We’ve been talking about the stages of grief/loss and so far, we’ve covered denial and anger. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the concept of bargaining. If you have known me for very long you might recognize in me that I will sell you pretty much anything I own if I think that you might want it. I like to think that this is because I am a shrewd businessman and have the ability to anticipate what you might want. The truth is, it’s more likely that I have little attachment to the physical items that I own and find more excitement in creating a deal than I do in holding onto something that means little to me. My family knows this all too well. If you ask any one of my siblings, they would say that I would sell them the shirt off my back or the shirt off their back for that matter if I thought I could make a deal. Bargaining can be good and bad.
When we look at business, bargaining can be a very beneficial attribute because it helps us to look at the scenario that we are stuck in from different points of view. When we begin to bargain, we begin to negotiate with what is truly important and let go of the things that are tertiary and have little or no value. This can be very important to help clean house and streamline our systems and processes. Sometimes bargaining is not about picking the best thing, it’s about putting two good things against one another for a short term solution. Bargaining can result in looking at the present situation and disregarding the longevity in turmoil that a decision could result in. Cutting something now may look like the right choice but if we don’t look at the long term consequences, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot. The truth may be that the situation or the project or even the company that we are bargaining with may be better off being eliminated. This is the hard and painful decision that we may need to make. If we continue to bargain, we are only elongating the death of the project or situation.
We only bargain with people or things that we believe have a higher value or power, regardless of whether or not it’s true. When we lose something like a job, a house, income, a relationship, or some form of comfort, and we move to the stage of bargaining what we are doing is attempting to exchange our loss and get back that would we cannot have. The reason that this is a problem is because we are spending our time and energy focusing on something that we have lost that we cannot have back. Instead of working on moving forward and adjusting to our new reality.
