Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,72
to his rant.
Finally the professor called time.
And pointed to Sarah.
“She was going to win that negotiation—do you know why?”
Sarah could see from the faces of her classmates that no one agreed. Troy clearly had the upper hand, they must have thought, with all that power and force behind his argument.
“Status,” the professor said. “Henley had the higher status.”
“She just sat in a chair the whole time,” one of her classmates said.
“Right,” the professor answered. “She stayed calm and didn’t let herself get drawn in. She had her number, and she stuck to it. Collins here could have popped a blood vessel in his brain from arguing so hard, but Henley was never going to give in. Am I right?” he asked her.
“I might have given him a million more,” Sarah said. “But that was going to be it.”
The professor pointed at her. “She had a plan. She didn’t show up wondering what she was going to do, she already knew.”
“But that’s stupid,” someone else argued. “The whole point is to negotiate.”
“No, the point is to win a negotiation,” the professor said. “And the way you do that is to make sure you always maintain your higher status. When you shout and loom over people and try to bully them, you’re weak. The quieter you are, the less you say, the stronger you look. You want to be the rock the waves crash up against—not the puny wave. No question in my mind: Henley would have won.”
It was one of her favorite moments in law school, and one of her favorite classes. The lessons she learned helped mold her into the kind of attorney she was now. The professor taught her to think strategically in ways she never had before.
And she was about to apply one of those lessons now.
“Is it better to go to your opponent’s office for a negotiation,” the professor asked the class one night, “or make him come to you?”
“Come to you,” most of the class answered.
Sarah said nothing. Because she already knew enough of this professor to know he rarely followed conventional wisdom.
“No, you go to them,” he said. “For two reasons: first, you can leave. That means you always have the power of walking away if the other side doesn’t give you what you want. Second, it displays confidence. Since everyone believes the same thing you do—or did until now, I hope—it means one of two things will happen: they’ll either wonder why you’re so willing to go to them, which will make them suspicious and off-balance, or they’ll think you don’t understand such an obvious element of strategy, which will make them overconfident. Either way, you’re in the stronger position.”
Sarah had sat there listening with a huge smile on her face. It was as if the professor kept handing her all the keys to life.
And it was why she now wrote back to Burke: Your place.
***
Sarah stood on the threshold of his front door, studying the room behind him.
It was dark everywhere hers was light: dark hardwood floors, dark rugs, dark furniture, dark cabinets in the kitchen instead of the ones she had painted white.
“Your brooding phase?” she asked, before realizing he might not see anything wrong with it.
Joe glanced behind him. “It came decorated. I don’t have the touch, as you know.”
She did. His old apartment near UCLA contained a mishmash of furniture he collected from his parents and various other relatives and friends. Joe was never poor the way Sarah was—he had grown up in Palo Alto with parents who both worked for tech companies—but Joe liked to spend money on things that were important to him. A stylish apartment was not one of them.
“Want something to drink?” Joe asked as she followed him inside.
Good question, Sarah thought. Would it be better to stay completely sober and alert, or to ease her nerves with a little lubrication?
“Wine,” she said. “Or beer—whatever you have.”
“Beer I always have.”
He opened the shiny black door of his refrigerator, pulled out two bottles, and set them on the spotless counter.
“Cleaning woman?” Sarah guessed.
“What, you don’t think this is all me?”
Considering what a slob he’d been in law school, Sarah doubted it, but maybe he had matured and changed.
“I’m hardly here anymore,” he told her, “but she still comes in twice a month, whether I need it or not.”
Her mother would love having a client like that, Sarah thought. But she doubted whether any of her mother’s customers had Joe’s kind of money.