No rush at all on this. Whenever works.

Eight words, sent on a Thursday afternoon, about a quote that went out on Monday.

Nothing in them is wrong. Every one of them is calibrated to say that the sender is relaxed, busy, and not especially invested.

They took four drafts.

This isn't only a dating thing, although it turns up there too. It's the follow up you didn't send, the price you didn't defend, the call you let him make first. All of it filed under being unavailable.

At some point in the last few years, a very good idea reached you with a terrible title attached, and the title won.

You are not trying to be fake. You are trying to stop needing it so badly, which is the correct instinct aimed at the correct target.

You're just working on the wrong end of it. Because indifference is not a mood you can install. It's a position. Positions get built. They don't get adopted.

I've been quoted by people who needed the work and people who didn't. I've also been sitting next to the woman who got the three day text, reading it over her shoulder.

Neither report says he seemed indifferent.

They both say something felt managed.

She did not find that text mysterious, by the way. She found it slow.

A man who actually has other options is not composing anything. He's answering from a parking lot, with one thumb, between two other things. He's quick, he's short, and he tells you exactly what he can and can't do, because none of it costs him anything to say.

Speed is the tell. Not distance.

A three day reply is a man working out how his reply is going to land, and the buyer can feel that happening even when he couldn't tell you what he's picking up on.

So he doesn't come away thinking you're unbothered. He comes away thinking the price might be soft.

And then he comes back lower.

There's a framework I use called the Indifference Pivot, which is wanting the deal without needing the deal, and being willing to walk away from it. Men hear that and immediately try to manufacture the feeling.

The feeling is downstream. It shows up by itself on the day you have two conversations running instead of one.

You cannot talk yourself into being willing to walk away from the only thing on your desk. Your body knows what's at stake. It will tell on you inside the first ten seconds and keep telling on you until somebody signs something.

Which is why the posture is such a trap. It asks you to fake the output of a position instead of spending the week building the position.

The argument isn't that nothing matters. It's that your supply of caring is finite, it is getting spent either way, and hardly anybody chooses where it goes.

Caring about fewer things is the instruction. Caring about them less is the misprint.

A man with three things he will not move on is relaxed about the other two hundred, and he never had to practice being relaxed. The three did that for him."

Curtis is forty seven and owns a metal fabrication shop with nineteen people in it. He came to me about how he shows up in negotiations, and he had read the same book you have.

He'd quoted a hospital expansion at two hundred and forty thousand. The general contractor came back asking for one ninety five.

So he did what the posture told him to do. Waited two days, replied in four lines, said he'd have to think about whether the schedule worked at that number.

He also spent both of those days unable to eat lunch.

The contractor came back at one eighty.

I asked him one question, which was what else the shop had out for quote that quarter.
Nothing. One job, and a payroll of nineteen.

He hadn't been negotiating. He'd been performing a position he did not hold, at a man who buys from fabricators for a living and can hear an empty shop down a phone line.

What he did about it took five weeks and none of it was interesting. He put two more quotes out, including one he was fairly sure he'd lose, specifically so that there would be three.

He won the small one.

Then he reopened the hospital job at two twenty five and said the schedule worked at that number and not below it.

The small job had already taken the slot he would have had to keep clear for them. So for the first time, the sentence was true when he said it.

He got two eighteen.

The part he actually called me about was that he said it in roughly nine seconds and then went home and slept.

"I didn't get calmer," Curtis said. "I got a second customer. The calm came free with it."

Before your next conversation about money, open one other door.

One call or one email, to one alternative. A second buyer, a second supplier, a second client, a second anything. It does not need to be a strong option and it does not need to go anywhere.

Then pay attention to your own voice in the first conversation.

You'll learn something inside a week either way. If your tone changes, you were never calm, you were cornered, and now you know what the actual fix is and it isn't breathing exercises.

If nothing changes, you were already fine, and the whole exercise cost you one afternoon.

One thing from the buying side of the table.

Nobody has ever walked away from a man thinking, I'm not certain he cared, how thrilling.

What lands is a man who obviously does care, says so without decorating it, and would clearly be fine on Thursday either way.

That man is not harder to be than the one you've been performing. He's just built out of options rather than out of a performance.

Go get a second conversation. The not caring takes care of itself.

Hold your standard. It's undeniable when you do. 😈

~ Angela