As people, we bring our own prejudices, values, likes, dislikes, tendencies, and history with us to the negotiation table. Values, behaviors, and experiences unique to each player in the negotiation are likely to influence the way he or she perceives the situation. In supervisory skills courses, we talk about the fact that people's values are typically established by adolescence.

Successful negotiators possess and intentionally display certain behaviors that enable them to build trust, maintain power, stay focused on interests, and create high value agreements. Self discipline also allows the negotiator to stay focused on the topic, and value point at hand, not to revert to selling when power appears to be slipping, and not to get sidetracked by personal interests. In order to work through a wide variety of options and potential combinations requires creativity as well as the comfort with a fair amount ambiguity regarding the outcome, at least in the early stages.

Information about the counterpart him or herself can also be gathered by asking open ended questions designed to evaluate their perspective behavioral style approach to a challenge or their own depth of knowledge on the topic. If however you are choosing the path the principled negotiation and seeking to develop trust, work toward a long term relationship and maximize the value of the agreement for all involved demonstration of empathy will be an important behavior. That your counterpart is striving for a win,lose outcome and is not interested in a collaborative approach, then you must develop a set of objective criteria by which to judge the agreement.