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- Hacker News
- Find a temperature that both sides can accept. Also, the dozen other people affected by the air conditioning? Do they pay rent too?
This feels like a story from someone who just crossed the threshold into adulthood and thinks that makes him the "dad" now.
- In terms of saying no - the title of this piece tho a bit tangential to the content, I’d recommend the book Set Boundaries Find Peace https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55782639-set-boundaries-...
Also at this one event I’ve been to, there are some exercises to get people more comfortable saying no. You pair up, one person out of nowhere says no and the other person verbally celebrates the no. Then switch. There’s a guideline that if you’re a maybe say no and then take the time to reflect on why a maybe and then if realize actually a yes then can say yes and change your mind.
by nkzednan - Apparently, the French typically start with "no" because it leaves them room to say "yes" later, which is harder to go back on.
> “Answering ‘non’ gives you the option to say ‘oui’ [yes] later; [it’s] the opposite when you say ‘oui’, you can no longer say ‘non’!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20190804-why-the-french...
- Declaring the probability works too and is maybe more cross-culture compatible (very important!) as some people may take no as no.
E.g. "I am keen, and will likely do that I just need a day to think/research/decide".
by hahahaa - Well you got told No, did it anyway and lost the room. Not sure you understood the negotiation part.by vasco
- Hollow victory.
The landlord was probably trying to squeeze some small margin by leasing unoccupied hours. The loss of occupancy is probably a small rounding error.
The yoga group now without a space. A major loss for them.
by dalemhurley - Saying no without attempting to negotiate first also comes off as childish, and affects the outcome of future negotiations because it demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise.by chromakode
- No is a perfectly reasonable starting point for a negotiation.by engineer_22
- Sometimes "no" is a full answer. Compromise is not owed if the demands seem unreasonable. If you ask a question and can't accept no for an answer, you were not really asking.by nicbou
- This post struck me as overly simplistic; not sure if that was intentional for illustrative purposes, or the classic "I read 50 pages of this management book last night and now will apply it to everything" approach. The answer is almost always the third way, where you both get pretty much all of the essence of what you're after, but not through oppositional simple paths. You don't negotiate WHAT you get, but HOW you get there. The post here is very one-sided and confrontational.by skeeter2020
- I felt zero sympathy after the author decided to ignore any possible valid reasoning under the cemented position of 'well I pay rent' -- that's not maturity.
Further more, my rule: the more someone tells you how mature their position is and how child like you're being the more the odds increase that the only problem is that your opponent doesn't have a mirror or an ounce of introspection.
by serf - I agree, especially mentioning the compressor as being some ignore-worthy issue. I can imagine the owner saying something like “this is a desert and that unit’s designed to be powered on continuously, and when you flat-out turn the thing off it breaks the hardware. Stop turning it off.”
And on that note, has no one involved heard of a thermostat?
by kstrauser - It feels to me as if the author got it backwards - in turning the AC back on, they didn’t „say no“ - the person who put up the note has „said no“ in the first place (to the practice of turning the ACs off) and the author was ignoring this clearly visible outlined boundary that other person has drawn.
Don’t get me wrong, the note itself wasn’t great either, but ignoring it wasn’t some great sign of „saying no“ - it was needlessly escalating a conflict instead of trying to resolve it.
by pflenker - 100%, the author believes they learned the lesson, but failed to recognize what it looks like when a person on the other side initiates this process. It's amazing the dissonance here:
> They should expect a possible answer to be 'No' and be prepared to negotiate the difference. I didn't throw these wise words back at him, but that's what was going through my head. And it emboldened me further. I simply told him the room is unusable for yoga with the AC on and we've paid rent for the room.
They were emboldened to discard even mentioning negotiation and stood their ground instead. That might be fine if the lesson you're trying to illustrate is one about firm boundaries but the advice they're holding up here was very much the opposite.
by Muskwalker - I remember an executive who was like this person. They had a private office and it was a little cold so they brought in a space heater. That sent the thermostat off, suddenly the whole office became ice cold. He would not listen to anyone’s else pleas because his comfort was more important. People from building maintenance would put up signs and he would rip them down. Some people’s idea of negotiating is just forcing peoples hand until they have no choice but to terminate the relationship. We were also kicked out of the building.by dalemhurley
- > He listed some vague reasons, compressor this, compressor that, costs, etc... which I didn't care to understand.
wouldn't part of an "adult-to-adult conversation" also be to try and listen to the other, if nothing else than to understand their arguments?
> After some filler words, he said he will talk to the owner terminating the contract and giving a refund. I said great and hung up.
If that's what OP understands as "negotiating the difference" then ok, I guess...
by xg15 - So at the beginning of the story you started with a rented space you and others practice yoga, and the end result is that you lost your practice room, without gaining anything else other then… slightly more confidence?
Is there supposed to be a teaching in here?
- I don’t think he actually lost the practice room. The person speaking was not the owner.
- Teaching, yes: one should stand for what's important and there might be costs, one should do that despite the costs. Life is not only about gaining some short-term things.by kunley
- It feels like a LinkedIn post without the payoff.by weego
- Also this doesn’t even feel the same “no and negotiate” he’s advocating for? This is straight up “No.” Territory. He rents the dang space it’s not anyone else’s decision.by crab_galaxy
- That's how boundaries work. When you set them, you define your actions when they are crossed, and you accept the consequences of those actions.
It doesn't magically give you the upper hand in one-sided negotiations. It only ensures that your actions are in line with your principles.
by nicbou - To not be a pushover. The alternative is also not getting what they want: a cold yoga space. So this is probably the better outcome.by nkrisc
- This is poorly written with an unclear outcome. This starts as talking about how to make 1:1s more productive. It ends with, I must presume though it is unclear, losing a lease with no backup. This is not more productive.
Compromise is about figuring out how to give everybody what they want while letting go of how it happens. Turning on half the ACs is a great compromise. Whatever happened at the end is not.
To be generous to the author though, I can see how standing up for yourself in this way would feel revolutionary to someone who has never pushed back in their life. Just know this is the first step on a much longer journey. The next step is figuring out what the compromise would have been with the authority figure on the phone.
by madrox - Part of negotiating is understanding when no compromise is possible. Cancelling the rental seems like the best outcome here, although I don't like the author's tone much.by fwipsy
- The author kept acting in good faith till the other party stopped doing so, which I took as the actual resolution to this story. Maybe when you stop treating people like rational adults when they have demonstrated otherwise is where you find your real “no.” It’s a hard lesson I’ve learned many times, and it sometimes entails walking away from something to preserve your own sanity/integrity.by flatline
- I read it as they already had the compromise in place, since he said they agreed the AC closest to him would be off and the AC farthest from him would remain on, and the other party eventually demanded the close AC be on as well.
In this scenario, where a compromise was reached and then breached by the other party, how exactly would you arrive at a "compromise"?
by cgyvbunji - I think the keys here are
1. It’s not clear who wrote the note, and they didn’t leave contact info or any opening to a negotiation. If the note had said “this AC must stay on at all times, please call 111-222-3333 with any questions - building engineer” that would’ve completely reversed the morality of story for me. But the note asserts authority by making this non-negotiable demand (which is the part that seems patronizing to me—I agree with TFA here) and doesn’t justify that authority at all, no “I’m the owner” or anything.
2. The first step of finding a compromise is knowing what everybody wants. The author of TFA didn’t seem to do that in the story, and his apparent lack of curiosity about the compressor does not reflect well, I agree, but neither does a threat from whoever wrote the note.
My wild guess here is that the person who wrote the note worked in maintenance and was unhappy about the building warming and cooling and wanted a stable temperature. The resolution may well be that the author has to find a new place to do yoga, but if he’s not interested in air-conditioned yoga, and the building’s authorities aren’t interested in tenants who want the AC off, that outcome might have been inevitable anyway.
by msteffen - I thought this article was supposed to be about negotiating, but this person doesn't want to listen to or negotiate with anyone.
The closest they came to negotiation was when they were doing yoga alone in one room and "decided" to allow a dozen other people in a different room to turn their A/C on.
> On these days, I've told them to turn the AC off until we're done. One day, I was the only one practicing and I had to tell this to a dozen people outside the room. I will never forget the bugged looks I got back. Eventually their leader spoke up and we decided that they can turn on the AC further away from the room.
Then when the other tenants finally get sick of this, they get the owner on the phone. This is the negotiating opportunity. Instead, this person gloats about not listening:
> The man on the other end introduced himself as some authority figure and told me to turn the AC back on. He listed some vague reasons, compressor this, compressor that, costs, etc... which I didn't care to understand. But then he asked me in an accusing tone, why I turned it off despite the note saying not to. Peter Block would find this question childish. After all, two adults should be able to ask each other for what they want. They should expect a possible answer to be 'No' and be prepared to negotiate the difference.
I think they forgot to consider that the other person can also say "no". This is the climax of the negotiation opportunity, and he uses it to tell off the manager:
> After some filler words, he said he will talk to the owner terminating the contract and giving a refund. I said great and hung up.
The intense worship for Peter Block throughout the post is a strange contrast to the way they fail to implement any part of the advice other than the "No" part.
There was no negotiation here. Just a strange pyrrhic victory.
by Aurornis - I think you missed the point. Any negotiation, from the point of view of the author, was a negative and unfair outcome.
He had paid to rent the space for a particular purpose. He had already compromised by allowing a portion of the space to be less than ideal for his use. The other side was demanding “completely our way and nothing for you” given fabricated reasons.
He did not care to understand because he could tell the reasons were not legitimate.
No was the right answer and to call the manager’s bluff. He does t make the final decision, the owner does.
by holografix