Week Four of Communication Module

Monday, 22nd March
(The Art of Negotiation Skills by Mr. Hisham Ab. Karim)

A negotiation is an interactive communication process that may take place whenever we want something from someone else or another person wants something from us. Most of us negotiate with one another frequently. Once we realize this, theoretically, we have two choices: accept the fact that negotiation is a way of life in our culture and improve our skills so that we can negotiate with confidence; or, do nothing about it.



A day full of energy interactive with Mr. Hisham, I learned new things and knowledge about negotiation skills. Basically, there are two primary kinds of negotiation, which are distributive negotiation and integrative negotiation. Four fundamental concepts in skilled negotiation had also been explained by Mr. Hisham. There are BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement), Reservation Price, ZOPA (Zone Of Possible Agreement), and Value Creation Through Trades.

To have an effective negotiation:
1) Getting the other side to the negotiation table
2) Making a good start
3) Establish the right tone, use small talk and build relationship slowly
4) Do the active listening, take notes as appropriate
5) Close the deal, write down the terms

However, there are some possible barriers to the agreement such as die hard bargainers, lack of trust, differences in gender and culture, as well as difficulties in communication.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Tuesday, 23rd March
(Writing an Article for Publications by Miss Liew Suet Fun and Madam Sarasvati A/P Rajindra)

We were fortunate to have a veteran writer, Miss Liew Suet Fun as our trainer. For me, she is a flexible writer with multiple genres. She can write poems, documentaries, news articles, short stories, etc. Based on her stories, she really enjoys doing her work. It showed when she was talking to us, as there were no signs of regret in her eyes. She always believes that the more we write, the better our writing will be.



Miss Suet Fun trained us on creative and scientific writing. As mentioned by her, creative writing involves sympathetic, emotive, subtle, not literal, subjective, and creative aspects. In order to produce decent writing, idea is the key to create desirable content. Brainstorming is a technique that involves observation and a little bit of role-playing. Research comes next. If we believe that our idea is solid, it is helpful to find some key points to help organize our article’s theme, idea and how-to. We need to bear in mind that writing is a learned craft and no one does a first draft that is perfect.

As an exercise, we were divided into groups and were given two different articles each group. We were required to go through and weigh the articles based on certain aspects we had learned before.