Timing is Everything (Part II)

Get time on your side, and improve difficult conversations.

“When you have free time, you have the headspace and bandwidth to pursue new ideas. Free time increases your serendipity surface area.”

—Sahil Bloom

In the last post, we introduced this idea that controlling the timing of your difficult conversations, to the extent possible, can significantly impact your potential outcomes. The lesson from our airline anecdote, in a nutshell: If you need to negotiate changes to a far-off airplane ticket, don’t do it when you and your customer service agent are under added stress. If you can, wait until skies are calm and extraneous pressure subsides.

The lesson impacts your approach to conflict resolution in a range of other personal and professional contexts.

Although various aspects of a negotiation and its milieu will be out of your control, you can often affect a negotiation’s timing. Just as you realize that calling your airline’s customer service department on a different day, at a different moment, can relieve certain pressures on your eventual di…