We often think that the point of a negotiation is to reach an agreement. The top-selling book on negotiation is called Getting to Yes, after all. The implication is that a good negotiator is someone who makes deals, not someone who walks away. In relationships, this problem is even worse. Most of us don’t want to think of ourselves as someone who turns a friend down. And the more they need our help, the more important the request is to them, the harder it is. Where does this come from?

We don’t like to be disagreeable

The current state of the art in describing personality is something called the five-factor model. If you give a large group of subjects a personality test with hundreds of questions, you will find certain identifiable patterns: Some of the questions tend to get similar answers from the same people. The people who say, “I always show up to meetings on time” also tend to say, “I keep my desk tidy” and “I never take office supplies home with me.” Once you have a stable group of questions that track together, psychologists try to name the underlying quality that unites those people. For the questions above, the underlying construct is called conscientiousness.

Conscientious people tend to be diligent, orderly, and trustworthy, and they obey the rules. Most personality psychologists agree that factor analysis yields five variables, known as “The Big Five.” They are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. If you are quite high on the agreeableness scale, it turns out that that has a big influence on how you perform in a negotiation.

Agreeable people tend to be kind, empathetic, polite, cooperative, and considerate. If you ask an agreeable person to come to a particular movie with you, they will say yes. A disagreeable person is more likely to demand a different movie or say they want to stay home and play video games. The agreeable person is the perfect dinner party guest, “willing to please and to be pleased,” as novelist Patrick O’Brian put it. Agreeableness is a great quality for relationship building. It makes people like you.

But there is a downside. Agreeable people find it harder to say no. They are the people most likely to make the mistake of taking a bad deal to avoid the social awkwardness of disagreement. As a result, agreeable people end up doing worse in distributive negotiations, where you are deciding who gets what, like around salary. In their desire to please others, they take care of others but not themselves. Women tend to score higher than men on agreeableness. 

You don’t have infinite money or infinite time. You can’t say yes to everything. No matter how kind you are, at some point you have to say no, so you can say yes to the things that are really important.

No deal is better than a bad deal

The lives of our ancestors were harsh and short. It made sense for them to be risk averse about losing valuable opportunities. We live in a different world, one that is richer, full of more opportunities, and less dangerous. While we have abundant material goods, some of the things we want are mutually exclusive, such as taking a job or choosing whom to marry. With these kinds of choices, it makes sense to be careful and extremely picky.

Imagine you were fishing on a beautiful lake, surrounded by mountains on a beautiful day. Sure, you’d love to catch a fish. But even if you don’t, it’s great to be out in nature, isn’t it, admiring the gorgeous scenery? Let’s say the lake has a strict limit, only one fish per angler, but you can stay out as long as you want. You might like to eat fish, but if you don’t catch anything that day, you have food back in your rental house or apartment or camp. Should you keep the first fish that comes along, then go back and hang out in your camp or cabin for the rest of the day? Or does it make more sense to throw an average fish or two back until you get a really special one?

No matter how kind you are, at some point you have to say no, so you can say yes to the things that are really important.

That is what negotiation is like. It isn’t a failure if you don’t get exactly the one you think you want. You can still enjoy the process. By being picky you maximize your chance of catching a fish worth telling stories about.

Remember, not getting a deal today is fine. It’s all part of the search for the best deal you can make. In each negotiation, there are plenty of goals besides just reaching an agreement. You can work on your skills. You can learn more about the marketplace and about your fellow humans. The experience can be fun and fascinating if you let go of the need to agree. Do your preparation on alternatives, and that way when the right deal does come along, you’ll know it.