Getting to Yes with Yourself: And Other Worthy Opponents. William Ury

more effectively you will be able to deal with others and to pursue your interests with ease and success. The inner yes method is designed to help you go to the balcony when you like, stay on the balcony for as long as you like, and negotiate from a balcony perspective.

      Listen With Empathy

      Psychologists have estimated that we have anywhere between twelve thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day. The majority of those—as high as 80 percent—are thought to be negative: obsessing about mistakes, battling guilt, or thinking about inadequacies. For some, the harsh critical voice of our inner judge is stronger, for others weaker, but perhaps no one escapes it. “You said the wrong thing!” “How could you have been so blind?” “You did a terrible job!” Each negative thought is a no to yourself. There is a saying that goes, “If you talked to your friends the way you talk to yourself, you wouldn’t have any.”

      Self-judgment may be the greatest barrier to self-understanding. If we want to understand other human beings, there is no better way than to listen to them with empathy like a close friend would. If you wish to understand yourself, the same rule applies: listen with empathy. Instead of talking negatively to yourself, try to listen to yourself with respect and positive attention. Instead of judging yourself, accept yourself just as you are.

      Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but it is different. Sympathy means “to feel with.” It means to feel sorry for a person’s predicament, but without necessarily understanding it. Empathy, in contrast, means “to feel into.” It means to understand what it is like to be in that situation.

      Listening to yourself with empathy goes one level deeper than observing. To observe is to see from the outside, whereas to listen is to feel from the inside. Observing offers you a detached view, whereas listening gives you an intimate understanding. Observation gives us the understanding of a scientist studying what a beetle looks like under a microscope, whereas listening gives you the understanding of what it feels like to be a beetle. You can benefit from both modalities together. Anthropologists have found that the best way to understand a foreign culture is to participate in it actively and at the same time to maintain an outside observer’s perspective. I find this method, called participant observation, is equally useful when it comes to understanding ourselves.

      As I listen to myself, I notice that the majority of my problematic emotions are the same every day. For example, one anxiety that pops up regularly concerns the daily to-do list that only seems to expand: Will I be able to get through it? To understand and reduce the intensity of these recurring feelings, I have come up with a daily exercise: In the morning, I imagine sitting at a kitchen table. As each familiar thought or emotion such as anxiety or fear, shame or pride shows up, I offer it an imaginary seat. I have learned to welcome all customers, no one excluded. I seek to treat them as the old friends or acquaintances that they are. As the kitchen table fills up, I listen to the free-flowing conversation of feelings and thoughts.

      What about the inner judge? I make a place for him at the kitchen table too. If I try to suppress or exclude him, he simply goes underground and continues to judge from a hiding place. The best approach, I find, is to simply accept him as one of the regular characters in my life. I have even come to appreciate him as being like an old uncle who thinks he is trying to protect me but is often just getting in the way. Accepting him, I find, is the best way to tame him.

      If nothing else, I find this kitchen table exercise helps me remain aware of these regulars so that they are less likely to catch me by surprise and sweep me away. I have learned, especially, to listen for any dark feelings or thoughts that I may normally disown or stigmatize. Anger is one of them. I have found that, if I don’t recognize when I’m feeling angry and then listen for what is behind that feeling, it can leak out in a destructive way when I least expect it, for example, in a sensitive conversation with my wife.

      Jamil Mahuad, former president of Ecuador and a Harvard colleague, once shared how he gradually learned to deal with his painful feelings by putting these feelings in the spotlight. “Sadness . . . was not well received by males in my family. When some of my ancestors were really sad, they averted that emotion by expressing anger,” he explained. “I had the same difficulty. Still it is not easy for me to connect with pain, with grief. But by recognizing and bringing this shadow to light, you start incorporating that ‘new’ part into what you are.” By bringing his painful emotions “to light,” Jamil was able to control his anger and operate with a balcony perspective as he conducted a difficult peace negotiation with the president of Peru, thereby putting an end to the longest-running war in the hemisphere.

      Keep in mind that listening is not just an intellectual exercise but an emotional and physical one as well. For example, when you are afraid, try to feel the fear in your body. What does it feel like? Icy? Does it feel like a pit in your stomach? Does your throat feel parched? Recognize its familiar feeling and just stay with it for a moment without pushing it away. Try to relax and feel your way into the fear. Breathe into it if you can. That way, you can slowly begin to release it.

      If this kind of deeper listening to yourself seems awkward or too challenging, consider asking a friend—or even a professional counselor or therapist—to listen to you until you are able to make a habit of listening to yourself. Or consider keeping a daily journal. I find that writing down my feelings and thoughts, even if only for a few minutes, keeps me on the balcony and helps me uncover patterns that I would not see in the rush of life. Try it out and you will begin to see and listen to yourself more clearly and understand yourself better.

      One of the great benefits of listening to yourself before you enter into a problematic conversation or negotiation is that it clears your mind so that you can then listen far more easily to others. I have long taught listening as one of the central skills of negotiation and have noticed how difficult it is for people to listen to others, particularly in conflict situations. Could it be that the main obstacle is all the unheard emotions and thoughts that are clamoring for attention and cluttering up our minds? Could it be that the secret to listening to others is to listen to ourselves first?

      Uncover Your Needs

      If you listen to your feelings, particularly recurrent ones of dissatisfaction, you will find that they point you in the direction of unmet concerns and interests. Properly interpreted, they can help you uncover your deepest needs.

      In the old story of King Arthur, a young knight from the court sets out with enthusiasm to find the Holy Grail. Within the first months of searching, he sees in the woods an apparition of a great castle. Entering, he finds an old injured king seated with his knights and on the banquet table a silver chalice, the very Grail itself. The young knight is tongue-tied, however, and while he wrestles with what to say to the king, the castle suddenly disappears and he is left alone in the forest, disconsolate.

      The knight continues to search for many decades without success until one day there springs up in front of him the very same castle in the woods. The knight enters and sees the king and on the table the Grail. This time, much older and wiser, the knight instinctively finds the right words. He asks the old king a simple but powerful question: “What ails thee?” As the knight listens to the king’s woes and uncovers his deepest needs, a human connection of friendship grows between the two and, out of that friendship, the king gives the knight the Grail, sought after by so many.

      That is the power of asking the right question. We can each take a lesson from the knight and ask ourselves about what is not going well for us. In what areas of your life are you not happy or fully satisfied? Is it work or money, family or relationship, or health or general well-being? Feelings of dissatisfaction are the language that your needs use to communicate with you. When your needs are frustrated or unfulfilled, it is only natural to feel anxiety, fear, anger, or sadness. What, then, are these underlying needs? What do you most want? What are your deepest motivations? The better you understand your needs, the more likely you will be able to