Defining the Pause Button

Pushing your pause button is the best way to keep some emotional distance during high-stress situations — at home, at work, anywhere you need a little space. I teach this method in my negotiation courses to explain the concept that waiting is good — that doing nothing is sometimes the right action. I tell students, “If you’re getting stressed out, don’t just do something . . . sit there.”
Pushing the pause button just means putting the negotiations on hold for a moment or an hour or an evening while you sort things out. Everyone owns a pause button, so to speak, and everyone pushes it in a different way. When you push the pause button, you freeze-frame the negotiation — much as you freeze-frame a movie on the television screen with your remote control or on your computer. You step away, physically or psychologically, to review the work you have done up to that point and check over your plan for the rest of the negotiation. You take a break. It may be purely mental; it may be imperceptible to the other side; but you give yourself whatever time it takes to review matters before you continue. This focused review is a separate activity from the other basic elements of negotiation. It gives you an opportunity to regroup, catch your breath, and be sure that you aren’t missing anything. The pause button gives you that little bit of emotional distance that allows you to make the decisions you want to make in your business and your life.
Pushing the pause button gives you the opportunity to review the entire process of negotiating and to make sure that you aren’t overlooking anything. It allows you to avoid getting boxed into a corner. By pushing the pause button, you keep your emotions from ruling (and ruining) the negotiation. Knowing how to use your pause button is so important that I include a pause button on the Cheat Sheet at the beginning of this book. Tear out this pause button and carry it with you until you develop one of your own. Whenever negotiations get heated, having this card with you should serve as a reminder to press your internal pause button. (The back of this card lists the basic skills of negotiation. After you press pause is a good time to review these skills as they relate to the negotiation at hand.) I am told that senior executives across the country have taped this little card to their computer screens.