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![Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts by [Daniel Shapiro]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Y-HcdlHOL._SY346_.jpg)
Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts Kindle Edition
Daniel Shapiro (Author) Find all the books, read about the author and more. See search results for this author |
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For anyone struggling with conflict, this book can transform you. Negotiating the Nonnegotiable takes you on a journey into the heart and soul of conflict, providing unique insight into the emotional undercurrents that too often sweep us out to sea. With vivid stories of his closed-door sessions with warring political groups, disputing businesspeople, and families in crisis, Daniel Shapiro presents a universally applicable method to successfully navigate conflict. A deep, provocative book to reflect on and wrestle with, this book can change your life.
Be warned: This book is not a quick fix. Real change takes work. You will learn how to master five emotional dynamics that can sabotage conflict outside your awareness:
1. Vertigo: How can you avoid getting emotionally consumed in conflict?
2. Repetition compulsion: How can you stop repeating the same conflicts again and again?
3. Taboos: How can you discuss sensitive issues at the heart of the conflict?
4. Assault on the sacred: What should you do if your values feel threatened?
5. Identity politics: What can you do if others use politics against you?
In our era of discontent, this is just the book we need to resolve conflict in our own lives and in the world around us.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateApril 19 2016
- File size4680 KB
Product description
Review
—William Ury, co-author of Getting to Yes and author of Getting to Yes with Yourself
“Quite simply, the best book I have ever read on negotiating in situations of extreme conflict.”
—Matthew Bishop, The Economist Group
“Brilliant insights to the baffling conundrum of our age, intractable disputes of all kinds.”
—Daniel Goleman, author Emotional Intelligence
"Excellent."
—David Brooks, The New York Times
“Shapiro exposes the myth that humans are primarily rational in their decision making. . . . More importantly, he discusses the conflicts between good and bad that take place in all of us. . . . The world has been enriched with another intelligent lecture on how we should interact with each other. Hopefully this time we will listen.”
—Forbes
“Daniel Shapiro gives you the tools to transform yourself.”
—Rick Kleffel (KQED), Rainbow Light blog
“I have recommended Shapiro’s book more than any other book I have read in quite some time.”
—PsychCentral
“A blueprint for successful negotiation.”
—Booklist
“Appealing to rationality isn’t always the best way to mend a rift; instead, both parties in a negotiation have to be willing to get in touch with the conflict’s more emotional underpinnings. In his book, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable [Shapiro] shares the strategies he’s used to help people in all kinds of settings access the core emotions driving their conflicts and reach mutually beneficial resolutions.”
—Business Insider
“A must-read! Dan Shapiro’s Negotiating the Nonnegotiable offers bold, practical, and uplifting advice to reduce the turmoil of conflict and foster reconciliation in your professional and personal life.”
—Michael Wheeler, Harvard Business School
“Daniel Shapiro provides us with one of the most optimistic and compelling approaches to conflict resolution of our time.”
—Howard W. Buffett, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
“With telling examples from the bedroom to the boardroom to the war room, this book gives us something invaluable—a way both to see the perils of identity conflict in negotiation and to avoid them.”
—Robert Cialdini, Author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
“Negotiating the Nonnegotiable is one of the most important books of our modern era.”
—Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, Ambassador of the Netherlands to the Holy See
“A life-changing book! If you are going to read one book this year to improve your life, choose Negotiating the Nonnegotiable.”
—Simona Baciu, Founder and President, Transylvania College
“A modern masterpiece! Bold and compelling from the first page. . . . Every leader should read it and live by it.”
—Katherine Garrett-Cox, CEO, Alliance Trust Investments
“Negotiating the Nonnegotiable is sure to be required reading for diplomats and peace-builders alike."
—Nancy Lindborg, President, United States Institute of Peace
“Those seeking peaceful resolutions should keep this book on a bedside table.”
—David Gergen, former White House adviser; Co-director, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School of Government --This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B013Q702GU
- Publisher : Penguin Books (April 19 2016)
- Language : English
- File size : 4680 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Not Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 350 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #264,656 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Daniel L. Shapiro is an internationally renowned expert on conflict resolution. Named one of Harvard’s top 15 professors by the Harvard Crimson, he founded and directs the Harvard International Negotiation Program, and regularly advises everyone from hostage negotiators to families in crisis, disputing CEOs to clashing heads of state. His greatest learning has come from negotiating with three of the world's toughest bargainers: his three young boys.
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Shapiro introduces what he characterizes as “a new paradigm for resolving conflict — one that speaks to as much of the heart as to the head. Just as scientists have discovered the inner workings of the physical world, my research in the field of conflict resolution has revealed emotional forces that drive people to conflict. These forces are invisible to the eye, yet their impact is deeply felt: They can tear apart the closest friendship, break up a marriage, destroy a business, and fuel sectarian violence. Unless we learn to counteract such forces, we will tend to engage repeatedly in the same frustrating conflicts, with the same frustrating results. This book provides the necessary tools to overcome these dynamics and foster cooperative relations, turning the more emotionally charged conflict into an opportunity for mutual benefit.”
I hasten to add that this book will be of substantial benefit to supervisors and their relations with their direct reports, to be sure, but it will also help prepare supervisors to increase their direct reports’ understanding of various emotional forces. Conflicts at all levels and in all areas of every organization need to be resolved “in mutual agreement” as well as the inevitable conflicts that develop with customers.
Organizations as well as individuals have an identity that, Shapiro suggests, has five pillars (BRAVE): beliefs, rituals, allegiances, values, and emotionally meaningful experiences that are memorable. When one or more is threatened, conflicts immediately develop with regard to the source of the threat, of course, but also between and among those who feel threatened. I agree with Shapiro about the importance of what he characterizes as “relational identity”: affiliation (i.e. emotional connection) shared by those involved, and, autonomy (i.e. feeling unrestrained). “In a conflict, the core relational challenge is to figure out how to satisfy your] desire to be simultaneously one [begin italics] with [end italics] the other party (affiliation) and one [begin italics’ apart from [end italics] the other party (autonomy), Fundamentally, how can you coexist as both two ones and one set of twos?” That in the proverbial nutshell is how to resolve most conflicts.
These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Shapiro’s coverage in Sections 1-3:
o The Method to Bridge the Toughest Emotional Divides (Pages xv-xvi)
o Key Dimensions of Conflict Resolution (7-9)
o Unlocking the Power of Identity (9-10)
o Relational Identity: The Hidden Source of Leverage (17-21)
o Beware of the Tribes Effect (23-25)
o The Disorienting World of Vertigo, and, Obstacles (32-39)
o Breaking Free of Vertigo (39-49)
o Barriers to Breaking Free from Repetition Compulsion (54-65)
o What Are Taboos? (71-73)
o How to Navigate Taboos (75-84)
o Welcome to the World of the Sacred (91-95)
o A Strategy for Negotiating the Sacred (96-109)
o The Pitfalls of Politics, and, Strategies to Address These Pitfalls (113-128)
o Conventional Methods of Conflict Resolution Are Insufficient (132-135)
o Principles of Integrative Dynamics (135-138)
o How a Mythos Works (141-143)
o Strategy: Creative Introspection (143-155)
o Three Stage of Letting Go of a Grudge (165-174)
o A Four-Step Strategy for Proactively Building Crosscutting Connections (177-190)
o SAS: Reconfiguring Your Relationship (192-201)
One of the most common reactions to a threat to organizational or individual identity is what Shapiro characterizes as the Tribes Effect, “an adversarial mindset that pits your identity against that if the other side: it is [begin italics] me versus you [end italics], [begin italics] us versus them [end italics]. This mindset most likely evolved to help groups protect their bloodlines from, outside threat. Today it can just as easily be activated in a two-person conflict, whether between siblings, spouses, or diplomats.” Shakespeare dramatizes the Tribes Effect in many of his plays, notably in Romeo and Juliet, but it is recurrent in great literature dating back at least to Homer and that reminds me the term “barbarian” was coined in ancient Athens and its literally meaning was “non-Greek.”
Shapiro affirms the value of “Fostering the Spirit of Reconciliation” (or Conciliation) in all relationships, one that can avoid or overcome the Tribes Effect. “The world did not have to explode at Davos, and it need not explode in your own life. The potential for reconciliation rests firmly in your mind and in your heart. It is up to you to decide whether or not to use it.”
He also has much of value to share concerning what he characterizes as “The Ladder of Being,” derived from an insight by the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger “that humans are not things but ways of being in the world. We do not exist as a separate entity from the world in which we live but are intrinsically connected to it. The world does not exist without our consciousness, just as consciousness does not exist without the world. The Ladder of Being calls attention to five levels of self-awareness. No level is more ‘real’ than another, just as the outer level of an onion is no more authentic than its core. In a conflict, it can be helpful to identify your level of being and then consider to what level you aspire.”
These comments remind us that some of our most stressful conflicts are within us, not with another person. The term atonement for those of the Christian faith refers to being at one with God. Philosophers since Socrates have affirmed the importance of being at one with ourselves. This is what Saint Paul has in mind when referring to “many parts, one body.”
Each day, consciously or unconsciously, we are engaged in negotiation about what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do, etc. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman acknowledges that he contradicts himself. “I am large. I contain multitudes.” So do we all. On this point, let’s give Daniel Shapiro the final word. “Our differences are our strength, our similarities are enduring.” The challenge is to recognize them and then embrace them.
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