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Your Present Moment – Stillness, Choice and Transformation

Your present moment – this moment – the one you are in right now – is the intersection between your past and your future. If you let them, your time choices come alive in this moment.

At once profound and mysterious, your present moment is a place of stillness. As you allow yourself to settle in and fully experience the stillness, your moment reveals itself as both an opening and a turning point.

Always, your present moment offers you the potential for deep insight and transformation. But the paradox is that it doesn’t work to aggressively mine your moments for meaning.

No, it’s with openness and stillness that you need to start. I’m not talking about developing a time management skill or implementing a productivity tool but rather about letting yourself experience an encounter.

That is where you need to start, to truly live the power of your present moment. As Marianne Williamson has written:

The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always now.

The past is gone and the future has not yet arrived. You are alone with yourself and a wealth of powerful choices as you pause and let yourself just BE in the present moment.

Last week I wrote about living mindfully in your present moment, and one of the things I noted is that:

Living in your moments, breathing in what they have to offer, you get to know yourself. Your wants, needs, and interests are constantly evolving, and they emerge from your moments if you let them.

I’d like to continue and build on that idea today by picking up on an article from zenhabits titled Savor Discipline: Merge the Interests of Your Future & Present Selves. Here Leo Babauta explores the challenge that being disciplined presents us with in our moments. What do we do – how do we choose – when, essentially, our present and future interests aren’t in sync?

The first thing that he does – and I love this – is to frame this as a relational issue. We have our present and our future self in dialogue about whatever choice we’re wrestling with.

Next, he removes the self-critical component that so often trips us up and keeps us stuck by suggesting that we treat this conversation as an exchange between two friends.

Imagine you were going to lunch with your friend, and you had to decide where to eat. You each have different preferences. Choosing one over the other – going to Japanese food (your friend’s preference) instead vegan Mexican (yours) – isn’t fair. So maybe you pick a third choice that you both like (a place that serves sushi burritos, perhaps). Or maybe you choose this time, and your friend chooses the next time. Either way, both are happy.

You pause, in your present moment, and your present and future self work out a compromise. As soon as you pause, you are introducing an element of mindfulness. This, in and of itself is transformative, no matter what you decide.

And of the options available, Savor Discipline is a path that opens new doors that your present and future self hadn’t even known existed. I’ll explore this exciting option further in my next post, so stay tuned.

And in the meantime, here’s to your time success!

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Negotiations – How Not To Be Cowered By A Bully – Negotiation Tip of the Week

“That was a stupid question!”

Those were the words uttered by someone who considered himself to be superior to the person that posed the question. Such a response can also be the positioning attempts of a bully.

When negotiating, you need to know how not to be cowered by a bully. Doing so will allow you to negotiate more effectively, maintain a more peaceful state of mind, and reduce the overall level of stress you might possess at the negotiation table.

This article discloses insights that will allow you to be better prepared to deal with a bully in your negotiations. It can also serve as a booster for your degree of confidence when dealing with such a person.

Know when someone is truly attempting to bully you.

As I’ve stated in other articles that I’ve written, before assuming someone is attempting to bully you, be sure your assumptions are accurate. This can be accomplished by asking outright if the other negotiator is trying to bully you and/or stating that you feel bullied; the choice you adopt will be dependent on the type of person you’re engaged with. In the case of someone that’s just aggressive, and not a bully, if you state that you’re feeling bullied and say so with a smile on your face, that may alert him that he needs to become subdued.

Understand the thought process behind a bully’s effort to bully you.

You also need to understand what a bully thinks of you. Ask yourself, does he perceive me to be an easy target, someone that will back down at the first sign of aggression, or is he testing me to see how I’ll react? Having this insight will reveal the options you might utilize to combat his efforts. You should have gathered information about the bullying efforts that he’s used in other situations, which means you should be prepared for how he might negotiate with you. But, in case you haven’t, be nimble enough to have strategies at the ready, to deter his bullying attempts.

Consider his source of leverage/power.

Power is fluid. That means it changes from moment to moment. If you understand the source of his power, if you can’t attack him, you can attack it. This is done by letting that source know that it will have a price to pay, as the result of the bullying activities of its associate. Knowing his sources of power will also allow you to gain leverage by simply mentioning the fact that you’re aware of who his ‘backers’ are.

In a negotiation, a bully is as strong as he and you agree he is. Thus, to the degree that either perspective is altered, so is the perspective of the bully’s power. Therefore, if you know you’ll be in an environment in which someone may attempt to bully you, especially if they’ve displayed such tendencies in the past, be prepared with retorts stating, “you don’t want to try that with me. I bite back!” Just be mindful of not escalating a situation passed a point that you can’t control. Such rebukes will allay the bully’s perspective and thoughts about picking on you, which means, he’ll more than likely engage with you in a more respectful manner… and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

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Product Managers Know That Pricing Is All About The Presentation

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!

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