Emotional Recentering

• Difficulty: Intermediate
• Estimated effectiveness: High
• Implementation time: A few seconds to minutes, can be trained
• Fields of application: Crisis negotiation, Sales, Public speaking, Management, Diplomacy
• Synonyms: Regaining emotional control, Anchoring, Return to calm
• Tags: mindfulness, cardiac coherence, anchoring, self-reset, Fisher Shapiro

Emotional recentring restores clarity after being knocked off balance and prevents a one-off jolt from throwing the whole negotiation out of kilter. Quick and discreet once trained, it restores access to judgement. Its limitation: it requires an automatic routine to work under heavy pressure, and a recentring that is too visible can betray the very disturbance it repairs.

To be triggered just after a destabilising shock (attack, surprise, wound) and before any significant response. Not to be confused with flight: to recentre is to return to intention, not to avoid the subject. Of little use if no loss of balance has occurred.

Recognise: after one of your manoeuvres, the other party pauses, breathes, and seems to collect themselves before responding differently. Neutralise: maintain the pressure of the tempo without giving them time to rest, or press on again before they have recentred. Turn it around: grant yourself that same recentring time rather than being subjected to theirs.

Recentring becomes questionable when it serves to display a façade of composure masking a manoeuvre, or to deprive the other party of their legitimate emotion by treating it as a mere obstacle to be circumvented. Used on oneself, it remains healthy; used to manipulate another person's emotional rhythm, it slides towards control. The aim must remain clarity, not domination.

A direct complement to Emotional management (prevent vs repair) and to the Pattern interrupt applied to oneself. Close to Relational calibration in its dimension of adjustment. Stands in opposition to the impulsive reaction and to escalation.

• Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, 1990.
• Roger Fisher & Daniel Shapiro, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, 2005.
• David Rock, Your Brain at Work, 2009.

• Defuse an emotional escalation before it blocks the substantive discussion
• Explicitly acknowledge the other party's emotion without being drawn onto affective ground
• Bring the conversation back from reproaches and positions towards facts, criteria and interests
• Preserve the relationship and the other party's face while protecting the objective of the negotiation
• Regain control of the framing of the exchange without authoritarianism or a frontal power struggle

Sales · The furious buyer brought back to the figures (representative scenario): During an annual renegotiation, a large-retail buyer explodes: "Your price increases are outright theft, you're taking us for fools!" Rather than justifying himself inch by inch or replying in the same tone, the sales director pauses and responds: "I can see this increase is putting you in a difficult position with your own management, and I understand that it is exasperating." The buyer, acknowledged in his feelings, lowers his tone. The salesperson immediately follows up: "Let's look together at the breakdown of our material costs and see across which volumes we can absorb the impact." In two sentences, acknowledgement of the emotion and then a pivot to objective criteria, the discussion leaves the register of accusation and returns to a negotiation over data.

Company · The tense labour meeting (representative scenario): During the negotiation of a restructuring plan, a staff representative violently challenges the HR director: "You're destroying lives while management pays itself bonuses!" The HR director resists the temptation to counter-attack or to invoke the legal framework. She responds: "What I hear is genuine anger and concern for the colleagues affected. It is legitimate and I am not going to brush it aside." She then recentres: "It is precisely to limit these impacts that we are around this table: let's go back over the three support measures and see which of them strike you as insufficient." The session, on the brink of breakdown, continues with a point-by-point examination of the measures; the emotion has been acknowledged, but it is the substance that takes over again.

Everyday life · The neighbour dispute that gets out of hand (representative scenario): Two neighbours are at odds over a shared boundary fence. One piles up grievances: the noise, the trees, "your total lack of respect for years". The other senses that responding to each reproach would feed the spiral. He chooses to recentre: "I can see it's not just the fence, and that you feel you haven't been respected; I take note of that and I'm willing to talk about it. For today, can we first settle the question of the fence, since the builder is waiting for our answer on Friday?" By validating the feeling without opening every front at once, he obtains an agreement on the urgent matter and a meeting for the rest.

• Denying or minimising the emotion ("calm down", "it's not that serious"): this is the surest way to provoke an escalation rather than a calming
• Recentring too quickly, before the other party truly feels heard: the pivot is then perceived as an evasion or as contempt, and the emotion returns amplified
• Confusing recentring with diversion: changing the subject to dodge a painful question destroys trust, whereas recentring acknowledges the sensitive point before returning to it at the right moment
• Letting yourself be emotionally contaminated and answering anger with anger, turning a negotiation into a clash of personalities
• Using mechanical, repeated empathy formulas ("I understand, I understand") without sincerity: façade empathy is quickly detected and discredits the whole approach

• Roger Fisher, William Ury (1981) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In Houghton Mifflin
• Roger Fisher, Daniel Shapiro (2005) Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate Viking Press
• Chris Voss, Tahl Raz (2016) Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It HarperBusiness