Negotiations with Your Future Self

I am a member of Toastmasters, and for one of my speeches, I had to discuss negotiations. Originally, I thought about reflecting on past negotiations I had around yard sales, classmates, or future employers, but I came across a video that talked about thinking of your future self as another person, and decided to write about the negotiations we have with our future selves. After delivering the speech, I decided this was another great topic for "The Drop," so please enjoy!

I believe we have all been in this scenario. It’s the end of a long day, and you are tired and ready to go to sleep. Just as you are about to go to bed you remember something you have to do. The dishes, folding laundry, an assignment, a task, something that would be better if you did quickly before you went to bed. But what do we do, we say those infamous words: “I’ll get up early and do it in the morning.” We say this, go to bed, and when we awake, we either regret doing this task in the morning, or we again push that task a long to our future self.

When this occurs, we are having a negotiation between our current self and our future self. However, this negotiation can often be a 1-sided argument, with only the current self giving input and making the decision. Toastmasters discusses four different types of negotiation styles: competitive, accommodation, compromise, collaborative. And today, I would like to discuss how we can use all of these styles to negotiate between our current and future self.

The first style I will discuss is competitive. Negotiators who employ a competitive approach tend to believe in clear winners and losers. Using this negotiating style may come across as strategic, but aggressive. This style is most effective when an agreement is required quickly or there are limited variables to an agreement. As the story I gave in the beginning, we often do a competitive negotiation with our future selves where we just tell our future selves we will do the action with little to no thought of what our future selves will be busy with. However, I believe you should only do a competitive negotiation between you and your future self if there is an urgent need for time between the two. For example, if you have to get up early the next day to prep for an important meeting, your future self can negotiate going to bed instead of doing the dishes. Likewise, if you have an early morning flight, your current self can make the competitive decision to pack the night before. Because who all here has missed a flight due to packing early in the morning.

The second style is accommodation. To employ the accommodation style of negotiation, you must be willing to give information and make concessions. This style puts relationships with others as the highest priority. It can be very effective when you need to mend or maintain relationships. I see this type of negotiation as doing yourself a future favor, or making accommodations for your future self. An example of this is using your free time to get ahead on a project or task for the next day or next week, or stocking up on supplies you don’t need now, but in the future. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, people did a favor for their future selves by stocking up years of future toilet paper.

Meeting your counterparts halfway, where all parties make concessions, is

indicative of a compromise style. The parties involved work together to find points

that they have in common. The compromise style is most effective when there are time constraints or when relationships are positive. Using this approach keeps the relationship intact, but the result is often less than ideal for both parties. This is best when part of a task can be done at one time, and the rest at another time. For example, back when we had to write reports for school, a compromise you can make with yourself and your future selves is if the paper is supposed to be 10 pages, to write 1 page a day, and then leave yourself 1 day for review, so there isn’t too much work for yourself on one day. This is advice I wish I took because it usually ended up with me writing all 11 the night before and morning of the due date.

This final style is the collaborative, or meeting the needs of both parties with the

best solution. You can apply a collaborative style of negotiation by brainstorming to gather ideas for solutions that will meet everyone’s needs. This style is most effective for developing and maintaining positive relationships but can be time-consuming. This is best for bigger and more complicated tasks, or tasks that must be done based on previous works. A great example would be training for a long-distance race. Every day, you must do your part in running, stretching, or strength building, so you can pass on that progress to your tomorrow self, and then they can do that for the next day, and the next, all the way up to the future you that runs the race. If during that training season, enough days are missed, it will not be possible to make up that progress, and come time of the race, it will be hard to perform or even finish that race. That collaborative negotiation and cumulative progress that you and your future selves did together, that will give

you the ability to finish that race.

In conclusion, I would like to end with this. Our brain treats the thoughts of our future self the same way we think of others, such as friends and family [1]. So as you negotiate with friends and family, remember to take mental notes of what works and what does not, and take the different negotiation styles to figure out the best way to communicate with your future self!

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References:

[1] How to Improve Your Life in 24 HOURS by Better Ideas