A couple of years ago a business partner of mine proposed starting a new business with a third person. I liked the idea of that business and I accepted going to a meeting to get to know the third person. After the meeting I told my partner that I couldn’t do business with that man and if he did not get rid of him, I would be out. Of course he asked me what I had against that person. I said: “I think he has a hidden agenda and he is lying to us.” But I couldn’t give my partner any arguments or proofs. It was just a feeling. The result was that I lost that business and I had a hard time with my partner who accused me of a bad attitude and a lack of trust. In the long run, however, I won, because after six months my partner came to me and told me that indeed that person had a personal agenda to use our names and connections for his personal interests. From there on my partner started to listen to me when I had “feelings”. “Listen to your inner voice”, “trust your instincts”, “feel your guts” are some advice that we often hear from experienced negotiators if we want to improve our performance in negotiation. These are the same qualities that almost everybody recognizes as a differentiator between a good negotiator and let’s say a rookie. Good negotiators always use their instincts successfully. Right! What is that instinct and how does it work? Have you heard about curricula that is teaching about instinct in the formal educational system? I haven’t! That’s why if you ask 10 people the first question above, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. In this article you will find mine. First of all, “instincts” have nothing to do with the mind. And here is the big problem. Our society is built “around” our minds. At the societal level we talk only about systems. A system is a mind construction. Legal system, economic system, educational system, health system, organizational system and so on are paradoxical. They are created for humans. But when you are talking about them you find yourself talking about anything but humans. So in this environment of societal construction it is clear that mind will prevail. That’s how everything is being analyzed and evaluated at the mind’s level. It is very hard to justify (this is a contradiction in terms because justifying is by default a rational process) a negotiation result with a “feeling”. Everybody wants – including us – concrete data and figures to analyze a situation. And this is mostly what we do in preparing a negotiation. We gather information and analyze it in order to make decisions; we are perfectly using our minds to compare – this is the primordial task of our minds. By comparing different information, data, situations, figures and so on, we make decisions. Some call this analysis. Sometimes we use our imagination – another useful task of our minds – to find solutions. Some call this creativity. But what if we don’t have at our disposal all the data we need? Do we not make decisions? Do we stall until we have all the information? Possibly! But it’s clear that in most cases we have deadlines. We have to act! What’s left in the game for us in this situation? Only “instinct”! Under the concept of “instinct” in our decision-making process lie two notions: intuition and inspiration. Both of these notions have one purpose only. They are instruments for seeking information. Properly used they offer you that type of information that gives you the feeling of certainty. You know! Despite evidence, against all arguments and most of all – contrary to what everybody else thinks or believes, you know! And that feeling is indestructible. All of you many times in your life hit your forehead with your palm in a moment of truth. And then an inner monologue comes, something like: “I knew it! I should have listened to my feeling!” That’s what’s happening when after a while a decision has been proven to be wrong. But before that, in the moment in which you were taking that wrong decision, something inside you was shouting not to take it. It was only a “voice” in your head that had nothing to do with the surrounding reality: facts, information, people. How to listen or follow something like this that nobody would understand in the context where everything else is pointing to that decision? For example, do you know how many people get married just because the wedding preparations are too advanced to be canceled? They have the feeling not to do it, but they don’t follow it. Everybody has intuition and inspiration. We are born with them. Actually, in the first three or four years of our lives they are our basic decision making instruments. And we use them all the time. This is the reason for the saying “kids are never wrong”. Why? Because kids are correctly using intuition and inspiration, they are positively sure about the things they do. In a certain extent they are like animals. Animals don’t have much of a brain – although many scientists want to prove the opposite view – and animals have no doubts about the actions they take. Why don’t intuition and inspiration work later in our lives? The reason is because education interferes. There is nothing wrong with the term education in itself. It’s just that in our society education is only replacing feelings with rationality. Except in some artistic areas, this is the case everywhere: feelings are not educated. Again, there is nothing wrong with rationality. It’s just that human beings have both feelings and rationality and both should be developed equally. And there is something else, more to it, as shown later in this article. Lately this has started to be figured out and more and more educational methods are focusing on feelings and instincts. Emotional intelligence is one of the fancy terms that are being used in this area. How intuition and inspiration work? First of all – an interesting example that shows the limits of rationality. Zenon (Zeno) was a Greek pre-socratic philosopher who lived in the 5th century b.C. We have from him a few logical paradoxes. One of them is the race between the turtle and the athlete Achilles. They race one another. At the beginning the turtle is 1 km ahead, and Achilles runs with double of the turtle’s speed. When will Achilles reach the turtle? Zenon’s answer was: never! Why? Because at the time Achilles runs 1 km, the turtle has moved 500 m ahead, when Achilles runs this 500 m, the turtle has moved 250 m ahead, when Achilles runs the next 250 m, the turtle has moved 125 m ahead and so on. Whatever distance you take relative to each other, the turtle has a small advantage ahead. It is the problem of the small infinity. All famous minds of the world have struggled for 2000 years to prove wrong Zenon’s logic but they couldn’t. In reality the answer is obvious. Achilles will catch up with the turtle after a 2 km run. Now imagine that you are not so good at arithmetic. You cannot calculate so fast the result, though you have listened Zenon’s argument, which is rationally unbeatable. What’s your first thought? This can’t be true! Rationally Zenon proved it is. How did you know that it isn’t? Of course by intuition! It is the reason that has driven you to find the correct answer to that riddle. Even though you don’t know the exact answer, intuition is what makes you, at least, to try to find it. It is exactly what is happening in a negotiation when we have the feeling that things are not what they look like to be. If only we use our intuition for this – and it’s something. But intuition is more than that. Sometimes intuition gives you the answer. The Flicker frequency, around 24 frames/second, is a very well-known number in imagistic. A sequence of 24 consequent photos of a moving object, shown in 1 second intervals will generate the movement effect of that object. That’s the “technical” use of this frequency. The real reason of it is that this is the speed limit of our mind. Our mind cannot process more than 24 images, thoughts, ideas in one second. That’s our mind’s limitation. Now think about it, in a negotiation when you have more than one person, each of them having all types of reactions – verbal, non-verbal, movements and so on – and you having a plan to follow, to take care for your communication, and all of this happening at the same time – it is hard to believe that you can use your mind to process effectively and completely all of the available information. It doesn’t work like this! People are able to take good decisions in complex situations where the quantity of information and options is far too high to be analyzed and processed in real time. How do they accomplish it? They do it by using their intuition. After that they use their minds to justify the decision. Intuition is not voodoo! It is a state of our consciousness in which our capacity to access, process and analyze information reaches an incredible level, far better than any computer processor that exists in our technology. Have you ever wondered why top athletes are paid with millions dollars for their achievements? You think it’s just because they sell tickets? Not only! Athletes are the ones who can reach this state of consciousness during a game and are capable of finding the winning solution in a tremendously short period of time. They don’t think, they act! And we are all cheering them when they do it. To be there, they train for years. It is not easy, but it’s possible. Anybody can do it with trust and perseverance. And when you reach that state of consciousness, you will know exactly what you have to do, with total confidence and certainty. Exactly like the top athlete who knows how to score. Intuition is an act of will working in real time. You have to want to know in the particular moment when things are happening, by using that state of consciousness. Inspiration is a little different. It has to do also with the state of consciousness but is not working in real time. It’s like a back routine program. You also want to know, but not now. Later! In the state of consciousness you manifest your will, than disconnect, having the confidence that the answer will come later. And later, in a moment of illumination, having no clue where from, the solution to your problem appears. One of the most famous replicas in cinema is Scarlet O’Hara’s ”after all… tomorrow is another day.” It contains the mechanism of inspiration. Sometimes when you have a problem or you need to take a decision you find yourself saying: “I need to sleep over it!” Ok, what is that except an unconscious method of accessing inspiration? And moreover, inspiration is linked in the collective mind with the artistic environment. There is only one explanation for it. Artists know better to access that state of consciousness. That’s all! In this article I have connected intuition and feelings. Then I introduced the term state of consciousness. You may wonder why sometimes I speak about feelings and other times about the state of consciousness related to intuition and inspiration. Actually, the state of consciousness has nothing to do with feelings. It’s just that in our society, as I said before, everything is around mind. Except mind’s field, we as society recognize feelings. So if we cannot link intuition with our mind, then by miss-interpretation we link it with our feelings! At the beginning of the article I linked – including the title – feelings with intuition and inspiration, just because that’s the way they are usually perceived. That view, however, is wrong, in my opinion! It is wrong because there is more to it, such as the state of consciousness that offers many things to us. Intuition and inspiration are some of those things. Some say that happiness is another one. Radu Ionecsu is a Romanian expert in negotiation. In the ’90 he founded a network infrastructure company, now part of a multinational. 10 years ago he started a new career as a trainer, coach, consultant and media analyst focusing on negotiation, coaching and management. His area of activity is mostly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Radu Ionescu may be reached at radu.ionescu@negociere.ro Copyright © 2012 Radu Ionescu