You Don’t Know It’s True Until It’s Tested

“I’m a straight shooter.”
“I won’t muck you around.”
“To be honest with you…”
“I’ll be upfront with you…”

There are certain phrases you hear often enough in negotiation that, rightly or wrongly, they almost make you brace yourself for what might come next.

After lots of negotiations in this recent market, I started thinking that perhaps we are too quick to interpret contradictions as dishonesty.

Maybe most people genuinely believe what they are telling us at the time.

The problem is that you don’t really know something is true until it’s tested.

We don’t always know ourselves as well as we think

It’s easy to say what you would do when the decision is hypothetical.

It’s different when there is real money on the table. A deadline. A disappointed partner. Another buyer. A mortgage. The possibility of losing a property you’ve fallen in love with, or accepting less for a home you’ve spent 20 years building your life around.

What was absolutely true on Monday can feel very different by Friday.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Monday was a lie.

It might simply mean you discovered something about yourself on Thursday.

Psychology has long examined our desire for consistency between what we believe, what we say and how we behave. When those things don’t line up, it creates what psychologists call cognitive dissonance — an uncomfortable inconsistency that we’re naturally motivated to resolve.

Negotiation theory approaches the same problem from another direction.

One of the central ideas of principled negotiation is to distinguish between a person’s position and their underlying interests.

A position might be:

“We won’t sell below $1.2 million.”

An interest might actually be:

“We need enough money to comfortably buy the next property.”

Those sound similar, but they’re not necessarily the same thing.If the next property becomes cheaper, the interest may be satisfied at a different sale price.

The position changes because the circumstances around it changed.

“I’m only trying to do what’s best for my family”

This is another statement I hear regularly.

And it’s probably true.

But there’s something interesting about it in a negotiation.

The buyer is trying to do what’s best for their family.

The seller is trying to do what’s best for theirs.

One person’s genuine belief in the righteousness of their position doesn’t automatically give them the moral or ethical high ground.

We’re all looking at the situation through our own window.

We’re all working with the information, pressures, priorities and emotions we have at that particular moment.

And we’re all capable of discovering that something we thought was incredibly important to us actually wasn’t — or that something we barely considered turns out to matter enormously.

The difficulty starts when the talk and the walk separate

This is where negotiations can become uncomfortable.

Someone has communicated something very clearly.

Another party has relied upon it.

Then their behaviour changes.

The explanation might still sound perfectly reasonable, but something doesn’t feel right because the words and actions no longer seem to fit together.

The instinctive response is often:

“They weren’t being honest with me.

”Sometimes that’s probably correct.

But I think there’s another possibility we don’t consider often enough:

They might not have known.

You can genuinely believe you don’t mind walking five kilometres until you’ve walked four.

You weren’t lying at kilometre one.

You just hadn’t experienced kilometre four yet.

Property negotiations can be exactly like that.

“I’ll walk away at $1 million.”

“We’ll never accept that.”

“We’re definitely buying if they accept this.”

“We don’t care if somebody else buys it.”

Then the decision becomes real.

Suddenly you aren’t discussing what you would do anymore.

You have to actually do it.

And sometimes that’s when you discover your real position.

That’s why good negotiation isn’t about deciding who’s telling the truth

For me, this is one of the most important parts of being an agent.

My job isn’t simply to carry statements from one side of a transaction to the other.

It’s to understand what sits underneath them.

What is the buyer actually trying to achieve?

What matters most to the seller?

Which parts are genuine constraints?

Which are preferences?

And which things haven’t actually been tested yet?

The Harvard approach to principled negotiation similarly encourages negotiators to look beyond fixed positions, understand underlying interests and, where possible, use objective information rather than turning the negotiation into a contest over whose version of events is right.

That’s particularly important in property because decisions can affect hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of dollars.

A seller shouldn’t make an important decision based upon an assumption about what a buyer will or won’t do.

A buyer shouldn’t make one based upon an assumption about a seller.

And neither party should be forced to make a major financial decision based on somebody else’s “truth” if that truth has never actually been tested.

Sometimes my role is therefore to create enough clarity for both parties to make a genuine decision for themselves.

Not to call someone’s bluff.

Not to prove somebody wrong.

Just to get beyond assumptions.

Today’s truth can still have been true

Perhaps this is the part I’ve been thinking about most.

We tend to view consistency as evidence of honesty.

“If you meant what you said yesterday, you should still mean it today.”

But human beings aren’t that simple.

We receive new information.

Circumstances change.

Fear appears.

Priorities move.

We talk to our partner.

We sleep on something.

We discover what we’re actually prepared to lose.

And occasionally we discover that the person we misunderstood wasn’t the person sitting across the negotiating table.

It was ourselves.

There’s nothing inherently dishonest about changing your mind.

The important part is recognising when it has changed and communicating that honestly.

Because perhaps integrity isn’t never changing your position.

Perhaps it’s being prepared to acknowledge when you have.