8/23 Blog #2: My Negotiations Before "Negotiations"

This is a more difficult question to answer. I don’t have a great amount of human/human conflict in my life. I live alone, I have a long fuse, and I haven’t had an opportunity to really negotiate a conflict. I have lived in the same apartment for over a year. My personal and professional ties weren’t too conflicted in the last week.
The closest I came to negotiating was a job interview I had at the governor’s office. However, I was not put in a very good position. My position was not to get more money, it was to just get hired. I looked at the common interests of the parties, and that was employment for both. I worked from a soft position, flexible on hours and wage, and the employer held all the cards.
This is not nearly as exciting as negotiating my contract for my apartment, where both I and the apartment took hard approaches, yet still found a way to agree to terms. It was mostly because I was realistically flexible in the end, and just wanted things to be done. In the future, I will look more to common interests—which I rarely have done in professional negotiations settings, but I have tended to do with personal relationships.