Negotiation is critical because, at the end of it, one of you will win more concessions. 

Competitive negotiation is not dependent on chance. 

Making a reasonable deal requires good logic, empathy and dominance.

But did you know that your speaking voice pitch can increase your chance of winning a negotiation?

There’s nothing I love more than competition (and reading research about voice). 

I thrive in battles of wits, and yet I found this research completely fascinating. It helped me see why some past negotiations didn’t pan out positively for me, on the basis of what my voice was doing. 

You have to get across this because you never know when you’ll need to negotiate like your job, business or life depend on it. Get yourself ready by watching this episode because for all we know, the voice matters more than the message in many instances.

Scroll to watch 5-minute episode and refine your negotiation skills now!

You might be wondering how can you use a better voice when you’re in the negotiation hot seat?

I always recommend that you know how to warm up your voice, have a solid sense of how your voice works and how to care for it, and definitely consider 1-1 voice training with a voice expert to get the science-backed feedback you need for a clear and impactful personal voice tone. 

These are all great goals that will give life to your negotiation skills.

And, if you’ve been feeling like your communication confidence is dropping, I want to encourage you to get more specific. Could it be that you’re a solid communicator in many areas but specific activities like negotiation, persuasion or even assertive speech need strategy? It’s never helpful to be too general about these things. In your job and social interactions there are very specific activities you need to achieve. Chances are you’re not doing an appalling job at every activity, but there’s nothing like feeling weak in one area to start to drop in confidence. 

But don’t go to that space. 

Communication confidence is built on strategy, so instead of feeling like a bad communicator, check yourself. Are your confidence concerns more about the lack of strategy for certain types of conversations? If that’s the case, focus on strategy, not difficulty! And, if you get stuck, you know where to find me!

Ciao for now!

xxx

Michalsky, Jan & Schoormann, Heike & Schultze, Thomas. (2019). Towards the Prosody of Persuasion in Competitive Negotiation. The Relationship Between f0 and Negotiation Success in Same Sex Sales Tasks. 311-315. 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-3031. 

Browne, R., Mania, J., Miedema, F., Broekens, J. and Oertel, C. (2020) Towards Understanding the Effect of Voice on Human-Agent Negotiation. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conferenceon Intelligent Virtual Agents