Offer and Acceptance - How to get to a commitment
Offer and Acceptance - How to get to a commitment
More lessons from horses that work in everyday life
So nice to “see” you all here - my faithful readers and my new subscribers alike. This year on Substack I have moved from straight memoir to something in the space between memoir and essay and advice column. The first year of my writing here was ostensibly about the journeys I made in the 1990s, but ended up being a lot about the human teachers I encountered and life lessons I learned. This year I started writing what Iʻve learned from horses as teachers.
And because I want this writing to be “an offer of value” I keep my readership in mind. Knowing that my newer subscribers are mostly in the real estate profession, I find myself thinking about how what I outlined at the start of the year would be of value to you in particular. While several of my posts are explicitly about our profession, I want to invite you as well as my other readers to free up your thinking by indulging me as I write about horses. In this case, about how requests and offers as they show up between horses and horses, and between humans and horses.
If you do find this writing to be of value and you arrived here without “subscribing” - you can “subscribe” for free by entering your email address below. That way new installments get sent to you weekly. There is also a paid option, but I have not yet put any content behind a firewall…so you would be voluntarily affirming the value here if you select that option.
In May I found myself at the end of a graduation party moving wordlessly within a herd. Because where I live if you are still there at the end of a party or meeting, you simply begin making plates or bags of food to go, washing dishes, drying dishes, folding tables, sweeping a floor. It is still a party, but the music is playing through a bluetooth speaker instead of ukulele, guitar and voices live. Kids are sprawled in front of a TV with The Lion King on the screen. In another Land, a partying herd might not have this shared norm. But here dozens of people coordinated action with minimal words, lots of smiles and cheek kisses, bags of food offered and accepted in pantomime, humming and efficient.
So how does this party scene evolve from where I ended the most recent posts about lessons from horses, written before my detour into re-finding my lost voice, written when what I was writing about being In Search Of vocation, purpose, meaningful work or what I called Finding Your Place In the Herd? How do you find acceptance in a herd, period? Because proximity alone does not make individuals into a herd or a team or a community.
Shared understandings and mutually accepted commitments do that.
Belonging is a two-way street; how many of us have experienced standing on the outside, wanting desperately to belong, to contribute - but never gaining acceptance? Or wanting so badly to connect with another person but not knowing how to approach them? One thing is for sure - we are wired for relationship. Another thing is for sure - we are not all equally skilled at communication, at building and maintaining relationships. Standing on the sidelines hoping to be noticed and waiting for an invitation is rarely an effective move.
I love doing Equine Guided Education, because structured interactions with horses can help us learn what effective communication and relationship building looks and feels like, without triggering the shyness and overlay of possible consequences that can inhibit us when trying to learn new skills with humans.
In working with leaders or teams, I combine the experiential learning with a explaining a simple formula, a pattern of communication that we use unconsciously, but that once understood is like an LED light bulb in your brain that never needs replaced, it just illuminates everything indefinitely. Whether in daily household chores, multimillion-dollar business deals, or major personal life commitments, you will find this same underlying structure: we make commitments starting with offers and requests. The framework of this linguistic analysis1 is something I learned in the Action in Management course which introduced me to Ariana and Equine Guided Education, approximately 25 years ago.
Its weird. We think of negotiation as a specialized skill, yet individually and collectively, we make offers, negotiate offers, and accept or decline offers all the time. We make requests and have our requests accepted, declined or countered in almost every interaction with other people. This is one of the first communications skills children learn. Most of our offers and acceptances are momentary agreements in the simple coordination of every day life: “If you eat your broccoli, you can have dessert.” “Iʻll wash the dishes, you can dry.” Whether we are cleaning up after a graduation party, negotiating a buyer representation agreement in real estate, or inviting the dog to join us for a walk, offers, requests and acceptances are how we coordinate everything!
So how do we get from offer or request to acceptance? I mean actionable acceptance, acceptance we can trust will guide our future relationships. Note that even legally for a contract between two entities or people, to exist - to move beyond the offer to an actionable commitment, one of the elements required is “acceptance.” For real estate agents, if you are “writing offers” for clients, at the end of the day what you and your clients hope for is an accepted offer (for the purchase of real property). I donʻt know if this is the same in other states, but in Hawaiʻi where I practice, old-timers in the real estate business still refer to the Purchase Contract as the “DROA” - which stands for deposit, receipt, offer and acceptance.
Offers, requests, and acceptances or rejections can also be communicated via body language. “Iʻll wash, you can dry” might look like handing someone a dish towel as you squeeze soap onto a sponge. If they take the towel, you have a deal. When the young gelding attempts to engage Zara in play and she pins her ears at him, she is declining his request. By taking a step back, he acknowledges that he understands and accepts her decline. If he does not respond, she will amplify her request to be left alone until he leaves her space.
Her initial request was ignored, and so she amplified the volume.
He might learn from the experience and the next time he will approach her just until she pauses in her grazing and cocks an ear or lifts her head slightly. His pausing at her spatial boundary is a request to approach. If she goes back to grazing, his polite request has been accepted and he can come graze along side her.
When someone declines your first offer, think of it as an opportunity to listen to their ideas and try a new offer more in alignment with what they value. It does not mean you donʻt have a chance at a relationship with them, or that you or your idea will never be accepted by the herd. Think of it as a conversation, not a judgment of your value as a human being. And if you find through conversation that you and the other individual or the herd do not value the same things, will there be value for you in pursuing that relationship? Or is it better to simply say, “Thank you for your time” while mentally adding “Next!” as move on with a smile?
But letʻs say you are close to making a big commitment, the kind of commitment we translate into legal terms. A binding contract requires more than offer and acceptance; there also must be consideration. In a real estate transaction that means your earnest money deposit, but generally speaking consideration is something of value used to “seal the deal,” to indicate good faith, to be at risk if you fail to perform. There are also required elements that more contextual - are both parties competent and authorized to make a binding commitment? Do both of you have the capacity to perform the obligations to which you are agreeing?
Assuming the parties are mentally competent, legally or situationally authorized, and we havenʻt agreed to something impossible, in our interpersonal commitments as in business, successful commitments also have a defined time frame and explicit conditions of satisfaction. By conditions of satisfaction, I mean how will be both know that the obligation has been fulfilled and that the customer or recipientʻs expectations have been met? We avoid a lot of resentment and disappointment if we be sure the terms are spelled out up front. Thatʻs why marriage vows specify things like “in sickness and in health” and “until death do us part.”
To be honest, I gave my answer in the framing of this question: How do we move from listening to begin to make tentative offers, in order to find out which offers have value and will be accepted by the herd as our commitments to them?
What works for me is to craft offers based upon initial listening, proposing terms, backing off if those terms are not accepted, listening some more, trying a different size or shape of agreement on for size.
First comes listening. Then offer - assessment of value - acceptance - commitment.
If the initial commitment doesnʻt feel squeaky clean, just rinse and repeat, as the saying goes.
Does it work that way for you?
Owing much to this book, Understanding Computers and Cognition by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores and to the work of Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana.