How to Optimize Your BATNA & Negotiate with Strength

Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen your starting position in a negotiation. It’s a lens through which we can clearly and confidently assess every package to make sure we’re making the best decision according to what matters to us. 

When you have a great alternative to the offer that’s in front of you, you negotiate and present your value differently - you make your leverage stronger. 

A BATNA allows us to make the most of what we bring to the table, which brings us closer to getting what we’re worth and what serves us. 

How can you create your BATNA so that you go into negotiation with strength and confidence? What is the risk of going into a negotiation without a BATNA? 

In this episode, I share strategies for developing a strong BATNA and why it’s a critical piece of a successful negotiation.  

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode 

• The main purposes of your BATNA 
  Your BATNA protects you from entering into agreements you should reject and saying yes to a job that won’t serve you long-term. It also helps you optimize the assets you have so that every agreement you make will satisfy your interests as much as possible. 
  
  
• How to use the BATNA to make a decision on an offer 
  Having your BATNA is going to protect you from accepting terms that don’t serve you, but it will also prevent you from rejecting terms that might be in your best interest to accept just because they aren’t 100% perfect. 
  
  
• Why your BATNA should be the starting point
  Some of us adopt the approach of negotiating first, seeing what happens and then figuring out your BATNA. The problem with this is that we’ll go into a negotiation blind, and that uncertainty will make it hard for us to advocate for ourselves. If you’ve already sought out an alternative and you have another offer on the table, you’re going to be more willing to go to bat for yourself.