less forbidding.
All of us have intuitively done something close to this
thousands of times. You’ll start a criticism of a friend by
saying, “I don’t want this to sound harsh . . .” hoping that
whatever comes next will be softened. Or you’ll say, “I
don’t want to seem like an asshole . . .” hoping your
counterpart will tell you a few sentences later that you’re not
that bad. The small but critical mistake this commits is
denying the negative. That actually gives it credence.
In court, defense lawyers do this properly by mentioning
everything their client is accused of, and all the weaknesses
of their case, in the opening statement. They call this
technique “taking the sting out.”
What I want to do here is turn this into a process that,
applied systematically, you can use to disarm your
counterpart while negotiating everything from your son’s
bedtime to large business contracts.
The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing
your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an
accusation audit.
This idea of an accusation audit is really, really hard for
people to get their minds around. The first time I tell my
students about it, they say, “Oh my God. We can’t do that.”
It seems both artificial and self-loathing. It seems like it
would make things worse. But then I remind them that it’s
exactly what I did the first day of class when I labeled their
fears of the hostage game in advance. And they all admit
that none of them knew.