires its adherents to “be conscious” but also because it requires its practitioners to “serve somebody.”

In her book On Freedom, the author Maggie Nelson notes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but human connection.

When I entered the conference room where’d I learn how to help people resolve their differences collaboratively rather than with force, I was no longer addicted to substances but I was a hardcore, ride or die hand-maiden of fear and force.

Let’s go back to Dylan. Here are the first two stanzas of Gotta Serve Somebody

You may be an ambassador to England or France

You may like to gamble, you might like to dance

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world

You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes

Indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord

But you're gonna have to serve somebody

Before sobriety and before that day at the Hilton Hotel on Figueroa Blvd. in downtown Los Angeles, I was serving my clients (a good thing) but doing so by creating fear in their opponents with the ultimate goal of forcing them to do what my client wanted them to do - to lose.

By the end of that first day of negotiation and mediation training, I’d learned that the first step in a mutually satisfactory “deal” was to create an atmosphere of hope and safety - hope that the parties had it within them to work together to solve their mutual problem and safety from the bullying they’d experienced as participants in the adversarial system of justice.

I was, as you can imagine, skeptical. But I was as willing to put down the tools of my warrior trade as I’d been a decade earlier to put down the drugs and alcohol that seemed the singular way to achieve some barely acceptable degree of contentment in my disordered life.

The next step, like one of the early steps in a program of recovery, was to be of service. Not to convince the other guy to see things my way, but to learn what the other guy really wanted. What she desired, feared, prioritized, valued, and needed. And the third step - a radical departure - was to find a way to deliver something to fulfill those needs, allay those fears, and align with those values.

The transformative path

The purpose of a mediator is to serve both parties at the same time with the same commitment and passion you used to have to serving your own client’s interests. All of which requires everyone - mediator included - to wrestle with the problem as partners rather than adversaries, to be truthful, authentic and, yes, vulnerable.

I have hundreds of stories about the ways in which this method of solving life’s inevitable conflicts is not only effective, but spiritually transformative. I want to write a little about this experience in a manner that right now feels slightly beyond my grasp. But sobriety has taught me to reach beyond my grasp as a way of growing and a way of being of service to others.

So stick with me. I hope to deliver something of greater value here than simply a way to negotiate what you want and need without being conscious of the desires and requirements of those who you consider your enemy.

You can use these tools to manipulate others (in service to the devil) or us them to liberate yourself and everyone who enters your orbit (the Lord).