Your aspiration is an optimistic assessment of what you could achieve in a given negotiation. And because aspirations are optimistic, they inevitably enhance your expectations for—and, as a result, enhance the outcome of—the negotiation.
Setting and focusing on your aspirations represents an often overlooked advantage in negotiation. Aspirations provide psychological leverage that makes you focus on the potential upside of a negotiation, rather than on your downside protection (your alternative) or your bottom line (your reservation price). This increases the likelihood that you will achieve better results. Indeed, research shows that the more challenging your aspirations, the better you will perform. Even if you do not meet your aspirations, they will motivate you to perform better than if you had set more modest goals.
Your aspirations should be set independently of your alternatives.
Alternatives offer a safety net and shouldn’t get mixed up with your goals for a negotiation, but many negotiators treat them as a standard of performance. Negotiators with poor alternatives often set their expectations lower, causing them to accept less. This result goes hand in hand with the general notion that better alternatives produce better outcomes, and worse alternatives produce worse outcomes.
In fact, your aspiration is the antidote to your natural focus on your alternative. Just because you may have poor alternatives does not mean that you should be pessimistic in setting your aspiration. Be mindful that the quality of your alternative plays a powerful role in enhancing or diminishing your performance, independent of your actual negotiation skill.
Focusing on aspirations can make you a better negotiator, but it won’t necessarily make you happier with the outcome of your negotiation.
Counterintuitively, you tend to get more but are less satisfied if you focus on your aspirations, but you feel more satisfied with a worse outcome if you focused on your alternatives. The alternative-focused negotiators got less, but they exceeded their alternatives, which satisfied them. By focusing on their alternatives, that alternative became the goal, the mark to beat. By contrast, the aspiration-focused negotiators got more, but less than they aspired to, which frustrated them.
This is the dark side of aspirations. Specifically, while optimistic aspirations lead to better negotiation outcomes, you will be less satisfied with your objectively better outcome. Consider the following example:
For decades, the World Value Survey identified the Danes as the happiest people in the world. Over the last thirty years, more than 67 percent of Danes have reported feeling very satisfied with their lives. What is the secret of this happiness, a secret they evidently have not shared with their Scandinavian neighbors? It appears to be low expectations.
Negotiators often act like Danes, who seem to set their expectations low about everything, including their happiness—and, as a result, feel content with their lives. Negotiators tend to focus on their alternatives, and when they exceed them, it makes them much happier than they would have been if they’d focused on their aspirations and failed to achieve them.
So focusing on alternatives means sacrificing performance for good feelings. This suggests that your subjective measure of getting a good deal is whether or not you’ve exceeded your alternative. Paradoxically, having lower goals and subsequently lower performance gives you greater satisfaction.
To cope with this paradox, you must determine before any negotiation whether your goal is performance or satisfaction. If you prefer satisfaction, you should focus on your alternatives, but if the overall value of your outcome is a more important measure, you should focus on your aspirations (while knowing full well that you will likely be less satisfied with the outcome). You will not likely achieve your aspiration, but having high aspirations makes it more likely that you will get a better outcome. Additionally, if your goal is getting more, you should determine your alternatives and your reservation price, and then put it aside and instead use your aspiration as the standard to anchor your assessment of your performance. During the negotiation, you should focus exclusively on your aspiration price. Only after you have negotiated the best deal possible, and just before agreeing to it, you should compare the value of your alternative and your reservation price, and accept the deal only if it meets or exceeds both of these parameters.
Once you have established your reservation and aspiration prices, the next step is to figure out how to achieve a deal that will approach your aspirations. Where are the opportunities for you to claim value? For that, you need to think about the structure of the issues over which you could be negotiating.
