Alexandra Carter

It's the one you have with yourself.

And I find that that is where negotiation has to start.

A lot of people think it starts from the moment you sit down with somebody else and that's too late.

It starts by sitting down with yourself and asking the right questions so that you go into that negotiation with power.

Power is actually not about bluster or aggression.

Power is about knowledge.

And the more you know about yourself and about your situation by raising the right questions, the more I have seen people go in and perform with tremendous confidence.

The first five questions are what I call the mirror questions.

And those are ones, as the name would suggest—

where you are asking yourself.

And it's five great questions that you can do in 30 minutes or less to really give you that incredible clarity and peace and perspective that you need when you're going in.

And then the second five questions are the window questions.

And those, for your listeners, if anybody has ever gotten in a room with somebody else or sat down and blanked on what they wanted to say,

You're never going to do that again because you're going to have at your fingertips five great questions that are going to produce a lot of value in any conversation you have.

So it's mirror and window.

A lot of times people assume, because I coach a lot of folks in negotiation, they assume that they need to start with the solutions.

You know, let's say you're sitting down with a contractor to talk about a bathroom renovation and they think they should just go in and start talking about the numbers.

That is not the question you need to ask.

The first place to start every negotiation is asking this question.

What's the problem I want to solve?