Yellow lights (objections, stalls, doubts, concerns) posed by clients are processed first by the emotional centers of our brain and only after by the portions of the brain that generate reason and logic.  Since a yellow light can represent a threat to our success (personally and professionally), our first reactions can be the fear-based emotions of fight, flight, or freeze.  Sometimes these emotions are so strong they inhibit or diminish rational response altogether.

Any fear-based emotions we transmit are in turn processed by the client’s emotional centers and tend to reduce rather than increase confidence, and substantiate rather than eliminate any concerns.Experiencing emotional reactions is non-optional; that is just how we are wired.  Where we have a choice is in what happens next.  With practice, we can feel the emotion, recognize it, let is pass through, and move on to a considered (rather than a reactive) response.  Rather than stimulus / response we learn awareness and choice.Some yellow lights tend to cause more intense reactions than others.  The following hierarchy of reactions comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and is called Logical Levels.  The “higher” the level, the more emotion it tends to generate.  If we can get past the emotions and recognize the level at which it operates, one of our choices is to see if we can establish agreement at the next-higher level.  That agreement can then set a common ground for resolving the issue at hand.

Environment:  Challenges to where and when something should happen or to verifiable evidence and/or facts about the situation. 

 Tactics:  Challenges to your implementation of the solution.

Strategies:  Challenges to your major approaches to the proposed solution.

Beliefs:  Challenges to what you believe to be true/false, right/wrong, good/bad, etc.  This might show up in differences of opinion about the presumed problem or beliefs about the negative or positive consequences and implications of the problem.

Values:  Challenges to your personal values, such as honesty, fairness, or loyalty.

 Identity:  Challenges to who you think you are — personally or professionally.  This could be anything from misperception (“You are a tactical implementation company.  How can you help us with strategy?”) to outright, if unspoken, prejudice (The potential client won’t deal with you because of race, religion, gender, appearance, lack of credentials, age, etc.)If you disagree on environment, seek agreement on tactics; if a tactic is challenged, seek agreement on overall strategy; if you disagree on beliefs, seek agreement on values.  Challenges to identity can be difficult because “there is nowhere to go.”  One possibility:  “If I could get you the undeniably best solution for the best value, would you hold the fact that I was ______ against me?”  Or, “I get the sense that even if I could get you a superior solution at a great value, you wouldn’t be interested as long as I am a ______.  Is that a fair statement?”

Here are some examples:

1. CLIENT:  You’ve got your facts wrong.  We have 10 product lines, not 8.  And you misspelled the name of our Western Region VP.
   
   CONSULTANT:  I definitely want to get the facts right.  And I apologize for the misspelling.  That was poor proofreading on our part.  I don’t want to proceed if you feel the change from 8 to 10 materially changes the overall approach.  Should we stop now or can we appropriately take that into account and look at the rest of the proposal on its merits?
   
2. CLIENT:  I think you have this all wrong.  This needs to be centralized at corporate and not driven by the field.
   CONSULTANT:  As you can well imagine, I’ve heard strong opinions on both sides of that issue.  First, before we tackle the issue of centralized or decentralized, are you on board with what the initiative needs to accomplish, and it’s just a matter of the best way to do it?
   
3. CLIENT:  We can’t take people off current jobs to implement this and we can’t have people try to implement it who don’t understand how we do business.
   CONSULTANT:  That’s a tough spot to be in.  And unfortunately, not unusual.  It seems like we could either give up, or at least explore some options.  Are the challenges you are facing big enough that it would be worth at least a little discussion of some possible alternatives? 

Clearly, gaining agreement on the next-higher level doesn’t resolve the concern.  It can give common ground to discuss options, and as such, can be a helpful tool in our tool belt.