Don’t argue with William Ury. You’ll lose.
One of the world’s top negotiators, Ury co-founded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation where he currently directs the Global Negotiation Initiative. He is the author of The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No & Still Get to Yes.
In the last 30 years, Ury has mediated in conflicts from corporate mergers to ethnic wars in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. With former president Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, and during the 1980s, helped the US and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert accidental nuclear war. He’s served as consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House and recently was enlisted as a third party to help to end a civil war in Aceh, Indonesia, and to prevent one in Venezuela.
“Fear generates a type of holding on. The more you hold on, the more fearful you get and vice versa. You need to learn how to break the cycle and let go. For me, it’s much easier to let go if I’m in nature and I steady myself in order to gain a larger perspective around the fear. To realize that there’s a larger world, a larger presence, it allows you to see what you’re going through at that moment and shows you that no matter what, it’s quite small thing in the grand scheme of things.”
Read how Ury confronts his fear as he meets with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in fear.less.
Tags: negotiation