William Ury: A Yes Man Says No

The co-author of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981), William Ury knows a few things about mediation. For 30 years, he has served as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts around corporate mergers, wildcat strikes in a Kentucky coal mine, ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and even family disputes. With former President Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, an organization dedicated to ending civil wars around the world. Along the way, he has taught negotiation skills to thousands of corporate executives, diplomats, labor leaders, and military officers helping organizations reach mutually beneficial agreements. 

Getting to YES focused on finding acceptable solutions through “principled negotiation.” 

But after nearly 25 years of getting to yes, this yes man said no. As the father of a baby with serious medical problems, he realized that in order to make positive choices about her health, he would have to oppose new medical procedures that he felt were inappropriate.

In The Power of Positive No: How to Say No & Still Get to Yes, Ury offers the following tips:

1. Uncover your deeper YES (a core interest, need, or value), express it to the other person, and stay true to your yes.
2. Deliver a respectful NO. Keep your tone neutral and matter-of-fact and empower your NO with a Plan B.
3. Negotiate to a healthy YES. A healthy YES yields a positive outcome. Follow your NO with a positive proposal and facilitate a wise agreement.
“In order to say yes to what’s truly important, you first need to say no to other things,” says Ury. “No is the new Yes,” he says. “And the “positive no” may be the most valuable life skill you’ll ever learn.”  

reposted from http://www.wcablog.com

 

April Webcast: Charles Jenkins

reposted from http://www.wcablog.com

In this webcast, Charles Jenkins, senior pastor role at the historic Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, talks with Jim Mellado about thriving in change. You can read more on the topic in Pastor Jenkins’ book Thriving in Change.

Here are a few of our notes to get you thinking!

“There is applied change and basic change – basic change is just change for change’s sake. Applied change is change with a needed necessary end result.”

“I knew I needed to start at the concept…what’s the destination? I couldn’t get people there if the destination wasn’t clear.”

“Honor people with one-on-one conversations. It’s critical to help resistant people process the changes. The goal with early adopters is to create advocates, but with the resisters your goal is to help them find neutrality.”

“When it comes to change, often leaders make change to problems only they see. You’ve got to make everybody see the problem so they know why the change is necessary.”

“For a senior leader, it’s like Shakespeare. Play your part and then exit the stage. For a successor, be comfortable in your own skin – David can’t wear Saul’s armor.”

Sharpened by the Grind: Part 1

A Great Post by Pastor Vernon Armitage on wcablog.com

My dad loved pocket knives. He could put a razor’s edge on the blade of his knife with the precision of a master. I knew the blade was sharp when he would confidently roll up the sleeve of his shirt and shave a patch of hair off his arm. With a pleased look on his face he would say, “That should do it.” Even though I watched him numerous times, I could take the same knife and whit rock and quickly put a dull edge on the blade. No use to roll up my sleeve- no hair would be in danger. How could he place the grind of metal and rock together and always sharpen the blade? But as for me, I would always grind it dull. 

This analogy makes me wonder, how do you stay at the grind of ministry day after day and have it sharpen you rather than dull you? 

I served as the senior pastor of a church for over forty years and had the opportunity of seeing the ministry grow from slightly over one hundred in attendance to around four thousand on the weekend. That was a long grind! However, there was a time that I did not do any better at the grind of ministry than I did with sharpening a knife. As our church was booming with growth, I was also being stretched too thin. During one of my talks I realized that I could not continue. I walked off the stage in the middle of my message and a friend drove me home because I was a complete basket case. I had allowed the grind to finally bring me to a complete and dull halt. I was not aware of my dull condition until it ended in a deep, debilitating, depression.

read more.....

When Bad Things Happen to Good Relationships

Conflict occurs over things you least expect. Here's what you can do.

One of our family scrapbooks contains a note written many years ago by our daughter's best friend, Cindy. It was written when the girls were both 8 years old and inseparable. They walked to school together every morning, enjoyed frequent sleepovers, and consulted one another on homework assignments each night.

Then one day a tiny incident stressed their friendship. Our daughter, becoming impatient when Cindy would not walk fast enough on the way to school, called her a slowpoke.

It was impulsive, a bad choice of words. One can only guess what it may have meant to Cindy. At any rate there was instant enmity between the girls. That evening there was no collaboration on homework. An upcoming sleepover was canceled. And the following morning the girls walked to school by different routes.

A day later a note, the one in our scrapbook, came in the mail. Addressed to our daughter, it read: "You called me a slowpoke, and I am angry at you. Your no longer friend, Cindy." Could Cindy have been more specific? The issue, her feelings, the altered status of the relationship: all clearly defined in two sentences.

The separation lasted, at most, one more day. When both girls realized how much they missed each other, they offered mutual "sorrys" (one for walking too slow, the other for using the epithet slowpoke) and resumed their friendship. Soon, it was as if nothing had come between them.

Yet something had happened; something had been learned. One girl had become aware of the importance of guarding her tongue lest an errant word hurt another's feelings. And the other learned not to overreact in a heated moment. Valuable lessons. If remembered, the "learnings" might save both of them in many of the inevitable quarrels they would experience in the future.

I recall wishing at the time that it would be nice if some of the adults in our church could deal with their prickly issues as clearly, as quickly, and as completely as the two girls had done. And what I wished for my congregation, I also wished for myself. In the field of human conflict, I was far from a genius.

Article by Gordon MacDonald - This excerpt was taken from Christianity Today, to read the entire article click here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2011/winter/badthingsgood.html