Along with meditation, visualization techniques can be useful to negotiators. They improve creativity, confidence, and focus. Visualization basically consists in mapping your mind through a repeated projection of images and positive energy. These are things you want to happen and you believe in. It’s like working on a puzzle with the advantage of already knowing how the puzzle will look like when completed.
When you enter a negotiation already having visualized where you want to go and how to get there, you get less distracted by events occurring during negotiation or in connection with it. Negotiators who spend time thinking about how the other side sees the problem are proven to generate more valuable outcomes for themselves.
Visualization techniques are well-known by athletes to improve their performance. They pump themselves up with confidence, think about all possible ways to get there, and picture themselves holding the trophy. Imagery is proven to stimulate the human brain, activating part of the brain playing a key role in motor activation, and help it to map actions necessary to achieve set goals.
The power of visualization cannot be better illustrated than with the story of Natan Sharansky, the ex-Soviet Union dissident. Before being accused of spying for the benefit of the Americans and sentenced to 13 years of forced labor in 1978, Sharansky used to play chess. He even won a championship in his native city of Donetsk at the age of 15. His dream was to become a chess champion one day. Deprived of a chess board in jail, Sharansky started playing games in his mind, developing tremendous abilities to anticipate chess moves. After being released, Sharansky moved to Israel. It happened that in 1996, he was among the 25 Israelis to take on Gary Kasparov, world chess champion, in a simultaneous chess exhibition. Sharansky beat Kasparov that night and said thathe had little time for chess during his dissident years in the Soviet Union, but he recovered his skills in prison, where he said he spent the long days in solitary confinement playing three simultaneous games in his mind.
