Strategic Conversations, Part 2 - Root of All Behavior

This is part two of a five-part podcast series on leading Strategic Conversations so you can improve your results and relationships at work. Check out the first episode here. 

In this episode, I explain what's at the root of all behavior. When you understand what drives people's behavior and what drives your behavior, it is so powerful, because now you know how to influence yourself and others. 

What drives your actions? What drives the behavior of your negotiation counterpart? 

You'll learn: 

1. What emotion is and the role it plays in driving our behavior 

2. The difference between neutral circumstances and thoughts, and how we become biased 

3. The thinking that generated $50K then $100K in income for me 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 63 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee. I specialize in helping women in male-dominated industries who love their jobs but hate office politics.

And I help them become bolder, braver, and better paid.

This is Part Two of a five-part podcast series that I’m doing on how to lead strategic conversations at work to improve your results, your reputation, and relationships.

And, in case you missed it, I highly recommend you go back and listen to the last episode, which was the first part in this five-part series. I talked about how to plan your strategic conversation with a future focus.

This is so important - so important - and many of us miss this part.

It’s important because, when you have future focus, you know what you want for your future and you want what you want from a place of abundance.

And what I mean by that is that, right now, you know you have enough and it’s great...and you want more.

And you appreciate that. You appreciate where you are and you want more and it’s this great feeling of abundant desire, rather than I don’t have enough. I’m a victim and I need more.

And when you’re in that scarcity mindset, it’s not great. You don’t feel great and so then you don’t have a great future focus.

So I wanna encourage you to really think and create your future focus that drives you to come to these strategic conversations with a feeling of calm, with a feeling of confidence, with a feeling of appreciation. Because, when you’re feeling this way and you’re future focused, you become more present in the now.

It’s so cool.

Today, I’m so excited to talk to you about the root of all behavior.

The root of all behavior.

It’s like this secret to the Universe. It is the secret to the Universe.

When you understand what drives people and their behavior and what drives your behavior - why you do what you do - it is so powerful because now you know what you can do to influence your behavior in a way that influences other people’s behavior.

I mean that’s the endgame of negotiation. That’s the endgame of strategic conversations, isn’t it?

So, first, you have to know how...well, before you know the how, you gotta know the why and that’s the part we’re gonna talk about.

And then you influence yourself first before influencing anyone else’s behavior.

So many of us don’t know why we don’t take action, why we don’t ask, why we hesitate to ask for what we want because we don’t understand what’s at the root of our behavior.

So, when I say this is like the secret to the Universe, is it a hyperbole? I don’t think so!

It is not. The root of all behavior is the why behind negotiation experts all agreeing that empathy, listening, and curiosity are the key skills and attributes of great negotiators.

Because, once you understand the root of all behavior, then you can get to it.

Okay, so the first thing I want to establish for you is that feelings drive all behavior and now, if you’re an engineer, a scientist, you’re a logical, rational-minded, technical person and you’re listening to this and you’re like That’s nuts. Feelings don’t drive my behavior! It’s data. It’s information!

Hold your horses there for a minute if you’re thinking that.

Because, when I say feelings, I’m talking about the vibration in your body that you experience as emotion. I’m not talking about the brain chatter that a lot of people associate with what they feel like.

And, when we are driven to take action after we consume specific information or data, we are being driven by the emotion of certainty, the emotion of having authority, the emotion of being right.

So, there are only five things. And feelings are right in the middle of those five things that just happen to explain the root of all behavior.

So what are the five things?

First, there are neutral circumstances, things that happen in our world that we can prove to be true. You have a conversation with Steve on Wednesday or you got an email from a colleague on Thursday. You can print that email and you can prove it in the court of law. You had a phone conversation and there is a log of that phone conversation. It happened.

So, circumstances are neutral, provable, they’re factual.

And this is important. I want you to really pay attention to this.

The second thing that’s really important to understanding the root of all behavior is that we have thoughts about those neutral circumstances and these thoughts are our opinions, our assessment, our interpretation, our judgments and our brains are hardwired for storytelling. We have verbal brains.

If you do speak language, if you do want to understand and communicate language, that is, we have a brain that is just constantly spewing out thoughts, judgments, assessments, opinions, interpretations.

Thoughts are not circumstances. Circumstances are not our thoughts.

Take, for example, I just coached a client who happens to work in a growing tech startup and she’s responsible for this new marketing project and she felt that it was a fact that no one has a clear idea how to execute this project. Those were her words. “No one has a clear idea how to execute this project.” And she felt that this was a fact.

It felt factual. It felt like a circumstance.

But, in fact, it’s her brain’s interpretation of a neutral circumstance called project. There’s this project, right? We can all agree that there’s a project they’re working on and it’s her assessment that no one has a clear idea.

This is a subjective assessment because somebody else could have a completely different thought that the project is going really well. And, in fact, in the same breath, she told me “The project can be executed if we had x, y, and z.”

So, in fact, she had an idea of how to execute the project, so this is really funny.

It might seem like I’m splitting hairs about circumstances and thoughts. This distinction is important. This is really, really important because of the way our brains have evolved, our brains are constantly judging, assessing, opining at the strategic conversation, at the negotiation table.

And we feel, because we’re so close to our thoughts, and for so many years we have thought that our thinking, our assessment, our opinions, our observations are facts, we are going to be biased.

We are going to be biased by what we think because, as humans, we are all biased. There’s nobody who’s not biased by what they think.

This is important and thinking is important because it creates the third thing that lies at the root of all behavior: our emotion.

Remember, I said feelings drive all our actions and emotion is experienced as a vibration in the body, right?

When you feel sad, you feel this energy drop. For me it’s like at the pit of my stomach. I feel the energy drop in my spine and my stomach and sometimes I feel like crying, sometimes I feel like holing up and not seeing people.

When I feel mad, I feel like punching somebody. When I feel mad, I feel like stomping. It’s an emotion that has a vibration in the body and it makes me want to take action, which is the fourth thing, right?

What we do is driven by what we feel.

And sometimes we don’t take action when we feel a certain emotion.

Take, for example, if you feel anxious because you’re thinking Oh, I can’t ask for what I want because then they’ll say no and I can’t deal with rejection. I can’t deal with rejection.

If that is the thought you have in your mind, you may feel anxiety and in order for you to push this anxiety aside, you might not take action. You might procrastinate. Now, I know this because I’ve done this myself for many, many years before I learned how to negotiate for myself and started teaching it to other women.

So the result you create is the sum of all these actions or inactions is the result of your thinking. The result will prove your thought to be right. And the result is the fifth thing in the root of all behavior, right?

So let me give an example.

And, first, to recap: first, there are neutral circumstances that are provable, factual.

Second, there are thoughts, our interpretation, our opinion, our assessment, our observation of neutral circumstances.

And there is the feeling that is generated by what we think.

And number four is what we do or what we don’t do because of the emotion created by the thought.

And, finally, the fifth thing is the result that we have.

I want you to think about this framework and think about the money that you make.

For me, at one point in my career, I made $50,000 while working at a hedge fund. And then a year into the job, I found out the going market rate was $100,000.

And that was a tough wake-up call that I had to figure this out.

I had to learn how to negotiate, learn how to communicate, learn how to engage in strategic conversations, lead and influence other people, so that I can improve my results and not shoot myself in the foot like I just had by earning $50,000 at a hedge fund.

So what was the thinking that had created the result of me making $50,000 at a hedge fund?

I was young, I was fresh out of college and I had the thought that I’m not supposed to ask for more. I’m not supposed to ask for more.

And the feeling that was created by this thought was kind of a fear.

I had the fear of messing up. I had the fear of Oh, I’m doing this new job and I’m a newbie, I don’t know, I shouldn’t ask questions, I should just keep my head down and just do good work and then they’re gonna reward me.

I had the thought that I’m not supposed to ask for more. I had the thought that They’re supposed to reward me and the feeling, one of the feelings that was created by this mindset was one of fear.

And because I was afraid, I didn’t ask for more. I didn’t research more. I didn’t try to figure it out. I just wanted to keep my head down. And that’s what I did. And that’s how I earned $50,000.

Fast-forward, several years later, I was working for tech startups in operations and I had read Women Don’t Ask, I trained, I hired a negotiation coach who specialized in training women. She became my role model.

And then I had a new thought about my salary. The new thought I had was that I will ask for what I want. And I had a future focus of one day making $100,000 and so I asked for what I want because, when I thought to myself on purpose, I’m going to do this, I’m going to negotiate, I’m going to ask for what I want, thinking that thought on purpose generated the feeling of courage that drove my action.

And I did sit down with the co-founders of this startup and I did ask for $100,000. I asked for a $20,000 salary increase.

The long and the short of it was they didn’t give it to me initially but, after fundraising, they did. They gave me a $20,000 salary increase. So, in the meantime, I asked, I kept believing that one day I will earn what I want. I continued to create value in that role and, as a result, one day, fast-forward a couple months later, they did reward me with a $20,000 salary increase and I got the salary of $100,000. That was really cool.

So, what does this mean for you?

How can you raise your self-awareness around what you are thinking about you, about the negotiation process, about the negotiation counterpart, about the potential outcome of this negotiation?

I want you to write it all down.

And don’t try to be more mature or more enlightened. Just write down what you think and what your brain is coming up with and then just observe, Oh, these are my thoughts.

And this is something that I do all the time. A thought download. Just write down all your thoughts - negative, positive, intentional, unintentional - and see what is the impact of the thinking that you’re having, the impact of your mindset around your strategic conversation and how is it impacting your emotions, your current actions and the results that you have now?

By the way, the results you have now, one of which can be the amount of money you make now in your job, is the result of past thinking.

So, think about okay, what was I thinking a year ago? Was I thinking I gotta do whatever it takes to get this job? Or I know my worth and I’m going to ask for that salary increase?

Just notice. Notice how what you were thinking in the past has created the result you have now.

So what this means is that what you think now will create the result you have in the future. What you think now about that conversation, about your counterpart, about the process and potential outcomes will impact the results you have later.

So you want to be really intentional about it, yeah?

Most of us don’t realize that our thinking is creating our results. Most of us feel like we’re at the effect of circumstances that are not neutral but somehow set up against us. I really did believe and feel this way before I learned how to shift my mindset, so to speak.

So, I have some parting thoughts for you.

What if everything about where you are in your career, everything about that upcoming conversation, everything about your counterpart is the way it’s supposed to be?

What if you are where you’re supposed to be?

Because, you know, the world changes depending on our perspective.

I could have a thought This is a great day and I can feel great or I can have the thought This is a terrible day and feel terrible, right?

It’s the same thing about your negotiation. So what I’m saying is how you think will impact how you negotiate.

And how your counterpart is thinking will impact how they show up and how they feel about the negotiation and the results they have from the negotiation.

How you think creates your results and this applies to your salary, this applies to your work, this applies to the relations you have at work. So I wanna leave you with this thought that maybe the first thing you want to do is just simply raise your self-awareness around what you’re thinking.

Write it all down and ask yourself why am I thinking this?

Why?

What emotions are driving your behavior?

What emotions do you want to drive your behavior?

What emotions do you want them to experience?

So, if you want to learn more on this topic, if you really want to start changing your own behavior so you do become bolder, braver, and better paid from a place of genuine self-confidence and real power that comes from within, I have an offer for you.

I have an exclusive six-week coaching program where we’re going to explore what’s not working for you, we’re going to explore your compelling vision, we’re going to explore your emotional mastery, we’re gonna explore how you can cut through the drama, we’re gonna explore how you can create conscious leadership and create intentional outcomes in your career. And one of those best be becoming bolder, braver, and better paid.

So if you want to learn more, you can email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com. Come to my site, jamieleecoach.com and I look forward to hearing from you and, next week, I’ll tell you more about how to engage in and lead strategic conversations.

Thank you and have a great week!

Strategic Conversations, Part 1 - Planning with Future Focus

I coach smart women to get promoted and better paid without throwing anyone under the bus, manipulating people, or burning themselves out. 

How? 

I teach simple but powerful concepts that help my clients engage in strategic conversations with a mindset of self-confidence and authentic power. 

Over five podcast episodes, I'll be teaching each of these five simple but powerful concepts that you can immediately implement into your life and career so you can get bolder, braver, and better paid. 

This episode is about the first and most important concept: Planning with Future Focus. 

Three questions I ask my clients to help them with Future Focus is: 

1. WHO are you in the process of becoming? 

2. WHAT results do you want in the future? 

3. HOW can you be your Future Self now? 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 62 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m Jamie Lee. I’m a coach who helps smart, ambitious women working in male-dominated industries like tech, engineering, finance, energy, etc. get promoted and better paid.

My clients do this without throwing anyone under the bus because, frankly speaking, they hate office politics and who can blame them? And my clients learn how to thrive in their careers without playing little games or manipulating people.

Most importantly, they do it without burning themselves out.

How?

I teach my clients how to engage in strategic conversations with a mindset that generates self-confidence and authentic power.

My clients learn how to negotiate, lead, and influence with emotional mastery, which is the secret to lasting success and genuine confidence.

Now, if you’re listening to this and wondering: Wait, what? Where’s the catch?

Here’s the catch: It’s simple.

Really, no! So simple that you might overlook it, you might disregard it.

I certainly did for the first 35 years of my life, almost 40. The secret is that it’s so simple to master these strategies, to learn the new mindset, but it takes effort, it takes practice, it takes a whole lot of mental focus to get it right.

So it’s simple but not easy.

So I want you to stay tuned for more on this because I will be teaching you, my dear podcast listeners, my thrivers, these simple, powerful, but not always easy to implement concepts right here in this podcast.

Why?

Because you’re born to thrive. Not just survive, not just get by, but thrive.

I believe that.

This past week, I had the amazing privilege of presenting one of my favorite workshops: Strategic Conversations - How to Lead, Influence, and (of course) Thrive for women working in deep foundations right here in Manhattan.

For those of you who are not engineers, like me, I will tell you what deep foundations is. I Googled it and I also learned from having conversations with the engineers this past week: deep foundations is the work geotechnical engineers do - geotechnical means that they work with the earth, the rocks - and they study the earth, the rocks, and figure out the best way to lay down roots for buildings - foundations for buildings, highrises. And we have plenty of them here in New York City.

So, the deeper the roots, the more sophisticated the foundations, the higher the building can rise.

And, on a personal note, this is so cool. This is so cool for me because I recently moved to Hudson Yards here in New York City and Langan, the engineering firm that hosted the workshop this week, it’s the same engineering firm that laid down the deep foundations for Hudson Yards.

It took two years, I learned. Nearly the entire New York office and probably more working around the clock, hundreds of engineers working around the clock for two years. I heard they had to work 24-hour shifts, just around the clock, all hands on deck and they laid down the most technologically advanced and the most deep foundations in the Western Hemisphere. Isn’t that so cool? I think that’s amazing.

And what’s really, really mind-boggling is that Hudson Yards is actually built on top of servicing train lines and so they had to be so sophisticated and it was like laying down some really intricate root canals right next to servicing train lines. And I heard some amazing stories of how engineers - the best engineers - worked around the clock to make this possible.

Anyway, at this workshop this past week, I presented five key ingredients of strategic conversations, how to lead, how to influence so you can thrive in your career by showing up to strategic conversations and leading them.

So, these key ingredients are some of the most simple but powerful concepts that you can immediately implement into your career to get bolder - that’s right - to get braver, of course, and get better paid.

I’ve decided to teach each of these concepts over a five-podcast series starting today. The first of these five concepts is planning with future focus, so that’s what we’ll talk about today.

Most of us are past-focused and I know this because when I ask my coaching clients, “Okay, tell me about where you are now and where you want to go,” they immediately go into their past. They immediately start telling me about where they went to school, how they got their first job, how they got lucky or they didn’t get lucky and now they are where they are. And so they tell me everything about what had happened in their past because we, a lot of people, most of us are past-focused and we feel that what has happened in our past will determine our present and our future.

And when you think that the past determines your present and your future, guess what you get.

More of the same. More of your past.

If you had experienced some things that are unfair...I remember early in my career when I worked at many of these companies, many, most of these companies, I always felt the situation was unfair. And when I thought the situation was unfair, my boss was terrible, he’s not a good manager, things are so unfair for me. And when I thought this, I always sought evidence of how the situation was unfair for me in the past and how the situation was unfair for me now and then I created that by thinking it into the future.

And of course, when I got to the future, that’s what I got because I was always thinking it’s unfair.

And our primitive brains are wired for security, safety, and comfort and I think this explains why so many of us are past-focused as opposed to future-focused because the brain is wired for security, safety, and comfort and the brain will look to repeat patterns of the past so that it can have a sense of security, safety and comfort.

Even if you feel miserable, if you’ve been so miserable in your life, it just feels comfortable being miserable because it’s what is familiar. So then we keep looking for the familiar in the past, in the present, and then again in the future.

What if we said we can have a future focus, not a past focus?

This is simple but it takes mental focus. It takes active imagination to create future focus. And it’s simple but it might feel unnatural and, because it feels unnatural, it might feel uncomfortable and, because it feels uncomfortable, not a lot of people do it. And that’s how you stay stuck in your past focus, repeating the past over and over again.

Nothing changes if you keep looking into the past.

So, I have some key questions to help you create future focus and I hope you take this as an opportunity to apply this to your own life, to your own career, and you can do this by writing down your own answers to these questions.

The first question that I like to ask is: Who are you in the process of becoming?

When we were young, we were always in the process of becoming something new. I remember,  when I graduated kindergarten, I was interviewed at the kindergarten graduation ceremony and the adult asked me “Who do you want to become in the future?” And I said “I want to become a teacher.”

And here I am, teaching.

And when you were in elementary school, who are you in the process of becoming? You were always preparing for the next grade. If you’re in first grade, you’re looking forward to becoming a second-grader. If you’re a second-grader, you’re looking forward to becoming a third-grader and so on and so forth, right?

But then, sometime after college graduation or high school graduation, we stop asking ourselves who are we in the process of becoming?

And we feel like we’ve just become a person.

Or, worse yet, we feel like we need somebody else’s permission to become the next level.

And I see this is my own experience when I felt that I needed the acceptance, the approval of my supervisors, my managers, my employers. I needed them to give me their stamp of approval so that I can become promoted and become a manager and become the next level.

And what I want to offer you is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to become someone new.

You only need your own permission.

You don’t need the school system, you don’t need the authorities, you don’t need the employer to give you a definition of who you are in the process of becoming.

It’s up to you.

If you can imagine it, you can be it.

Take, for example, I have a recent client who works in a male-dominated industry, super smart, super ambitious, her brain is just amazing. And she hates office politics, right? And she kind of struggled with this future focus and then we landed at: I’m in the process of becoming somebody who fulfills her potential.

And that unlocked a lot of self-appreciation, self-acceptance, self-confidence.

And she had a recent win she shared with me, which is that she’s been doing so well in her job right now she got a call from this C-level executive who called her personally and told her that she should continue to act as if she couldn’t fail.

And I think that’s because she has created the mindset of I’m becoming a person who fulfills her potential.

What you think creates your result.

So if you think you are becoming somebody who is a better leader, if you think you are becoming somebody who is bolder, who is braver, who is better paid, then you can make that a reality.

Just by thinking it, believing it and seeing it, imagining it, you have already created this as a possibility for you.

So the only permission you need is yours.

Who are you in the process of becoming?

I am in the process of becoming somebody who creates a scalable coaching business. I am in the process of becoming a coach who creates $250,000 and more in annual revenues. And I love just thinking about who I am in the process of becoming.

Take, for example, you can become somebody who has as much money as you want.

I like to think about what would it be like for me to just have an extra $20,000 in my bank account? It’s just sitting there in my checking account. It’s just sitting there, sitting pretty, and when I go to my checking account, I see it, it’s just there. And I’m like, yeah, that’s a possibility and I am in the process of becoming somebody who has created that result.

So my next question for you to help create a future focus is: What results do you want for yourself in the future?

And this is a big question that a lot of people, surprisingly, struggle with. 9 out of 10 times when I ask my clients, “What do you want for yourself?” the first words out of their mouth are “I don’t know.”

So I want you to take some time and just write down what do I want for myself?

I want to have more money.

I want to be a leader in the industry.

I want to be promoted.

What you want is, I think, something that is sacred. And when you can want something and feel good about wanting it, it’s just magical.

And the secret to this magic is to want what you want from a place of abundance, not scarcity.

And you would know if you’re in a scarcity mindset because you’re thinking, “You know, if I make more money, than it means someone else makes less money and that makes me feel bad. If I win, that means someone has to lose.”

In other words, you’re thinking in a win/lose mindset, a zero-sum game.

You’re thinking there’s only a fixed and limited amount of good things in the world and I shouldn’t be the one to hog it all. I don’t deserve what I want.

The impact of you bringing a scarcity mindset to a strategic conversation is that it results in you bringing a past focus. It results in you thinking, “Well, I did x, so give me y.” It results in you creating this sort of win/lose mindset that can create a haggling situation as opposed to a win/win conversation.

So the alternative to this is to come from a place of abundance, to want what you want and feel good because you’re coming from the mindset of there’s always more and the abundance only grows.

Now, these are two diametrically opposed mindsets and it’s totally okay for us to sort of struggle in terms of straddling from all of our thinking, having been in this scarcity mindset and we’re now trying to cross what I call the River of Misery and really think and believe from an abundance mindset. That’s where I am. And that’s where most of us are because most of us have a human brain, most of us are predisposed to think in scarcity and it takes effort, it takes mental focus to consciously choose to think in an abundance mindset.

In other words, belief is a choice. It’s a choice that takes effort.

And I have been practicing this abundance mindset for a few years now, just a few years since I’ve become a coach, and it has created a tremendous impact in my life, in my thinking, in how I feel, and in the results I create because I now do believe and I do think that when I make more money, when I have created that amazing, scalable business, when I do just have that $20,000 just sitting in my checking account, sitting pretty, my clients get to make more money because when I’m more successful, it means that I get to invest more into making this business scalable, successful, impactful, and that creates positive results in the people I work with.

The work I do changes lives. I mean, right now, I have clients who have generated 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars increase in salary. Just imagine what else is possible if I can grow as a person, as a coach, as a business person.

Imagine the impact that you can make if your abundance only grows and grows.

I think about my mother a lot because I kind of have learned my scarcity mindset from her but, at the same time, I’ve also learned the impact of what happens when women win, when women economically, when women make money.

There’s research that’s quoted by Clinton Global Institute that women around the world in developing countries, when they make money, they invest 90% of it back into their families and that means it goes back into their communities. So, when women win, the world wins.

And my mother showed this to me with her example, even though she taught me a lot of scarcity mindset by her example, she also taught me that when she made money, she made sure it went toward children. We got it. We got it in terms of food, in terms of rent, in terms of clothing, in terms of education, right?

When women win, families, communities, the world wins.

So, when you win, we all win.

It’s a win/win game.

And that is the abundance mindset that is so important for you to bring to yourself, to your future focus, to your strategic conversation.

It’s so powerful when you come to this conversation, let’s say a salary negotiation, with the mindset of There’s plenty of good things in the world. There’s plenty of value that I can create. And there’s plenty of money to go around. And I’m worthy of what I want. I’m worthy of the value I create. I’m worthy of the money I earn.

Just imagine the power of believing it and bringing it with you to the conversation.

This is a tough one to really believe.

I know because I’ve coached my smart, ambitious women around it. It’s so tough but you can believe it if you practice it, if you want to believe it.

A lot of us, a lot of us who are smart, a lot of us who are ambitious, we feel like we need to struggle. We feel like we need to strive, you know?

Again, this is the example I learned from my mother: you gotta strive, you gotta work hard, you gotta put in that extra effort, there’s virtue in working hard.

And of course, this is all great. There’s nothing wrong with that. Working hard feels great.

But if we approach it from a scarcity mindset, there’s only a limited amount of good things and we’re not really sure we’re really worthy of it, so maybe we shouldn’t have what we want. Underneath, there’s the fear that we’re not worthy of our success, which leads to tension, which leads to stress, which leads to subconscious stress, this cognitive dissonance.

But what if you can imagine the person you are currently in the process of becoming? What if you can imagine your future self and you can imagine your future self with absolute love, unconditional love?

And when I ask my clients to imagine their future self, who is successful, who is worthy and when I ask them, “What emotion does your future self feel?”, they almost always say “Present. Calm. In the moment.”

And so this is really fascinating because, the more we think about our future self, the more we think about who we are in the process of becoming, the more we think to believe that we are worthy of what we want for ourselves in the future, we come back into the present. We become present. Now.

This leads to my third question: How can you be your future self now? How can you live into that future vision now? And how can you bring that future self to this strategic conversation?

How would your successful vision of you in the future, what does she look like? How does she hold herself? How does she show up to a strategic conversation?

Would she sit tall? Might she make eye contact? And might she think, “You know, what I want is a done deal because I can imagine the future and it’s amazing and it’s great and I’m worthy of it,” and so it’s not such a big deal that you ask for what you want because you’re coming from a place of abundance, you’re coming from a place of worthiness.

And so another way to think about it is kind of like you’re reverse engineering your future self into the now. You imagine your future, you live into it because what you imagine for the future is what you bring now because when you imagine the future, you feel the emotions now. Just like when you imagine, or when you think about the past, you feel those emotions now. So it’s always what you think now, whether that’s the past or the future.

And the option that I want to offer you is that you can come from an abundance, from a place of worthiness and luxuriate, enjoy what you want, feel good in what you want.

And when you do that, it’s not such a big deal if you’re in this strategic conversation and you encounter some pushback, you hear no, it’s not such a big deal because in the future, you know it’s a done deal. It’s just a small stumbling block right now and you can deal with it.

What couldn’t you ask for? What couldn’t be able to say with honesty if you really came from a place of love, abundance, worthiness, from the future?

So, if you enjoy this, if you enjoyed listening about your future focus and how to bring this future focus to your strategic conversation, I want to invite you to my exclusive six-week coaching program that I’ve just created for women who are ambitious, women who want to become braver leaders and braver leaders who are better paid.

It’s a six-week program.

In the first week, we’re going to explore what’s not working for you.

The second week, we explore that compelling vision of your future.

The third week we talk about emotional mastery because emotional mastery creates negotiation mastery.

And then week four, we talk about how to cut through the drama with your emotional mastery. Week five we talk about your conscious leadership, we put all the elements together.

And then week six it all comes together for us to hone in on the intentional outcomes, the results that you want to create with your leadership, with your mastery of emotions and negotiation.

So, if you are interested and you want to schedule a quick consult to see if this might be a good fit for you, email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com.

I look forward to hearing from you and I will talk to you again next week.

How to Negotiate Budget Cuts and Unconscious Bias with Amy Auton-Smith

I met Amy Auton-Smith at Catalyst Conference in March 2019. She shared a salary negotiation story of how she successfully negotiated a win-win solution when the budget for her position was significantly reduced. I immediately knew I'd love to have her share both her negotiation story and the story of how she started her startup on the podcast. 

Amy is a long-term champion of equality and diversity. As CEO of FairFrame, she's working to bring cutting-edge tech and diversity and inclusion research outcomes together to help mitigate the effects of unconscious bias at work. Amy is passionate about helping employers and leaders everywhere to ensure that everyone can achieve their true potential at work.

Check out Fairframe.io or on Crunchbase. 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 61 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I am a leadership and negotiation coach and today I am really excited to share this interview with Amy Auton-Smith of FairFrame.io.

Amy is a long-term champion of equality and diversity and, as CEO of Fair Frame, she’s working to bring cutting-edge tech and diversity and inclusion research outcomes together to help mitigate the effects of unconscious bias at work.

Amy is passionate about helping employers and leaders everywhere to ensure that everyone can achieve their true potential at work.

I met Amy at the Catalyst Conference in New York City last month. She had a booth where she was showcasing her company, FairFrame.io and the technology is really cool and interesting and you’ll hear more about that in the interview.

But, while we were talking, when I shared with her that I’m a negotiation coach, she shared this amazing story of how she negotiated her salary, her working arrangement when she was still working as an attorney. She was offered a great job with great pay and then, right before she was about to say yes, the pay was significantly reduced.

And so then she came up with a solution to the problem that made both sides happy and she was happy with the outcome. So I thought it was a great story. I wanted you to hear it from her and also to learn more about the really cool work that women are doing, women entrepreneurs are doing, to help mitigate the effects of unconscious bias at work.

So, without further ado, here’s the interview with Amy Auton-Smith. Enjoy.

Jamie: Hello, Amy!

Amy: Hi, Jamie. Nice to speak to you.

Jamie: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Before we dive into the questions, I’d love for you to tell us more about FairFrame.io.

Amy: So, FairFrame.io is an early-stage startup based in New York which helps people to see the linguistics of unconscious bias, so how the way we express ourselves can indicate stereotyped ways of thinking. And then we also use our ability to surface unconscious bias and stereotype in writing to inform large-scale analytics for organizations. So we both help individuals to see, right there in the moment, how thinking processes can influence how we rate and appraise other people and we provide analytics for organizations on a large scale.

Jamie: Wow. This is really fascinating and I think people would find this kind of tool very useful and I know, for a lot of women, they encounter unconscious bias in the process of negotiating their careers and even their lives, you know.  And so, I’m curious, for you, what has been the biggest negotiation that had the most impact on your life and career?

Amy: Well, just on the first part, we get such a positive response from women when they see what FairFrame does and how it really helps people to see where stereotyped thinking creeps into everyday interactions. We’ve had so many women, especially senior women leaders go “Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen that before.”

I think for me one of the most notably interesting negotiations that I remember in relation to senior level positions was when I was applying for a leadership role and I’d been approached by the headhunter and I’d been given the specifications for the role, including the particular salary that was on offer, and I went through a very long selection process with multiple interviews including interviews with the chair of the company and the CEO and they indicated that they would like to make me a job offer but then the head of HR phoned me and, slightly apologetically, indicated that the salary for the role had changed and it had changed downwards quite dramatically.

So I inquired what was the reason for this and they said that the budget for the role had changed. So, at that point, I kind of was faced with a rather difficult situation because the role was one that I really wanted but the salary that was on offer was in no way attractive. So I took the information and said, “Okay, well, thank you very much. I’ll think about it,” and paused to reflect. My initial inclination was to say, “Okay, this is time wasting and they obviously don’t value the skills that I’m gonna bring to this role.” However, upon reflection, I thought, you know, maybe there is a budgetary element here and perhaps if I take them on face value, there might be an opening.

So I went back to them and I said “Well, the salary that you’re offering for the full-time role isn’t attractive but if you’d be interested in making the role part-time, I’m actually looking at starting some initiatives myself separately and I would be interested in a part-time role.” And I suggested that I work the equivalent of...the equivalent reduced number of hours to make the salary what they had originally suggested. And the head of HR took this away and very quickly came back and said that they’d love to proceed. So we turned what could have been, you know, quite a difficult situation to one where, in fact, in turned out better for me and I think for the organization as well.

Jamie: That’s wonderful! You know, this sort of thing happens more often than we’d like where you’re going for a position or an opportunity and the budget isn’t...and we’re like “Oh, this is great!” and then out of the blue somebody says “Oh, now we don’t have the budget.” So I really appreciate how you didn’t take it personally when the budget was cut. You didn’t make it mean something kind of negative about how they’re valuing you or undervaluing you and you were able to achieve a win-win situation where you got to take the job and have more time and get paid the appropriate amount of money. So, I’m curious, how did you go from there to starting FairFrame?

Amy: So I suppose perhaps my experience in that role did make me more attuned to actual variations in the workplace and, interestingly, for that particular workplace, my salary was quite helpful to them eventually when people did start querying the gender pay gap within the organization and, I suppose, fortunately for them, because they had me on this relatively high salary compared to a lot of other women in broadly similar roles in the organization, they were able to say that they were, you know,  not applying a blanket differential in how they paid their people but there was the suggestion that this might be the case.

So I started to become quite interested in the dynamics of gender equality in leadership. And I have a long history of being involved in relation to gender equality generally, particularly, I started out with human rights for women and girls and then became a sort of amateur active workplace champion in the way that quite a lot of people do.

So, a few years ago, I started to look at changing from my career focus of being an organizational attorney. So I was chief legal officer in my last role and I was looking at ways to become more active and more agentic in relation to delivering change on gender equality. So, at the time, I started to look for academic courses in gender, classes that I could take at universities in the UK and, at the same time, my partner was offered the chance to move to New York.

And I always said no to this before because moving overseas and a UK-specific legal qualification don’t tend to hang together super well but I saw an opportunity, so the deal was we would move to New York and I would have a period of time in which I could study for a Master’s degree in a gender or gender-parallel field so I actually...we moved to New York about four years ago and I went to NYU to do a degree in general management but with the option, which I took, to take several classes in organizational diversity and that kind of iterated...I originally assumed that I would look for some kind of role where I could either work in an organization that helped to foster an environment of diversity and inclusion or perhaps to take a leadership role in relation to that.

And then being part of the NYU ecosystem gave me access to such an amazing entrepreneurial environment and it sparked the thought that perhaps I could become an entrepreneur and, at the same time, I was doing a project with a large, multinational organization in which I’d seen the lack of resources available to people who wanted to be more effective on identifying issues of bias and stereotype but there’s very few products available to help people. So, putting the two things together - the environment and also my desire to foster a more active role in relation to diversity and inclusion - led me to have the idea for FairFrame and to start down the process of becoming an entrepreneur.

Jamie: Excellent! You know, the way you describe it, it’s like one thing led to another, another, and then, you know, here you are. And I gotta ask, was it a smooth ride?

Amy: So...no. When I first moved to the US having quit my legal career, that was a pretty anxious time because the legal profession in the UK is a very defined career track, so I had one of those, nowadays, pretty unusual resumes where every position was an increasing level of responsibility, etc., etc. And I had reached a very senior level. So then to, you know, as my late night subconscious thought processes phrased it, “throw everything away” to move overseas and potentially start again from scratch was...it wasn’t easy and I did have a lot of nights when I lay awake wondering if I’d made a horrible mistake.

Jamie: Mmm. Yeah. I think a lot of the people who are listening would empathize because we want to create something new and audacious but there’s always that fear. And so what was the compelling vision for you to overcome, you know, those sleepless nights and doubt and all of that?

Amy: Well, fundamentally, I mean, I didn’t make this decision on a whim. So it was something that my partner and I looked at very carefully and we looked at whether it was affordable and doable and how it would fit into a long-term strategy and the risk was a pretty calculated one, to be honest. So, having the opportunity to come to the US and study at NYU is not something that is in itself a risky endeavor and there was always the possibility of returning to the UK and, you know,  perhaps going back into the same career track, so I think the unconscious level of all the sort of evenings, late nights level of worry was not proportionate to the actual risk. And the risk that we were taking was one that we thought through and assessed and what it did do, of course, is open up way more doors than the one door that I’d closed by, you know, stepping away from my legal career to explore this opportunity.

Jamie: Mmm. Yeah, so kind of taking a step back and thinking about the landscape, what do you think is possible for women? You know, especially women like you who want to become bolder, braver, and better paid? You know, unconscious bias exists, right, so what can women do to overcome the barriers?

Amy: Yeah and I think that’s a really simple-sounding question which actually has a very complex societal framework around it. So, frankly, one of the only reasons why I can even contemplate being an entrepreneur is because I have a partner who is able to support our family and our family’s expenses. So, you know, I’m not single and in my twenties with, you know, a lifestyle that doesn’t carry a lot of inherent cost. I think that is an interesting part of the startup environments and the ecosystem, which is the extent to which the doors are not in fact open to all entrepreneurs.

And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the extent to which support is available to entrepreneurs where...you know, working carries a cost. So, for example, if you have caring responsibilities and you need to travel or even be away from home for meetings, as soon as you have caring responsibilities, that isn’t a free activity. You have to pay someone to be there while you’re not and, for as long as entrepreneurs don’t have access to support in those early stages before businesses become revenue-generating and able to pay salaries, there is an extent to which the entrepreneurial ecosystem is gonna be a closed door. I think it will be very interesting for the VCs and the entrepreneurial support ecosystem to look at whether there is an interest in and whether there is an opportunity left on the table from entrepreneurs for whom working carries an actual cost.

I think, in terms of succeeding as a woman, being aware of the ways that unconscious bias and stereotype can play against you is probably good knowledge to have and then to be able to plot your route through despite the biases and the stereotype that might apply. So avoiding the kind of fix-the-woman approach, which tends to be quite prevalent in a lot of diversity and inclusion initiatives but also being aware that achieving an objective might require a more careful navigation than would be the case for, say, a man in a similar position.

Jamie: Mmm. So, what I’m gleaning from what you said is don’t assume that there is something wrong with you because you encounter an imperfect world.

Amy: No, absolutely. And I think the value that women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color bring to the entrepreneurial ecosystem is dramatically undervalued at this point and despite the higher [indecipherable] in some circumstances, I think having that determination and also not taking it personally are good attributes to have.

And, fundamentally, there are a lot of ideas out there that are not being looked at by huge swathes of the startup ecosystem, so if you have a good idea and you have belief in yourself, push through some of the resistance that you might encounter because chances are that resistance is based upon the other person’s prior experience and expectation, which almost necessarily because of the low participation of women and people of color and other minority entrepreneurs in that ecosystem, their experience is likely not to include how you look at things and what you can bring to the table. So, obviously, pay attention to advice that you receive along the way but also maybe don’t always pay too much attention to it. Keep that self-belief.

Jamie: Yeah, I love that. So don’t just fold or give in immediately when you encounter pushback, right? Because it might have nothing to do with you. It’s all about what they’re thinking and believing based on their past experience. And so, you know, your first story really exemplified that really well. You encountered a potential obstacle and you’re like no, you know, maybe we can still work with this and you found a great work-around solution.

So, I’m kind of curious, you know, from using....from your work with FairFrame, do you have any suggestions, like communication strategies that you would recommend in terms of how to respond to, you know, language that is...or perspective or pushback that comes from an unconscious bias point of view.

Amy: Yeah, and that’s a really interesting questions because I would look at it from the point of view of why should the person on the receiving end be the one who has to recalibrate the behavior? And I would say the way we should be looking at this is not how can someone help someone else to understand that their own perspective and experiences might be different. Take that burden off the women and underrepresented people and actually ask those in positions of decision-making power to be more self-aware and conscious about people’s different lived experiences.

Having said that, if you are in an experience or a workplace where that level of sophistication in the levels above you or around you isn’t present...yeah, calling out behaviors can be helpful but also frequently can be tricky, so I think looking for the work-around and finding the allies, finding the supporters, finding the mentors is going to be key.

And I think, especially in the workplace, a lot of workplaces now are taking this a lot more seriously than has previously been the case so there might even be opportunities where, if the support is not available to you, actually there might be a door open somewhere for you to take a lead in saying, hey, we need this and it’s more than just me, there’s whole ways in which we as an organization can do better and see if those doors might open. But, yeah, fundamentally, it is a difficult paradigm to negotiate and there is a well-known backlash effect as well for raising things and raising things in certain ways and then that’s unfortunate.

Jamie: Well, let me ask you this: what would constitute, you know, communication that reflects unconscious bias? What’s something that gets flagged over and over again in your work with FairFrame?

Amy: So we, because we’re looking at the linguistics of bias, I’m connected in to quite a few people who are researching this at the moment and also starting to use some really interesting technology techniques to identify linguistic text for bias. So FairFrame combines a machine learning approach with also a social science-based approach. So we’ve gone through vast quantities of research to identify the linguistic tags of stereotype and bias that have previously been identified by researchers and what’s super exciting for us is people in the ecosystem that we’re interacting with have been really inspired to look at this as a source of study and obviously, this is happening elsewhere as well.

And we see...I got sent today, in fact, two pieces of research by someone that we’ve been talking to about the linguistics of bias and how, you know, the way that we think is reflected in the way we express ourselves. So classic examples would be, you know, think of the way things like the word “abrasive” and I mean this is a fairly well-known example which you would hope is still not being used but, you know, whenever we mention the word “abrasive,” senior women shake their head and say, ugh, I’ve seen this over and over again.

So changing from a description of “abrasive” to maybe “assertive” or “has direct communications skills” or “has a direct communication style” and asking managers to be aware that if you’re using this word and you’re using it for a women, that this is word that is dramatically more likely to be used for women and it carries a stereotype and a bias load, so rephrasing yourself and readjusting your thinking onto whether what you characterize as abrasive in this person in front of you might actually be just a very direct communication style when your personal expectation of them is that they are, maybe, warm and perhaps caring in how they present to other people but those attributes wouldn’t be expected uniformly across the peer group.

So just prompting that thought process: am I applying the same standards to this person in front of me as I would apply to others from a different group? And if the answer is maybe or no then it’s probably time to readjust your thinking and how you’re appraising this person in front of you.

Jamie: Yeah and I think when you say that, you really, you know, touch on both the opportunity and the challenge of addressing bias because it’s so deeply ingrained in how people think and somebody who says oh, that Cheryl is so shrill and abrasive…

Amy: Right.

Jamie: They’re just making an observation and not realize that they’re making a choice, an unconscious choice to see this person as problematic, not...rather than appreciating her directness. So, yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, you know, your work is so fascinating and I think it’s valuable. Where can people go to learn more about the work you do?

Amy: So, we’re still very early-stage and we haven’t launched a public-facing product yet so we’re working with some large organizations to refine and calibrate how we present this information to managers and also how we present the analytics in a dashboard format, so there’s www.fairframe.io, which is our company’s landing page, and then keep an eye out on LinkedIn, so I’m always happy to connect with people who want to see what’s going up on LinkedIn and I always post a selection of interesting snippets from the diversity and inclusion community, particularly ones related to linguistics and how we can be more effective and in the moment about the management of our own stereotypes and bias.

And I do want to be very clear about one thing right here, which is it can often come across as thought, when we talk about rating and appraising people in the workplace, we’re just talking about men rating women but one thing to be really clear about is stereotype and bias that focuses on gender attributes is something that is common to both men and women in the workplace.

So just to highlight, when I talk about a manager looking at a person in front of them, it’s not always the case that that manager is going to be a man. And these ways of thinking that we have are common across most human beings, so just to emphasize that there are ways in which all of us can become better at becoming more objective in our appraisal of others in the workplace.

And the key factor here, of course, is the ones who are less likely to benefit from stereotypes, positive or negative stereotypes, are women and groups that tend to be underrepresented as you move further up an organization. So everyone who’s in decision-making positions or positions of leadership, I would say it is a useful exercise to consider whether our own thought processes might be inadvertently blinding us to positive attributes in people in front of us.

And they’re a little discredited in some circles but there’s a really interesting little test you can do online called the Implicit Association Tests and these have been running for a very long time and they’re quite straightforward. What they do is ask people taking the test to correlate, for example, certain words with, for example, work or family. And the speed with which you can correlate, say, a feminine word or idea with family versus a feminine word or idea with work can indicate how easily your brain processes these and whether there’s a match or a mismatch in your unconscious processing. And I’ve taken these tests and it is really fascinating to just feel that slight hesitation sometimes when you’re trying to correlate something where your brain is saying, you know, men and career, women and family and then to try and switch round. And it was very interesting for me to take these tests because, despite my close engagement with diversity and inclusion, you know, it really brought home to me that my thought processes follow quite a stereotypical pattern until I self-correct.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Amy: To overlay that conscious level of processing information which is, of course, where that’s a decision-making and more objective decision-making arises.

Jamie: Yeah, I’ve taken the Harvard Implicit Bias test many years ago and I found out I was rather biased, more biased than I would like.

Amy: [laughs]

Jamie: And, you know, now that I work as a coach and I really help people shift their mindset, it’s all in the brain, right? The habits of your brain, the neural pathways that have been strengthened by practice. In other words, your just patterns of thinking over and over again and often these patterns are unconscious, it’s at the root of unconscious bias.

Amy: Definitely, yes.

Jamie: Yeah. It takes practice. It can be sometimes painful to realize that what you think to be true is not necessarily true. What we think is an observation and what we think is objective and when you say oh, that boss is terrible and these people hate me or this person has an agenda against me, you think you’re being objective but then you realize this is all opinions. Yeah, so…

Amy: It’s an incredibly huge...it’s an incredibly difficult for human beings to be genuinely objective and one of...Google has looked at this quite a lot and I was flicking through the Google re:Work suite of documentation and they highlight some research that shows the human brain has assessed by neuroscience researchers to process something like 11 million bits of information at any one time, of which we’re processing 40 consciously so, but sort of you know, 99.9996% unconscious in how we process the world around us.

And in the context of a busy workplace, particularly doing something that we feel we’ve got skills in and that we’ve been doing for many years, it’s exceptionally difficult to step out of those patterns of thinking, which is why I really hope that FairFrame will make a difference just in giving that in-the-moment prompt and that behavioral nudge, if you like, to apply a diversity thinking mindset rather than a pre-programmed thought process which is making those unconscious assumptions and decisions.

Jamie: Yeah. You’re doing really awesome work. Well, thank you so much Amy for your valuable time, your expertise and this great business that’s going to remind us more of our own unconscious thinking so that we can correct it and think more consciously and create better businesses and diversity in the world.

Amy: Jamie, it’s been a pleasure and thank you so much for your work in giving people voices and some interesting things to think about. It’s been great to meet you.

Jamie: Alright. Have a good one!

Amy: Thank you, and to you!

Two Simple Reminders That Improve Negotiation Outcomes: Dr. Julia Bear

According to research, women's monetary negotiation outcomes improved when they did two things before negotiating: 

1. Recalling the last three times they were assertive 

2. Imagining that they are negotiating for a friend. 

In this episode, I interview one of the co-authors of this research, Julia Bear. 

We explored this research, why what and how we think impact our negotiation results, and how we can apply research like this to improve our negotiation outcomes. 

Julia Bear is an Associate Professor in the College of Business at Stony Brook University. Dr. Bear’s research focuses on the influence of gender on negotiation outcomes, as well as conflict management in organizations. In her research, she investigates what factors, both individual and situational, influence the gender gap typically seen in negotiation outcomes, and how an understanding of these factors can help to reduce this gender gap in both initiation of negotiation and negotiation performance. 

Link to the research: Negotiating Femininity

Other resources mentioned include:

HBR article: 10 Myths about Negotiating Your First Salary

Book: Women Don't Ask

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 60 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach - now a certified coach, thank you very much! - Jamie Lee.

And today, I have a really special episode for you. I have an interview with Dr. Julia Bear of Stony Brook University, who published fascinating research along with Dr. Linda Babcock - the famous Dr. Linda Babcock who co-wrote Women Don’t Ask. And Dr. Julia and Dr. Linda - all these doctors. I love it - they found that it helps women to recall two particular things before they negotiate. And when women recall these two particular things, it helps their negotiation outcomes, literally, in terms of monetary outcomes.

The first is that you recall the last three times you’ve been assertive and the second is that you imagine that you are negotiating for a friend. And I think this research is so fascinating, I think it’s so helpful because it gives us practical tools that we can implement in our negotiations.

This helps us because a lot of us have this limiting belief that women are not good negotiators and that holds us back from becoming bolder, braver, and better paid. We also have the limiting belief that, oh, I don’t really need to prepare mentally for negotiation, so I really love this research.

So, without further ado, here is the interview with Dr. Julia Bear of Stoneybrook University.

Jamie: Yeah, we have Dr. Julia Bear on the podcast. Welcome to the podcast!

Julia: Thank you!

Jamie: Do you prefer that I call you Dr. Bear?

Julia: You can just call me Julia, that’s fine.

Jamie: Okay. Alright, Julia. Well, for those who don’t you, you’re an associate professor in the College of Business at Stony Brook University and Julia’s research focuses on the influence of gender on negotiation outcomes as well as conflict management in organizations. In her research, she investigates what factors, both individual and situational, influence the gender gap typically seen in negotiation outcomes and how an understanding of these factors can help to reduce this gender gap in both initiation of negotiation and negotiation performance, which we’re all about because this podcast is about helping ambitious people become bolder, braver, and better paid.

So, Julia, I’d love to hear what sparked your interest in the topic of gender and negotiation in the first place?

Julia: Yes, well, you know I’ve always been fascinated by gender issues and gender differences. I just think it’s a fascinating phenomenon, generally. And when I arrived at Carnegie Mellon University to start my PhD in Organizational Behavior, there was a professor there named Linda Babcock who had just published a book which some of your listeners may even be familiar with called Women Don’t Ask.

Jamie: Yeah.

Julia: And so that literally had just come out and that was really, in many ways, the blossoming and the beginning of research on gender and negotiation and I just found it fascinating, this notion that negotiation, which is a very specific type of behavior and interaction, really serves as an underlying mechanism for so many of the gender gaps that we see, whether we think of gender gaps in salaries, career advancement, etc.

So once I got there and met her and she had just published the book and given my interest in gender, it was really just a natural progression from there to start really digging into this work on gender and negotiation, which, again, was really in the very initial phases at that point.

Jamie: I remember reading Women Don’t Ask in 2013 and it changed my life.

Julia: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s a wonderful book. I would encourage your listeners if they’re...well, obviously they’re interested in this topic if they’re listening to the podcast. It’s a very well done book and it also couples...Linda wrote the book, actually, with a journalist, so it’s nice in the sense that it covers research on gender but it’s also written in a very engaging manner. It also incorporates really interesting stories from women’s lives as well.

Jamie: Yeah and they wrote a follow-up, which is Ask for It.

Julia: Yeah, mm-hmm. And Ask for It’s very nice too. It’s more of a how-to book but full of really, really good tips, many of which I actually teach in my classes in terms of how to go about negotiating, particularly if you find it anxiety-provoking or uncomfortable, etc. So, yeah, that was a nice follow-up as well. Mm-hmm.

Jamie: Nice, nice. And I know you co-wrote this article: Negotiating Femininity: Gender-Relevant Primes Improve Women’s Economic Performance in Gender Role Incongruent Situations.

Julia: Quite a mouthful, yeah.

Jamie: And you wrote that with Linda Babcock.

Julia: Yes, that’s right. Since then, we’ve co-authored papers. Of course I’ve also written many on my own or with other co-authors. But yes, Linda and I co-authored that paper and that was published, I believe, in 2017, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, so I will link the pdf of this article in the show notes. I’d love for you to give a bit of background about how you and Linda Babcock got the idea for doing this particular article.

Julia: Sure, so yes, there is some background to that article. So, when I started working in this area of gender negotiation, there were plenty of studies showing that if you look in sort of a very narrow landscape of negotiation, let’s say negotiating starting salary or negotiating price in a financial transaction, we tend to see that men, on average, tend to negotiate better outcomes than women.

And I want to be very clear here that all of this social science research is based on averages. I mean, of course there are plenty of women who love to negotiate; there are plenty of men who hate to negotiate, so gender can be a blunt variable, in a sense, to investigate. But on average, we do see men outperforming women

But I started to question the narrowness of the issues that we were investigating, right? And I started to say, if we think theoretically about gender, given men and women’s gender role, men are socialized and expected to be breadwinners, assertive. Women are typically socialized, expected to be communal, helpful, caring. I started to think, you know, maybe it’s no surprise that we see men outperforming women when negotiating over, you know, let’s say, financial issues or types of negotiation issues that map very well onto their gender role.

So, I started to investigate a variety of different issues, not just, let’s say, starting salary or price. But I tried to really test this notion that context should influence whether we see these gender differences. And, indeed, that’s what we found. So I published several papers showing that finding that, gender differences do depend on the context, the negotiation context.

And so I offer that as background to this particular paper because, once we had those findings, we then subsequently said okay, well if we know that there are certain contexts in which we don’t have gender differences, then how can we use that knowledge to actually help people to negotiate better and help women to negotiate better?

And thus the idea for that paper was born, in a sense, because we said, you know, is there some way where we can basically prime women psychologically to make the context feel like it’s a better fit? And that’s what we did in that paper. So, in other words, we said, okay, yes, there are a variety of contexts in which gender differences disappear and that’s all well and good but the fact is many people are negotiating things like salary or financial transactions. We know those are less of a good fit for women, so how can we perhaps psychologically prime them and make it a better fit?

So that’s sort of the background, this notion that there’s always this person-situation fit and for women, especially, competitive negotiations about money may be a poorer fit for women and we found that empirically in our older papers.

And so then that was the motivation for the 2017 paper was basically to say can we make - we called them gender-relevant primes. Because we said okay, wonderful, for women to make it fit better, we either need to remind them, sort of give them almost like a reminder, yes, you can be assertive, you can do this or try to make the situation fit their gender role better.

So that’s why we had two primes. We had one prime in which women recalled being assertive in the past right before negotiating and then we had one prime in which women actually imagined that they were gonna be negotiating for someone else. But both of those primes, the idea was to make the women’s fit with the negotiation situation better, so that it would improve their performance and indeed it did. That’s actually what we found.

Jamie: Cool! So that explains the title Gender-Relevant Primes.

Julia: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jamie: You know, helping women to see the negotiation as a better fit to how they see themselves.

Julia: Exactly. Exactly! So if you recall that you were assertive in the past, it’s kind of like, you know, a reminder that yes, the situation, this fits you, you’ve done this, so trying to make it fit that way. Or, again, the other prime we tested was okay, let’s reframe the situation psychologically. Imagine you’re doing it for a close friend. Advocating for other people has been shown empirically as a situation in which women negotiate just as well as men and so, by priming that way, it’s to sort of, you know, have women reframe the situation in a way that’s a better fit. Yeah.

Jamie: I really appreciate that in the title it says Negotiating Femininity, so it implies that femininity itself is negotiable. It’s a concept, really, and we can always reframe how we see our femininity so that we can see ourselves as a better fit to any situation, including a negotiation.

Julia: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jamie: Yeah. And I also appreciate the premise of the study and I’d love for you to tell us a bit more about that. And the premise is that what we think and how we think ahead of negotiating, particularly for money, impacts how we behave in the negotiation and, therefore, how we behave has an impact on our negotiating results.

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Jamie: And this fits perfectly to what I call the model, which is that even though circumstances are neutral, what we think about the circumstance is optional and what we think creates our feelings, therefore it creates our behavior, therefore it creates results.

So, tell us a little bit more about the behavioral impact that you observed. You discuss three different studies in this particular article so, tell us about the behavioral impact that you observed there.

Julia: Yeah, so basically, what we found is that across the three studies, when we compared women’s and men’s negotiation performance without the primes, men indeed outperformed women. Not a surprise. That’s what extent research has shown and, again, I just want to be clear on the effects, what we call the effect sizes in social science means sort of the magnitudes of the difference. It’s not huge, right? It’s not that men are incredible at negotiations and women are terrible but, on average, men were outperforming women.

But again, when we had women use one of the primes… so in the first study we studied the assertiveness prime and in the second study we tested the imagine it’s your close friend prime and then in the third study, we tested them both together and they actually worked equally well.

But, in any case, when women used these primes, in that case, their performance significantly improved in the negotiation and there was no gender difference. So, basically, men’s performance essentially stayed the same but women’s performance significantly improved and the gender difference was eliminated in negotiation performance.

Jamie: Yeah. And what I read from the article was the negotiation study participants had to do a mock negotiation where they were negotiating for the price of..was it an auto part? Engine?

Julia: Yes, yes. And we specifically chose that negotiation because in prior work - and that was the work I mentioned a few moments ago - in prior work, we have actually evaluated that particular negotiation and found that people generally rated this negotiation situation over the price of, actually, it’s the price of motorcycle headlights, people tended to evaluate this as a very masculine negotiation.

Jamie: Motorcycle headlights, yeah.

Julia: Yes. Well, it’s funny, is I have to tell you that negotiation exercise is widely used in negotiation training, which I actually find interesting and I wonder how that influences women in their training but that’s another issue. But in any case, yes, so we specifically chose that exercise to use in our study because we wanted to be sure that we were testing our primes in a situation, again, that was a poor fit for women. I mean that was the whole point of testing these primes, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah. So, my understanding of that prime was you were suggesting that women remember the last time they had to assert themselves and be forceful in defending…

Julia: Yes, exactly. Right. I believe it was recall three incidents, yes, and actually those characteristics that we chose, they actually are directly from an instrument called the Bem Sex Role Inventory and it’s directly from the measure of masculinity. So we actually chose those very intentionally from a theoretical perspective basically saying okay, let’s really test this notion that if we can, again, prime this masculinity for women, that will help mitigate the lack of fit and really help them improve their performance.

Jamie: Wow, fascinating! I didn’t know that there was a textbook about masculinity.

Julia: Oh, absolutely. There is very, very, very rich work on gender theory and this paper really was directly based off of that work. Yes.

Jamie: So it’s really theoretical. It doesn’t mean that, you know, men are this and women are that. It’s our concepts about gender.

Julia: Yeah, the concepts about gender that we tend to see in terms of the way boys and girls are socialized, the expectations for men and women’s behavior. And, again, it’s not that we’re saying all women are like this or all men are like that. Of course that would be sort of silly and simplistic but rather, from a big picture [indecipherable] perspective, we know that there are norms and expectations for behavior and we know that they differ for men and women. Yeah.

Jamie: Hmm. Okay. And I would like to just call out the distinction that it’s what we think about gender that impacts our behavior, so when we think that this is, you know, masculine behavior and because I am a woman I can’t behave that way, it hinders our willingness to participate in this sort of transactional conversation. That’s what I’m hearing. And so, I’m curious to know why do you think that recalling this perceived masculine behavior in the past had women improve their negotiation results in these mock negotiations?

Julia: You know, that’s a great question and I don’t have a good answer to that in the sense that we didn’t actually measure that. So, again, the question is what is the mechanism that’s explaining in the primes and we really didn’t get a good measure of that, so I can’t speak to that empirically so well.

You know, I do think, psychologically, it gives a sense, a greater sense, perhaps, of self-advocacy or a sense of feeling like, you know, yes, I’ve been in these situations before. I’ve done this. There’s also a great deal of research - and I see this in my research as well - that women do find negotiations much more aversive than men. They report much greater anxiety than men about negotiating, so it could also just be helpful in terms of quelling anxiety. It’s, you know, this is not a novel situation, so to speak, you know, reminding oneself I’ve done this before, I can do this again. You know, those are potential mechanisms. Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that, when women recall being assertive and being forceful in their communication, they feel confidence from having remembered that they’ve done it before.

Julia: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I think women have fewer opportunities as they grow up for social learning when it comes to negotiation, right? Social learning meaning learning through observing others’ behavior, similar others behavior. So I do think that having that reminder can be very helpful.

Jamie: Mmm, yeah. And that was one of the biggest takeaways for me from reading Women Don’t Ask about how men, young men, are often coached from an older male about how to play contact sports and that could be...and that sort of situation also plays out in negotiations because they get coached by other people and so I guess, long story short, when women are encouraged to recall the past behavior when they did defend and assert themselves, it’s kind of like you’re coaching yourself.

Julia: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I agree. I agree.

Jamie: Great! So, the second prime was that women were encouraged to prepare as if they’re preparing for this negotiation on behalf of a friend.

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Jamie: This is so fascinating and you call this gender-complementary, is that right?

Julia: That’s right. That’s right. It’s funny, it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this paper, that’s right. So we called the assertive one that we were just talking about, we called it the supplementary prime, meaning it’s for supplementing and then this is the complementary, right, meaning that it’s trying to reinforce this notion that negotiation may in fact be complementary to aspects of women’s gender role.

Jamie: Yeah and so many of my clients and people that I’ve taught in workshops, they all have said...many and many of them say that they feel so comfortable negotiating on behalf of other people.

Julia: Mm-hmm. Yeah and this has definitely been shown empirically, that women in fact, when they negotiate for somebody else, they do significantly better than when they negotiate for themselves and they negotiate just as well as men do. And so this prime was really based off of those findings, right? It was saying okay, how can we harness, so to speak, the positive effects that we know happen for women when they negotiate for other people.

Jamie: Yeah. So what do you think was behind the psychological, you know, the underpinnings of that? When women negotiate as if they’re negotiating for a friend they actually get a better deal.

Julia: Yeah. I think, again, a really good question and we don’t have the data to speak to that. You know I think that it may...you know, there are two potential mechanisms. I think similar to the other prime, the supplementary prime or the assertiveness prime, I think, you know, it may serve as sort of a psychological....the word is escaping me right now...sort of a psychological cue to basically reframe the situation a more positive way, kind of break through that anxiety or discomfort, right? And, you know, make people realize that they can, in fact, mentally reframe the negotiation as a more positive situation in which they can feel free to be more assertive.

Jamie: Yeah, and what I notice as a coach is that a lot of people, including myself, we have difficulty seeing ourselves from the most objective perspective. We’re often our own harshest critics.

Julia: Yes, yes.

Jamie: And it’s hard for...it’s really easy to give praise to other people and extremely hard to accept praise for ourselves, especially if you are ambitious, overachieving. I think that that tendency kind of is congruent to, correlates to how driven you are because you think you drive yourself by not saying the kindest things to yourself instead of being as kind and loving to yourself. And so when you think about negotiating for a friend, as opposed to for you, I think it kind of switches on this more compassionate, even kinder aspect of ourselves and it’s very powerful because it actually improves the results.

Julia: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. It was interesting that, because, again, you know, we went into this paper with a very empirical perspective, of course, and it was interesting that both frames...both primes, excuse me, they did indeed work and if I remember the data correctly, I believe that they worked...I believe that the results were pretty comparable for both primes, which was also interesting in and of itself. They both sort of served as these cues for women to really reframe the situation and negotiate more assertively, yeah.

Jamie: And when you say that, do you mean that the results were comparable, meaning the impact on the actual…?

Julia: Yes, on the actual outcome, yes. I’d have to double check that but I believe, if memory serves, it wasn’t like oh, one prime worked so much better than the other. In fact they both worked pretty comparably, if memory serves.

Jamie: Well I’m of course not coming from an empirical perspective, I’m coming from a coaching perspective, but I love this. This is really fascinating and also it’s the kind of work that I do with my clients. I help them on an individual basis, you know, recall how they were confident and assertive for themselves and how...This is really great. I appreciate this.

So, if we may, I’d like to switch gears a bit and I want to ask you a personal question.

Julia: Sure! Mm-hmm.

Jamie: This is a question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast. What was a negotiation - and I want to tell you that I define negotiation simply as a conversation with the intention of reaching agreement where everyone has the right to say no, so a very broad definition of negotiation - what was a negotiation in your life or career that had the biggest impact on you? And I’d love to hear, you know, what had happened and what you learned.

Julia: Ummm….yeah, that’s a good question. So, there really is not one specific negotiation that stands out. I can say, on a personal level, that - and perhaps that’s why I was interested in this research - that I think it was really when I started working in this area that I, first of all, A) realized that things were negotiable and B) realized that I should start negotiating them, right?

So, I don’t think...so for me, negotiation is not particularly intuitive but I think that working in this area has made me more likely to negotiate and I have had several negotiations at work that I realized in retrospect had I not been working in this area, I might not have negotiated them or even considered the issues negotiable, so to speak, over, you know, a variety of issues.

Jamie: Could you give us an example?

Julia: You know, there’s not sort of a really specific example that comes to mind but certainly there were issues that came up when I was relocating from...I had been living in Israel and I was relocating to the US and there were just a variety of issues that came up in that relocation and starting a job here that, in the past, I think I would have just taken them as a given, you know, like oh well of course the moving expenses aren’t going to cover an actual relocation, right? Or well, of course there are health insurance issues moving from another country that I actually thought twice about and thought well, wait a second, why can’t...you know, this is an exceptional situation, why don’t I try negotiating some of these issues, right?

It is a different move than the organization is used to accommodating but why not ask for some...you know, clearly moving from a different country there are different needs. So, things like that that I think in the past I would have just not...it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to negotiate. Many issues I didn’t even consider were even negotiable. And today, I just very much view...actually I like your definition of negotiation, I agree. I also view it as a conversation that, ideally, people can find a win-win solution and reach an agreement but as you said I like that very much as well, everybody has a right to disagree, to say no and you know, you try, you make your best attempt and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, you know?

But there’s no harm in asking, there’s no harm in trying and going in with a very collaborative and mindset of trying to solve a problem together. I think that’s a great conceptualization of negotiation.

Jamie: Thank you! And so, I’m curious, have you ever used one of these two primes yourself?

Julia: Yes, I have. I have definitely used some version of the assertiveness prime, absolutely. When I’m going into a new situation or a situation that I find intimidating for whatever reason, I’ve absolutely used that sort of reminder prime because I find it puts things in perspective. And sort of reminding myself, well, wait a second, you’ve done x, y, z, a, b, c, d, so, you know, you can do this, too.

You know the other thing I find really helpful as well to get better with using that prime is also just reframing the situation as learning experiences. So, rather than being sort of so nervous about something new or something daunting, reframing it as well, this is gonna be a learning experience. It’s something new I’m here to learn and yes, in fact, I’ve done a, b, c, d, e, f in my life and so we’ll just go in there and do it, you know, so that’s...I do find that helpful actually, yeah.

Jamie: Love it! So, three very actionable tips you’ve shared: First, before you engage in a negotiation, remind yourself of three times in the past where you did defend yourself, assert yourself, prove yourself. And two is you can also think about the situation as if you’re preparing for a very good friend. I’ve done a version of this, a variation of this, where I ask my client to think about how their best friend would describe them, the three words they would use, right? So it’s not you describing you, it’s your best friend or mentor describing you.

Julia: Yeah.

Jamie: Great. And then number three is just to think of the situation as a learning opportunity. So, you know, what can you learn? What is the lesson here? I think that’s a great, great tip.

Julia: Mm-hmm.

Jamie: So, finally, I think people would love to learn more about the kind of research that you do. Where can people go to learn more about you and your research?

Julia: So, that’s a great question and so...I’m laughing at your question because I think it’s a great question, unfortunately in academia, many of the journals that we all publish in are not always easy to access, which is unfortunate. They sort of sit in libraries and they’re often read by other academics as opposed to the general public, which is why I think it’s wonderful also your efforts to really translate this research to a wider audience.

But to answer your question, in terms of learning more about the research, they can certainly Google my website at Stony Brook, Julia Bear at Stony Brook. They can certainly email me through my website. I’m happy to share articles or anything else that is not accessible because it is, again, copyrighted and in journals.

And I also have a fun piece actually written with Linda Babcock on the Harvard Business Review website. It’s hbr.org and it is about the myth and reality of negotiating one’s salary. And so that’s a fun piece as well if people want to look at that and that’s not published in a journal that doesn’t like to...they should just be able to get access to that.

Jamie: Great. I will look it up and I will link it into the show notes.

Julia: That would be fantastic.

Jamie: Julia, this has been such a pleasure and there’s so much value here for all of us. Thank you so much for your time and for your expertise.

Julia: Thank you! And good luck to all your listeners with their future negotiations.

Jamie: Alright, great.

On Money, Family, and Passion: Eric Kohner Coaches Jamie Lee Using the Five Knowledge Centers

According to Ivy Business Journal, “Executives and HR managers know that coaching is the most potent tool for creating lasting personal change.” 

I think coaching is something everyone should get to test drive and experience first hand to really understand the impact of it. 

But if you can't hire a coach (or find a coach-in-training who will coach you for free) the second best thing might be for you to sit in on a coaching session.

That’s why earlier this week, I invited leadership coach Eric Kohner, who trained me to coach at the Coaches Training Institute to coach me on my own money beliefs using his leadership framework called the Five Knowledge Centers. 

The Five Knowledge Centers reflect:

1. Head - reason 

2. Heart - love

3. Gut - intuition and vision 

4. Groin - passion and drive

5. Hands - action  

Eric Kohner is an internationally recognized executive coach and keynote speaker. He founded EKCosystem, a global corporate training company dedicated to bringing HUMAN BEING into business, because “in today’s highly competitive world, the new hard skills are the heart skills.” 

Learn more about Eric's work here: www.ekcosystem.com 

Or reach him directly via email here: eric.kohner@icloud.com

You can reach me directly via email too: jamie@jamieleecoach.com 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 59 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your coach and host, Jamie Lee.

How are you?

I say it every episode and that’s because I really believe it: I believe we’re all born to thrive. Not just survive but thrive. And as a leadership and negotiation coach, I believe that asking for what we want or negotiating or engaging in collaborative value-creating conversations is the conscious practice of leadership that will enable you to thrive and be fulfilled.

The leadership I’m talking about and that I coach people on is not about how many people you manage or what title you have but rather how you consciously choose to grow yourself so you can be of greater value and be of greater service to the world.

And that’s why I love coaching because that is the mission of coaching, to enable people to become of greater value and to become of greater service to the world. I love coaching and I love being coached by other coaches and this is a special episode where you will hear me get coached by a master leadership coach, Eric Kohner, who trained me to become a coach with the Coaches Institute a couple of years ago.

But you know what? I want to be really honest because before I started training as a coach, before I experienced coaching for myself first-hand, I didn’t really get what coaching was about. I thought coaching was a hoax or, worse yet, a privileged way for somebody who’s got money to get somebody to listen to them and to get a paid friend or a pretend therapist.

I didn’t get it.

Once I experienced coaching for myself, that’s when the scales fell from my eyes and Eric really helped me do that and he was the first person I met who called himself a leadership coach and I was like Oh! I can do that too!

He showed me a powerful example of what is possible.

And since then, my life has never been the same. Coaching has changed how I think, how I feel, and how I show up to my life and career. Coaching has changed my mindset and because I changed my mindset, my results changed and so my life changed.

Coaching has enabled me to live the life of my dreams, to negotiate, to lead, and to thrive.

But, you know, I don’t want you to take my word for it. I think coaching really is a gift that everyone should experience first-hand but if you can’t afford it or if you don’t know any coaches who are in training who might be able to coach you for free, the second-best thing is for you to sit in on a coaching call.

And that’s why, earlier this week, I invited leadership coach Eric Kohner to coach me.

And I asked him to coach me on my money beliefs and if you’ve been listening to my podcast, you know that my mission is to help ambitious people like you become bolder, braver, and better paid. And unless I work on my money beliefs so that they’re not limiting beliefs, how can I coach other people? How can I be of service to others?

And that’s the reason why I am very open, transparent, and vulnerable in this episode. You’ll hear about what I think and believe, some of my own limiting beliefs, how I feel about them, and you’ll find out how Eric uses his five knowledge centers, his own leadership framework, to help me rise above it, to overcome, and to shift my mindset around it.

So, Eric was on this podcast last year. You might want to check out Episode 32 where we did a really cool discussion about #MeToo and what it means to be a male ally in these times. Eric is also an internationally recognized executive coach and keynote speaker and coach trainer. He founded EKCOsystem, a global corporate training company dedicated to bringing HUMAN BEING into business because in quotes, “in today’s highly competitive world, the new hard skills are the heart skills.”

You can learn more about Eric’s work on www.ekcosystem.com or you can reach him directly via email at eric.kohner@icloud.com. And if you have any feedback for me, feel free to email me directly: jamie@jamieleecoach.com

So I hope you enjoy this special episode where you get to experience me getting coached by Eric. Without further ado, here it is:

Jamie: I am down for some coaching. Yeah!

Eric: What do you want to get coached on?

Jamie: You know, one of the things that I coach people on is money because my goal is to help ambitious people become bolder, braver, and better paid. And that’s either through mindset shifting, going for their dreams, negotiating for more money and I would loved to be coached by you on my own money beliefs.

I’ll be more specific. I want to create abundance and wealth for myself and I also want to do it for my family but there’s like this little part of me that’s still kind of...I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like...you know, when I think about abundance and think about being able to make big donations like I feel like a lot of uplift but when I think about the obligation that I have to give back to my family, I feel like it’s like a speedbump. It’s like I feel a little resentful, you know?

For a bit of background, I am from an immigrant family and as a lot of immigrant families do, we give back to our parents because...yeah, I know it’s not only the immigrant families, but…

Eric: No, no. Just to reveal a little bit, my wife is from the Philippines so I was actually relating to you.

Jamie: Got it. Yeah.

Eric: That that is part of the culture in the Philippines, so that’s where I was coming from.

Jamie: Great. Yeah, I’m Korean but yeah, I think it’s very similar and my family, they tell me there is an expectation that I will share my wealth and I want to be able to come from real abundance and real generosity, you know what I mean? I don’t want to come from this place of obligation and guilt.

Eric: Right, got it.

Jamie: So that’s where I’m at.

Eric: First of all, to me, it’s inspiring that you’re getting so vulnerable in a webinar. I know personally and from studies that speaking about money is probably one of the most vulnerable topics to talk about. So I just want to acknowledge the courage that it’s taking for you to actually even talk about it in public.

Jamie: Thank you. My intention is to walk the talk I give and I think it’s important to talk about money. I think it’s really important to change what we think and believe and feel about money. Yeah.

Eric: Right.

Jamie: So it’s important to me.

Eric: So, I’m actually hearing, there’s already a few knowledge centers that you’re already tapping into. And, by the way, my dog just broke into the office so she’s very interested in this also, so I just want to include her. If she makes any noise, I apologize in advance. It seems like you’re getting a bit weighed down in your head about this.

Jamie: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Eric: Tell me about what’s happening in your head, like the rational, reasonable part.

Jamie: Yeah, the rational, reasonable part is like, it starts calculating. It starts, you know, expenses and doing the P&L analysis. Like how much money am I gonna make? Am I gonna have enough? And can I afford this? How much are they gonna ask for?

Eric: Yeah, exactly and how is this gonna impact my relationship with them and all that kind of stuff.

Jamie: Yeah. What are they gonna say? How are they gonna judge me? My mom’s gonna say I’m being cheap.

Eric: Yeah, being stingy, got it. And so that, it almost feels like there’s a weight in your head about that.

Jamie: Mmmm.

Eric: Yeah, yeah. Let’s go down to your heart.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Eric: I actually kind of want to...well, go to your heart first before I say what I wanna do. Go to your heart. What is your heart telling you about the relationship of money and family?

Jamie: Wow. You know, I’m kind of surprised...I feel a bit of sadness, like…

Eric: Okay.

Jamie: Yeah, there’s like a bit of...in my heart, in my chest I feel a bit of heaviness. Yeah.

Eric: So just be with that sadness for a second.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Eric: Just allow that sadness to be there. Because it’s giving you some information.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: What’s there now?

Jamie: Uhh...wow. I feel emotional thinking about the sacrifice...the sacrifice that my parents made coming to America, working so hard. I thought about the sacrifice my grandmothers made, living through some really difficult times like the Korean War and poverty. And I think the sadness comes from feeling that struggle and the lack that they had to go through for me to experience so much abundance and so there’s sadness, there’s like a ton of emotion and a lot of gratitude.

Eric: Gratitude. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that and there’s something pure there. It’s not attached to any solutions or what are you gonna do but that in itself has a really powerful effect on you. Yeah. So are you ready to actually sink down into your gut for a second?

Jamie: Okay.

Eric: Unless you want to stay there because sometimes clients, you know, we hit on something and to get all five knowledge centers, I really want this to work for you.

Jamie: [laughs] When you said, “Let’s go to your gut,” the first thing that came to my head was “Oh, I’m hungry!”

Eric: Your gut tells you that too!

Jamie: My gut tells me I’m gonna have lunch after this webinar.

Eric: And the gut is kind of the place where intuition and vision also resides. Like what is your gut telling you about abundance and family?

Jamie: You know, my gut feels this like so strongly. I feel this..I feel so certain that it is possible that I can create abundance in my life, that I can give away abundance and...I feel really strongly in my gut that what I dream for my clients, for myself, for us to actually become bolder, braver and a heck of a lot better paid, I really do believe it’s possible and I feel it like very strongly in my gut.

Eric: And, only because you also brought up family, what is your gut telling you about abundance and giving back to your family?

Jamie: Wow. The words that just popped into my head surprised me. The words that popped into my head were “It’s not too late. It’s never too late.”

Eric: Never too late.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Never too late for what?

Jamie: It’s never too late to create abundance, to give abundance. I guess my head was thinking about oh, you know, they already struggled so much and yeah…

Eric: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jamie: And my gut said it’s not too late. It’s never too late.

Eric: Never too late to come from abundance.

Jamie: Yeah. It’s never too late.

Eric: Right. Fantastic. So I see this big smile on your face.

Jamie: Yeah. I’m really surprised by what came to the surface.

Eric: Mmm, cool. You know, it’s almost like the smile on your face, it’s almost like an ageless smile. Like you could be five or you could be sixty five and I don’t know what that means but that’s what’s coming up over here. Yeah.

Jamie: That’s really funny. My life partner sometimes makes fun of me and he tells me I’m sixty-five years old. [laughs]

Eric: [Laughing] Well, being sixty-six, it ain’t that bad, okay?

Jamie: Nice.

Eric: Yeah. So, let’s now...and I’m gonna actually ask you to stand up, okay?

Jamie: Alright.

Eric: Because we’re gonna be now going to the groin area and the thing that I like to get my clients really in touch with that part of their body is….because it really is about being grounded and in touch with what are you passionate about?

Jamie: What am I passionate about?

Eric: What are you passionate about? What is it that you wanna create? Yeah.

Jamie: I’m really passionate about...I’m really passionate about helping people understand their own minds.

Eric: Mmm.

Jamie: Yeah. And I’m really passionate about helping people see their own potential and that nothing is too good to be true. That with the power of their minds that they really can accomplish and create anything that they desire. And I’m really passionate about believing that for myself as well.

Eric: Cool. Cool. And what about...I’m taking a little bit of a risk here, okay?

Jamie: It’s okay! Eric, can I just give a technical note? We would love to see your face. Is it possible for you to lift up your camera angle so we can see you?

Eric: That’s as far as it goes, so I’ll sit down.

Jamie: Okay.

Eric: Okay. So, can you see me now?

Jamie: I can see you really well.

Eric: Okay, great. So, what...and I wanna get back to what you were saying. You were talking about having people see what’s possible, having people really step into their greatness, all of that. And how about your family?

Jamie: Hmm.

Eric: What about seeing them from that perspective? What pops up when I ask that?

Jamie: Oh, wow. Wow. Hmmm. That’s a tricky one. Yeah.

Eric: Yeah, like I said. I knew that was a bit edgy, so…

Jamie: Yeah because my mind, my head immediately pops up and it says things like, oh, they don’t get what you’re doing, you know?

Eric: Right. Exactly.

Jamie: Why didn’t you become a lawyer? Why aren’t you climbing the corporate ladder?

Eric: Why aren’t you doing a nice corporate job? Right.

Jamie: Yeah. Why are you doing this coaching stuff? We don’t get it but as long as you make money, we get it, you know?

Eric: They don’t have to get it. This is not about them getting it. It’s about you getting it. About them. It’s about you seeing them from a place of possibility. So that’s kind of where I’m taking you. And I also notice that when I asked that question, you automatically went to your head.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Yeah.

Jamie: And all the reasons why they wouldn’t get it, they wouldn’t accept it, they wouldn’t approve of it.

Eric: Exactly. And they don’t have to! Because it’s not about them. This is about you.

Jamie: Yeah. So, wow. To see them from a place of possibility. You know, I went to...my mind went to my nephew and it’s really exciting to think that my nephew is going to have a life that is just so completely different from my parents’, from mine…

Eric: Right. So that’s what’s possible. Perhaps the next generation, then.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Yeah, yeah. And I’m gonna keep challenging you. I’m gonna challenge...so, your mother.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Eric: What is something that is so fantastic about her?

Jamie: What is so fantastic about her is her optimism, her drive, her work ethic, her love. Her love for her grandchild is just...it’s just so beautiful. I mean, she just has this overflowing love for my nephew and it makes me feel warm-hearted to see her be so happy holding this baby. She’s got this tremendous energy that I’ve always looked up to, you know? She’s a workhorse. And I also...what’s so fantastic about her is her belief in me, her belief in her own children, to do amazing thing that she hasn’t but for good reasons because she doesn’t speak English well and all that stuff but yeah, I think of her...I see her smiling, I see her as this incredible source of strength.

Eric: Yeah and if we had more time, we would go to your dad but [inaudible] the time also, but this is actually, what I’m seeing is, this is my intuition here, my gut is telling me the answer to everything here is around your passion.

Jamie: Mmm.

Eric: But before we go to that, there’s one other knowledge center I want to explore just for the sake of everybody getting the model here and that’s the hands.

Jamie: Okay.

Eric: What are your hands telling you about this?

Jamie: What are my hands telling me about this?

Eric: Yeah. About abundance and family?

Jamie: What do my hands tell me about this?

Eric: And you can sit down if you want. I just wanted to, on the passion part have you stand up, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah. Huh. My hands tell me that...I don’t know if it’s my hands saying this or it’s my mind saying this but what I want to believe is that I can build it.

Eric: Yes. Well we talked about the hands are what make things. What is it you want to build?

Jamie: I wanna build a really successful coaching practice. I wanna build a company that employs people and transforms lives. I wanna build something that really helps women double their income and their impact. Funny you say that, asking about the hand because I was thinking how it’s so easy because all I have to do is type into a computer [laughing].

Eric: Yeah, the hands actually...you need your hands. At least still today, we need our hands to work with technology.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Yes, yeah. So, I’m gonna ask you now to go back to your head.

Jamie: Okay.

Eric: But with that, all the knowledge that you just explored.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Eric: And I’m noticing you’ve got this very warm smile on your face right now.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Eric: What are you taking away from this, now we’ve been coaching for about twenty minutes? What are you gonna take away from this exploration around abundance and family?

Jamie: I don’t need to worry so much.

Eric: Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Wow.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: Yeah.

Jamie: You know I also coach with the Life Coach School by Brooke Castillo and she says worry pretends to be necessary and so that’s what came to my mind, I’m like why am I worried, you know? I think I’m gonna answer my own question. I think I’m worried because I’m feeling impatient. I want it now, I want the millions of dollars to give away like Oprah, like now!

Eric: You wanna give everybody a car.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah. You get a Mercedes! And what’s coming to me now is how I think it was when we went to the gut, my gut says it’s never too late.

Eric: Yeah, it’s never too late. And that seems to be a really powerful...it’s almost like a mantra or something. I don’t know. What do you want to do with that? Because that actually seems to ground you.

Jamie: Mmm. Yeah, that’s really interesting because when I sit down and write down my self-limiting thoughts, the one that comes up over and over again is that I’m running behind.

Eric: Right, right.

Jamie: And so it’s kind of like my gut telling me, “You’re not behind!”

Eric: You’re not falling behind. You’re right on time.

Jamie: There’s no rush.

Eric: There’s time, there’s no rush. Exactly. Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah.

Eric: So I wanna end this by just saying you are so up to this. You are so ready to step into this.

Jamie: Thank you! Thank you.

Eric: And my whole body is actually telling me that.

Jamie: Nice.

Eric: Yeah.

How to Tame Your Inner Mammal with Dr. Loretta Breuning

When I first encountered Dr. Loretta's work on Youtube, I was delighted because she has created a valuable body of work that helps us understand the why and how behind our animal impulses that don't always support our human aspirations to be better, to thrive, and to be at peace with ourselves and with the world. 

In this special interview, Dr. Loretta helps us see that there is nothing wrong with us -- even if our brains would have us think otherwise because of evolution, neurotransmitters, and socialization.

Loretta Breuning is Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute and Professor Emerita of Management at California State University, East Bay. She’s the author of Habits of a Happy Brain, and many other books that have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Turkish and German.

Learn more at InnerMammalInstitute.org 

To learn more about me (or to sign up for the upcoming free webinar), come to JamieLeeCoach.com 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! This is Episode 58 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your coach and host, Jamie Lee.

How are you?

Yesterday, I was at the Catalyst Conference and it was a phenomenal experience where I met really amazing leaders, both women and men, who are working to further diversity and inclusion, particularly for women in corporate America.

And I was interviewed and asked, “What tips do you have for women leaders on how to negotiate?” and my first tip was, first, you gotta ask, very specifically and concretely, for what you want. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that the reason I do the work I do is so I can walk the talk I give which is: You gotta ask.

And I’m so happy to tell you I did exactly that.

In the last episode where I talked about neurotransmitters, I was quoting Dr. Loretta Breuning quite often. I found her work on YouTube. I thought it was phenomenal. It’s educational and entertaining and it makes sense and it helps us be happier and be able to tame our animal impulses and be better human beings. It’s everything that I believe in.

And so I reached out to her and I made a very specific ask. I said, “Dr. Loretta, would you please come on to my podcast?”

And she said YES.

So this is a special interview with Dr. Loretta on how to tame your inner mammal at the negotiation table. Dr. Loretta is the founder of the Inner Mammal Institute - the website is innermammalinstitute.org. And she’s also Professor Emerita of Management at California State University East Bay. She’s the author of Habits of a Happy Brain and many other books that have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Turkish, German and more.

So I hope you enjoy this interview and come on by to jamieleecoach.com for next week’s special webinar if you want to sign up for that and join in the live conversation, that would be awesome. It would be really great if you’d leave an iTunes or Anchor or Google Play or Spotify review, wherever you listen to this podcast.

Without further ado, please enjoy this interview with Dr. Loretta Breuning of Inner Mammal Institute.

Jamie: Hi, Dr. Loretta!

Dr. Loretta: Hi! Nice to see you!

Jamie: Yeah! I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. It’s so amazing because I just did a webinar where I quoted you on the neurotransmitters and the impact on our social behavior, particularly when it comes to negotiating or engaging in conversations where we’re trying to reach agreement. And so I’m so thrilled to have you on the show and one of the questions I always my interviewees is: What was a negotiation - by which I mean a conversation leading to agreement - that had the biggest impact on your life and career? And I’d love to learn what you learned from that experience.

Dr. Loretta: Yes! Well, as I thought about it, one thing just kept coming to my mind and it was a negotiation with myself that had a very big impact. So, when I was in my twenties, I worked on Wall Street. I was in a training program. And I actually got a bad review. And I have such a clear memory of this because - and I don’t remember a lot - I was so upset that I walked home. So I walked home from Wall Street to Midtown and just debating and debating and the thing that kept coming to my mind is I want to quit. I know it’ll look bad on my resume but is life about your resume? Is my resume the only thing I’m living for?

So that was the whole debate over and over. And interestingly, I had been a waitress in grad school and college and I just dreamed of being a waitress so I didn’t have to worry and I started calculating how much I could...and then I thought, you know what? Being a waitress won’t really cut it. And I realized that I would be better off in the long run to be just a middle of the road banker, that if I just worked seven hours a day as a banker and went home and had a full life that that would be better than either trying to be a superstar banker or a waitress.

And that middle path, I never thought of that before and it was so liberating. And the end of the story - this is sort of the introduction of my new book Tame Your Anxiety, I don’t tell the whole story but - I realized that I had so many other interests that in order to really focus at work, I would have to give up all my interests and pretend to only care about this institution that I didn’t care about whatsoever or particularly agree with the day to day decision-making, which of course is not to say that I could run the world better as every 20-year-old thinks. I was motivated by other things and I was going to give myself permission to keep doing those other things despite the fact that they made me look bad when I was at work because my mind was always on other things. So that’s the short story.

Jamie: So, in other words, you negotiated with yourself during this 3.3 mile walk while you were stinging from this bad review.

Dr. Loretta: Yes!

Jamie: Yeah, so it sounds like you made peace with yourself. I love what you said, you gave yourself permission to live…

Dr. Loretta: In the middle lane, I call it the middle lane.

Jamie: Yeah, in the middle lane. And I’m curious, in the book you mentioned, is it Ten-Year or Tenure?

Dr. Loretta: Oh, sorry! Good question. Tame Your Anxiety.

Jamie: Oh, Tame Your Anxiety! Oh, beautiful. You know, I really appreciate that because the reason I got started in this line of work as a coach helping people with negotiation and leadership is because I encountered so much anxiety when it came to speaking up and asking for what I wanted, so I love that story. Thank you so much. So tell us more about the work that you do with the Inner Mammalian Institute.

Dr. Loretta: Inner Mammal Institute.

Jamie: Oh! I’m sorry, Inner Mammal Institute.

Dr. Loretta: It’s fine.

Jamie: Why is it important to understand our inner mammal or our animal impulses?

Dr. Loretta: So, we’ve inherited our brain chemicals from animals, both our happy chemicals and our unhappy chemicals and we wire them up in our own unique way but the impulses are so strong and yet nonverbal because they’re the impulses that helped animals survive. And when a person forces themself to only believe their own verbal logic, I call it your own personal publicity agency. You know, it’s like your own press releases, they’re not the whole story. And when you know how these chemicals work in animals, you say, “Oh wow! That’s exactly what I’m doing! That’s exactly what everyone else is doing!”

And then you can sort of give yourself a break and the main focus of my work is to help people build new neural pathways because our old neural pathways are built in youth and they cannot be perfect and we can always improve them. And, I’m sorry, and the neural pathways are what control the chemicals but because they’re built in childhood, they’re more primal impulses.

Jamie: So for those of us who don’t really understand brain science, would you explain what a neural pathway is?

Dr. Loretta: Sure, sure. And by the way, my training is not in neuroscience. So, I left academia and I did my own research and I connected the dots and I am not saying the same thing as other people are saying because, in academia, they’re very, very, very limited to what they can say and my work draws more from animal research that was done before it became taboo to do animal research.

So, neural pathways. So, we’re all born with billions of neurons but very few connections between them. The electricity in your brain flows like water in a storm, so it just flows wherever the pathway is well developed. And the difference between a developed pathway and an undeveloped pathway is a lot of things, so I don’t know how much detail you want me to go into but you probably heard about synapses connect.

So there’s a lot of little, real physical changes, many of them permanent, most of them built from repetition, from youth because we have more myelin when we’re young. And the last things is that chemicals, happy chemicals and unhappy chemicals, you can think of them as paving on the new neural pathways. It’s not exactly how it works but you can see how, in the animal world, when an animal finds food and it’s like yay! And that yay feeling builds connections that help the animal find food in the same place again.

When an animal is attacked by a predator, fear chemicals then build a pathway that turns on the fear the next time the animal is in that location. So this builds a sort of a navigation system that nonverbally tells you this is good for me and this is bad for me.

Jamie: Fascinating. First of all, I just want to say I love that you went from waitressing and banking to teaching and I know that you used to be a professor of management. So, from teaching professionals to now helping us understand our animal brains. I love this because, as a negotiation trainer, I always talk about the 3-A trap and how people have this natural impulse to either avoid, to accommodate, or attack in conflict situations and I think what you just described explains why we have this unconscious impulse to undermine ourselves because of the neural pathway that’s been built in our youth and also because of how our brain is wired.

Dr. Loretta: Yes, exactly. But it’s a little more complicated because when...every one of us is born in the same situation where we have urgent survival needs and absolutely no ability to do anything about it. So we’re all born with this sort of feeling of desperation and what do we do about it? We cry. So that’s our only natural, hard-wired survival skill and it works, so when you cry, your needs get met and fortunately over time, each time your need gets met and happy chemical released, your brain builds a pathway that says oh, that worked, that worked, that worked so hopefully you learn other things that work other than crying and that’s how we learn to talk, etc., etc.

But at a deeper level we all have threatened feelings and we all link somehow that other people are necessary to relieve that threat but just how we negotiate with other people is very individual, built on the random experiences that we’ve had and in academia, this is unfortunately reduced to nature or nurture, which they define as either your genes, which is currently the popular view, or nurture they define as our society, which is bad.

And this is totally off-base, I think, because your actual early experiences are very powerful and they’re very individual. So it’s not what society says, it’s how your parents interacted with you and even if you have two twins, parents cannot interact with them the same way, so it’s just a random set of experiences that build our neural pathways.

Jamie: Thank you for that. I appreciate that. I’d love to learn more about some of these chemicals, as well as what strategies do you teach to help us overcome the neural pathways that’s wired from our youth so that we can overcome them and do better.

Dr. Loretta: Okay. So, I’ll explain each of the chemicals and that’s a long story, so first I’ll do the quick, the short, easy answer to the final question you had which is what can you do about it, which is building a new pathway takes a lot of repetition and use and repetition means you’re feeding your brain new...did I say…after youth it takes a lot of repetition and feeding your brain a new experience is not so easy when you’re not just doing the natural animal impulse.

So how can you design a new experience, for example, in your case, it would be asking for what I want? So if you ask for what you want again and again and again, a new pathway builds but it’s not gonna feel good in the beginning and so you repeat it knowing that it will eventually feel good because the neurons will connect and it will flow. Until then, how can you make it feel a little more comfortable so you don’t feel so bad about it?

Jamie: Yeah.

Dr. Loretta: So let’s look at each of the happy chemicals to see what makes us happy. So, the first one is dopamine and dopamine is the expectation of a reward, so expectation subjective, when do you expect that you’re gonna get a reward, but it’s basically built on the dopamine of your past. So anything that got you a reward in the past built a pathway that said this is gonna work, this is gonna work, I’m just about to get it, I’m just about to get it.

Now you can see how anyone could think of examples of how that can work in daily life but you can also think of why most of us, we repeat ourselves. We do stuff that worked in the past, even when it stops working and we have trouble trying a new strategy because we don’t have the pathway that flows.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Loretta: So, I’m trying to keep this short, I’m sure you can think of a lot of ifs and buts. And a complication is that our brain habituates to what it already has. So let’s say you’re dying of thirst and you walk to an oasis and you’re so happy when you get closer to the oasis. But when you have unlimited running water, it doesn’t make you a bit happy. So it’s like this weird combination between the pathway to the oasis of your past but then it doesn’t make you happy because you have to meet a new need in a new way like a new and improved reward in order to get the big surge of dopamine that you’re hoping for rather than just going back to the same oasis and filling your water bottle every day.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah, so that’s dopamine, so I’ll just quickly do serotonin and oxytocin.

Jamie: Okay.

Dr. Loretta: So, oxytocin is the chemical that gives us the good feeling of trust. Now in the world of small-brained animals, they stick with the herd and then they can lower their guard so they feel a little safer from predators and that feels good and that’s what we’re all looking for. But animals are not always nice to each other, so that’s why the animal is always sticking to its own herd because a different herd is going to reject it.

And the animal is also worried, like when the herd runs, it has to run too. So when you get separated from the herd, your oxytocin falls and then you start feeling like you’re in an isolated mammal that’s about to get eaten.

But to complicate it more, bigger-brained mammals like apes, they can have one-to-one trust rather than just herd trust but they invest a lot of effort building that, which is the image we always see of two apes grooming each other’s fur.

Now, the complication is - so this is why we have to groom each other - the guy you groom may not groom you back, that’s complication number one. In nature, when your grooming partner is threatened, they scream for help and you’re expected to go because your brain has built these trust bonds but you may risk your life trying to save another ape and then when you’re in trouble, they may not try to save you, so there’s a real risk involved.

Jamie: It really got complicated!

Dr. Loretta: Yeah. But it doesn’t always work. But the other thing is that sometimes someone you let get close to you may attack you. So we love that feeling of trust, so we want to build trust bonds but it’s not safe to trust everyone, so our brain evolved to make careful decisions about when to release the trust.

But how does it make that decision? It’s hard, so it relies on your old oxytocin pathways. So that’s why we all repeat ourselves and we tend to trust in that situation that worked before and not to trust in that situation it didn’t trust before even though the paths can never be a perfect predictor of new situations.

Jamie: May I add that this totally makes sense why people gravitate towards people who look like themselves.

Dr. Loretta: Yes, yes, exactly. Because it matches your old trust pathways. But even on a more complex level because in the modern world, people are interacting with all different kinds of people but everyone can think of that early situation that built trust for them and the early situation that disappointed them and that we overinvest in finding similar situations to the one that worked and avoiding the one that didn’t work, even though there was a lot of randomness to them.

Jamie: Mmm. Yeah, good to know. So, tell us a little bit about cortisol because I know the stress response is something that we all have to contend with when we are trying to be brave, bold, ask for what we want. We feel that stress and it can feel as if we’re gonna die, we’re gonna get shut out from the herd, and…

Dr. Loretta: Yes, yes, absolutely. First, would you mind if I do serotonin first?

Jamie: Oh yeah, absolutely! Tell us about serotonin, yeah.

Dr. Loretta: So serotonin is another one of the happy chemicals and it’s the one you hear about in the context of antidepressants and again, I’m condensing a very big, long story and I’m happy to talk to anybody about it and my books explain in more detail. But in the mammal world, there is a social hierarchy in every group of mammals and when a mammal raises its social position, it gets more food and mating opportunity and it risks also bad consequences when it asserts itself.

So when you assert successfully, you get serotonin. When you assert unsuccessfully, you get cortisol and no one likes to talk about this but it’s so easy to see that this is what’s going on in our brain all the time.

Now, the bottom line is that serotonin is quickly metabolized so you want more and you want more and you want more but if you’re always asserting yourself then, oh, that’s not always gonna go well so you can end up with some cortisol. But then when you don’t assert yourself and your serotonin is gone, then you feel bad and you’re like how can I get more?

So this is complicated and frustrating and this is a problem that we all live with and everyone thinks something is wrong with the world, something is wrong with me or my life. Nothing is wrong. This is how our brain works and the only reason we are making ourselves crazy over this is because our lives are so damn easy that our bellies are full and we have so much energy left to stress over these social questions.

Jamie: Right and I was thinking about this, how it could be really minute social interactions like, take for example, I was in a class and somebody was smiling and my brain wanted to think that this person was smirking at me and I realized oh, my brain wants me to think that I’m at a lower social position because it wants to interpret this as a socially compromised position, you know what I mean?

Dr. Loretta: Yeah!

Jamie: But it was simply serotonin in play and cortisol in play here when I was thinking about what I was thinking about.

Dr. Loretta: Also those circuits are built from early training and they’re so deep and the consequences of doing it wrong when you’re a kid are so high that that’s why we build those big circuits. I have to tell you a great story that you’ll love. When McDonald’s first opened in Russia, that was an example of a culture where smiling, like looking directly at someone and smiling at them, is that ha ha ha, which is similar to the chimpanzee world, which I can explain more, but bottom line…

Jamie: So if you make eye contact and smile, it’s like they’re looking down on you.

Dr. Loretta: Yes and no. It’s more complicated because in the animal world, actually the smile is fear and animals don’t have the same facial muscles we have so it’s not really a smile but it’s like a fear but it’s the one that makes direct eye contact like that it’s like I’m bigger than you are, just try and mess with me!

Jamie: Interesting.

Dr. Loretta: So when McDonald’s first opened in Russia, in Moscow, they had people outside with megaphones explaining that the McDonald’s tradition is that your server smiles at you and to please understand that they’re not laughing at you but this is the McDonald’s tradition. Can you imagine?

Jamie: Wow. I was in Japan last year and that reminds me how in Japanese culture it’s very impolite to make direct eye contact.

Dr. Loretta: Yes. This is in my book Tame Your Anxiety, so I was the same way. So I grew up Italian and it was the same thing, I didn’t learn how to make eye contact with people and I had to train myself. And I did it by looking at supermarket clerks and I trained myself to become aware that I was having these feelings that were not about the situation but that were old feelings and if I was anxious then I was only anxious with a supermarket clerk so it was a good place to practice.

And I found that what was more triggering to me is that when I did make the effort to look directly at someone and if they didn’t look back at me because that felt so hurtful and then I had to remind myself that this poor person spends their whole day looking at people who may not look back at them so they’re just trained to look away so they don’t get hurt. So then you realize that it’s not about you, so that was very helpful.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you so much for reminding us that there’s nothing wrong with us.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah, yeah. And so much of the psychology that’s available, it’s either something’s wrong with you or something’s wrong with the world and…

Jamie: Something’s wrong with that person, that person is a narcissist, whatever.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah! Blame, blame, blame.

Jamie: Mm-hmm. I really appreciate your approach, which is not about blaming people but just being able to kind of have a metacognition, be able to understand how our brains work so that we can think with the higher part of our brain or what I understand to be the prefrontal cortex and I think that is the key to really thriving, living a thriving life, not just surviving you know from our animal impulses.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah. So the prefrontal cortex has less power than you think, so that’s why I try to encourage people not to think oh there’s my good brain and my bad brain and my good brain has to fight my bad brain. So that’s what my new book Tame Your Anxiety is about.

So the idea is, the way I try to explain it is you have a ship like the Titanic and when it’s going in one direction and you want to turn it to a new direction, that is so hard that you actually don’t see the ship move for 20 minutes. So it’s very hard to redirect and that’s what your prefrontal cortex can do. And that’s so hard, it take so much energy that you can’t use for other things like having routine conversations and driving and brushing your teeth. So you’re basically saving it for emergencies, okay?

So the rest of your life has to run on your big, built pathways. So the real challenge is to build new pathways because you’re not gonna have enough prefrontal cortex to do everything. So if your old pathways aren’t working for you, to build a new pathway so that you can do the new thing on automatic rather than expecting your prefrontal cortex to do it.

Jamie: Yeah and I love that because my mission is to help people create powerful mindset shifts and ultimately, I think the mindset shift is a new neural pathway.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah! So let’s think about what would be the new neural pathway that we would want a person to have. So what you’re thinking, what you talked about, the three As…

Jamie: Yes, it’s avoid, accommodate and usually it’s a cycle right? You avoid a conflict and then you just give in to whatever they ask you, accommodate, you’re like “Sure, okay, I’ll do it, yeah, no problem,” even though inside you’re sort of resenting the situation. And then over time the resentment grows and grows until it become untenable and you explode and you attack and you’re like “How could you?!”

And sometimes you don’t even attack the person with whom you actually have stressful thoughts. It’s like you attack another person in your sphere of influence who has lower power than you. Let’s say if you’re a parent you might get angry at your kid or you might get angry at your subordinate, or if you have a life partner, because there’s less repercussion with them, right? And then the cycle can continue over and over again. I’ve experienced myself.

Dr. Loretta: Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s so easy to see when other people do it so it’s very powerful when you can see it in yourself. So here’s the thing. So my philosophy is to focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want. So what do we want? So we don’t want the three As, so what do we want instead? And that’s what a person needs to use the prefrontal cortex to blaze that new trail through the jungle the first time and then keep repeating that trail until it builds a new neural pathway. But you can’t do it until you can first verbalize it because that’s what the prefrontal cortex is doing.

So let’s think, what are we wanting when we don’t want...so what I want is - and I’ll just take a guess and then you can put it into your language - so we want to first acknowledge to ourselves when there’s a conflict, which means that we want some authentic sense of our own desires and then maybe you could say an empathic sense of the other person’s desire and then we want a way to help find, I know the cliche is a win-win, but let’s say to create an effective solution that meets both of our needs.

Jamie: Exactly, yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it. I want to create solutions. I want to express my needs.

Dr. Loretta: I want to be authentic with myself about my own needs first.

Jamie: Yes!

Dr. Loretta: And then I want to communicate my awareness of the other person’s needs and I want to believe that there’s always a way to do it and even if the other person is digging in their heels to believe that no matter how that person is digging in, I don’t have to see them - this is my favorite thing - I don’t have to see that person as a gatekeeper in my life. There is always a path that I can create that can meet my needs regardless of whatever that person is.

Jamie: Beautiful. And I love where you’re headed with this because it’s very similar to my coaching work where I help my clients come up with new thoughts and then you practice the thought and at first it feels unfamiliar, it feels unbelievable, it doesn’t feel genuine at first because of the neural pathway. You have to continue to practice and turn that Titanic ship around, I guess, very slowly until it becomes a believable thought.

Dr. Loretta: Yeah. So you asked me about cortisol and I didn’t explain that and this is a perfect time. So, when you are wanting to do this new thought and it starts feeling bad, that bad feeling is cortisol and it’s caused by an old cortisol pathway and our brain evolved to prioritize bad feelings because a threat can kill you than missing out on a reward can kill you.

So anything that triggered your cortisol in the past built a huge pathway that says oh no, if you do this again, something awful is gonna happen. And so, for some people, it’s just asking for something. For some people, it’s just acknowledging to yourself that you want this thing and acknowledging that this other person in front of you is not a hundred percent on your side. And so to say, you know what? I’m a big boy. I’m gonna put on my big boy pants and this other person is not on my side so I’m believing in myself and my own ability to meet my needs despite the fact that other people are not necessarily on my side.

Jamie: So powerful and that’s how you generate self-confidence, believing in yourself. Yeah. This has been such valuable content, I’m so grateful for you, for the work that you do, I think it’s really going to help a lot of people make peace with their own brains, their lives, and ultimately to thrive. So, thank you so much. Now, tell us where can people go, our audience go to learn more about your work about Tame Your Anxiety?

Dr. Loretta: So my website is innermammalinstitute.org and I have a lot of books including Tame Your Anxiety which is available in March 2019 and my introductory book Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Oxytocin, Dopamine and Endorphin Levels and a bunch of other books. And I have videos, some of them are very short and I know people often say oh, I have someone I want to show this to and I think a five-minute video and the videos, as you know, are humorous so that makes it more approachable with other people.

Jamie: Yes, the videos were amazing. I highly recommend them. Thank you so much, Dr. Loretta!

Dr. Loretta: You’re welcome! Thanks so much for having me!

Jamie: Yeah! Please continue your awesome work.

Dr. Loretta: Thank you, thank you.

The Human Brain: How Neurotransmitters Impact Negotiation Behavior

As a negotiation geek, I love thinking about how the brain impacts our negotiating behaviors. The brain is a fascinating organ. It's the human computer that can process a trillion bits per second. Yet scientists say we've only barely begun to understand how the brain works. 

We know a few basic things, like how the brain evolved over millions of years and how some chemical messengers (or neurotransmitters) relay information that trigger thoughts and emotions that drive our behavior. In this episode, I talk about three neurotransmitters: serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol. 

My intention is to raise our awareness about our brains and the impact of these neurotransmitters so we can understand: 

Our own impulses at the negotiating table, The why behind how other people react to your ask, and How to create better strategies for success with all this in mind.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! This is Episode 57 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your coach and host, Jamie Lee.

How are you?

I believe that we are all born to thrive. Not just survive, not just get by, but really thrive on our own terms, live the life of our dreams.

And I believe that asking for what we want, negotiating, or engaging in collaborative value creating conversations is the practice of conscious leadership. And that means, as a leadership and negotiation coach, I work with human brains.

Take for example, what expectation does your brain hold when you want to ask for what you want?

And in the last episode, 56, I talked about how success comes from asking for what you want with a positive expectation that you will get a yes.

In other words, you want to hold the intentional thought in your brain that you will get a yes.

But we all know that’s not so easy because there’s a part of our brains that will immediately assume we’ll get a no. It will assume the worst-case scenario. It will bring up doubt. It will bring up fear. It will bring up worry and even shame for wanting what we truly want.

The brain will make us feel like we’re gonna die for taking courageous action and for asking for what we want.

And so the work of asking while expecting to win, even when your brain is tempted to assume we’ll get a no, is all about managing our minds. And we can all do this because we are not our brains. We are not the reactive or knee-jerk reaction thoughts that come up in our brains. We’re more than that. We have the capacity to watch our brains. We are the watcher, not the brain. We’re the watcher of the brain.

We have the capacity to manage our brains and show up to the negotiation table with self-composure, self-management, and self-confidence.

I’m a negotiation geek and I love thinking about how the brain impacts our negotiation behaviors but in any case, the brain itself is a fascinating organ. It’s a human computer that can process a trillion bits per second. Did you know that? And yet, scientists say that we’ve only barely begun to understand how the brain really works.

And we know just a few basic things and those are the things I want to share with you today. Like how the brain evolved over millions of years and how some chemical messengers which are called neurotransmitters relay information that can trigger thoughts and these thoughts can trigger emotion that can drive our behavior. That’s why it’s so important to understand how neurotransmitters impact negotiation behavior.

This is a replay of a webinar that I gave last month and I talk about three neurotransmitters:

1. Serotonin

2. Oxytocin

3. Cortisol

And my intention for sharing this content with you is so that we can raise our awareness about our brain so that we can understand, first, our own impulses at the negotiation table - and some of those impulses, if we followed them, we would undermine ourselves, so it’s really important to understand how we’re going to want to react so that we can manage our reactions - and number two, the why behind how other people react to your ask.

And I got feedback from somebody who attended the webinar live that attending this webinar really helped her understand why and how people react the way they do in her workplace conflict situations and this helped her gain a better understanding, bring some compassion, understanding, and wisdom.

And, finally, how to create better strategies for success with all of this in mind. So I cover all of this in this webinar, so I really hope you enjoy and if you like this content, come check out jamieleecoach.com for more webinars and more awesome content coming your way.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy!

Let’s get started. Hello! My name is Jamie Lee. I’m a leadership and negotiation coach and this is The Human Brain: How Neurotransmitters Impact Negotiation Behavior.

I have prepared a slide presentation for you, so let me share that.

Alright, so again, we’re gonna talk about the human brain and how neurotransmitters impact negotiation behavior.

I work as a leadership and negotiation coach and my mission is to help high performers like you become bolder, braver, and better paid through powerful mindset shifts.

So, why mindset? Why do I focus on this mindset? It’s because success is 90% mindset and mindset is how we think in our brains, how we feel in our hearts and in our bodies, and how we act from those emotions.

And when I talk about mindset, I talk about how there are only five things in the Universe. There are five things:

• Circumstances that are neutral and provable.

• How we interpret those circumstances, which are our thoughts, which are 100% optional.

• How we think influences how we feel.

• How we feel influences how we act.

• How we act creates our results.

And so, when you see this, you might think, “But wait. Is that right? Because I feel like there’s something wrong with my circumstances.”

It’s a very common misconception that many people have that, under the right circumstances, then we will have the right feelings, then we will have the right thoughts, then we will take the right actions to create the results we want.

For the most part, we feel like there is something wrong. Do you feel like there is something wrong in the world? With you? With the people with whom you negotiate at your work and in your life?

And I’m gonna guess that for most of you, the answer is, “Yeah. I feel like there is something wrong with the world, with me, with other people. There’s definitely something wrong.”

And if that is the case, I just want to reassure you that there is nothing wrong with you for thinking that way. And I hope that the content I will share with you will show you that there’s a really good reason why, which is that we have a human brain that has been programmed by design, by evolution, to make us think that there is something wrong. And when we think that there is something wrong, in fact there is nothing wrong with us.

And because we think there is something wrong, these are the common reactions to negotiating:

We either put up a fight, we try to dominate the conversation, we try to turn it into a debate and win at all costs, at the expense of collaboration, cooperation, and better reputation, better results.

Or we fold too early. We give up. We give in to other people’s demands and we feel defeated.

Or we take flight. We avoid the conversation altogether because the concept of dealing, of engaging in conflict is too uncomfortable for us.

So we either fight, we fold, or we take flight.

And again, there’s a good reason why. It’s because we have a human brain.

So, let’s talk about the human brain.

I’m not a scientist. I’m a coach. So, I’m just gonna talk about really, really basic things. The basic things that we all understand and know about the human brain. And, according to research I found on Google.com, there are 100 billion neurons or nerve cells, brain cells, in the brain. 100 billion. And these nerve cells don’t actually touch each other. They are connected by synapses.

What they do is they emit, the nerve cells emit neurotransmitters. So neurotransmitters are basically the chemical messengers of the brain that enable the nerve cells to talk to each other. And neurotransmitters can trigger thought processes. Neurotransmitters can trigger feelings and, therefore, neurotransmitters can trigger certain behaviors.

Take, for example, when we feel stress inside our body, it sets off 1400 different chemical reactions and more than 30 hormones and neurotransmitters. This is something that I learned from reading the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza, which I highly recommend. The book really goes into the science of how the brain works and how, actually, when the brain thinks, the emotions that are triggered by our thoughts are not just immaterial, they’re actually material because they do set off chemical reactions in our body. There is a real chemical reaction that happens when we feel a certain emotion and those chemical reactions trigger a desire to take certain actions.

And so understanding our brain is super important to understanding our mindset so that we can create the results that we want.

Another thing I found out about the brain is that there are a quadrillion synaptic connections. In other words, there are a thousand trillion - a quadrillion is a thousand trillion. There is just a mind-boggling number of synaptic connections that can happen in the brain, how nerve cells can connect with each other.

And, according to one research I read, the human brain is like a supercomputer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor. So that’s kind of really cool to think about how we have the most advanced machine, the world’s fastest supercomputer, in our heads: the brain.

So a lot of brain scientists at first, earlier in the twentieth century, thought that we are born with a certain number of brain cells and that’s it. So our capacity, our brain capacity, is determined at birth. That was what a lot of people thought but that thinking has evolved now and now neuroplasticity, which, basically, is another way to say that you can change your brain throughout your life - you can do that throughout your adulthood, well into your adulthood because we can change the neural pathway or how nerve cells connect with each other. The way our brain works can be changed and can evolve throughout our life.

So, that’s amazing news. It’s really great news.

And so, having said that, in the frame of neuroplasticity, I think it really helps us to understand the root of our impulses by understanding our human brain, understanding the role neurotransmitters or the chemical messengers play in our brains, so that we can understand our own impulses, our own impulses, particularly, around negotiating, which I said earlier was to fight, put up a fight, dominate and debate and to win at all costs, or to give up, to fold to early or to undermine ourselves, and finally to avoid negotiating altogether, which is something that I used to do because I felt too much anxiety about negotiating or asking for what I wanted.

Then it also helps us to understand the counterpart, our negotiation counterpart’s reactions. Why do they react the way they react?

We feel frustrated and feel a lot of stress because we don’t understand the root of other people’s behaviors and I think understanding the brain and neurotransmitters really helps us understand their reactions from a compassionate place, from a non-judgmental place.

And from there, we can learn how to negotiate better, how to create better results for ourselves. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today at this webinar.

So, the human brain evolved over 7 million years. That’s a long time. In summary, the brain is old.

According to the evolutionary model, we evolved from single cells to mammals and then to our current human form and according to this research that I read, the human brain evolved over seven million years. It tripled in size, but the most development of the human brain happened only over the last two million years.

And when you think about the fact that we now live in modern society with cutting-edge technology, the changes that our society has gone through happened within a blip of time when you think about the full spectrum of human evolution over millions and millions of years.

It’s old.

And so I’m gonna talk about how the brain has evolved over those long times and how that evolution is still impacting us today.

And so, because the brain is old, it hasn’t completely evolved past those patterns of the past. So the brain favors survival, by which I mean we evolved from a time when we lived as mammals in the wild. And so the brain favors survival or ways to avoid harm, physical harm, emotional harm, imagined harm, perceived harm, any sort of harm, any sort of pain, really because our brain perceives threat to any sort of harm or perceived, imagined, threat as a threat to our survival, to living in the wild and being able to pass on our gene pool, basically.

And the brain also favors belonging because over time we have evolved to become social animals and we’ve found safety in numbers.

And so the brain also favors repetition because when we repeat the patterns of the past that ensured our survival, ensured our belonging, then we know we can continue to survive. So the brain favors repetition of things that we’ve done in the past. It favors efficiency and that is because, when this pathway is formed, when this synapse is created, it is strengthened by repetition.

So, I’m gonna talk about three chemicals, brain chemicals, or neurotransmitters: serotonin, oxytocin and cortisol. As I said, I’m really gonna talk about really, really basic things and I’m going to talk about how these chemicals impact our behavior at the negotiation table and how we can improve our results from having understood the impact of these chemicals on ourselves and in our behavior.

So, the first chemical is serotonin. Serotonin is a happy chemical, like when there is serotonin fired in our brain, we feel good. And serotonin is associated with when we have gained social advantage or when we feel that we’re getting the respect of others and we feel pride.

Now, I know a lot of us don’t like to think of ourselves as animals that seek social advantage. We want to think that we naturally want to be equal with everyone, that everyone should be equal but the reality is that we evolved from having been these pack animals.

And on the right here is a picture of a meerkat. They look warm and fuzzy and cuddly but, in reality, they’re really fierce and aggressive. I was just reading research that says that even though they like to play a lot, even with their play they display a lot of aggressive behavior and that is driven by serotonin.

And one thing that I read that I found so fascinating is that “Natural selection built a brain that compares itself to others as if your life depended on it.” And this is a quote from Dr. Loretta Breuning.

And so our brains are wired to compare ourselves to others and to always size up the situation and see what is the hierarchy here, who’s on top, how do I compare with others, how do I one-up myself, how do I gain a social advantage? And that’s just baked into our mammalian brains and I find it really interesting that our brains are built to do that as if our life depended on it.

According to Dr. Breuning, our desire for social advantage is more primal than our desire for food or sex, which makes sense when you think about the fact that we evolved from having survived in the wilderness and having a top of the hierarchy ensure that we would be able to pass on our gene pool.

Now we don’t live that way but still these ways of thinking, the way that our brain is wired, impacts our behavior because serotonin drives us to one-up each other. And it drives us to want to fight to be right at all costs and to rage against power.

Now this may seem counterintuitive, right?

You may think that the people who are in power experience serotonin, people who don’t have power feel depleted of serotonin and so they feel sad, depressed, which makes sense when you think about the fact that serotonin, or the lack of serotonin is thought to be association with depression.

But also serotonin drives us to want to seek moral superiority and makes us want to feel special within a group of people and so how does this play out in our interaction with people, especially at the negotiation table?

So, when others try to one-up, when they try to say “Oh, I’m better than so-and-so because I have the better car or I have more money in my bank account,” or whatever, we judge them. We judge people like that. We find them really annoying. We call them arrogant, right? We dismiss them.

But see what your brain is doing there. By dismissing those people, by calling those people arrogant, we have found ourselves to be at a moral high ground. So by judging people, we find a way to one-up them. See how that impulse to one-up others is so deeply ingrained in us?

And when we try to defend our position, it feels like our very survival is at risk. It feels like there’s this innate desire to be right, to be proven right and this desire can undermine our negotiation outcomes because when we lose sight of our long-term goal and just try to fight people, we lose their trust, we can put the relationship at risk, and we can undermine our result.

And so I think it’s really important to remember that negotiation is not about one-ups and put-downs.

I used to think this way. I used to think “Oh, when you negotiate for what you want, you go in there, you make demands and you huff and puff and show yourself to be right and better than everyone else.” It’s about one-ups and put-downs. When people try to put you down, you come up with the better one-up.

So, this was a really game-changer for me, it really changed my life when I realized that negotiation is not about one-ups and put-downs but it’s simply a conversation with the intention of reaching agreement. That’s it. We can lose the drama.

And so, what are some things that we can do to improve our negotiation results in light of our mammalian brains wanting to always one-up others because of our desire for serotonin and to feel good?

We just first start with observing and raising our self-awareness. Observe our knee-jerk reaction to want to prove ourselves right, to want to be right, and be morally superior to others at any given time, at any point in the conversation.

Just observe and raise your self-awareness around that and ask will this help me? If I follow this impulse, this desire to prove myself right, will this help me achieve my big goal or just make me feel better in the moment?

Now take, for example, you’re going into a salary negotiation conversation and your supervisor makes a comment about, “Well, you’re doing pretty good but there’s this one aspect of your performance that I’d like you to improve.”

This sort of thing is something that I coach a lot of my clients over and our minds, our brains, will be tempted to just sort of fixate on that one negative comment because it means that we weren’t right, we’re not doing 100%, we’re not special. And it’s gonna make us want to fight and debate in the moment and say, “Wait, wait, wait. But you’re missing x, y, and z,” right?

So just observe that knee-jerk reaction and that desire to prove yourself right in that moment and ask, will this actually help me or will this make me feel just good in the moment?

And also, understand how the other side wants to be perceived by others because, in the workplace, we don’t like to think of it as a hierarchy but of course there are hierarchies in the workplace. There are people who make decisions, right? And how do those people want to be perceived by other people in the workplace? Treat them accordingly.

When I was very young, I once made the mistake of going up to the CEO of a small firm that I worked at and I went and I demanded that this person give me the reimbursement for a training that I had signed up for, it was like $1,000.

And we’re gonna talk about this a little bit later on but serotonin metabolizes very quickly and the brain’s natural state is actually cortisol, or stress, or to look for threats to your perceived social status. And so when this young person who’s fresh out of college marches up to you and makes a demand like that in front of everyone, from his perspective, it can seem like a threat.

And so I did myself a disservice by not thinking about how my behavior can undermine my own desired negotiation outcome because I didn’t think about how the CEO wanted to be treated.

So, what about you?

How can you better understand how you’re negotiation counterpart wants to be perceived by others and treat them accordingly?

Take, for example, if you need to negotiate for help with somebody and they want to be perceived as experts in a particular field, make sure you treat them accordingly. Make sure you treat them the way they want to be treated because it is linked to how their brain wants to see themselves as having a particular social standing.

So now let’s talk about oxytocin.

Oxytocin is happy chemical. It’s another happy chemical. When oxytocin fires, we feel good. And this chemical is associated with social trust, belonging, and the safety we seek in numbers. And we know that oxytocin is fired when a mother nurtures her infant and when a mother breastfeeds her infant.

I really like this quote from Dr. Loretta Breuning again, “Neurons connect when oxytocin flows, which wires you to trust in a context that triggered it for you before.”

Again, it kind of shows you how the brain will always want to revert to the past memories that triggered happy feelings, so when you felt good because you belonged to a softball team when you were in middle school, you will always want to recreate that happy feeling by belonging to a team like that.

So, oxytocin drives us to belong to a group, conform to a group, but also drives us to be selective about whom we trust because of what Dr. Breuning said, because neurons are going to look for the same context that triggered oxytocin for you before.

And so, how does this impact our thinking about our counterpart? How does this impact us at the negotiation table?

When others conform to their social group norms, we judge them to be closed-minded. We sometimes call these people biased and we make them out to be wrong. I have a lot of experience with this because I have belonged to many different social groups and I’m sure that’s also the case for you.

I was born in South Korea so, for my formative years, I belonged to the social group of Koreans who identified themselves as Koreans. And then I moved to America when I was very young. I’m an immigrant and so then I belonged to a social group of immigrants and now I belong to a social group of people who call themselves coaches, right?

And when I was assimilating, when I was becoming more American in my teenage years, I wanted to judge my parents. I wanted to say, “Oh, they’re so closed-minded. They’re so stuck in their old ways of thinking and feeling and behaving because they only wanted to stick to Korean ways of doing things. And I was judging them to be closed-minded but in fact, I think it’s really because of how our brains are wired and because our neurons fire when oxytocin flows and we’re always going to be looking for the same context. And so, for adults, they’re gonna look for the same context and for my parents, it was the context of being among other people who look and talk and eat like them. Koreans, right?

So, for us, when we want to do something different than our group, we fear social rejection because we don’t want to give up oxytocin flowing in our brains. Oxytocin makes us feel good and we fear that if we choose something that is different than the group we belong to, we will be rejected and we will lose out on oxytocin. So I think it’s really fascinating to think about how do we undermine ourselves, like our individual desires, our individual and unique dreams because of oxytocin?

What are we giving up to feel good and to feel like we belong?

And how often do we fold because we feel like we’re not going with the group?

I have coached some people who told me that they don’t want to be too successful in terms of their status, in terms of the money they earn because they don’t feel that it’s fair. And another way to look at that is they fear that they will lose belonging, lose the sense of belonging to this social group that identify themselves in a specific way in terms of as coworkers, as people who are struggling.

And when you think about how serotonin is also fired when we feel moral superiority, you can see how the cocktail of serotonin making us want to feel moral superiority over those people who have the things that we look down upon and oxytocin making us want to belong and stick with the group that shares the same values as us. You can see how it can create conflict and make us want to feel like it’s safer to just stick with the status quo instead of sticking our neck out, making waves, asking for what we want, and going for our dreams.

And so, what should we do?

Here’s some suggestions. First of all, you can use oxytocin as a positive way to create a bond with your negotiation partner. And that’s why, when I teach negotiation, I always talk about how the first thing you want to do is you want to establish a relationship. You want to establish that bond. And you can do that by identifying what is the common ground that both you and I share?

You and I both work in this particular industry.

You and I both work for this particular person.

You and I both want the same thing, which is to be able to go home to our loved ones sooner rather than later.

Or, do we share a common enemy? And that’s why a lot of people bond over gossip, right?

And a really easy way to think about this is you can simply talk about the weather.

“The weather is terrible today, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it totally sucks.”

And just by talking about some common ground or common enemy that you both share, you can easily and very quickly establish a bond. It can happen with something really simple like just a greeting, a little bit of small talk, or you can really invest time in establishing that relationship by sharing meals, going out, spending time together.

You don’t necessarily have to touch each other to create that feeling of oxytocin. You can just create a bond by building a relationship and I say this is like the fundamental thing that you want to do. This is the fundamental thing you want to do before asking for what you want, before making demands or negotiating.

And when you are negotiating, find social proof for your ask that they care about. Now, social proof is one of the six principles of influence that Robert Cialdini talks about in his book, Pre-Suasion. And social proof is basically, it shows that what you are asking for is something that is validated by a group of people.

And so, in the context of workplace negotiation, it’s really straightforward. Think about, okay, what are the metrics, what are the values, what are the key goals that the person that you’re negotiating with most cares about?

It’s not just what you care about. Take, for example, if you work as a graphic designer, you probably most care about creating the best graphic design. But the person that you negotiate with, what they really care about may be revenues for the company because their performance is measured by the revenue they generate for that company.

So social proof can be also metrics, goals, values, and so it takes some curiosity. It takes some asking questions, open questions, and researching the other side to understand what they most care about. Which group do they most want to belong to?

And also, don’t give up on your unique desires, on your individual goals for the sake of oxytocin. If you want to become the best person in your industry, if you want to become a person who earns a six-figure salary, don’t give that dream up because other people in your social circle haven’t done it, other people in your social circle look down on it.

I’m thinking about how, for me, not a lot of people in my immediate circle are coaches. I don’t know anyone who is also a Korean and an immigrant and a coach but just because I didn’t see other people doing what I’m doing now, it didn’t mean that I needed to give up on it.

So think about what it is you want and honor your desires, your individual desires.

So now, let’s talk about cortisol which is the only unhappy chemical I’m gonna talk about today. It’s an unhappy chemical triggered by real threats, perceived threats, and imagined threats.

So something really fascinating that I read while I was putting together this content was that cortisol is basically always there. In other words, it’s natural. The brain’s natural state is to always look for threats to its survival and that makes sense when you think about the millions and millions of years that humans survived in the wilderness and we had to watch out for threats to our survival like a predator, so our brains are wired to always seek out predators and to look for threats and because our brains are so big and because human brains think in terms of language, our brains are uniquely adapted to imagine threats, to create threats by our thinking, and we think in our language, with words.

Dr. Breuning says, “Cortisol creates the feeling that you will die if you don’t make the threat stop. Disappointment triggers cortisol.”

So this is really fascinating, that this explains so many things - why we buffer. Buffer is my way of describing how we try to resist feeling uncomfortable, we try to avoid disappointment, we try to react by doing things that will mask this threat of disappointment.

And often that looks like us looking for distractions, that looks like us giving up, that looks like us blaming other people.

And that’s because cortisol is baked into our brain for the purpose of our survival in the wilderness and it creates a feeling that you will die. That also explains why when we feel stressed about negotiating or doing anything that is courageous, it feels like, in a fundamental place in our brains, it feels like oh my god, we’re gonna die. Even though we’re not. We’re gonna be perfectly fine and all we’re gonna do is we’re gonna just sit down and have a conversation.

So, another really interesting thing about cortisol is that it is fired when our brain anticipates pain. And so it is fired when we anticipate pain and it makes us feel afraid of imagined or perceived threats and it can drive us to buffer or avoid, react, or resist uncomfortable feelings because, for us, in the wilderness, disappointment meant that we were getting eaten by a lion even though now, in our present lives, disappointments means that a conversation doesn’t go exactly as we imagined it, right?

So, at the negotiation table, when we don’t understand the picture in the mind of our negotiation counterpart, in other words, when we don’t understand how our negotiating counterpart is anticipating pain or imagining or perceiving threat to their identity, their social identity, their sense of belonging, when we don’t see that picture, then their stress reaction, which might be either avoiding, blaming, resisting, looking for distractions, it can seem really illogical. It can seem like what’s wrong with these people? Why are the acting like that? It doesn’t make any sense and then it creates even more stress for us.

But when we feel stress, when we imagine or perceive a threat to our social identity, it feels awful! It feels terrible! We feel it and I often ask my clients, so what do you feel when you feel stress? And it’s in the mind, they really feel it physically too, it’s in the body. They feel it in their neck, in the pit of their stomach, they can’t think straight and that stress can further impact their behavior and further impact their results.

So how do we work around this? How do we become better at responding to cortisol so that it doesn’t ruin our negotiation outcomes?

The first thing I want to offer is you want to learn how to separate stories from facts. Remember I just said how our human brains are big, they’re the biggest of mammalian brains and we’re uniquely adapted in that we think in language, in words. And the words that we have in our brains help us concoct stories. And the stories feel real. Our brains don’t know the difference between an emotion that is triggered by imagination, by thoughts, and the emotion that we experience from direct input from our environment.

In other words, there’s no difference between emotion that we feel because of our thinking and the emotion that we feel because of experience.

So this is the hardest part. What are the stories that we believe about ourselves? What are the stories that trigger our emotions at the negotiation table? And what are the facts?

I think this is why it’s really important to gain a really good mastery around your emotions. This is why how you feel will drive your negotiation outcomes because we want to first understand the stories that create the emotional reactions.

Take, for example, I’ve dealt with social anxiety for most of my life and I noticed at one point that I always felt threatened when people were looking at me a certain way. Now, that’s because I had created a story in my mind about what those people were intending, what those people were thinking, what those people were feeling about me when the fact of the situation was that simply they just made a facial expression.

And I had to remind myself, okay, this is another story. This is fiction that I’m getting myself into, not fact. So, first, sit down. Write down the thoughts you have about a situation and learn how to separate stories from facts. And this is gonna be difficult because this is something that I do with all my clients and they always tell me that their story is a fact because it feels like a fact.

And, again, that’s because the experience that we have in our brain from thoughts is just as real as emotion that we experience from actual experience.

And from there, once we have learned how to separate stories from facts, we want to learn how to allow the discomfort without buffering. Because, as I said, cortisol, the stress neurotransmitter, is a constant. I mentioned earlier, the good feeling chemicals - oxytocin, serotonin- when they are fired, they mask the cortisol but they metabolize quickly and so we come back to that natural state of feeling like there’s something wrong, feeling like we gotta be on the lookout, feeling like our own survival is at risk.

And it’s uncomfortable to just allow that cortisol to fire without reacting, without avoiding, without taking a negative action that takes us away from our goal as opposed to towards our goals. This requires us to separate our thinking from our emotion and to allow negative emotion because the reality of the human condition is that 50% of the time, we are going to experience negative emotion.

And, again, that’s just because of the way our brains are wired for survival from evolution. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with us, it just means that there is something right with us in that our brains are working just fine.

And also, something I teach all the time is so difficult to do and yet so simple. Easy for me to say, hard to implement, which is we want to get curious about our negotiation counterpart, not furious when they react from the stress they experience in their own minds because of the cortisol that is firing in their brains.

Let’s say people say no to your ask. Don’t get furious, just get curious.

Try to understand, better understand their stories, the picture in their mind’s eye. What is the perceived threat they see? What are they imagining? We don’t know until we ask and get curious about them.

So the purpose of this content was to help us better understand our human brains, better understand the behavior that can lead us to undermine our negotiation results and to think about ways to improve our negotiation outcomes.

And at the end of the day, I want to encourage all of us to stop beating ourselves up for having a human brain. Let’s stop beating ourselves up for wanting to feel morally superior, wanting to always feel special, wanting to fight when, in reality, that impulse is not gonna serve us, wanting to belong to a social group, wanting to conform even though we know that conforming is not going to serve what we truly want for ourselves.

And also, let’s stop beating ourselves up for feeling that, feeling stress, feeling like there’s something wrong because that’s just how we are wired. It doesn’t mean that we have to give in. It doesn’t mean that we have to concede. It doesn’t mean that we have to surrender to having this human brain. I think want we can do is that we can choose to evolve from our default, reactionary behavior because of the neurotransmitter.

We can create intentional thinking. We can manage our brain from the most evolved part of our brains which is, I believe, called the prefrontal cortex which is where our higher reasoning, planning, imagination, where all of that happens. We can start managing our human brain to lead, influence, and thrive.

And so that concludes the official content and if you like this material, I want to quickly tell you about the Small Group Mastermind that is starting in a month. Small Group Mastermind will start in March 2019. I just wrapped up the first group in January, it went really well. And it’s designed for eight women who want to lead, influence, and thrive and who want the support so that they can manage their brains.

Each group call will be a deep dive into your future self, imagining your future self, imagining your more evolved self and how to generate self-confidence from within you, how to set and maintain healthy boundaries and more. And you will benefit from both private coaching with me - you will get two sessions with me - as well as opportunity to interact and hold each other accountable within the context of this group.

So, we just talked about serotonin, oxytocin and cortisol and my intention with this Mastermind is to help you use your brain on purpose to create that future reality that you most want to create. And so you can come to jamieleecoach.com/mastermind to read more about it.

As I said, the next Mastermind will start on March 19th and if you sign up before then, you will schedule a private one-on-one coaching call with me and then there are going to be four group calls: one on how to set goals and how to envision your future self, the second will be on how to generate self-confidence, the third will be establishing boundaries, and the fourth will be emotional mastery - how do we become more evolved so that we don’t just give into our natural tendencies to fight, fold, and take flight but instead create emotional mastery so that we’re not just reacting to negative emotions but generating positive emotions on purpose to take positive action towards our goals?

So it works, as I mentioned, with both a combination of private and group coaching calls. You will have two private coaching calls with me, four group coaching calls, and in between calls, you will also get to deepen your learning and take action towards your individual goals. You will also be assigned worksheets that will help you deepen your learning of how to generate emotional mastery, etc.

So this is a testimonial from somebody who was in my January Mastermind and she said that “being in the Mastermind was extremely valuable and with the group’s help, [she] developed and applied strategies for helping her regain some control over [her] response to life’s hurdles.”  So what she’s talking about is how she was able to overcome her human brain tendency to react, right? “And in turn this has empowered me to better pursue the life that I want.”

So, if this is what you want for yourself, please get in touch with me. Let’s talk.

So this is a really, really good deal. My retail coaching fee is $350 but this group coaching program is only three monthly payments of $210, so you save more than $1,000.

Email me directly if you’re interested, or you can go to jamieleecoach.com/apply and submit your application form. Either way, if you apply you will get a free consult. You and I will get an opportunity to talk. I’m not about hard selling, I just want to make sure that this is a good, mutual fit for both you and for me and you might get benefit out of our quick conversation. So, reach out. There’s no harm and there’s no risk.

So, finally, does coaching actually generate results? I know coaching is becoming more popular but does it really work?

So, I want to share some of the results that my clients have seen in their own careers so you can decide for yourself.

So, I had one of my clients, she was able to flip a no to a yes for her dream job. I coached her as she was transitioning from one job to another and she really wanted to work with this particular dream company. At first, they said no. But because she was coached and because she really dug deep into her self-belief, into generating confidence for herself and not reacting from her brain’s natural tendencies but choosing using her human brain, her prefrontal cortex, to do what she knew she could do which was ask for more. And so she did. She negotiated a $10,000 salary increase when she flipped that no to a yes and she’s currently maxing out her quarterly bonus.

I have another client whom I coached through her negotiation process and she’s still a current client. When she got a job offer, she realized what she really wanted was a bigger role. She didn’t just want to be another project manager, she wanted to be a technical program manager so she asked for that bigger role and the thing that held her back from making that ask was her brain saying, “Who do you think you are to make that ask?” And so the coaching was around getting over that perceived fear and as a result, she got that bigger role, she is earning $10,000 more than she would have if she didn’t ask, and she’s also now working to achieve her goal of becoming an expert in her field.

I have another client who has a job and she also has a side hustle that’s all about making impact for women with ADHD and, again, the coaching is about managing her mindset about what is possible. What is she thinking by default and what does she want to think on purpose, intentionally? And when she chose thoughts that served her, by design, the thoughts that would make her motivated to overcome the brain’s natural tendency to avoid pain, she was able to reach out, she was able to get in touch with industry influencers, and she’s currently being groomed to be a thought leader at her day job.

So these are some of the results and there are more results. I have clients who are earning more money, becoming leaders and thought leaders in their fields, so if you want to see more results from my coaching, please go to jamieleecoach.com/results.

So if you have any questions about the content I’ve just shared, please feel free to type them into the Q&A box. If you look, I think it’s either at the top or the bottom of your Zoom interface, there is a little button that says ‘Q’, so if you click on that, you’ll be able to submit a question directly to me.

Alright, well if you don’t have any questions, I will assume you are satisfied with what you’ve heard, there’s nothing that was confusing. Thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you.

You've Gotta Ask

In this episode, I share insights on negotiation and leadership from the book Success Affirmations: 52 Weeks for Living a Passionate and Purposeful Life. 

In week 17, the affirmation is: 

I am asking for what I want and need with a positive expectation that I will get a YES. 

Some of the useful tips on asking include: 

Ask as if you expect to get it Assume you can Ask someone who can give it to you... 

I share my own thoughts, insights, and tips to help you ask for what you want so that you can become bolder, braver, and better paid. 

If you'd like to check out details about the upcoming mastermind, come over to https://www.jamieleecoach.com/mastermind

Or email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 56 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

I believe we are all born to thrive.

I believe that negotiation skills are leadership skills that help us influence and thrive.

I’m so excited for what is coming ahead in 2019! I will be back at Stony Brook’s STEM Leadership Women’s Program this April to teach negotiation skills to women in STEM. I’ll also be coaching live at the annual Catalyst Awards Conference here in New York City in March. And I have other exciting workshops and events lined up for the first half of 2019 and the second half of 2019 is going to just blow my mind.

I just know it.

And, of course, I have more exciting and free webinars planned for you, so stay tuned for that. And I have exciting plans for this podcast as well. In particular, I have interviews with a lawyer and a business professor who are both experts in salary negotiation and on the topic of women working in the workplace. So, my intention here is to provide as much amazing content as possible that’s all about helping you become bolder, braver, and better paid.

Today I want to share with you some nuggets of deep negotiation and leadership wisdom from a book that I’m reading. It’s called Success Affirmations: 52 Weeks for Living a Passionate and Purposeful Life.

I love this title because don’t we all want to become successful and to live a life full of purpose and passion, by which I mean enthusiasm and with heart? I think that’s what being born to thrive is all about. And this book is quick, it’s useful, and it’s co-written by Jack Canfield, Kelly Johnson, and Ram Ganglani.

Jack Canfield, by the way, is also the co-creator of the uber-successful Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise which sold over half a billion copies around the world. I mean, how’s that for success? And here’s a fun fact: Did you know that passages from Chicken Soup for the Soul are being studied in China in English as a second language classes?

I’m not from China, I’m from Korea and I came to the United States as a young kid and so, when I was a young, new immigrant kid in New Jersey, I was in ESL for two and a half years, so the fact that Chicken Soup for the Soul is studied in ESL sort of warms my heart.

Anyway, I just read my favorite chapter so far in the book and as soon as I read it I thought, “Wow, this is so good. I cannot wait to share with my podcast listeners.”

The book is organized into 52 weeks or 52 chapters and the one I’m sharing with you today is from week 17 or chapter 17, titled You’ve Gotta Ask. I love it! You’ve gotta ask. Every chapter or week in the book starts with affirmations for meditation and reflection.

Now, I can imagine some of you rolling your eyes at that. Maybe some of you are religious and the idea of starting your day with affirmations or a prayer is not that foreign to you. In either case, I invite you to think about affirmations as simply thoughts. Think of the affirmation you’re about to hear as an optional or a suggested thought.

The big question here is, do you choose to believe new, positive thoughts? And why does this matter?

This matters because circumstances in our lives are neutral and we cannot change them. But thoughts we have, which are simply how we choose to interpret those circumstances, are optional. And how we think impacts how we feel and how we feel impacts how we act or don’t act and how we act or don’t act generates our results. And remember the result we want is to succeed.

We can have two types of thoughts. First is default, which are knee-jerk reaction thoughts that have been programmed into us from the past, from our upbringing, and from socialization. They tend to be negative and cynical, like I don’t have enough time, I could never do that, I’m not good enough.

The second type is intentional thoughts or the thoughts we think on purpose, by design because we want to be in charge of our lives and not live by default. We want to be able to manage our own thoughts, manage our own feelings, our own actions, and therefore create our own results.

These thoughts that we have by design, on purpose can be neutral. They don’t always have to be positive. And they can be positive, like positive affirmations. The more we meditate, the more we reflect, or marinate in these new, intentional thoughts, the easier it becomes to believe new, intentional, and positive thoughts because belief is simply thoughts we have over and over again.

So, here is the affirmation for week 17 of Success Affirmations:

I am asking for what I want and need with a positive expectation that I will get a YES.

In my negotiation workshops, I often talk about the importance of embracing no. But this affirmation reminds me that it’s equally important to go into the conversation with a positive expectation that you will get a yes.

Unless somebody has explicitly said no to you, there’s always a possibility of yes. A positive expectation that you will get a yes generates so much confidence, optimism, and forward thinking, so I love this affirmation.

But wait...it gets better!

I know that the phrase “Wait...it gets better!” is a sales cliché, so think of me on a mission to sell you on the idea that you can ask for what you truly want and that you can ask well and that you can believe in yourself and believe in the possibility of yes so that you lead and thrive.

Anyway, so I said it gets better because later in the chapter, Jack Canfield shares his tips for asking for what you want. Here are the tips and then after I read the tips, I will go into a little bit more explanation and share with you my thoughts on why these tips are so effective and such good negotiation and leadership advice, okay?

1. Ask as if you expect to get it.

2. Assume you can.

3. Ask someone who can give it to you.

4. Be clear and specific when it comes to money. Ask for a specific amount.

5. Don’t assume you’ll get a no when you haven’t even asked yet.

So, number one: Ask as if you expect to get it. Ask with the positive expectation that you have already been given it - like it’s a done deal. Love that.  What would it be like if you’d already been given what you want? I want you imagine. I want you to live into it and ask from that place.

So let’s say you want a raise and promotion and if you already are promoted to, let’s say, senior vice president, what would you feel? How would you show up? And how would you ask? You’d be your future self or an evolved or more elevated version of you, whose got more gravitas, more dignity, more power.

So go to that place of more gravitas, more dignity, more power. In other words, show up to the negotiation conversation as your future self. You’ll be so much more compelling when you ask from that place.

So, for me, when I imagine that I already have what I want, which is a million-dollar coaching and speaking business, I see myself being calm. I see myself being graceful and grateful for the amazing abundance and success that I have already received.

And every day, I like to do a very vivid visualization of my future self as part of my daily meditation routine. When I envision my future self, I see myself standing tall, dressed in silk and wool, feeling grand. And you know what? That’s why, today, I am wearing silk and wool.

By the way, later in the book, there’s a really powerful affirmation:  

What I want also wants me.

What I want also wants me.

I love that. It’s a done deal! That’s a really powerful thought. What I want also wants me. If I were to imagine that what I want, which like so many of my clients, is collaboration, growth, and contribution, also wants me, I feel really good about asking for the opportunity to collaborate, to grow, and to make a contribution.

This is a really powerful mindset shift.

Here’s number two: Always assume you can. Don’t ever assume against yourself.

Now, how often do we assume against ourselves and give up even before we ask? I have a lot of experience in this. I have clients, too, who tell me they hold back from asking for promotions and raises because they are afraid they won’t be able to manage and lead well. They’re afraid to be a disappointment as a manager because they are attached to the disappointment they feel towards their own manager. They project this disappointment on themselves and assume against themselves.

Do you know what the biggest pitfall in negotiation is?

You guessed it. Making assumptions.

The worst assumption that you can make is believing against yourself. Assuming that you can’t do better or be different than what you have experienced in the past, than other people you’ve met and experienced and worked with.

Another dangerous assumption that I often hear is that people don’t know how to ask. I hear people, especially women, say things like, “Oh, I can’t ask for that. I can never negotiate for myself.” And I want to share with you, I absolutely don’t buy that there are people who cannot negotiate for themselves. It’s not true. Because negotiation is simply a conversation with the intention of reaching agreement where everyone has the right to say no. That’s it!

This means we’ve been negotiating since we were first able to say the word no, which is around age 2. We’ve already been negotiating all our lives. We can all say no. We can all ask.

So, assume you can. Don’t ever assume against yourself.

Number three was: Ask someone who can give it to you. Research who that is.

When I teach negotiation, I talk about the importance of identifying your allies, by which I mean identify who can be your mentor or a trusted advisor who can provide critical insights key to your success.

And then there are people who can be your champion or people who can go to bat for you behind closed doors when decisions about raises and promotions are being made.

And then there are also influencers who have the ear of the key decision-maker, right?

So, mentor, champion, influencer, decision-maker, there are different types of people who can be your allies. Sometimes the biggest hurdle in workplace negotiation is simply identifying who to ask, identifying the right person to ask, identifying the decision-maker.

For example, a couple of years ago, I coached a nonprofit executive who negotiated directly with the CEO for a raise and a title change, only to find out that the CEO could not implement the salary decision without the buy-in of the CFO. So it turned out the CFO is an important influencer and also a decision-maker who really needed to be part of that salary conversation.

So, do you know who makes the salary decisions at your company? Do you know whose buy-in is necessary in order for these decisions to be actually implemented? It may not be your direct supervisor. It may not be obvious because titles can be misleading.

For example, I once worked at a company where the CEO always deferred key money decisions to the CRO and the CRO deferred big decisions to the COO. So, ultimately, you had to get both the CRO and the COO to buy in before the CEO bought into the agreement. It was something that you wouldn’t know unless you had been part of the daily senior management discussions.

So, asking someone who can give you what you want does require research. It does require some study and being able to tap into your network to better understand the so-called unwritten rules of the workplace.

So, find out who can give you what you want and ask that person to give it to you.

Number four: Be clear and specific. When it comes to money, ask for a definite amount.

This is so important. A lot of my clients worry about lowballing themselves or getting burned if they ask for the amount they really want, which is the high end of the going market range for their role. And out of this worry and fear, they miss out on the opportunity to ask for exactly what they want.

Now, if you don’t ask for the definite amount of money that you want, then what happens is that you allow the other side to assign a dollar value on you. The other side, typically, is the recruiter or hiring manager. The recruiter or hiring manager, they are incentivized to acquire your services for low prices. They are incentivized to acquire high-quality labor, high-quality services for the lowest price possible. They’re not evil. That’s just how business is done.

So, don’t wait to be assigned a value. Go ahead and name your price.

So, let’s say if you want to earn $125,000 a year, you need to ask for $125,000 or more. Ask for $130,000. Ask for $135,000. This is even better because it creates wiggle room and you increase the odds that you actually get more than what you want. If you want to earn more money, you have to ask for more money.

This is called anchoring and it’s a very important negotiation strategy. And this is something that I have every person who participates in my negotiation workshop practice out loud. Ask for what you want. Make it specific, concrete. Ask for the number or more.

When it comes to requesting a specific behavior, say exactly what you want the person to do.

I talked a lot about this in Episode 53 about boundaries. I talked about how we often have manuals, invisible manuals for people and manuals are detailed instructions on how other people should think, feel, and act so that we can feel good. The funny thing about these manuals is that we often keep these manuals invisible or unexpressed and that can cause a lot of stress, aggravation, and resentment in a relationship.

So, I have been very fortunate to be in a loving life-partnership with a wonderful man for eleven years and we encounter this stress of invisible manuals on almost a daily basis. It can be something really simple and mundane. For example, this happened to us just last weekend. We were going from place A to B and we were carrying a bunch of bags, so we went to the place we wanted to go to and then he’s holding up this bag and he’s looking at me and he’s like, “Help!” And was like, “Huh? What do you want?”

I couldn’t read his mind. Yes, he said, “This is really obvious, Jamie.” Later on he said, “This is really obvious that I wanted you to help me by taking the bag,” but for some reason it wasn’t that obvious to me in the moment, I was distracted.

So I told him, “The next time you want me to help you, please tell me exactly how you want me to help. You want me to take the bag? Tell me, ‘Jamie, take the bag.’ It might seem obvious to you, but you know what? I don’t live in your brain.”

So this is a little example but there’s so many instances of stuff like this happening and creating stress in our lives. Don’t create invisible manuals. Make a specific request and say exactly what you want the person to do. So wise. So important.

He also has other tips, which I think are so important, like: Ask repeatedly. One of the most important principles of success is persistence. When you’re asking others to participate in the fulfillment of your goals, some people are going to say no. More than likely, they have a very good reason for declining. It’s not a reflection on you.

And number five: Don’t assume you’ll get a no when you haven’t even asked yet. That’s rejecting yourself before anyone else has even had a chance. Take the risk - if you get a no, nothing has changed and you’re no worse off than before. And you might just get a yes!

I mean what else can I add to that? This is so great. No is not a rejection of you.

If you do get a no, it can mean three things. Number one: It was not the right time. Number two: It was the wrong person to ask. Number three: It was not the right ask.

So, take that risk because the way I see it, the worst thing that can happen is that you learn from this no. You learn that it was not the right person. You learn that it was not the right time. You learn that it was not the right ask.

What do you want to ask for so that you can thrive?

What do you think and believe about what you want to ask for?

Is this thought believable for you: I am asking for what I want and need with a positive expectation that I will get a YES?

If so, go for it! If not, ask why.

Questioning those limiting beliefs that come up will be the first step in unlocking your bolder, braver, and better paid future.

By the way, if you’d like to take this work deeper with me and in the company of like-minded, ambitious women, I think you would love my Mastermind group. The next one kicks off on March 20th and you will benefit from both one-on-one coaching and group accountability. So, come check it out on jamieleecoach.com/mastermind.

Thank you so much and I will talk to you next week.

How to Generate Self-Confidence without Faking Anything

We all know self-confidence helps you get more of what you want. But how do you get confident if you haven't yet gotten what you want?

There's a better way than "fake it till you make it," pretending to be something you're not, or blowing yourself up like a blowfish... 

The best way is to generate confidence inside of you, by you and for you.

This is something I help my clients do so they can become bolder, braver, and better paid.

This episode is a replay of a webinar where I shared five simple steps anyone can master to generate self-confidence.

If you'd like to watch and not just listen to the replay, come to www.jamieleecoach.com or email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com. 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 55 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

How are you?

I believe that negotiation skills are leadership skills.

I believe that we are all born to lead, influence, and thrive.

In order to lead, in order to negotiate, in order to influence, confidence is key. And often we look outside of ourselves to generate that confidence for us and it never feels enough. It never feels adequate.

And I think that’s because real confidence comes from within us, not from outside of us.

This is a replay of a webinar that I gave earlier this week, so the sound quality is not super clear but if you are interested in seeing the entire webinar slides and everything, come to jamieleecoach.com and click on Join the Webinar when you land on the home page. There is a button there.

So, without further ado, please enjoy this replay of How to Generate Self-Confidence in Five Steps Without Faking Anything.

Thank you and talk to you soon!

Hello! Welcome to the webinar!

We will get started in literally one minute. I have a lot of amazing content ready for you, so I intend to get started right on time.

Alright, excellent, I love the people who showed up right on time! You’re amazing! Punctuality is an awesome trait, so I really salute you for showing up to the webinar right on time. Love it!

Okay, and I see some of my clients here as well. Great to have you!

So, I have prepared a slide presentation because I know some people like to read as well as listen. Some people are reading-oriented, listening-oriented, visual-oriented, aural-oriented.

So, welcome to the reprisal of this webinar, How to Generate Self-Confidence in Five Steps Without Faking Anything.  

My name is Jamie Lee, I work as a coach. You can email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com. You can come on over to my site: jamieleecoach.com

I am a coach, I am a speaker, I am a martial artist.

And maybe there’s a lesson right here on this introduction because I think you can generate a lot of self-confidence simply by the way you speak about yourself.

How do you introduce yourself?

What language, what identity do you choose for you?

And for me, I really feel at heart I am a coach, I am really born to be a coach. I love this vocation and I also  have worked as a professional speaker for a little bit longer than I have worked as a coach. And that was supported by the fact that I have been my first and foremost client as a coach. I coach myself constantly, all the time.

I am also a martial artist. This is something that is new in my life. This is about a year ago, I’ll tell you a little bit about that, and that has also helped to generate a lot of self-confidence.

As a coach, my mission is to help high performers like you become bolder, braver, and better paid through powerful mindset shifts.

I started out by helping women negotiate for what they want in the workplace and I have found that the most important thing is how we think, how we feel, and how we act, which is how I define mindset. It’s what we think, how we feel, how we act and how we think on purpose, how we feel on purpose, and how we act on purpose.

In other words, the intentional mindset that we bring to our negotiation, to our workplace, to our lives can generate results and if you think, feel, and act on purpose, you can create the results that you want.

So, as I mentioned, this is a reprisal of a webinar that I gave last week, so I just want to give a public announcement before we dive into the content because last week I was telling people about my Mastermind group and I said it’s going to launch - well, the second iteration- will launch in February and I’ve gotten feedback that more people would like to start in March. So, the date has changed, and you can come to jamieleecoach.com/mastermind to learn more about this group coaching opportunity.

Well, it’s more than just group coaching because you get the opportunity to do self-study, you get the opportunity to work with me privately, and to work within a group of ambitious, like-minded women. So, the first group call with start in March, March 19th, as you can see the dates are listed here.

What you see on this page is a picture from a really wonderful workshop that I get to give again! I’m really excited to reprise this workshop in March. I hosted a speakers’ workshop for global feminists. In this picture are feminists from all over the world: Canada, Poland, Peru, Africa, Congo, Syria. And these women come from places where there are conflict, where there is war, where there is poverty, where there is persecution of women. And yet they still choose to take a stand. They still choose to speak up, use their voice to elevate the status of women all around the world. They come to the UN and they address the UN, here in New York City, and they talk about what we can do as world citizens to uplift women around the world and to make the world a more equal place.

I think the work that I do is so important because I empower women to use their voices and I believe in the work that I do because women can change the world. I really believe that. And I believe that as a woman of color, as a first-generation immigrant, as somebody who is a minority in this country, I really feel that the work I do is important, not just because it generates a living for me, but because it has the power to change the world.

You have the power to change the world.

So, I have a lot to say, obviously.

I work as a speaker, a professional speaker, I often give workshops, keynotes, seminars and webinars just like this one and I still have more to say, so I also host a weekly podcast. You can find it on the Anchor platform, or on iTunes, Android, there’s ten different platforms where you can find Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I have 54 episodes, many of them around the issue of speaking up, communicating, setting boundaries, for example, how to negotiate, how to lead in your life so that you can thrive. I really do believe that we are all born with the capacity to thrive, not just survive, in our lives.

As I mentioned, I’m also a martial artist. I started a year ago. I’m still a white belt, as you can see in this Instagram photo, but this year I really doubled down on my commitment to making growth as a martial artist a priority in my life and I’ve been training quite a lot and it has really generated a lot of self-confidence for me.

I practice the art of Aikido which is a modern Japanese martial art that is focused around peace and protecting both the attacker and the defender. It’s about redirecting the flow of energy rather than putting people down and hurting people.

I do this practice every Monday night where I practice freestyle Aikido with my eyes closed and I have simultaneous attacks from my classmates, my fellow martial artists. And as you can imagine, 80% of the martial artists in my dojo are men. And I’m petite. I’m Asian. And most of them are about twice my size.

Regardless, because I commit to the art of this Aikido, I have learned how to flip them, throw them, evade them, even though they’re coming at me with strikes, punches. And I want to say, the number one thing in my practice that has really helped to generate the most self-confidence is every time I fall, I get back up again. Getting back up again over and over and over again not just does wonders for my core but does wonders for my self-confidence because it just reminds me again that I have the capacity to get up and learn, to grow, and try again and again and again.

We’ll talk a bit more about that in-depth.

So, if you are listening to this webinar, you might think, “Well, that’s nice, Jamie. That’s great. Must be easy for you. I bet self-confidence comes really easy for you.”

I can see how people can think that about me because it’s so easy to compare other people’s shiny outsides with your shabby inside. I used to do that too, all the time and think, “Oh! That must be nice for that other person, doing these great, amazing things, being a public speaker and coach and doing martial arts.”

The truth of the matter is I have struggled with self-confidence for most of my life. I struggle with anxiety every day. And there was a time in my life I was so lacking in confidence, I did not know how to speak up in the workplace.

About eleven years ago, I worked in finance, in a male-dominated industry. I was the only woman at the trading desk at a hedge fund and I remember just feeling so down on myself, feeling so frustrating, so lacking in self-esteem, I looked at my life partner and I said, “You know, I’ve really gotta learn how to communicate! I really can’t get through to my boss, to my coworkers. I feel like I’m hitting my head against the wall.”

I also found out I was making $50,000 in a $100,000 job. So there was a point in my life when I didn’t know how to negotiate, I didn’t know how to communicate, I didn’t know how to lead. I just felt like I was being affected by external circumstances and I felt stuck and lacking in self-confidence.

So what turned that around for me is that I made a conscious effort to growing the skills that I realized I needed in order for me to thrive and those skills were negotiating, leading, communicating. And now what I do is I teach other people how to do that because I’ve found out that this is such a powerful skill. You can learn it, you can grow it, and it will change your life.

And when you hear that, you might say, “Yeah, that’s easier said than done, Jamie.”

Absolutely! You’re right! It is easier said than done!

Talk is cheap.

For me, the moment my life really changed was when I started to study these concepts of negotiation, communication, and leadership and I decided that not only did I want to become so adept at it that I can teach it and coach other people to do it, I want to walk the talk that I give.

I want to be a living, walking example of what is possible when you apply those concepts, apply those skills, and really commit to growing as an individual.

So doing it has made the biggest impact, rather than talking about it. And today, we’re talking about it. This is easy. Listening about it is easy. Applying these concepts and seeing the impact in your life? That is going to generate change, power, and transformation.

So, don’t just listen to me. Try them out yourself.

And also, you might be wondering, “But, you know what? Studies say men have it easier. There’s so many books and articles that say men are confident, women are not.”

So, I want to take a pause there because I just want to highlight that this is a matter of perspective. It’s a matter of choice because there are other studies and there are other books that say men don’t have it easier. It’s actually tougher on men now. Women have it easier. It depends on who you ask. Some people will say men have it easier, some people will say women have it easier. So, what this shows us is that it’s a matter of perspective. When it’s a matter of perspective, it means that it’s a matter of choice.

So what’s the choice that you are making?

I used to think that the world is so unfair. I used to think it’s so unfair, men are privileged, women are not. It’s terrible. Something has to change in the world before something can change for me, inside of me.

And when I thought this way, when I believed this way, I felt very resentful, I felt powerless, I felt it was unfair, I felt frustrated, and I noticed that there wasn’t a lot of forward progress in my life. And notice when I held onto these thoughts, it’s unfair, that not a lot changed for me, inside of me.

And having said that, a lot of people think that self-confidence is created at the effect of external circumstances, that self-confidence is created because of the body you have, because of what other people do for you, because of the money you have, because of the success you create outside of you.

So, let’s examine that.

By the way, I looked up the word “self-confidence” on Google.com and this was the sample sentence that was being used just to demonstrate the use of the word self-confidence:

“I feel terribly tired and completely lacking in self-confidence.”

So what this example sentence shows us is that a lot of people think, even Google.com thinks that self-confidence is at the effect of the body. And I want to question that.

If you feel terribly tired, if your body is tired, does that really mean that you can’t generate self-confidence? If you feel terribly tired, does that mean that you will be completely lacking in self-confidence? I want to question that thought.

Here was the second sample sentence:

“She took care to build up his self-confidence by involving him in the planning.”

Now if we have some feminists in this group, in this audience, I think we should all question this. Why is she building up his self-confidence? Why isn’t she building up her own self-confidence? Why does he need her to build up his self-confidence, right? Is she his mother? I mean, it’s just weird. But this was the sentence that I found on Google.com as an example of the usage of the word self-confidence and it shows that a lot of people think that self-confidence is at the effect of other people.

My father, my own dear father told me that he doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence because he didn’t have the right upbringing. Even though my grandmother was this really successful, self-made business woman, he felt that nobody was there for him, therefore he doesn’t have the self-confidence and therefore he doesn’t have the success.

So, this kind of thinking is rampant, like everybody, a lot of people, 99% of the world probably thinks this way.

And also, a lot of people feel that confidence comes at the effect of what you have, of your bank account. This is something that one of my clients told me: “If I had $100,000, then I’d feel confident to quit my job and go for my dreams. Money is security and I need that security so that I can feel confident to quit my job and go for my dreams,”

And I want to question that. Why can’t you create the security in yourself before you have the money, right? And if you could generate that self-confidence before you had the money, imagine, you’d be more empowered, more ready, more confident to create money. And when you’re more confident, you create more money, right? Instead of waiting for the money to give you confidence, what if you created the confidence first and then created the money. I think your results would just be exponentially better.

But, you know, a lot of people feel that success comes when you have position, authority, success. But is that true? This is a fascinating TED Talk that I highly recommend. If you Google “Know Your Inner Saboteurs,” a TEDX talk given by executive coach Shirzad Chamine and what he did was he interviewed 100 CEOs and he asked them to share the one secret they never tell anyone, one secret that is really true inside of them.

And this is what they said: My air of confidence is fake. I don’t love myself very much. I am self-destructive and I don’t know why.

And remember, the CEOs in our world right now, 80% of them are men, so even though some people have the perspective that men have it easier, men are more confident, if we look at the actual data, things that real CEOs, again, most of them men, are saying, it seems contrary to our perspective that men have it easier.

My air of confidence is fake.

I don’t love myself very much.

I am self-destructive and I don’t know why.

So, this begs the question, if success and achievement, if position, big salary, big titles like CEO, if they don’t make you confident, then what does?

To summarize, I want to highlight that when you think that confidence is at the effect of external circumstances like position, title, money, other people, your body, this generates a sense of powerlessness, right? You’re giving power to other people to create confidence for you. You’re giving power to money to give you that sense of confidence. And when you feel powerless, you feel like a victim of the circumstance. And when you feel like a victim of the circumstance, you feel resentful. And when you’re resentful, unhappy, you feel insecure, you lack self-confidence.

So, what’s the solution?

Here’s the solution I want to suggest: Instead of waiting for external circumstances, what if you caused the effect? What if you generated that self-confidence from within you? And this, if you are the cause, you cause the effect of self-confidence and the results you have because of self-confidence, you generate immense power. You put yourself in the position of being the creator, you are in creation mode rather than survival mode, rather than stress mode, right? And when you are in creation mode and you generate that power, you have confidence, you generate that confidence.

So, what is self-confidence? Self-confidence, as I see it, is simply a state of mind. It’s a mindset. Remember, mindset is how you think, how you feel, and how you act. So, self-confidence is how you think of yourself. Self-confidence is how you feel trust for you to do the things that you said you will do. And self-confidence is how you act to follow through on your own commitments to yourself.

It’s all about the relationship that you have with yourself. How you think of yourself, how you feel about yourself, and how you act to follow through on commitments to yourself.

So, that said, as I promised, here are the five simple steps that anyone can do. Simple, not easy. It does require effort. It does require focus. It does require action. It does require risk.

So, what are the five steps?

Number one: Believe in your future self. Believe in you. Believe in your future self.

Number two: Commit to taking action.

Number three: Allow yourself to fail when you take that action.

Number four: Think greater than you feel.

Number: five: Do it all over again, again and again and again. Repeat.

So, what do I mean by believing in your future self? To believe is to simply think on repeat. That’s it. Whatever you believe, it feels like your truth. It feels like your reality because you have thought the thought on repeat over and over and over again. So, if you want to believe in your future self, simply think about your future self on repeat, on purpose, over and over and over again. It becomes a habit of the mind. You create a new habit of your new mind.

And just think about what the future is. I love this quote by Dan Sullivan: “The future is your property. The future belongs to you. At any given moment, when we think about the future, the future only exists as a concept in your mind.” And that means you can do whatever you want with your concept of the future.It does not have to look like yesterday, it does not like to look like your present.

You can build your property any way you want. I live in this really great New York City apartment where the shape of the living room is a triangle, not a rectangle. That’s why I have so many windows behind me, it’s a big triangle. So, it doesn’t have to look like every other apartment, right?

So your future is your property. You can make it be whatever you want. The only limitation is your imagination and that goes for whenever you think about the future because whenever you think about the future, the future simply exists as a concept in your mind. When I think about that, it really blows my mind, it’s really fun to think about the future.

So who is your future self?

Your future self is who you will become to live a life of no regrets.

Your future self is who you will come to live a life of no regrets.

So, having said that, this is a question that I want to pose to you and I really want you to think about it, and not just think about it but maybe journal about it. Write it out. What do you think? How would you answer this question: Who would you need to become to say you lived a life of no regrets at the end of your life?

The art of coaching is all about supporting you to live the life that you most want to live. And in order for you to do that, first we need to think about, imagine our future. Who would you need to become to say you lived a life of no regrets at the end of your life?

And for me, I answer this question by saying I would have taken 100% responsibility for everything that I have created in my life. I do not want to be a victim. I do not want to be in the position of blaming people at the end of my life because I didn’t do something, I didn’t generate a specific result. That, for me, is my definition of living a life of no regrets - taking 100% responsibility.

And for you, you may have a different response to that. Maybe for you, you would need to become the person who takes care of your family. You need to become the person who is the breadwinner. You need to become a better student, a better professional, a better architect, a better engineer, a better friend. For you, it’s a very individual and personal answer. No one’s life is like anyone’s life.

So, who would you need to become to say you lived a life of no regrets? Think about it. Journal about it.

And in order for you to believe in your future self, I think this requires for you to have an intentional relationship with your future self.

So, in this picture, what’s happening is that on the left is your current self and on the right is your future self which I’d imagine would be a greater version of you. Don’t we all want to grow and become a better version of ourselves?

So when the current self looks at the future self, what does she see? How do you see your future self? And this can be a really powerful exercise, something that I take all of my clients through. How do you see your future self? Is she more confident? Is she more accomplished? Is she standing tall? Is she bolder? Is she braver? Is she better paid? What kind of life is she living?

Get really vivid with your imagination.

And at the same time, you have a relationship with your future self. So how does your future self see you, you right now? And when I ask my future self, “Well, how do you see the current Jamie?”, the future self of Jamie says, “She’s doing great! Keep going! What you’re worrying about is not such a big deal. It’s all gonna work out. Don’t worry so much. It’s gonna go great. Keep going, you’re doing good.” There’s only words of encouragement, support, and love when I ask my future self, “How do you see me now,” right?

So this could be a really powerful exercise. You can do it yourself. Just ask yourself, “Who is my future self?” and get really vivid with your imagination. And also, from the perspective of your future self, see what that future you would say to you now.

And from there, number two: Commit to taking action. If you ask your future self, “What do I need to do to become a better version of me?” she may have an answer for you. Or you may know right now what you need to do in order to become that better version of you. So commit to taking action towards that future self because commitment generates immense power.

And for you, that commitment may look like, I am going to reach out to one person a day to grow my professional network. I am going to practice asking for what I want to build my negotiation skills. I’m going to commit to joining Toastmasters, which is something that I did three years ago because I am committed to growing my skills as a speaker.

Action creates results, so commit to taking action.

So, what is one ambitious goal that you want to achieve so you can be more of who you want to be? Write this goal down and make this goal specific and time-bound so it’s real.

Once we do that, we are going to experience the negative emotions, the ugly emotions, right? Fear, doubt, shame. And a lot of us don’t know how to deal with these negative emotions and interpret these emotions as a sign that we need to stop, as a sign that we can’t honor our commitment, honor our commitment and take action, that we can’t do the things, which is not true.

What if fear, doubt, shame, or any other negative emotion that comes up with you committing to taking actions towards an ambitious goal are there for you to get past them? What if they’re not a stop sign? What if they’re not a Do-Not-Proceed sign? What if they are a door, an entryway for you to get past and go to someplace really cool? Maybe you’re exiting the door and going on an adventure or maybe you’re going into the house and living the life of your dreams.

And also, what is failure, exactly? Because in order for us to commit and continue to take action, we need to allow ourselves to fail. That’s number three: allow ourselves to fail.

What is failure, exactly? How do you define failure?

And I have coached many clients and clients have answered this question many different ways. Predominantly, there have been three responses:

Failure is simply an omission of a necessary action or key step. You just didn’t do the thing. So, take for example, last week I gave this webinar and I forgot to hit record. So that was a failure on my part. I omitted the action of hitting record.

Some clients have told me that failure is simply when things are different than what you expected it to be. It’s simply a different result than your expectation. It’s just different. Sometimes people feel that’s a failure. That’s fine.

Also, my client told me this past weekend that for her failure is simply a learning opportunity and I think that is a really great way to look at failure. When you look at failure as a way to learn, as an opportunity to learn, you put yourself in the growth mindset as opposed to the fixed mindset. If you haven’t already, look up Carol Dweck growth mindset and when you think that failure is a way to learn and grow yourself, you’re more likely to generate self-confidence, willingness to take action and continue to develop your skills. But when you have a fixed mindset that it’s either/or, you either succeed or fail and failure is bad. There’s no learning opportunity, it’s just bad. When you have that fixed mindset, you’re less likely to continue to take action, continue to grow and actually grow.

And I think this really sums it up. “For me, the road to success is paved with failure.” This is a quote by my own coach, Brooke Castillo who is an extraordinarily successful woman. She has created $17 million as a life coach! Amazing!

“The road to success is paved with failure”. So are you willing to fail so that you can succeed? Are you willing to get on that road to success and allow yourself to make mistakes, omit necessary actions, and learn in the process? Because that is how you succeed.

And when you continue to allow yourself to fail, allow yourself to learn, then you can generate a lot of self-confidence from that commitment to continuing to grow yourself.

But I think a lot of people mistake the concept of failure with the fear of what other people will think, what other people will say about us. And this is a barrier that I often encounter when I coach negotiation clients. A lot of women have said that they are reluctant to negotiate, especially in the workplace, because they are afraid of being seen as greedy, aggressive, a witch with a ‘b’. So we create barriers for ourselves. We create barriers for developing and generating self-confidence when we let that fear of what other people will think, when we let that fear stop us from taking action. So we create barriers for ourselves when we let fear stop us from taking action and stop us from allowing ourselves to fail.

So, if you have experienced that fear, here’s a question I want to ask you. So what if you gave it your all, you gave it 100% to achieving your ambitious goal, to living a life of no regrets, to making yourself more like the future self that you want to be and you failed? You forgot to do something. It happens to the best of us, right? It didn’t go as you expected or you learned that oh, I had to something completely different. So what if you failed? And what do you think people will say?

And also, I want to highlight, this is a really powerful exercise, so if you are following along, if you have some pen and paper, write it down. What do you really think people will say if you gave it your all and you failed at achieving your ambitious goal?

So, for me, when I ask this question to myself, I can see either way. Some people would be like, “Oh, it’s not big deal, Jamie. You can try again. You’ve got what it takes! Don’t worry so much about it. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” It’s something that I’ve actually heard a lot of people tell me. And if you are an ambitious person who sets some ambitious goals for yourself, you might have also heard that. People are like, “Don’t be so hard on yourself! It’s alright! No big deal,” right? For people outside of you, they see that you can do it, it’s not a big deal.

The part of myself that can imagine the negative things, I call it the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee or the Primitive Brain because it’s always saying things like, “Who do you think you are? You’re gonna fail. You’re not gonna meet expectations. You’re gonna be a disappointment. Why do you even try?”

That voice is the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee and that voice is like, “Well people might say, ‘Told you so. This coaching thing is a hack. I told you you’re not gonna succeed.’” Okay, so I can imagine both sides.

So, if you can imagine both sides, write down what they would say and then ask yourself, “Who are these people? Who are these people exactly? What are they saying and who are they?” I want you to name ten. Really think about it. Who are ten people who are gonna say that it wasn’t worth it for you to go for your dreams. Who are they?

When I ask myself this question, I realize that I have generalized one or two people who said something that wasn’t quite as bad I think it’s gonna be and then I extrapolated it in my brain and then I created this story that they said these things.

I’ll be more specific. I recognize that when I was growing up, my sister used to be like, “Well, don’t do that! I’m gonna tell Mom! You said a bad word!” She said things like that, with the best intention, I’m sure. And then I blew it up in my mind over time that I can’t do the things that I want because then people will criticize me. And when I really try to think of ten people who say negative things about me, I can’t name them! There might have been one person who was having a bad day and said something that was tangential to what I was doing.

So, anyway, long story short, what I do in my own brain is create a story, a fictional story, from an irrelevant past. And I often blow up a story that is not actually what people literally said.

So try it out for you. Who are these ten people who are gonna have an opinion if you go for your dreams and fail? And really name them. Is that exactly what they said? Be really truthful here.

Number four: Now that you have believed in your future self, now that you have committed to taking action, now that you have allowed yourself to fail, number four is the key step, which is to think greater than you feel.

Think greater about you than how you feel about you.

What do I mean by that?

This is a quote from this phenomenal book I highly, highly recommend. This book is literally changing my life inside out. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe DiSpenza. I love it so much, I bought a copy for everyone in the January Small Group Mastermind. It’s a book about the science of the human brain and how you can leverage meditation to change your brain. I love that! So powerful.

So, what does it mean to think greater than how you feel?

Well, first of all, you have to write down your thoughts. What is it that you think about you when you go to take that ambitious action towards your ambitious goal so that you can live a life of no regrets? What are all the negative thoughts? What are all the positive thoughts? All of them. Who do you think you are? You’re gonna fail. This isn’t gonna go well. I’m probably gonna give up. Or maybe you have some great thoughts. This is great. I’m excited! Write them down. Our mind is very fickle. Our minds are slippery. The act of writing down the thoughts will give you the opportunity to assume the position of authority as the watcher of your mind.

So you’re not just at the effect of your mind, you get to watch your mind. This is a very powerful act, actually.

And thoughts and feelings are very connected, interconnected. Thoughts cause emotions and so you want to become aware of your emotion. What is the feeling? And what is the connection between what you’re feeling and what you are thinking? Because there is always a connection. And the thing here is we have not been taught to become aware of our feelings. We have been taught to just think, think, think, think, use our analytical minds to survive and get by, make money, right? And more thoughts, more stressful thoughts, just create more stress.

We have not been taught how to become aware of our emotions inside of ourselves and how to deal with them, so I’m gonna talk about that in a little bit.

So, write down your thoughts, become aware of the feelings. What is the emotion? And then choose new thoughts on purpose. Allow yourself to become aware of the thoughts. Allow yourself to become aware of the feelings. And even if you feel a negative thought, you can choose to think a greater thought on purpose.

So, as I said, we’ve not been taught how to manage negative emotions like fear, doubt, and shame which will come up when we commit to taking action, when we commit to a really ambitious goal. They will come up. It’s just part of the process. So, how do we manage them?

Well, first of all, we’ve not been taught how to manage them, so most people take three steps when they feel uncomfortable emotions like fear, doubt, and shame.

Number one: We resist. If you’re not familiar with the symbol beneath the word ‘Resist,’ these are emojis, text emojis that were invented in Japan and in this emoji you can see that the mouth is like a squiggly line. You’re tensing like this, you’re trying to resist the emotion, just not allow yourself to feel the uncomfortable emotions. This is something that a lot of us do by habit, by default.

And some of us just react. And what’s happening here is this little text guy, text emoji guy is flipping a table. Might be a girl, might be woman, excuse me. Text emoji person is flipping a table because they’re reacting to negative emotion. Just blame and anger and attack.

Or you simply avoid. You just shut down the conversation. You walk away. You don’t deal with it at all. And this is a common reaction to how people deal with conflict as well, which is a whole other topic.

But what can happen is, when you resist, react, and avoid, you create this trap, this cycle of resisting, reacting, avoiding, resisting, reacting, avoiding. And it just becomes this cycle that perpetuates itself. You don’t evolve out of the negative emotion, you just make it greater unintentionally.

So, what is an emotion? Why do we create these negative cycles? Why is it so difficult to deal, why do people think that it’s so difficult to deal with? Well, simply, emotion is a vibration in the body. When you feel excitement, like when I feel excitement, I feel it in my chest, I feel like a lightness in my head. When I feel shame, I feel this heaviness in the pit of my stomach.

Emotion is a vibration that you can experience in the body. That’s it.

And as I mentioned earlier, it’s associated with a thought, which is simply a sentence in your mind. And so emotion, by itself, is completely harmless. Anger, when you feel the emotion of anger, you might feel tightness in your stomach and it’s completely harmless to just allow that emotion to be and to pass through the body. It is possible and it is something that I coach my clients to do. And it’s a very, very powerful thing because you can observe emotion with compassion, you can experience emotion without suffering, and you can generate new emotion. And remember, self-confidence is the feeling of trust that you will do what you said you will do, and you can generate that emotion inside of yourself.

And emotions are so powerful because there are only five things in the universe. WHAT?! That’s crazy! There are only five things in the Universe? I mean, everything in our world, in our lives, can be categorized into one of these five things. That’s it!

There are neutral circumstances. We talked about the body, we talked about money, we talked about other people, we talked about titles, position, these are all circumstances that are provable, that are neutral, that are factual. Circumstances are things that you can prove in the court of law. And how we interpret or what we think of those neutral circumstances are thoughts which are 100% optional.

Now, our brains are wired in such a way that think thoughts by default and that is because our brains are wired for efficiency and it’s just efficient for the brain to just have these knee-jerk reaction thoughts. And in the book that I mentioned to you earlier, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Dr. Joe DiSpenza talks about how 95% of our thoughts are unconscious. They come from our subconscious mind because it has been programmed by socialization, by habit, by our past.

So, what I’m saying is even though 95% of your thoughts will not feel like an option, they’ll just feel factual and believable, they are in fact optional because you can choose to use the human brain, the prefrontal cortex to generate new thoughts on purpose.

And that’s what I mean when I say think greater than you feel.

And the thoughts that you have generate feelings, generate emotions, and the emotions are so powerful according to MIT professor Jared Curhan, feelings rule negotiation. How you feel about yourself, how you feel about the counterpart, how you feel about the potential outcome, how you feel about the process. That’s what drives the success of a negotiation.

Why?

Because feelings drive behavior. Feelings drive your actions. And as I mentioned earlier, actions drive results. And the results that you get from a specific thought will always prove the originating thought.

So, let me give you an example of this model when I indulged in a default thought, in a thought that comes from the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee, as I mentioned, or the Primitive Brain. So, as I mentioned, three years ago, I lacked confidence as a speaker but I had this dream, I had the vision of becoming a professional speaker, workshop leader, and coach. So, I joined Toastmasters and I committed to delivering a prepared speech at least once a month for ten months. They had a program called The Competent Communicator and in The Competent Communicator, there are ten speeches. I said, I am going to deliver a speech at least once a month.So, I made the commitment.

And so the neutral circumstance was that I had scheduled myself to give a speech at New York Toastmasters and New York Toastmasters is a wonderful nonprofit that really does wonders, especially if you are looking to develop your self-confidence as a speaker, communicator, and leader.

But at one point, I had the default thought that I’m afraid to fail in front of people. I’m afraid what people will think. I’m afraid of messing up. And when I had this thought, when I thought this thought, I’m afraid to fail in front of people, I experienced the emotion of fear and also anxiety, fearful anxiety. And when I was coming from this fearful anxiety, I procrastinated. That was the action that I took from this fearful anxiety because I didn’t know how to deal, I didn’t know how to allow for this emotion. I was resisting it, I was avoiding it, and I was looking for distractions like looking for snacks in the kitchen or checking my email or going on social media.

And then I would worry rather than work on the speech. And then I fumbled through the speech. I didn’t really do my best because I had spent so much time procrastinating, looking for distractions, worrying rather than working on this speech.

And what was the result that I had created for myself from thinking that I’m afraid to fail in front of people is that I felt like a failure. And you see how the result, feeling like a failure, provided evidence for the thought that I’m afraid to fail in front of people.

So, how did I apply thinking greater than how I feel to myself?

Once I started coaching myself, I decided to approach the Toastmasters speech with a different mindset, with a different thought. So, same circumstance, Toastmasters speech, and I decided to think a new thought on purpose, even though I was still experiencing anxiety.

I am committed to learn by doing. I am committed to learn by failing. I am committed to allow myself to fail in front of 60 people who attend New York Toastmasters because that is how I will learn. That is how I will grow myself and I am committed to learn by doing because this is how I grow. I’m committed to learn by doing.

And when I told myself that I’m committed to this, I’m committed to doing this, I felt the emotion of commitment. And the emotion of commitment feels solid. It feels like strength inside my body and from that feeling of strength, I can allow the feeling of anxiety to pass through. I can let it be and not resist it, not react to it, not avoid it.

And when I allow the feeling of anxiety to pass through, then I can use the power of my human brain to plan, to prepare, and to practice ahead of time. And when I planned, prepared, and practiced ahead of time, I can ride the adrenaline when I’m standing in front of 60-some-odd people and follow through on my commitment.

So you see how the intentional thought created this new feeling that allowed me to process the negative feeling and follow through on taking action.

And of course there were times I did fail. I didn’t always give perfect speeches. I fumbled. I used a lot of space-filler words, ums and uhs, I still do. I have made mistakes in front of people but that’s okay. It was my commitment to keep showing up, keep following through because I really believed in the vision of my future self who is a professional speaker.

And now I’m doing that! I get paid thousands of dollars to attend leadership conferences, to show up to organizations and teach people the art of negotiating, the art of communicating, the art of leading.

And as a result, I have grown my self-confidence. You can do this too. You don’t need to be a coach, speaker, whatever. You can apply this new thinking on purpose to generate emotion on purpose so that you can generate self-confidence for you, by you.

And so, finally, the last step in the process is to do it over and over and over again. Repeat it, 1-4. Believe in your future self, commit to taking action, allow yourself to fail, continue to think greater than how you feel. And that takes courage.

I remember the last year I was in Toastmasters, I was VP of Membership and I committed to acting from courage rather than comfort. That was inspired by reading Brené Brown. Brené Brown talks about how you can rise about shame by choosing courage over comfort.

So how does courage look for you? What does it look like when you act from courage? When you act from the courage to dream, to believe in your future self, the courage to take action, the courage to feel discomfort because you can and it’s harmless, and the courage to do it over and over and over again.

This, I tell you, will change your life.

So, that wraps up the official content and if you like this material then I want to take this opportunity, the last five minutes that we have, to tell you a little bit more about Small Group Mastermind, which I said earlier will start in March 2019. I got feedback from people that March works better.

So, Small Group Mastermind. It is for eight women who want to lead, influence, and thrive. I’m looking for ambitious people who have strong values of service and excellence. And what you get is, in addition to one-on-one coaching, two one-on-one coaching sessions with me, you also get deep dives into future self, self-confidence, boundaries, emotional mastery, and more. And you’ll get to benefit from both private coaching as well as group accountability as well as the opportunity to study this material by yourself.

So, how does it work exactly? Come to this link: jamieleecoach.com/mastermind. But basically, as I said, you get private coaching, group coaching calls with deep dives on these specific topics and in between calls you will be held accountable to complete worksheets and take action towards your goals.

So if you really want this unique opportunity to be supported by me individually and by a group of like-minded, ambitious women, this is perfect for you because it’s a great deal. And these are the dates and the plan. I just wrapped up the January Mastermind and Sarah S. who was one of the seven women - the first group was seven women - she said that, “Working with Jamie in the Mastermind was extremely valuable.” She said with the group’s help, she developed and applied strategies for helping her regain control over her responses to life’s hurdles and in turn, this empowered her to better pursue the life that she wants.

I love this testimonial.

Here are the next steps: It’s only three payments of $210. You save about $1295 compared to my retail, one-on-one, private coaching rate of $350/hour. This is a great bargain.

If you are interested, email me. Let’s set up a time for us to talk. Let’s make sure this is a good fit for you or you can go to my site and apply at jamieleecoach.com/apply. If you apply, you will get the opportunity to have a free consultation, so there’s no risk, really.

So, does coaching actually work? Does it generate results? Will it generate results for you? So, if you got www.jamieleecoach.com/results, you can see all of the testimonials from my previous negotiation, leadership coaching clients, as well as workshop clients.

I want to tell you some of the success stories from the past year. I coached this amazing woman, Sarah, who was also in the January Mastermind and through coaching, she was able to flip a no to a yes with her dream job company. She was initially turned down but she didn’t give up. She didn’t give up believing in her future self. She didn’t give up generating her own self-confidence and so she was able to go back, get an informational interview, and then get an offer from her dream job. And in the process, she also negotiated a $10,000 salary increase. She is now maxing out her quarterly bonus and she’s still coaching with me and coached her through the performance review process.

I have another client who also hired me to coach her through a salary negotiation process and she’s still coaching with me now as a leadership client. And when she got the offer, she countered, she asked for what she really wanted which was a bigger role. She wanted to be in a capacity to lead technical conversations rather than just be a project manager and as a result she also got a $10,000 salary increase and she is on target to achieve her goal of attending grad school. She’s working towards that goal on purpose with a lot of thought work.

I have another client who I coached and as a result of our coaching, she grew her impact-focused side hustle. She created this wonderful business in addition to her day job that supports women with ADHD and as a result, she was interviewed by industry influencers and this was as a result of her generating her own self-confidence, not looking outside of herself, but generating it from within herself. And she’s also doing so well at her day job. I recently coached her through her performance review cycle and she’s been tapped by the founder of her organization to be a thought leader at her day job. So she’s also growing her entrepreneurial side hustle and excelling at her day job. You can do that. You can thrive.

Do you have any questions for me? We are out of time. I like to end my webinars on time because I want to honor and respect your time commitments as well. If you have any questions for me, feel free to email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com. This webinar was recorded, so if you were not able to attend it live, you will still be able to watch it and stream it.

Thank you very much for your time and attention. If you have any questions, email me. I am grateful for your time and focus. Thank you! Have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your day.

Why Do You Assume the Worst-Case Scenario?

"I'm afraid of losing all my money and becoming a bag lady." 

"I think they are going to criticize and rebuke me." 

"They will pigeonhole me for what I've done, not what I can do." 

Does your brain assume the worst-case scenario when it comes to your career and interactions with other people? 

If so, what's the impact of assuming the worst? What's the upside and what's the downside? 

In this episode, I share: 

- my personal experience of assuming the worst and living in survival mode 

- two of the "worst-case scenarios" that actually happened in my life 

- some biases I'm choosing on PURPOSE so that I can thrive, not just survive. 

If you enjoy this podcast, you'd enjoy joining me at my upcoming webinar. Come register at www.jamieleecoach.com 

Or write me for suggestions, thoughts, and more: jamie@jamieleecoach.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 54 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

How are you?

Happy February 1st!

How was your month of January?

My month rocked. It was awesome.

I meditated 31 consecutive days. As I mentioned in Episode 52, I read How to Break the Habit of Being Yourself  by Dr. Joe DiSpenza and I did the meditation that he recommends in that book. It’s amazing. So powerful.

And I also did 14 days of Aikido training, which is pretty much every other day. I am committed to becoming a masterful Aikido athlete. Aikido, if you don’t know, is a Japanese martial art focused on peace, flow of energy, and protecting both the attacker and defender, even though there are throws, grabs, twists, turns, flips.

It’s a lot of fun and I love how the martial art of Aikido is like a physical connection of the concepts that I’m learning in the book and also the concepts that I’m teaching here in the podcast about how mind overcomes matter, how we can integrate our mind, body, and spirit and thrive, no matter what other people say, do or think.

In other words, no matter what the circumstances are, no matter if somebody’s trying to grab you, throw you, you can maintain your ground, you can maintain your power, you can maintain your peace. And that is possible.

So I love how all the things that I’m working on in my personal life and my professional life, there is so much synchronicity.

And I did my Mastermind Group in the month of January as well. We met four times this month, every Tuesday, and we had some really great conversations on self-confidence, on setting goals, on emotional mastery as opposed to emotional dependence, which creates powerlessness and resentment. And finally, we talked about how to process discomfort so that we can become courageous and become unstoppable as negotiators and leaders.

So, I’m really excited for the second iteration of Mastermind. So, if you’re interested, email me: jamie@jamieleecoach.com and better yet, come join my webinar next Wednesday on February 6th at 12:30 pm EST/ 9:30 am PT.

I’m going to reprise the webinar I gave this past Wednesday on how to generate self-confidence in five simple steps without faking anything.

Now, I want to say all the concepts that I teach and apply, I apply them to myself first and I know that they work because I have done them, I have applied and worked through them, I have coached myself and I know that self-confidence is something that you can create in yourself, regardless of your circumstance, regardless of how much money you have, what you look like, how much student loan debt you have.

It doesn’t matter. You can create self-confidence and with self-confidence you can do what you want in your life and in your career.

So, join me. It’s gonna be a really fun discussion. I have some phenomenal content ready for you. Join me. Challenge me with your difficult questions. You can also join the webinar on demand, so even if you cannot join it this Wednesday, you can watch it later. So, if you want to register, come to my site, jamieleecoach.com.

So today, I want to talk to you about why we assume the worst-case scenario.

I had some phenomenal coaching sessions with amazing women and the common thread among all of the coaching sessions this week was that these amazing women are all assuming the worst-case scenario in one way or another.

And I have done the same.

So take, for example, somebody who is going for a new job, a career transition. She’s worried, she’s assuming the worst-case scenario that people will pigeon-hole her for what she has done in the past, not what she can do in the future. She feels that her resume will be a liability and people won’t give her a chance to prove her future potential.

I had another conversation with somebody who assumes the worst when people reach out to her, send her an email, or call her at work and she immediately goes to the worst-case scenario that she’s going to be rebuked or people are going to find fault with her.

And why? It’s because there’s been experiences like that in her childhood. With our parents, when we have experienced parents who rebuked us or when we recall the childhood memory of being afraid, it’s like our mind is just playing a repeat of a past experience.

And there’s another with whom I’ve spoken and she is afraid of the worst-case scenario that a lot of people are afraid of, which is losing all her money and ending up as a bag lady, a homeless bag lady.

So, why do we assume the worst-case scenario?

I think our brain will reason that it’s because if we prepare for the worst-case scenario, then at worst, if that worst-case scenario happens, then we will be prepared for it and then we will be able to survive that worst-case scenario.

And notice how our focus on surviving the worst-case scenario keeps us in survival mode, in fight mode, in stress mode, not in thriving mode, not in creative mode, not in value creation mode.

So, I think there are just, in general, three explanations for why we always assume the worst, which is a symptom of our negative bias, right? Our brains are wired for negative bias.

Number one is that we have experienced it in the past. We experienced our parents getting mad at us, rebuking us for something that we did wrong and so then we start thinking that we’re going to get rebuked and get yelled at in the workplace.

So we think that the past repeats itself, right? That’s number one.

Number two, we have, as a society, as a culture, we have a bias for scarcity. Money is running out. The planet’s resources are running out. Time is running out. There’s so much marketing messaging around how you better do it now, you better buy now before the sale ends, before stock runs out, right?

There is so much focus on scarcity in our culture and society, so we are trained to believe that things are not going to last. Time, money, energy, particularly.

And number three, there are a lot of naysayers, you know? The more successful you become, sure, you experience feedback and sometimes there are haters, right? Haters are gonna hate. And there are naysayers. Naysayers are gonna say nay!

And those people who are wired to just criticize and find fault with you, that’s their bias, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are right because, just as much as there are haters, there are people who are kind of like me. Who are sort of biased for positivity and will always find reasons for why things are going well.

So, our brains are wired, our brains are hardwired for us to believe that the past repeats itself, to believe that time, money, energy will run out, to have a scarcity bias, and number three, to have a negative bias. And when we hear naysayers outside of us saying those things, our brains will be tempted to believe them.

I will be tempted to believe that my gender, my skin tone, that the shape of my body will determine what’s possible for me because there are so many people and a lot of marketing messages that are about hey, there’s something wrong with you. You gotta fix it. Spend money to fix it, right?

So, I want to explore a little bit at a deeper level, what is the impact of this worst-case scenario bias?

When we assume the worst-case scenario, how do we think, how do we feel, how do we act, and what are the results that we create from assuming the worst-case scenario?

And I did some work on myself because, I mean, I used to assume the worst-case scenario just constantly, incessantly, I was very miserable for a very long time in my career.

And the common thread among all of the times I assumed the worst-case scenario - that people don’t like me, that money is going to run out, people don’t get me, that my external circumstance, that my body defines my future, what is available, what is possible for me - when I assumed those things, I always got defensive.

Take, for example, when I assume that people don’t like me, I experience the fear of social rejection and then I try to manage that fear by preemptively getting defensive with people, putting up walls, or worse yet, belittling myself.

And I see a lot of people, I’ve seen women do this. I’ve seen myself do it. You get kind of nervous and kind of weird and you say [laughs nervously], “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry I said that! Sorry I exist! Sorry I’m taking up space!” And you belittle yourself preemptively in an effort to save yourself from a perceived attack.

Now, the thing that is really interesting is that when we assume the worst-case scenario, when we think that other people don’t like us, they’re gonna reject us, criticize us, etc., our brain will see that image, that imagined future, and it won’t know the difference between that imagined perception of a dangerous future, of a worst-case scenario, from what it actually perceives, from sensory perception.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between a sensory perception and imagined perception.

Now, you have all experienced this.

You know, take, for example, you are thinking about somebody who said something really nasty to you and when you start thinking about that person and you re-imagine, you remember that situation where anger was boiling up, and you can start feeling, physically feeling the discomfort and the tightness in your stomach or in your neck and you can feel the blood pressure rise up. You can feel yourself getting hot and angry and defensive.

Or if you think about somebody you are infatuated with and you imagine a sexual fantasy, your body will automatically go into that mode where you’re feeling aroused and excited, right?

So, even if those people, the person that you’re angry at or the person that you’re infatuated with are not in front of you, just by imagining those people, imagining the situation, or remembering the situation, you have a physical reaction.

And that shows you that your brain doesn’t know the difference between an imagined perception and a sensory perception.

So, when you assume the worst-case scenario, what happens is that you put yourself in that worst-case scenario. You create the situation in your body at a brain level, at a chemical level, at a hormonal level.

You go into that fight or flight mode. You go into that survival mode. You go into that stress mode simply by imagining that worst-case scenario.

The worst thing that can actually happen when you imagine the worst-case scenario is an emotion.

Emotion, Dr. Joe DiSpenza says in his book, is the chemical residue of a past experience, so when you experience that worst-case scenario from having remembered something that happened to you that triggers all this negative emotion, you feel the experience.

You feel the emotion of shame, fear, guilt.

That’s it. That’s the worst thing.

And when you imagine the worst thing, you create that emotion in your body.

And so, for me, my reaction to that emotion of either shame, fear, guilt, anxiety, failure is that I would get defensive. I would want to put up a fight. I would get tight and tense.

Just thinking about it, just remembering how I used to be right now as I’m recording this podcast is recreating...I’m remembering right now in my body what that defensiveness felt like.

I always felt like I was under attack even though I was never actually under attack because I was always imagining the worst-case scenario.

And I would get defensive. I would get weird. I would get creepy. I would belittle myself. Or if I felt that the worst-case scenario would happen and that I would run out of money, I would feel panicky. I would feel like I was going to die.

The primitive brain, when it’s not managed, is like a toddler with a knife and even though there is no actual toddler with a knife, it can feel as if your existence or your ego is under attack by this toddler with a knife.

And so when I examine my own experience of always going to the worst-case scenario, I notice that I got defensive, I get creepy, I get needy, I feel desperate, I feel panicky, I feel stressed out, and as a result, I would not be able to show up and be genuine with people.

I would not like those people but be so desperate for their approval. I would always feel so afraid of spending any money. I would be so afraid that I would not be able to access my creativity and imagination to generate value for other people, which is how you actually create money, so I was not in that creation mode.

And I would get angry. Preemptively angry.

So, I was thinking about this and then I wondered what were the actual worst-case scenarios that had happened?

And I can think of two things. Things that happened that at one point I was actually very upset about.

One was that - this happened about twelve years ago - I was married to a man who overstayed his student visa. So we were actually in a loving relationship, actually living together, and he asked me to marry him so that he can get a green card and stay in the United States. And I was very young, naive, I did not have a lot of money, neither did he. And so we got married at the city hall. We just had a nice lunch with a friend, and that was it. We didn’t have a wedding.

Long story short, we go to the green card interview and he couldn’t answer a single question. His mind went completely blank.

It’s funny now but I was livid back then when he failed the green card interview.

He couldn’t remember where I lived, where I worked, he couldn’t remember what bank account I had. He couldn’t remember a single detail about my family even though he had spent...and he had cooked holiday dinners for them!

We were in a real relationship but, at the green card interview, we looked like we were completely fake because he couldn’t answer a single question.

I was so angry.

I was so angry.

I had never been so angry.

And I thought that was the worst-case scenario and it had happened! I was shocked, I was upset. But over time, I have learned to really appreciate what happened because it allowed me to leave him.

And this was the best thing that had happened because over time I realized that he was not the person I thought he was. I think if I had stayed in that relationship, I would not be where I am today. And if he had not failed that interview, I may still be with him.

And after I left that relationship, I found a wonderful man whom I’m still with. We’ve been together for 11 years and he’s very different from the first husband I had.

And so the worst thing that had happened turned out actually to be the best possible thing.

Also, I talk about how I bungled my salary negotiation ten years ago. I had no experience in the finance industry, I didn’t research the going market rates, I didn’t tap my network, I didn’t really prepare a statement of value, I didn’t know how to frame for value and ask for the high end of the going market range. So I didn’t do any of that and then found out I was making $50,000 in a job that is valued to be $100,000 at most other hedge funds.

And so at first I was very angry but over time I have become really appreciative of that too because it taught me a really valuable lesson of all the things that I could have done and now I teach those lessons. I teach those lessons and I get paid to teach those lessons. I get paid thousands of dollars to go to women’s leadership conferences, to go to corporations, to universities.

I was just at NYU law school and I spoke on the panel about fair pay and I shared that experience verbatim. I said, “Hey, I once found out I was making $50,000 but I’m really appreciative that it happened because it taught me all the things that I now teach others, that I am now teaching you.”

Long story short, I want to challenge your thinking around worst-case scenarios. And that’s the work I do with all my clients. I always challenge why are you always assuming the worst-case scenario. What is the impact of going into the worst-case scenario in your mind, right? Because it creates, it recreates those negative emotions and you react from that negative emotion and you go into survival mode, stress mode, fight mode.

One of the things that experts all agree on is that humans are biased. We are all biased. And our default mode is for negative bias. Our default mode is for scarcity bias. Our default mode is to buy into what everyone else tells us to be true.

But what if we purposely chose biases that served us, biases that helped us thrive?

So here are some biases that I am choosing for myself:

• To hell with circumstances, I create my own future.

• The future will be more amazing than my brain can imagine now.

• I want to have a future focus and I want to believe that the future is even better than what I have experienced in the past, than what I can imagine now.

• And I also want to have a bias that there is always more than I need.

• There is always more time, there is always more money, there is always more energy.

• I’m going to let my mind evolve into creation mode as opposed to survival mode. And I know that is how I will thrive.

• And I’m going to let all the naysayers be wrong about me. Let the people who have their thoughts about me be wrong about me. Why not? Everyone’s going to say, do, and think what they say, do, and think anyways and why not let them be wrong?

• My gender, my skin tone, the shape of who I am, where I come from can never create limitations but only opportunities. And when I choose to see it this way, it generates a lot of appreciation, gratitude, and excitement.

• I choose to celebrate what is possible for me.

• I choose to celebrate the best possible scenarios and not always go to the worst-case scenarios. And this is how I believe we can make the gender wage gap irrelevant in that awesome, amazing future, which will not be the worst-case scenario but the best possible scenario.

So, what about you?

What bias will you drop?

What bias do you want to choose on purpose so that you can set yourself up for success and create the best possible scenario?

Thank you and I will talk to you next week.

Bye!

How to Set Boundaries Without Giving Up Power

Clients often tell me that they struggle with setting boundaries at work. The feelings associated with this are resentment, victimhood, and powerlessness. 

Here's the good news: It's totally possible to set and maintain boundaries without giving up personal power when you take 100% responsibility for your own emotions and actions. This leads to both self-empowerment and healthy relationships. 

In this episode, you'll learn 

- How other people and external circumstances don't create our feelings,

- How emotional dependency leads to manuals that disempower, and 

- The difference between a manual and boundary 

If you'd like to register for the upcoming free webinar or to get in touch with me for a trial coaching session, email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com. 

If you'd like to read past podcast transcripts, go to https://www.jamieleecoach.com/podcast

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 53 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

I’m so excited for what is to come for this little podcast that started on the Anchor platform.

I started last year, started recording it in my closet, and I have been doing it for almost a full year now and I am invested in growing this podcast and making sure that I deliver the best quality content, the best coaching content that I can offer you so that you can thrive.

Not just survive, not just get by in your life and your career, but really thrive.

That is my intention because I do believe that we are all born to thrive. We are all born with the capacity to thrive and be the best version of who we can be.

So, today I want to talk to you about how to set boundaries without giving up power.

My small group mastermind has been discussing pushback and how we can reframe pushback so that we don’t feel so resistant, powerless, and victim-y around pushing back when we have set boundaries.

And I think it’s really simple.

It’s simple to set boundaries.

It may be simple but not easy to set boundaries.

We are 100% capable of taking 100% responsibility for our emotions and not attaching our emotional lives to how other people and especially bosses, coworkers, partners behave or don’t behave or don’t live up to our expectations.

And we can set boundaries that are simple statements, like “If this happens, then I will...” “If somebody touches me inappropriately, I will immediately leave the situation and call the authorities.”

This requires taking full responsibility for our emotions, for our actions and it’s never about what other people have to do, it’s about how we will act to honor our commitment to ourselves.

Why is it so hard?

I think it’s because, as I talked about in the earlier episode, we have been trained from a very young age to think that outside forces cause our feelings inside.

We have been told to not say certain things at the playground because it hurts Johnny’s feelings.

We have been told to grow up and be a good citizen to make our parents proud.

We have been told that our actions make our friends and our allies and people who are in relationship with us feel a certain emotion, that our actions and words help other people feel safe, feel good, feel loved, feel secure.

And then we think that our bosses and our coworkers, their actions cause us to feel like we belong, feel safe in the workplace.

And I am here to say that is not the case. It’s simply not true.

It’s not true, because when people say certain things...let me give you an example:

If somebody says, “What’s wrong with you,” it’s not the fact that somebody said, “What’s wrong with you?” Let’s say this person is close to you, lives with you, loves you.

Okay, this happened to me in my own life with somebody that I’m in a relationship with and they say, “What’s wrong with you?”

Now, when they say that, just because they said, “What’s wrong with you?” doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me, doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with the relationship, or that there is something wrong with the person who said it, even though it would be very tempting to think any of those things.

I can think, “There’s something wrong with me,” and feel shame. I can think, “There’s something wrong with him for saying that,” and feel judgment, anger, and blame. Or I can think, “Hmm. I wonder why he said that.” Or I can think, “From his point of view, I can see why he would say that,” and feel compassion.

The point I’m making here is that outside circumstances don’t cause our emotions.

What other people do and say don’t cause how we feel inside. It’s what we think about what has happened that cause our emotion.

Just like with the simple statement, “What’s wrong with you?”, you can have many different perspectives on that one little statement.

So what we think about what happened is always our choice but, when we were growing up, we were taught that outside forces cause our feelings inside. And this taught us to become emotionally dependent on other people, external circumstances.

And when we are emotionally dependent, as if we are emotionally children to other people, we develop what I would call manuals. Emotional manuals, not operating manuals that we have at work, right? Manuals on how other people should behave so that we can feel good.

And we have many manuals. 99.98% of the population have manuals for other people. And these manuals are often not written down or explicitly shared with the people for whom we have created it. They’re almost always in our minds.

And it’s something like, my boss should give me credit for the work I did.

If I keep my head down and do good work, I should get a promotion, even if I don’t ask for it.

My boss should invite me to meetings to make me feel included and safe in my job.

My boss should care about me.

I’m totally talking about how I used to be in my former life as an employee because I had a lot of manuals toward my boss and I attached my emotional life to the manual because I wanted to feel validated, recognized, like I belonged, like I was secure and safe in my job and I had developed these long instructions of how my boss should behave towards me so that I can feel good.

And in doing so, I gave up my power and ended up feeling very resentful, powerless, annoyed and miserable.

The reason why I’m talking about manuals here at length is because, in my own experience, I have seen that - now this is before I learned these powerful coaching concepts - before I knew them I was conflating and confusing manuals for how other people, especially my boss and my coworkers should behave to make me feel good with boundaries that I hadn’t really decided on.

So how you can set boundaries without giving up any power is to first drop the manuals because, hey, let’s face it, they don’t work. And when we do create these manuals for other people, they just make us feel resentful and powerless.

And then set clear boundaries and honor them without creating expectations that other people should respect it or do anything because, at the end of the day, everyone, all the humans, are allowed to be, to do, and to think as they already are, as they already do, as they already think.

Other people are never in our control and when we try to control other people, it just exacerbates, it just makes that feeling of powerlessness and resentment worse.

The only thing that we can control, really, is how we think about situations, how we create emotions in ourselves, and what we do.

And this is really powerful stuff because when we can manage our own minds and think on purpose and create the emotion that we need to drive the action that we want to take, then we create results in our lives.

But about three years ago, I didn’t know that. I was an employee and I want to share with you a situation that had happened at work that might seem kind of vague. Vague in terms of, is it a boundary violation or is it a manual issue?

So, I want to share with you what had happened and I want to offer some of my perspectives and the new perspective that I’ve gained now that I understand these new concepts around setting boundaries.

So, three years ago I was working for a man. Let’s call him Dan. And I worked at an open office. One day, Dan came into the office and he decided to shift the angle of his desk, which was right next to mine, and as a result, he shifted mine and somebody else’s desk that was right in front of mine. So, we were in a triad and he shifted the angle of the entire triad of desks.

He just didn’t give me any notice about it. He didn’t say anything before he just got up and shifted the desks.

It really pissed me off at that time!

I had the thought that he does not respect me, he does not respect my personal space, and in my head I was thinking, “What a jerk!”

We’re really talking about two inches of space here, okay?

But because I had the thought that he does not respect me and that he should, I was feeling resentful. I was feeling powerless in the situation.

Because, you know, I had, in general, these unspoken expectations that he should make me feel valued, respected, and like I belong and I am safe at work by treating me with respect, and that he should invite me to meetings and include me in discussions.

And, of course, he did not invite me to all the meetings. Of course, he did not include me in all the decision-making processes, and, as a result of my thinking, I was often seething silently and very often complaining bitterly behind his back.

I was acting out like an emotional child. I was attached to him, I was looking to him to satisfy my emotional need.

So, this day, my other coworker whose desk was part of the triad, she came into the office, she saw what had happened, and it seemed to me she didn’t give as much thought to the situation as I had and made it this big thing about how he doesn’t respect me and blah blah blah.

She simply came into the office, she saw that her desk had shifted by about two inches, and she moved her desk back to the original location. So, I’m like, great, I’m gonna follow. I jerked my desk right back into the original place and I didn’t say a word to Dan. I didn’t even look at him. It was so totally awkward.

The result I had created from thinking that he doesn’t respect me was that I felt resentment. And the action that I took from feeling resentment was that I did not look at him, I did not say anything to him, I gave him power in the situation.

And then I was wallowing in that sense of powerlessness. And then I hated on him when he didn’t live up to my unspoken expectations. And then I jerked my desk back, even though I had hated on him for doing the same thing. In fact, I had mirrored his action which I had judged as disrespectful.

I did not show respect. I did not show curiosity. I did not show presence of mind and engage in the conversation that goes something like, “Oh, I see that you moved our desks. What’s up? Did you have an opinion about how our triad was situated? Did you have a better idea of how we can be sitting in this office?”

Imagine the impact that could have had on our relationship, right?

But I didn’t go there.

Now, I think it’s true that I could have set, for myself, the boundary that if somebody moves my desk, I will move it back into its original place.

I could have decided for myself, even though the desk doesn’t personally belong to me, we work in an office space that belongs to the company, we’re using equipment that belongs to the company, working on the desk that belongs to the company.

I could have still created a personal boundary for myself that said if somebody moves my desk or things on my desk, I will put it back into the original location.

And, had I done that instead of making it about other people and how other people are impacting my emotions, had I done that and just simply honored my commitment to myself, to this new created boundary, I think I could have engaged in this situation with no resentment, no anger, no blame, no sense of victimhood.

Imagine how powerful that could have been.

I recently helped another client with a similar situation but not about her desk, it was about how she was getting assigned tasks. It was about how she was getting assigned to do tasks from a coworker who is the project manager. My client is the doer, she’s the subject matter expert in her field, the coworker is the project manager. Let’s call the project manager Benny, just for the clarity of our conversation.

So, my client was having problems with Benny because Benny was, in my client’s estimation, not giving enough thought to how long the tasks take, how long the project actually takes to do, and how to best serve the client and one particular situation that was creating a lot of stress for my client was that Benny had assigned a critical client project task at 4:00 pm on Friday. And this is not a task that can be completed in a hour. It takes three hours.

So my client was feeling very frustrated and she felt that Benny should do a better job. Benny should give more thought to how to do Benny’s job to make my client’s job easier and ultimately serve the client needs better.

And so what had happened was my client was having manuals, creating manuals for Benny and Benny was not living up to those manuals because, let’s face it, when we create these manuals that invest our emotional lives to them, 99.99% of the time, people will not live up to our manuals and this will create more stress, resentment, feelings of victimhood, anger, resentment.

And so, at the end of the session, the client decided that she was going to create boundaries for herself to honor her commitment to herself to be the best at what she does and not make it anything about how Benny should behave.

So, she decided her new boundary was if Benny does not assign tasks on time and my client knows what needs to get done, my client will initiate the task regardless. She will do what she needs to do if she knows what it is that she needs to get done, she will do it anyway.

And she said that the effect of having created this boundary for herself and honoring this boundary, not making it mean anything negative about Benny and not creating these expectations, not being in this judgy, blamey, victim-y place, it made her feel empowered.

And also it made her a leader. It made her a person who takes initiative, somebody who takes the proactive solution and runs with it, somebody who creates solutions, not waits for other people to tell her what to do so that she can do it.

So, I’m curious what your thoughts are on setting boundaries because I think this is a really powerful tool that can help liberate us from so much unnecessary stress in the workplace.

And again, just to recap, boundaries are what you will do in a specific situation to honor your commitment to yourself. It’s never about what other people have to do because when you create manuals for other people, it sets you up for stress, resentment and powerlessness.

And everyone is already allowed, everyone is already doing what they do and so when we just acknowledge and accept the fact that people are allowed to be, to do, and to think as they are, it gives us the freedom to show up and to honor our commitments 100% of the time.

Thank you so much and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.

Why It Feels Gross to Claim Value for Ourselves

Clients often tell me, “It feels gross to claim value for myself. It feels like bragging. It’s uncomfortable to assign dollar value to my accomplishments.” 

In this episode, I dispel a persistent myth -- one that was ingrained in me by the patriarchy from a very young age --  that holds us back from generating real self-worth and authentic self-confidence. 

Find out how to generate power, so you can claim value for yourself and become unstoppable as a negotiator. 

Here's where you can access transcriptions of previous episodes and get in touch with me: https://www.jamieleecoach.com/podcast

Your review on iTunes would be super appreciated!

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Hello! Welcome to Episode 52 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

First, I just want to say thank you for listening!

I really appreciate you.

I would love if you would go to iTunes and leave a review because that would help other people find and access this content.

I really appreciate that my listeners are coming back and listening every week, every time I produce content, and I intend to create more podcasts this year, marrying the best of coaching principles, leadership principles, and helping you negotiate so that you can lead, influence, and thrive.

I was away last week. I traveled to Atlanta, Georgia and delivered a negotiation workshop for women who work in the nuclear industry. That was phenomenal!

And today I want to talk to you about why it feels gross to claim value for ourselves at the negotiation table.

When clients come to me, they’re often struggling with speaking and articulating their unique value at the negotiation table, especially when it comes to asking for money.

They tell me, “I don’t want to come across as too aggressive.”

“I don’t want to be seen as arrogant.”

“I don’t want to be seen as selfish or greedy.”

Or the often say, “It feels gross to brag about my accomplishments. It feels gross to assign a dollar to the value I bring.”

Now, I think that this is because, from a very young age, we’ve been trained to seek external validation from others.

I was born in South Korea and I was really trained to seek external validation from authority figures like parents, teachers, basically, the patriarchy.

And we’ve been told that conforming to the expectations of other people will make them feel good about us.

And when they feel good, they reward us with acceptance, recognition, and reward which sometimes takes the form of money.

We’ve been taught this myth that how we do, how we behave, makes other people feel something inside that then causes them to give us what we want and that, basically, the power is in their hands to give us what we really want for ourselves which is acceptance, recognition, and reward.

Take for example this common phrase, “Be a good girl and make mom proud.”

It feels so innocent and yet there is this myth, this lie that when you do something it will make other people feel something.

And I’ll tell you why I think that is not true.

And this line of thinking extends into the workplace where I used to believe that if I work hard and if I keep my head down then my boss will love me, then my boss will reward me with recognition, money, promotions.

When it feels gross to claim value for ourselves, we’re not only experiencing the feeling of powerlessness but we’re experiencing the fear of social rejection and losing the approval of others.

When I was afraid of losing other people’s approval, it was because I was relying on external validation to make me feel good about me on the inside. It was because I was relying on external validation to make me feel that I am worthy and that I can ask for what I want.

I was waiting.

I badly, badly wanted my boss to approve of me so that I could feel good and worthy inside.

So this meant that even though I was a fully grown adult, I was really acting as an emotional child. Emotional child basically means that I was relying on other people to make me feel something good, something worthy, some sense of certainty that I deliver value, that I deliver value and am worth the money that I want.

I believed my boss was responsible for both my positive emotions and negative emotions. I believed he was responsible for my lack of motivation, which I didn’t have a lot of and therefore that he was responsible for my lack of career fulfillment, lack of growth, that I was stuck in my career, and it was all because my boss was not giving me what I wanted so I can feel good and feel certain of my value.

So instead of feeling what I wanted to feel, which was fulfillment and worthiness, I was full of blame, anger, and resentment. They were gross feelings. Those feelings felt really gross.

I was not a lot of fun to be around at this time. I was full of misery. And you know, as the saying goes, misery loves company. I would complain and whine and throw temper tantrums about my boss behind my boss’ back. This is how I behaved as an emotional child.

But here is the truth that I have learned since then. Here is the truth that I think can help us really become powerful from the inside out: It’s that we are 100% responsible for our feelings.

Every moment. In every situation.

Yes, even at work.

Yes, even when it comes to claiming value for ourselves.

And especially when we are negotiating for what we want, for money, for example.

We are 100% responsible for the confidence we bring. We are 100% responsible for the nervousness we feel. We are 100% responsible for the certainty that we want to generate so that we can claim value with confidence.

Now this is because there are only five things in the Universe.

Number one: Circumstances, which are neutral, factual, and provable.

And how we interpret those circumstances is number two: our thoughts, our judgments, our beliefs.

And number three is that our thoughts generate our feelings, our emotions, which is so important in a negotiation.

According to research by MIT professor Jared Curhan, our feelings are the number one factor that is most important to negotiators.

It is not because feelings are fluffy, not because we’re soft people.

It’s because feelings drive number four: our actions. At the root of all our behavior is how we feel, and how we feel drives what we do or don’t do.

And then finally number five: the sum of our actions or inactions creates the results we have.

So, let me give you an example of this.

Back then, when I was acting as an emotional child in the workplace and always blaming my boss and feeling unworthy and therefore I felt gross to claim value for myself, I had the thought that he (it was always a he for some reason) should give me recognition.

At work, which is the neutral circumstance, I want him to give me recognition so that I can feel good about me and my value.

And when I had the thought that he should give me recognition, I felt a lot of resentment. I felt a lot of just this yucky feeling. That’s the phrase I like to label resentment. It’s yucky, it feels yucky to feel resentment, right?

And I was feeling this yucky resentment, I was complaining and whining and throwing temper tantrums behind my boss’ back. I was not speaking up at work. I was not contributing my ideas. I was very passive. I was waiting for him to give me recognition.

In negotiation, this is sometimes called the tiara syndrome, where we’re waiting for people to anoint us with validation and recognition, as opposed to us actively seeking what we want right?

So that’s what I was doing. And the sum of my actions, the result that I was creating by thinking that he should give me recognition, feeling yucky resentment, and not taking any action was that I was not giving myself recognition and I was also not giving him any recognition.

So there was no recognition to go around and it felt even more gross when I thought about claiming my value. There was no sense of power and certainty in this model.

So here’s another model I’d like to suggest:

At work, which is the neutral circumstance, what if you had the thought: I create value?

What if you had the thought: What I do benefits others?

So, don’t make it about other people. Don’t create manuals in which other people have to do certain things to make you feel good. But what if you dropped those manuals, you drop the shoulds, and you came from a place of real authenticity and personal responsibility, emotional responsibility?

I am responsible for how I feel and I can create value at work.

I create value that benefits others.

So, what if you had the thought and you really believed that I create value and I benefit others?

What would that feel like for you?

And maybe at this point you’re hearing this and you’re thinking, “I don’t know, it’s kind of inconceivable for me to think that I just feel that I am creating value that benefits others, period.”

But what if you did?

Because it is a choice. It is a choice for you to think that.

For me, when I think I am creating value that benefits others, it makes me feel valued. It makes me feel like I am worthy. That what I’m doing is worthy.

And from this place of feeling valued, I am motivated to create even more value. I am motivated to step out of my comfort zone and try to learn how I can benefit others.

I would be more willing to listen. I’d be more willing to take action to create even more value, because I feel inspired to think that I create value that benefits others.

And as a result, because I am taking action, because I am taking action from this place of feeling valued and feeling inspired, I would create even more value. And you see how the thought will help support the result that you have.

And the result creates evidence for the thought.

So this is great news because, as I said, we can choose all our thoughts and we can choose all our beliefs. And when we choose empowering thoughts, when choose empowering beliefs without relying on external validation, without relying on other people to make us feel something inside of us, this puts power back in our hands. This gives us that real, authentic power.

And we then can create emotions that we need to drive the actions that we do want to take. For example, claiming value for ourselves at the negotiation table.

If you really believed in yourself and did not rely on other people to tell you that you are valuable, you would be unstoppable when it comes to claiming value for yourself, when it comes to asking for what you want and requesting what you want because not only are you feeling confident from the inside out, you’re not relying on other people’s responses to make you feel good.

Even when they don’t follow through, even when they don’t say yes, you have the choice to decide what that means.

Again, this puts power right back in your hands instead of disempowering you. Instead of losing the negotiation, you can reframe your thinking and you can come back and try again and again, right?

The best negotiators are persistent negotiators because they can generate their own confidence. They can generate their own self-approval. They can generate their own self-recognition.

So this requires breaking the habit of thinking on default or thinking the way society or patriarchy trained us to thing, which is again relying on external validation, relying on other people to make us feel good and giving them a long list - and sometimes we don’t even give them a long list - of manuals, by which I mean a long list of instructions for how they can make us feel good.

Instead of doing that, we make honest requests, we make bold asks, and we don’t get disappointed, we don’t interpret it as a personal failure when people don’t follow through.

And when people don’t follow through, we can still move on.

And when we have this mastery over our thinking and therefore our own emotions, we create negotiation mastery. We become unstoppable. I really believe that.

And that is because when you lose the need for other people to make you feel comfortable, when you lose the need for other people to make you feel liked, or you lose the need to make you feel valuable, what could you not ask for?

There’s nothing that you couldn’t ask for.

We have full authority 100% of the time over how we feel, over how we think about ourselves, about other people and about the value we bring to the negotiation table.

We don’t have to wait for other people to give us acceptance, to give us recognition, to place a tiara on our head so that we can feel certain of our value, so that we don’t feel afraid of claiming value for ourselves.

We can generate that feeling of certainty within ourselves.

It’s not easy. It takes practice. It takes consistent effort. But it is possible.

We also don’t need to worry about what other people think.

Now, I know when people hear this, they will object and say “But, you know, it does matter because what other people think will impact how I rise or don’t rise through the ranks of this organization.”

But, ultimately, we are not what people think.

We are never limited by other people’s thoughts or judgments about us unless we believe them to be true.

And we are more than what people think of us. We are more than what we think of us.

And, in fact, one of the most powerful things that I do as a coach is I work with a client and I ask her to list all of her accomplishments and when I just play it back to her, the list of accomplishments that she has made, it’s always like, wow, you’ve done all of this. That’s amazing, right?

For a lot of us, it’s hard to feel that what we have done is worthwhile, worth the value that we’re asking for because we tend to be perfectionists, because we tend to wait for other people to give us validation.

But when we drop that need, we realize that what we have done is really valuable.

Who we are is uniquely valuable.

So, we have the power to decide who we are.

We have the power to decide who we will become in the future and that will give you a really powerful focus, a future focus, that will make you influential and make people inspired to change the status quo, which is basically the endgame of negotiation, right?

So, from this place of real and authentic power, we can generate self-acceptance. We can generate self-approval. We can generate real self-confidence.

And I just want to end this by sharing with you that this is the outcome I coach my clients to create for themselves so that they can lead, so that they can influence, so that they can negotiate, so that they can thrive on their own terms.

And I think that is a really beautiful outcome that is possible for everyone at any time because, again, we are 100% responsible for our feelings and we are capable of it.

So I hope that helps you think through why it feels gross to claim value for ourselves. I hope it helps you to put that power back in your hands.

I would love to hear from you: jamieleecoach.com/podcast. If you would leave a review, that would be fabulous.

Thank you so much and I will talk to you next week.

How to Break the Habit of Being You

Out of unconscious habit, I've thought that there's something wrong with me. I've thought, "I'm lazy. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough." 

Thinking this way had me feeling shame, anxiety, and self-loathing. 

This negative mindset did not motivate me to inspired action. 

In 2019, I'm committed to breaking this habit, so I can love myself more fully and create more intentionally. 

I share my three biggest takeaways from the awesome book "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispensa (https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Habit-Being-Yourself-Create/dp/1401938094), which are: 

1. Mind Creates Reality

2. Mind Shapes Body

3. To Change is To Think Greater Than How We Feel 

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 51 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

Happy New Year!

How is the first week of 2019 unfolding for you?

I hope it’s going superbly.

I had the awesome privilege of traveling extensively for the past two weeks. I was in Japan, we went to several cities, including Tokyo and Kyoto, Nara, Tokushima. We also went to Singapore and we had a fabulous time and ate the most delicious foods. It was wonderful.

This trip was made especially meaningful to me because I got to do two things:

First, I got to take a long mental break from my own thought errors.

And I read the book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself  by Dr. Joe Dispenza which gave me valuable insights on how to address my thought errors.

The thought error I’m talking about is something that a lot of ambitious people encounter. When you are ambitious, you set high goals and expectations for yourself.

I’ve noticed that I have a pattern of habitually setting more goals, more to-do items within one day than I can actually do and this is something that I’m going to work on addressing in 2019.

The effect this creates is that I often fall short of my high expectations.

I fail. A lot. I fail all the time.

And I say that with pride, not with shame, because I do know that the road to success is paved with failure.

But at the same time, I haven’t quite made myself accustomed to the new pattern of thinking that would help me deal with this failure better than I have done before.

And that means that I often encounter my default thinking, which is thinking that there’s something wrong with me.

That I’m lazy. That I’m not good enough. That I’m not smart enough.

And when I allow my brain to entertain these thoughts, the thoughts generate feelings of shame, anger, frustration, anxiety, depression and self-loathing.

I really struggled with self-loathing in late 2018.

I’ve noticed that the combination of high expectations and cold winter months and shorter days during November and December is somehow...it creates an environmental cue for my brain and my subconscious mind to just make these negative thought errors more strong. Especially in the morning.

And so in late November and December, I woke up very often feeling sad and heavy and then I would intentionally work on creating new thoughts, new patterns of behavior so that I can accomplish regardless of the fact that I was feeling sad and heavy and dealing with self-loathing.

So, you know what? I’m actually really proud of myself.

And the first thing I did when we left on vacation was I stopped hating on myself. I said, “Enough! I’m on vacation. I am going to give myself credit. I am going to be grateful to me for all that I have accomplished.”

And that was a really powerful and poignant moment for me when I just looked myself square in the eye in the mirror and I said, “Thank you.”

Reading the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself really helped me understand why this thought error was happening and how it became so habitual that my body became accustomed, it became a sort of automated response from the body and the subconscious mind to have and to repeat the thought error that there’s something wrong with me and that there’s something for me to hate about myself.

And I highly, highly recommend this book. And reading this book really helped me see that there are three truths:

Number one: Mind creates reality, mind creates your reality.

Number two: The mind shapes the body.

And number three: Change is possible when we think greater than how we feel.

So number one: Mind creates reality. This might have you think, “Wait. But, Jamie, I think you’ve got it wrong. Isn’t it circumstances that create your reality?”

Well, hear me out on this.

I think the thought that our circumstances create our reality is another thought error that so many of us suffer from.

A lot of us think that, hey, only if I had a new job that I like better, I’ll be happier. Only if I had more money, I’ll be happier. Only if I went away on vacation, only if I got to away on an awesome vacation like Jamie did, I’ll feel better about myself.

Now, I have had these thoughts myself and in my experience, what I have found that new circumstances did not always change my internal reality. It didn’t always change how I feel from the inside.

And isn’t it that we all want to feel better at the end of having achieved whatever new circumstances that we’re chasing?

Isn’t it that we just want to feel happy and successful and peaceful by having the new job, by having more money, by going away on vacation?

But it’s not true that simply having these new circumstances will create those internal changes.

In my experience, before I learned to manage my own mind, when I had a new job, that was great, it was a very temporary high and within two or three months I often felt the same frustration and the boredom that I felt when I had an old job.

And when I made more money, before I learned to manage my mind, I still encountered worries about, okay, now I have this money, how am I gonna keep it? And then I would worry that I somehow didn’t deserve it. Or then I would worry how am I going to earn it again?

And before I learned to manage my mind, when I went on vacation, an awesome vacation, I’d still worry about the job that I wasn’t happy with. Even though I was on vacation away from the job, I would be thinking about the job and making myself unhappy even though I was away.

Does that sound familiar to you?

And the point that I’m trying to make is circumstances don’t change our internal state of being. It’s what we think, it’s how our minds are thinking that create the internal experience of happy, joy, wonder, gratitude.

And I think reading this book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, really helped me see that it is possible. It gave me a manual for creating new thoughts that are not the same as default thinking which are triggered by our environment, our circumstances, our socialization.

The most powerful thing that you can do for yourself is to believe in yourself, in your potential to change in spite of your current circumstances, no matter what your socialization is and no matter what other people believe and say.

This is what amazing leaders in history have done. This is what Martin Luther King did. This is what Mother Teresa did. This is what Gandhi did.

They believed in a new possibility, in a new future, regardless of how much suffering, how much injustice was in their world at their time.

So, your mind creates your reality. What you think and what you believe will shape your experience of your reality.

It’s similar to confirmation bias, right? If you think you’re going to have a wonderful time, you will find reasons for how this is a wonderful time. If you think this is going to be a terrible time, your mind will go and find evidence to support the thought that this is a terrible time.

So your mind, your mindset, will create your reality. And that’s why I prioritize on helping people shift their mindset so that they can become bolder, braver, and better paid.

Another thing that reading the book really helped me understand in a scientific way is that the mind shapes the body.

The book talks about how there is a neurochemical relationship between the brain and body. As you think certain thoughts, the brain produces chemicals, neurotransmitters, neuropeptides that trigger hormones in your body, that cause you to feel exactly the way you’re thinking.

And, in the book, Joe Dispenza talks about if you start to think about confronting your teenager over the new dent in the car, your neurotransmitters would start a thought process in your brain to produce a specific level of mind.

And your neuropeptides would chemically signal your body in a specific way and then you would begin to feel a bit riled up because the peptides find their way to your adrenal glands and the adrenal glands would be prompted to release the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which is the hormone associated with a stress response, and now you are definitely feeling fired up.

Chemically, your body is ready for battle.

And so what you think, the thoughts, create the feeling, and the feeling sort of confirms the thought in your mind. The way you feel makes the way you think even stronger. And in the book he calls this the feedback loop or state of being. In other words, how you are being is shaped by what you think and what you feel.

And the beautiful thing is that change is possible. To change is to think greater than how you feel.

And this reminded me of a question that I was asked during a recent coaching session with an ambitious professional who wanted to become more bolder, more outspoken, and a better communicator at work but she struggled with the worry of how she would be perceived, and when she worried about how she would be perceived, she found herself holding back, not speaking up, not engaging, not sharing her ideas.

And she asked me, “Jamie, so how can I become confident and comfortable with sharing my ideas?”

And I thought the question was beautiful because it exposed the thought error in the way she had formed the question.

Confidence is not synonymous with feeling comfortable. It’s the very opposite. Confidence comes from embracing the discomfort and taking action anyway.

That’s the definition of courage, right? Feeling the fear and taking action anyway.

So this requires you to raise your self-awareness around the feelings that you have, the unconscious thought patterns that create the feelings of anxiety, fear, and worry and to think on purpose.

In the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza talks about how there are three levels of brain.

There is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, there is the limbic brain, that is responsible for managing your emotions, and then there is the cerebellum which is the subconscious mind that manages your automatic body functions and movements.

And a lot of our memorized emotions from the past get processed in the limbic brain and the cerebellum and so it becomes this automated thought pattern, thinking pattern, feeling pattern, behavioral pattern.

And I think the thought error that I was struggling with in the late 2018 was definitely something that had become so deeply ingrained into my subconscious mind, into the mid and the lower parts of my brain that I really had to think on purpose and it took a lot of effort for me to engage my prefrontal cortex and tell myself to think new thoughts.

Have new thoughts like, “Nothing has gone wrong. Everything is working out for me. I’m exactly where I need to be.”

And that’s how I was able to continue to show up and produce content and deliver value to my clients and I think this is going to be something that I want to take to the next level. This is something that I will take to the next level in 2019.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with a distinction. In the book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza had this great diagram that had two columns:

On the left, it’s titled Survival and under survival are stress, contraction, fear, anger, sadness, disease, cause and effect, past, the familiar things. And on the right the column was titled Creation and he had these words: homeostasis, expansion, love, joy, trust, health, causing an effect, unfamiliar, unknown.

And what that reminds me of - the right hand column, the creation column - reminds me of my definition of authenticity which is the you that you are in the process of becoming.

It is the future you. It is not the you that you are most comfortable and familiar with being out of habit from the past, but it is the you that you are in the process of becoming from here on out.

So, my definition of authenticity is based on the person that you will create and my big goal for 2019 is to create intentionally, with joy, with trust, in a state of health, in a state of conscious thinking so that I can cause an effect in my life that is greater than I’ve ever seen before.

What about you?

How will you embrace the new you in 2019?

How will you create your authentic self in 2019?

What will it take for you to break the habit of thinking by default, thinking and repeating the errors of your past?

How will you become the new you and break the habit of being the old you?

It’s a really delicious question to mull over on the first weekend of 2019. I look forward to speaking with you again soon, next week.

Bye Bye!

How to Become Bolder, Braver, and Better Paid with Klay S. Williams

How do ambitious people actually become bolder, braver, and better paid? 

By making a contribution. 
By committing to their life's purpose. 
By risking their authenticity, even when there's only $500 in the back pocket and not much else, other than a dream. 

This the story of Klay S. Williams, whom I met at a Dress for Success event in 2016. 

Klay helps Fortune 500 professionals find their true purpose and satisfaction in four areas of life: Career, Relationships, Spiritual Lives, and Health. He's the founder of Plan A Enterprises, LLC, a full services lifestyle firm. He's also an author, speaker, and host of Plan A Konversations (the podcast) and Bookstr Wellness, a new digital TV show showcasing authors in the mind-body-spirit space.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi! Welcome to Episode 48 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

Today, I have a special guest, my friend Klay S. Williams of Plan A Konversations.

You know, you meet one of these people who have become bolder, braver, and really better paid by making a contribution, believing in themselves, and taking courageous action because they are committed to their life vision and their purpose and Klay is one of those people.

And as you will hear when I was listening to his story, even though I’ve heard them before, I was just blown away. And I think it’s really inspiring and he sets a really powerful example of what is possible when we set our sights high and commit to becoming bolder, braver, and better paid.

So, please enjoy and I will talk to you soon. Bye!

Jamie: Hi, Klay!

Klay: Hi, Jamie! How are you?

Jamie: I’m doing great. How are you?

Klay: I am well, thank you.

Jamie: Nice, nice. So, let’s get this conversation started!

Klay: Yeah!

Jamie: I always ask my guests to tell me about a negotiation in your life or career that had the biggest impact on you. And I define negotiation as a conversation with the intention of reaching agreement.

Klay: Interestingly enough, this is a kind of ironic level of negotiation in terms of reaching an agreement, based off of intention. When I was in fourth grade, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and I don’t know if you are familiar with the big drug boom that happened in LA, Chicago, and Detroit during the 80s but I was a part of that sort of period in time and we lived in a really great neighborhood and, all of a sudden, a drug house appeared on our block.

Jamie: Woah.

Klay: Right? Yeah. And so our next door neighbors, I went over to go get them to play after school, and their grandmother came and said, “Hey, they can’t come out and play because our street’s no longer safe,” and that was foreign to me. And so I asked her why and she said because there was a drug house and I was like, oh, okay.

So I went back home and I said to my mom, “Okay, I need you to get me the white pages, an envelope, a letter, and a stamp,” and she said, “What do you need that for?” I said, “If you give me this, this will help us with the drug house that’s on the block.” She was like, “Oh, okay,” and because I was really an eccentric kind of kid anyway, my mom didn’t think anything of it.

And so I wrote the mayor of Detroit, Mayor Coleman Young, a letter explaining to him the drug house that was on the block and I told him that me and my friends, who can no longer come out and play, we all got very good grades in school and if you want us to continue to get good grades in school and support us, could you do your part in making sure our neighborhood is safe and get rid of this house?

Jamie: Wow.

Klay: Jamie, it was like maybe four weeks later, we were riding our bikes across the street and of course we had a little safe zone because of the house and there was a SWAT team that came on our block, raided the house, and the drug house was no more.

I get a letter, maybe I think three weeks after that, and it was from Mayor Coleman Young thanking me for my tip and asking me if there was any other space that was preventing me and my friends or anyone else I knew from playing who got good grades, so we would make sure we kept our end of the bargain up.

Jamie: Amazing! What did you learn from this experience?

Klay: I learned that, in terms of the negotiation part of it, that there’s a lot of give and take. What is it that I was doing that I could use as leverage as a little kid in terms of the contribution to the world and to the space and what it was that I wanted to get out of this? But also knowing how could this benefit, you know, not only the city but other people around me?

And so that really taught me kind of what it was like to negotiate in the sense of a really roundabout way but it gave me a sense of being able to know that my power and my words and my contribution really matters.

Jamie: Amazing. And that also reminds me of your leadership! How you stepped into your leadership even as a little kid. You realized, I have a voice, I have power, I have the ability to communicate to the people who are in a position of authority. And I define leadership as creating solutions in the best interest of everyone and you created a solution that was a win-win for you, so that you can continue to have good grades and play outside, and for the community.

Klay: Yeah, that really set the basis as I moved on in adulthood and really thought back, wait a minute, let me comb through my past and see where are there other scenarios where I’ve been confronted with a challenge. How did I get myself out of it? And that literally, I think, was the foundation for how I would then approach any level of risk-taking, any level of leadership, and just courage in general.

Jamie: Alright, so let’s fast-forward. How did you apply those lessons in creating Plan A with Klay?

Klay: Well, interestingly enough, I was in grad school at Princeton Theological Seminary and I was working at Polo Ralph Lauren to offset the cost of grad school. I ended up getting a promotion to a manager, I was just a sales associate, and I was also, of course, getting my master of divinity across the street. And people started to come into Ralph Lauren not just to shop but to talk to me about their life issues and problems.

Mind you, I never told anyone that I was obtaining an M.Div. I kept my life very separate. And while I was having these wonderful spiritual awakenings and epiphanies at the door of this luxury brand service and not so much on campus at Princeton, I said to myself, “There has to be a way that I can juxtapose my love for nurturing the interior with image consulting the exterior,” and Plan A was sort of born from that in a Starbucks coffee shop in Princeton, New Jersey.

And while I was toying with idea, okay, how am I actually going to make this happen? And I said to myself at that point, “You’re gonna have to take a risk,” and I remember I had turned down so many wonderful opportunities because it wasn’t the perfect fit after graduate school.

Jamie: Yeah.

Klay: I ended up moving back to Detroit, Michigan where my parents were at the time and was just trying to get my mind together. I literally was a monster all of that summer because I knew what I really wanted to do but I did not tap into that courage that I had or that level of risk-taking, that level of leadership to even just say, “Klay, go ahead and go.” And so….

Jamie: And create this newfangled thing!

Klay: What’s that?

Jamie: And to create this newfangled thing that’s never existed before.

Klay: Yeah! Yeah and after, literally, Jamie, accepting this position over the summer. I had another luxury gig from my old boss at Ralph Lauren. I ended up going to New Jersey, I walked into the store, a sense of claustrophobia came over me, Jamie, and I returned the relocation check.

I went back to Detroit, Michigan. I said, “Sit down, Klay, you know what you want to do in your heart of hearts. You need to muster up all the strength and courage and take a risk,” and I moved to New York City with $500 and began this company.

I couch-surfed for a little bit, maybe close to a year. I called maybe 12 or 14 different friends and said, “Hey, can I crash on your couch maybe once every other week? You know, if there’s a time where I may need a meal, can you support me?” And then you know, asked them again, “How can I support you in exchange?” And so Plan A was born from that experience.

Jamie: Wow. So what helped you become bolder and braver than before? Actually, the question that I really want to ask is what made you decide and commit to that vision?

Klay: Good question. So, during that summer of me just being so incredibly unhappy because I was not living to the vision or the purpose that I had in mind, I knew that I would have to create what I wanted it to be. I was talking to one of my friends, Inger Parker, and I talk about her in all my books and my talks and things like that. And she said to me, you know, I said, “Well, if I just had x amount of dollars, then I can move to New York City. If I just x amount of relationships with this particular company or that network then I could do this.”

And she said, “You know what, Klay? It’ll never be perfect. It’ll never be exactly how you want it to be in order for you to move, so wait, you’re gonna wait until you’re, wait, 30, 45, 50, 60, then the grave?”

And when she said the grave part, there was something inside of me that said, “Oh my gosh, I do not want to be that person. I do not want to be that individual who has spent their whole entire life wishing, shoulda, couldas. I want to live to the highest expression of who I am as a person. I want to expand my mind and I want to really give this a shot. It’s something that I really believe in. I know that I can do it.” And that conversation, literally, was the impetus for me packing up my car and moving to New York.

Jamie: With $500 in your pocket.

Klay: With $500.

Jamie: Yeah. My father did something very similar. He packed up his life in South Korea and he was like, “I’m just gonna go to America. I’m gonna make it work.”

Klay: Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna make it work. And I think there’s something inside of people who decide to do that where they feel like it’s perhaps a life or death scenario. Where if the vision of what you truly have is what you feel you’ve been called to do, there is no, I mean clearly, there’s no Plan B. I mean, that’s the whole reason why the work I do is called there’s only Plan A because that’s what I feel purpose work is at the core.

Jamie: Wow. So what changed for you as a result of that?

Klay: I’m sorry?

Jamie: What changed for you? What was the transformation you created for yourself when you stepped into that vision and you were like, “I’m gonna execute on this vision, I’m gonna live my purpose?”

Klay: It’s really interesting because I became bolder, I became more authentic. This was also a point where I was forced to face anything that I shoved in the closet and for lack of a better word or expression, I literally came out of the closet. I discovered during this whole period of time that I was gay. And by me deciding to go on this adventure, anything that I compartmentalized, anything that I did not want to face all came running to me like the floodgates had just opened.

Jamie: Mmm.

Klay: And I think I was the Universe’s way of saying if you want to get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you have to make sure that you are as authentic as the voice that you are speaking out to the world. Can you get beyond just speaking this level of jargon, but can you actually walk the walk?

Jamie: Wow.

Klay: And from that experience, I kid you not, like the sexuality piece came out and made me a better person. Anything, my relationship to money shifted, my relationship to other people shifted, any area that I felt inferior, I was faced with these things all within that first year. Me not wanting to ask for what I need. Me not setting boundaries with other people and then getting mad at them for…

Jamie: I think your story is going to be so inspiring for many people who just wait for the opportunity to be who they really are, who want the circumstances to line up so that they can speak up and stand in their own power.

Klay: Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah. And I love that you mention the money relationship because, as you know, a lot of my listeners, we, including me, we want to become bolder and braver so that we can be better paid.

Klay: Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah. So what, if anything, helped you become better paid? And I’d love to hear a story!

Klay: I have a great story for you. One of my...I had just changed my pricing matrix and I landed my first, one of my first Fortune 500 clients and she had this incredible epiphany, this incredible service and she ended up leaving corporate America and matriculated to her calling and passion and she enrolled the school of midwifery at Yale. She said to me before she left, “Hey, Klay, do you mind if I take you to brunch?” And I was like oh, okay, great!

And so we ended up going to brunch, she goes, “There’s a reason why I wanted so sit down with you,” and I was like, “Oh, okay” and I was like, okay, maybe she’s gonna give me some feedback that I need to hear as a coach or something maybe has transpired in her life and she said, “Take this the best way possible, but your prices are too low,” and I go, “Wait, what?”

She goes, “Klay, you have too many high touch points, you have such great quality and a level of transformation. The things that you gave me, I kind of felt that you gave a lot of things for free that were, could have been add-ons.” And she goes, “I’m glad I got in now, but you need to double your prices.”

Jamie: Woah!

Klay: Yeah!

Jamie: Do you mind sharing what your prices were before and what became after?

Klay: Right, right, so at that point I was charging $3500 for this monthly package that I was offering and after that conversation I literally start, my prices start at $10,000.

Jamie: For like a series of coaching?

Klay: For an extended service.

Jamie: For like how long a package is that?

Klay: Oh, got it, for the monthly Plan A interval package, is what I call it it, it’s a 30-day intensive.

Jamie: You’re charging $10,000 for a 30-day intensive?

Klay: Yeah.

Jamie: Wow.

Klay: Yeah.

Jamie: Nice.

Klay: She said to me at that point…

Jamie: Wait, wait, wait! So that’s almost triple the price!

Klay: Yeah! Yeah. And if I did not have that conversation with her, I would not have been, I don’t know if I would have said to myself, okay, you’re worth this amount of money. Maybe something would have happened later on but hearing it from a client who not only saw the value in it but also would pull me aside and said this is what I really think you need to charge.

And the good thing about it was she was in financial services, so she helped me map out, during that brunch, a pricing matrix that made sense for me and also for the level that I wanted to be at.

Jamie: Amazing. What I love about this story is that it was your client. It was your client who clearly saw the value of your contributions and you obviously had over-delivered many times over, right?

Klay: Mmm-hmm.

Jamie: And so you got the clear signal, you got the permission slip from the person who charges you. That’s really incredible.

Klay: Yeah. And I had never had that kind of experience happen before. I had people who were really satisfied but not to the point where they were like saying, “Let me help you out in this way by telling you that you’re undervaluing yourself.”

Jamie: Yeah. And I just can’t stress it enough that, you know, you first over-delivered and I think that’s so key. I was just reading this quote from Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich…

Klay: I love that book and that quote! Go ahead!

Jamie: Yeah. And I’m gonna paraphrase but, basically, the person who does more than she is paid for will get paid more than she gives…

Klay: Yeah! And it says give more in use value than cash value. And that literally, and Jamie, this is crazy synchronicity, me and my marketing and business officer this morning just used that as a conversation point in our meeting for our 2019 goals. It’s so true, it’s so true.

Jamie: Wow. Amazing. I find this incredibly inspiring and wow, so what has happened since then?

Klay: Let’s see. So, since then, I’ve moved into a new building and, again, just started asking for what I want, utilizing my networks and that kind of thing, but so my offices are down in the Helmsley Building in New York City, one of the oldest historic buildings in all of New York, which has been such an incredible blessing.

Jamie: That’s near Grand Central, right?

Klay: Yeah! Uh-huh. Really, another great opportunity has come, like I’ve now set it up where media informs the business development and business development informs the media and so I’m hosting a show called Bookstr Wellness. I’m a regular guest host on Bold Television, which is a lifestyle brand, and I also have my own podcast as well and so, from that different business opportunities have just really been sort of skyrocketing.

Jamie: Wow and you are living the dream. You’re living the American dream, you know?

Klay: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because I was just having this moment before the Thanksgiving holiday and I was just thinking to myself, I have so many more big, big, big goals and big dreams that I really want to, you know, accomplish but at this point in life I was just thinking, “Thank you, Universe, because I am everything that I have always wanted to be at this point.” And that in itself…

Jamie: Can I just interject here and make a plug for that podcast you did? Thank you, More Please. Please everyone go and listen to Klay’s awesome podcast. It’s short, sweet, and so powerful. Thank you, More Please. It’s about your approach to abundance and the grace with which you receive that abundance.

Klay: Yeah. Yeah. You can’t do anything without it. You really can’t. And just being grateful in the muck and mire of the busyness and just wanting someone to see you and understand your value and all your hard work. It literally is just this vehicle that I believe that prepares and propels and just sets you up for continued success.

Jamie: Yeah. So, what advice do you have for ambitious people? And ambitious people are listening to this podcast and they want to live a life like yours, authentic, real, abundant and making their dreams come true. What advice do you have for people like that who want to lead with purpose and authenticity?

Klay: I would say, again, first, to set boundaries with other people. I found out through a lot of trials and tribulations, ups and downs, good and bad times that your relationships and literally the people who surround you can either be your biggest advocates or they can be people who are pulling you down from accomplishing whatever those visions or those goals are. I cannot stress that enough and as Yvonne and Luvvie say from the really cool podcast Jesus and Jollof, they always say on your glow up, when you’re coming up, be cautious of who you spend your time with because that could really be a deterrent.

I would also say ask for what you want, what you need and what you feel that you deserve. And a lot of times, I kid you not, my biggest breaks have come by me being very persistent and also not being afraid for asking people for what I want. My very first spotlight, television, was on Fox 5. I literally, Jamie, I harassed the national news advisor until he literally said to me, “Okay, okay, I have 15 minutes at like 12:00. Can you call then?” And I had my elevator pitch ready and I pitched to him and I had my first spot with a viewership of over 5 million people in New York City, right?

Jamie: Wow.

Klay: And so make sure you’re persistent in your goals. And the third piece of that conversation is you have to be very clear and authentic in who you are as a person. Anybody, no matter if you’re selling a product, if you are the product, people who become your clients or who are your clients, they can see through anybody that’s just completely faking it. If you are not who you say you are, you know.

And last but not least is, one thing I do wish I would have done a little bit more diligently and on purpose with intention was enjoy the journey. I spent so much time working incredibly hard where I missed so many holidays, I missed friends’ weddings, I’ve missed just hanging out with people and it’s been a long, long, long journey to just really be able to be at this point. But I do wish that I would have enjoyed the process a whole lot more and so, if you have that additional 15 minutes to spend with a friend over coffee, if you can get to that holiday with mom, dad, or whomever, be conscious that that time is also important.

Jamie: How long did it take you from that moment when you arrived in New York City with $500 in your pocket...When was that?

Klay: 2007. The whole idea started in 2006 at a Starbucks in Princeton and the day after Christmas is when I arrived. So this Christmas will be 13 years.

Jamie: Wow.

Klay: It has been every bit of a journey and, you know, extreme, extreme hard work and perseverance and faith and risk.

Jamie: Yeah, so, I’m on a similar journey. I’m…

Klay: Of course you are!

Jamie: I want to learn from you, Klay. I want to learn from the book of Klay here, so what do you do when you feel like giving up out of fear, out of the scarcity mindset? I call it the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee, you know, the voice in your head that says, “Who do you think you are? You’re not good enough.”

Klay: Yeah.

Jamie: What have you done that helps you overcome those moments of doubt and fear and anxiety?

Klay: So there’s two things. The first part is that I’m the kind of person that when I have the vision in mind, I discount every step along the way. So, yeah, I’ve partnered with Deepak Chopra. Yeah, I have all this wealth of media experience. Yeah, I’ve had a desk side with a producer at CBS and all these incredible things. I will discount all those things, well, I haven’t arrived at the vision!

So what I would do is I would literally start to go back in my emails and go back to my vision board that I have and what I do is star everything that I’ve accomplished and all the things along the way. I will go back and give credence and give a special level of gratitude for those things and say, oh, wait a minute, I actually have accomplished a whole lot!

You know, because I think somebody like me who’s very ambitious, who has a very strong Type A personality and who is literally at my core just a hard worker, when I don’t feel that I’ve arrived at that end goal, I forget everything else that I have accomplished. And so going back and remembering those short-term goals and those mid-level goals, it always brings me out of the funk.

And then the second part of it is too, fitness, movement and exercise has become my therapy. When I get into a funk or a space of oh my gosh, I’m starting to panic or I’m starting to get that scarcity mindset, I’m like, okay, Klay, have you moved today? And usually the answer is no. And so after this interview, I have my training session that I go to and I think people have to figure out for themselves, for me, therapy is my gym schedule.

People have to figure out what their outlet is for them. I know a lot of clients that I have, they’ll do, you know, there’s an art project. Some will go for a walk. Some will bake. Some will, you know, do arts and crafts. Some will color, there are adult coloring books and things like that now. Or they’ll reach out to a mentor. But whatever that thing is, that has to be on your schedule and you have to do it daily. It literally will, if not annihilate, it will lessen the burden of resistance that inevitable will creep in.

Jamie: You have to develop yourself physically, emotionally, mentally, and it is a practice for you, a daily practice.

Klay: Yeah. Absolutely.

Jamie: Amazing. So where can people go to learn more about the work that you do, about Plan A with Klay and more?

Klay: Yeah. Okay, great, so I’m on all of your favorite social media by the exact same handle of @planawithklay and they can also go to my website klayswilliams.com and just for your listeners, Klay is with a K.

Jamie: Amazing. I’m so happy to have you share your journey to becoming bolder, braver, and better paid. I appreciate you Klay!

Klay: Thanks so much, Jamie! Thanks for this time.

Jamie: And have a great one!

Klay: Alright, you too. Bye bye!

Jamie: Bye!

Interview with Aeric Meredith-Goujon: How to Negotiate and Coach Relationships

If you're a human being in, wanting to be in, or who just got out of a relationship, you won't want to miss this interview with relationship coach Aeric Meredithgoujon. 

Aeric is a visual artist, musician and relationship coach. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two kids.

In this conversation, Aeric and I explored 
- How getting married is an exercise in interest-based negotiation 
- How relationships can have a purpose
- The difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict
- How different orientations can cause misunderstanding and, what to do about it

You can learn more about Aeric here: aeric.nyc 

You can sign up for my upcoming webinars here:
www.jamieleecoach.com/free-coaching-live

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 47 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.  I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

How are you thriving this holiday festive season?

My go-to greeting is Happy Merry Everything.

Happy Merry Everything!

Today I have a special conversation that I’d love to share with you with a relationship coach.

And if you are a human being, you are in, you are wanting to be in, or you may be just gotten out of a relationship. And in this season of merry-making, relationships come to the forefront of our minds because we are reconnecting with loved ones, with family, friends, lovers.

My life-partner and I have been together for 11 years and our relationship continues to evolve and our relationship continues to support me so that I can thrive and show up and coach and do the things that I love.

Aeric Meredith-Goujon is a visual artist, a musician, and a relationship coach. I met him at coach training and I was fascinated by what he does and immediately wanted to have this conversation with him to learn more about what it means to negotiate and coach relationships.

Because we do that all the time, we just don’t call it that.

Aeric lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two kids and in this conversation, Aeric and I explored how getting married is an exercise in interspace negotiation, how relationships can have a purpose, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict, as well as how people have different orientations around speaking or communicating, and how those differences can cause misunderstanding, and what to do about those misunderstandings.

I have to say, this has been one of the most useful conversations. What I learned from Aeric I applied to my life and my relationship and immediately saw an improvement.

So I hope you will enjoy this conversation and I will talk to you soon.

Have a Merry Happy Everything until then.

Jamie: Hello, Aeric!

Aeric: Hey! How are you doing?

Jamie: How are you?

Aeric: Good.

Jamie: Awesome. Thanks so much for joining the Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee podcast.

Aeric: Thanks so much for inviting me.

Jamie: Yeah. So, here’s a question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast: I’d love to hear about a negotiation in your life or career that had the biggest impact on you.

Aeric: Yeah. I was thinking about this question and something that occurs to me is that I think it’s true that when it comes to very important decisions, especially ones that have to do with other people or other parties, negotiation actually isn’t my default. It’s more, I try to actually be more in a consultation framework or headspace when it comes to things that are actually very important, and so…

Jamie: Can I just interject here...?

Aeric: Sure.

Jamie:...And share that I define negotiation as simply a conversation where you’re trying to reach an agreement but in reality everyone has the right to say no. So, yeah, a consultation approach definitely makes sense, especially when you’re trying to engage in a conversation, trying to understand what people want and help them reach an agreement. So, do you feel that you’ve done something like that?

Aeric: Oh, sure, sure. It’s funny, the first thing that pops into my mind is actually the decision to get married.

Jamie: Ooooh, that’s a good one!

Aeric: Right? And the thing that I recall most about it is that there was no proposal dynamic going on. It was very much a mutual decision that we arrived at together after evaluating ourselves and our goals and our situation and our lives at the time. And it was a very, kind of, I guess systematic is the word, approach to evaluating whether this was going to be something we were going to do or not, whether this was a…

Jamie: Let me ask you this: When did it click for both of you? When was it that you were both like, yeah, we’re gonna get married, it’s a no-brainer?

Aeric: Um. It was almost...not instantaneous but it didn’t actually take very long to get there. We hadn't actually even known each other for very long. I think the subject first came up after we had been going out for maybe three weeks or so.

Jamie: Wow!

Aeric: And I think that’s because, at least for my part, that was always my orientation. That was the purpose of any relationship that I would be having, right? So, I just wanted to be up-front about that from the get-go and it was probably about three months in when it became clear that this was actually where it was going.

So we already had a framework in place from the beginning of our relationship that this was the umbrella, like this was the sphere in which this relationship existed. And then once it became kind of clear that we were basically on the same page about things like values and goals and guiding principles, from then on that was how we kind of evaluate each stage in our relationship, whether it was going on kind of according to these values and principles.

Jamie: That’s really interesting you say that because the way I teach negotiation is about getting clear on each side’s shared values and interests and that’s exactly what you’re saying. You’re saying you realized you shared interests and values and a sense of purpose with your partner and so then getting married became a no-brainer.

Aeric: Yeah.

Jamie: Getting to yes became a no-brainer for you.

Aeric: Right.

Jamie: So, yeah, that’s like a very classic example of mutual benefit, interspace negotiation.

Aeric: Right, right.

Jamie: It doesn’t sound romantic and yet, you know, I imagine it’s very fulfilling.

Aeric: Mmhmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there’s a lot that’s, I guess you could say inherently unfulfilling about romance. I mean there’s a difference between thrilling and fulfilling, you know.

Jamie: So what did you learn from that?

Aeric: You mean what did I learn from that experience of the very beginning of a relationship?

Jamie: That’s right.

Aeric: Hmmm. What did I learn? I learned the value of understanding one’s values.

Jamie: The value of understanding one’s values.

Aeric: Yeah.

Jamie: Absolutely. So, you are a relationship coach among many other things, like a musician, a photographer, and I’m really curious to learn how you coach couples, how you coach relationships. How is that possible? How do you do that?

Aeric: Well, it starts with having clarity on the fact that the client is the relationship.

Jamie: Oh!

Aeric: Rather than being the individuals in the relationship. There’s a difference. So we set things up with the discussion of that being the framework, with that being the orientation. And so that means we are treating the relationship as a living entity in and of itself.

Jamie: That’s fascinating, that a relationship has life.

Aeric: Right. It has life, it has goals, it has interests. It needs nourishment, it needs feeding, it needs education, it needs training. All the things that an individual needs to function in a healthy way, a relationship also needs. And the two parties in the relationship are the parents of this little life.

Jamie: Huh.

Aeric: Yeah.

Jamie: Wow. And so, I’d imagine that when there is conflict, when there is perceived conflict between two people, that’s when people have the perception that oh, this relationship is at risk.

Aeric: Right.

Jamie: And I’d imagine that you have a way of differentiating between healthy and unhealthy conflict.

Aeric: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that helps to navigate that is, going back to this idea of understanding values. And so, for the individuals in the relationship, I encourage them to really take a look at the things that are important to them - what their goals are, what their values are, what their guiding principles in life [are]. And from there, once those things are identified and articulated, then the two people can see where there are areas of overlap, where there are areas where they have ways of mutually assisting one another in the realization of those goals and that’s where the relationship lives.

And so when conflict comes up, it can be much easier to resolve or at least figure out how to address those conflicts when you’re looking at them through the lens of principle, of guiding fundamental baseline principle and goals. And you can ask questions like: Is what’s happening in furtherance of our purpose or not? And if there are agreed upon purposes to begin with, then you can start to answer questions about what are we going to do about it? Or how important is this point of conflict?

Because there’s some points of conflict which actually aren’t as important as they seem once you look at them through the lense of the ultimate goal, the ultimate purpose or result or value?

Jamie: Can you give us an example of that? Like what would be healthy conflict? What would be unhealthy conflict?

Aeric: Hmm. Healthy conflict. Um. Let’s take...I’m trying to think of a good example here...Sorry for all the dead air...

Jamie: Like have you seen an example where two people had conflict that actually brought them together as opposed to further apart?

Aeric: Right. Oh, there might be, like the areas I guess that tend to be most volatile or most impactful are things like child-rearing or money or sexuality. Things that are fundamentally tied to our sense of ultimate security, right? So, let’s say we’re trying to decide where we want to live, where we want to buy a house, assuming that buying a house is something that is already an established goal.

One way to address that is to ask the question: What do we want our life to actually be? And while one party might be drawn to living in the suburbs, definitely, one partner might be drawn to living in the city, just as a matter of personal taste, or familiarity, where they grew up or whatever. It could be easy for the conflict to live there, like, well, this is what I want and this is what you want.

But if you say, well, what is it that we want our relationship to achieve in the world? If it is something like, I don’t know, a certain kind of service to the community or maybe it is focused primarily on a certain kind of environment for children. Then, the personal tastes can take a backseat to the ultimate goals, right?

And if part of what you want in your education of your children are things like exposure to culture, exposure to different kinds of people, I don’t know, vibrant and ready access to arts and museums and music and things like that, it might be that you decide, well, we’re going to live in the city because we value these things more than we value our personal tastes.

Or if you value space, a certain amount of quiet, a certain amount of regularity and predictability and distance from the stimulation of the city, you might come down to well, that’s the thing that we value and so we’re going to make our home someplace that has those qualities. And again, irrespective of personal tastes, it might come down to that being the decision. And so the conflict is sort of mitigated by paying more attention to big-value things than small-value things.

Jamie: I find this idea very fascinating that a relationship can have a purpose. It’s a relationship, like you said, has life, it needs nourishment and it can also have a purpose. As coaches, you and I help people clarify their sense of purpose and at the same time, a relationship can have a purpose. That’s a really fascinating idea. And what I’m hearing is that’s how, once you’re clear on the purpose of the relationship, that can help mitigate conflict and help bring people together. So, how do you help couples clarify the purpose of their relationship?

Aeric: Yeah. Well, the first thing is to introduce the idea of purpose in the first place because in my experience it’s not something that people really are in the habit of thinking about when it comes to relationships. Like most of the time, I think…

Jamie: Or even their lives. People don’t even think, we just think oh, we do the things we’re told to do and we have to do.

Aeric: Right.

Jamie: What is my purpose? I don’t know!

Aeric: Yeah, but even then, we’re growing more familiar with the idea of life having a purpose. Like, that’s not a strange concept. Even if an individual hasn’t necessarily thought about that for themselves, it’s not too difficult to wrap your head around the question: What is the purpose of your life?

But when it comes to relationships, most of the time, people experience it kind of, almost in a passive way. It’s something that is a result of feelings. Like I have a strong feeling about this other person. I want to be with them. And a relationship results from that, right?

But I think that it is possible and even good, healthy and productive to think about the relationship as something that is more active than passive. Like, what is the purpose of it? What can it do? Not just what can it provide for me as far as a receptacle for my feelings or an environment for my feelings to exist in. But what can it do?

And some examples I give to sort of help people start to think about this is, like, the obvious one is family and child-rearing. Like, the purpose of the relationship can be an environment for raising children. Or the purpose of a relationship can be as an engine of service to the community and it can be a vehicle for our mutual development as a way for the two parties to assist each other in their emotional, psychological, spiritual development and then part of the purpose of the relationship can be an active engagement in that endeavor, in that process.

Jamie: Yeah. If you don’t mind my asking, I’m curious, what do you feel is the purpose of your relationship?

Aeric: Well, those examples that I just gave, because those are the things that we’ve kind of identified as the core elements, the core purposes. So, when we are making decisions about things, or we are at a crossroads in terms of deciding things or in a place of conflict, we can look at those three things and ask what action would be in furtherance of those purposes?

Jamie: Yeah. And what was the process of you two, you and your wife, getting clear on that sense of purpose?

Aeric: Oh, gosh. It’s been...I think...hmmm. We’ve been married for 26 years, so it’s been kind of a long, steady evolution towards this understanding.

Jamie: Yeah.

Aeric: And one of the main elements in helping to guide us to this point has been our faith, our religious orientation, which is the Baha’i religion, and there are many things in the scripture of the Baha’i faith about the question of purpose and about marriage and family life which act as very useful guideposts in kind of evaluating these kinds of questions, so that’s a big thing.

And it’s also kind of an almost daily reflection on our marriage as this living entity. And being in the habit of looking at it like it’s our first child I think gives us a certain orientation towards evaluating it and kind of drawing a picture of what we think it should look like, of what our process should be.

Jamie: This is really interesting to me because I’ve been with my life partner for almost 11 years and sometimes I feel like we can be each other’s child but I hadn’t thought about the perspective of treating the relationship that he and I share as our offspring, so this is really interesting to me.

And I’d imagine that throughout this process of you reflecting and using, well, not using, but being inspired by your shared religion that there were a lot of conversations, that there was a lot of open communication and you and I know that communication between two people in a relationship can be thorny sometimes.

Sometimes it’s like the person who is closest to you you feel like you’re not getting through to because we’re not so accustomed to them being right next to us and yet we feel like they are the ones who are not listening or somehow we’re not getting through to them even though they’re always there for us.

And so I wonder if you have some advice, some tips that you can share with me and my audience who are really interested in improving their communication skills and, you know, my perspective is that communication really is the language of leadership even in our personal relationships. Is there a myth about good communication between two people in a relationship that you’d like to dispel for us?

Aeric: Well, I...hmm. One thing that we discovered, and it was probably 15 years into our marriage before we figured this out, we were having a very common kind of communication issue, I mean like you were just saying where you’re talking to the person but you don’t really seem to be hearing each other correctly.

Jamie: Yeah.

Aeric: And it’s funny how we think of that as a communication problem even though the people involved are actually very good communicators. My wife is a lawyer and I’m an artist and communicating is what we both do as our jobs, right? So we’re not bad communicators. And yet there was something awry in our ability to make ourselves understood to each other. And through a lot of trial and, I don’t even know if it was error so much as a lack of true understanding of a certain truth about ourselves, we figured out that the thing that was happening was that we have a different orientation towards speaking, towards the act of speaking.

Jamie: Interesting!

Aeric: And this was not something that I was even aware existed. Like, nobody told us that this was ever a thing. But it turns out, we were able to figure out that, for her, speaking to another person is a way of processing thoughts and for me, speaking to another person, specifically her, is a way of relaying already-processed thoughts, see?

So, we would have conversations about stuff and at the end of the conversation, I would think that we were finished because for me internally, that’s how it works. I think about things and when I’m done thinking about them, I speak. But for her, the end of the conversation wouldn’t be the end of the conversation, so the next day she would sort of start in again on this thing that I thought was concluded.

And that was very, very confusing to me because I didn’t understand that she was doing externally what I naturally do internally, right? And because [broken] she would perceive that I was not engaged or not interested or not paying attention because I wouldn’t be saying anything in the course of the conversation about this issue that we were having, which she read as not being present or being…

Jamie: Not caring even.

Aeric: Not caring, yeah. And so what was happening was that we were actually misreading each other’s behavior and interpreting through our own lens of what’s natural for us, right?

Jamie: Yeah.

Aeric: And so once we figured out that this was what was going on, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to change how we do things, but it does change our understanding of what the other person is doing. So that means that, going forward, I can have the presence of mind to say, “I know I’m not saying anything right now, but I am listening to you and I’m processing all of this and I’ll get back to you with my thoughts when I have any.” So, you know, I’m addressing my understanding of her reality so that she can be assured that I am there, I am present even though I’m not saying anything, right?

Jamie: This is such a good conversation and I really appreciate your perspective, your male perspective, because as a woman in a heterosexual relationship myself, I encounter very similar frustrations and dynamic where I think I’m just kind of thinking out loud and expecting somebody to…

Aeric: To like engage and...

Jamie: To help process.

Aeric: Yeah, yeah.

Jamie: My partner sometimes is impatient, why haven’t you already decided?

Aeric: Right, right.

Jamie: What haven’t you already made up your mind and told me what your decision is?

Aeric: It’s funny how people with these different orientations often wind up together.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah. And I want to make sure I’m not making some sort of gender assumptions, not every woman, not every man is like this.

Aeric: Yeah. Certainly there are patterns to it but I certainly have come across couples where it is the opposite, where the man is the out-loud thinker and the woman is the internal processor, so I have seen that too, yeah.

Jamie: Ah. Interesting. Well, this is really good information, I think, for all of us who have to communicate with people who process information differently, who have a different communication orientation, so I appreciate that. So, Aeric, where can people learn more about you and the work that you do?

Aeric: Well, I have a site, or I will very soon. It’s aeric.nyc, so you’ll be able to reach me there and learn a little bit about my coaching from there.

Jamie: Excellent! Aeric.nyc, it’s coming soon!

Aeric: Coming soon, yeah.

Jamie: Excellent, excellent. Well, Aeric, thank you so much for your time and your expertise and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Aeric: You too. And thank you so, so much. I really appreciate this.

Jamie: Okay! Bye bye.

Aeric: Take care, bye bye.

Jamie: Bye!

A 15-Year Career Retrospective Introspective

What did you desire for yourself in the past? What did you think and believe in the past that have now become your current reality? What do you believe now? What is your dream for the future? These are some of the questions I answer for myself in this career retrospective introspective episode.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 46 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.

Another episode, another police siren here in New York City.

Can you hear that? It’s kind of beautiful how well we are taken care of. That’s the thought I have as I hear the police - or the ambulance, I’m not sure - pass by.

It is December. Happy December! It is my birth month and I want to celebrate our struggles.

I want to celebrate all of our frustrations.

I want to celebrate all of our exhaustion, failures, facepalm moments, the moments of despair and just sheer disappointment.

All those moments of self doubt.

All those moments of almost giving up on our dreams, almost giving up on being bolder, braver and better paid because it just felt too hard, it just felt too unlikely, it felt too embarrassing - potentially embarrassing - and just the thought of it was painful.

I want us to celebrate all those moments of pain that we endured to get to where we are today in December 2018.

Because without those moments, we don’t thrive.

It is because of those moments of negative emotion, of almost giving up, of doubting and then overcoming the doubt and the fear and the shame and the guilt that we thrive.

That is why we are born to thrive.

I’ve been mulling on several big questions over the past few days.

A client asked me, “How did you get hired? How did you make your first $60,000-$70,000?”

And Catalyst, which is a leading not-for-profit headquartered here in New York that is all about advancing diversity and inclusion in corporate America for women and minorities, they asked me to come and speak about the unwritten rules of the workplace. That’s a webinar happening next week, December 11th.

And at the same time, I’ve been asking some big questions to myself because tonight I’m gonna be meeting with my Mastermind to talk about our big goals, our Wildly Improbable Goals (WIGs for short) for 2019. Last year we met and set WIGs for 2019 and I shattered through nearly all of them.

So, the net effect here of mulling on these big questions about my past, about my experience in the workplace and also about where I am going in the future, the net effect of all of that is I became retrospective, looking back, but also introspective, looking in.

And so I thought it would be really fun to do this episode and walk you through my career journey and share with you what I see when I look back, retrospectively, and what I see when I look in, introspectively.

What was I thinking and believing then?

And I think that’s really important because when I think about what I was thinking and believing in the past, I see they created the results I have now in my present.

My past thinking created my present results and therefore, in order for me to create new results in the future, I have to have some new thinking.

So I will share with you some of my new thoughts for 2019 and beyond.

But, before we go there, the unwritten rules.

What are the unwritten rules?

Well, when I think about my own career trajectory, there are three things that come to mind.

First is that there are no rules. You gotta throw the rulebook out.

Why? Because everyone’s journey, everyone’s life, everyone’s career trajectory is as unique as their thumbprint. So there is no hard and fast rule about how to do your career.

And so for the person who asked me, “Well, how did you get hired? How did you make money?” I’ll share with you my herstory if you will but I want you to resist the temptation to compare your trajectory to mine because, again, my life is as unique as my thumbprint as your life is as unique as your thumbprint.

And also, when you think about the rules of the workplace or your career rules, I think it’s actually more often the case that the written rules may not apply.

Case in point is yesterday I went to a talk given by another Catalyst researcher, Katherine Giscombe, who is the expert on women of color and their experiences in corporate America.

And she cited this really fascinating research that out of the 15 companies that she studied for her research, 14 out of the 15 said that they have accountability in terms of supporting minority women of color and helping them advance in their companies.

And yet when they asked the actual women of color at these companies, 17%, so that’s more like 1 out of 15 rather than 14 out of 15, I don’t know if the math is correct but when you think about the ratio it’s like the inverse, right?

The majority of the companies that say yes, they have a written standard of upholding diversity and inclusion and having accountability for this and yet most of the people did not actually experience that to be true for them, especially the women of color.

So, yeah. I think the first rule is really that there are no rules.

Having said that, another unwritten rule of the workplace is that you need a future focus.

And this is really interesting because nobody teaches us how to have future focus.

We don’t learn how to have a future focus in school and I think that’s why so many of us struggle with articulating our future potential when it comes to advocating for the value that we bring because it’s hard for us to dream big, to think big, and thereby lead big.

It’s easier for our minds and our brains to think about what we have done in the past and how can we recreate that.

But in leadership and negotiation, it’s about influencing and motivating people to change the status quo and in order to do that, you need to have a big future focus.

You need to tell us how awesome the future is going to be, this alternative future that your leadership and your ask will make possible.

And finally, the third thing I want to say about unwritten rules is that you have to let your desire guide you towards the career of your dreams.

And remember there are no unwritten rules. You gotta throw the rulebook out. Each career trajectory is going to be unique as your thumbprint and so that means you gotta follow that little tug inside your heart.

You gotta follow that little inkling, that slight suggestion, the hint that you get from you, from that little voice inside you.

So, having said that, I will quickly walk you through my resume.

And in the beginning of my career, when I first graduated from Smith College, wow, nearly fifteen years ago, I didn’t know how to navigate the working world.

I am an immigrant. My parents are immigrants and I watched them work 10, 11 hour days at their store, their gift shop in Queens, for 364 days out of the year and so what I learned from watching them is you just work and work and work and work and somehow that’s how you manage to make the rent, manage to put food on the table, and you just work and work and work and work.

But how to network, how to build a personal brand, no, they didn’t do any of that, so I didn’t learn from the example of my parents. I had to teach myself.

I began by just a lot of trial and error. And last night when I attended this talk about how women of color advance in corporate America, they mentioned that trial and error is not one of the strategies that work, and I thought, “Okay, well, that’s interesting to me because, for me, that’s how I grew my career. That’s how I started my career.

I applied to jobs on Craigslist.

And then the first place that offered me a paying job, I took it. And nearly fifteen years ago, it was with this little internet company called Legal Match. I don’t know, I don’t think they are around anymore and I was basically a sales development representative or a glorified telemarketer.

I would call up law offices and try to pitch them on a subscription to this internet service and I got paid $10 an hour with $20 commission for every appointment booked and I was there for just a few months.

But what I realize when I look back on it now is that I was so hungry to get a job that any job was okay for me because I desired so strongly to move out of my mother’s couch in New Jersey. Yeah. And so the driving belief back then was I must, I will get a job, any job will do. You pay me, I will show up and figure it out because I gotta make some money. I gotta make some money and move out.

When I was very young, I dreamt about living in New York City.

I dreamt about living and working in New York City and I was commuting from New Jersey. Not very far, just a quick bus ride, but still it felt like a different world to be in New Jersey, to be in Manhattan was like night and day. Different energy, right? Different culture, different people, different buildings, different experiences and I so desired to find a job in New York City.

And so that’s exactly what I did. I mean, I was not very picky.

So after a few months at this little internet company where I was calling up law offices as a sales rep, I desired for something better. I desired to find a better job, a job that is more fulfilling, a job that perhaps makes use of my education.

I studied Japanese in college and I studied abroad in Tokyo for my junior year abroad and so I applied through a Japanese temp agency and landed a temp receptionist position at an international organization that was going to build a nuclear power plant in North Korea.

That’s right.

You heard me right.

This organization, in 2005 was going to build a nuclear power plant in North Korea. No, that was actually 2004, I stand corrected.

It was organized like the UN as a conglomerate of international diplomats: Japanese, South Korean, American, European, the EU, and I was so excited when landed this temp job as a receptionist. It was like I won the lottery because I am idealistic, if you can’t tell by now, and it really resonated with my dream and desire to contribute to world peace.

So, the long story short here was that during the Clinton administration, former President Jimmy Carter brokered, negotiated a deal in which the international community will build North Korea a sustainable and renewable source of energy in exchange for their promise to stop building nuclear weapons but we all know what happened to that promise. They broke it.

So by the winter of 2005 after the presidential election when Bush was re-elected, the whole organization came to a screeching halt. Everything just stopped. So my dream job became sort of a nightmare job because every day I would go into the office and sit in icy silence.

I got paid $14 an hour, by the way, so I was starting to make a little bit more money and here I was, it was supposed to have been my dream job but no, it turned out it was not my dream job.

I vividly recall commiserating with my college friend. One day We got together for coffee and we were so miserable at our first jobs out of college. They were so disappointing. The pay was so low. Office culture was so...ugh, just frustrating.

And I recall she and I, we kept telling each other, “You know what? It’s only going to get better. It’s only going to get better from here. It’s only going to get better.” I worked at believing it. I really did.

And guess what? It did.

Over time, It did.

After working at this international organization for six months as a temp receptionist getting paid $14 an hour, I saved $2,000. And I felt like I had a lot of money. $2,000.

I moved out of my mother’s couch. I found a little apartment share in Queens and I quit my temp job. I had $2,000, so I had exactly 4 months’ rent, nothing else.

It’s funny. It’s really funny now but also I’m really inspired. I have a lot of respect for my future self for having so much faith and taking such a risk. I mean, I wouldn’t do that now. I have bigger bills to pay but even if I had just four months of whatever, I don’t know if I could…

Anyway, the point being here, I made my dream come true.

I moved out of my mother’s couch. I was now living in New York City. I did have a job. And now I needed to get a new job and my desire, I had a strong desire to just make it work. And because I saw my parents work really hard and make it work in America, I decided I can do it too.

And so, I just hustled, I went back to Craigslist.

Do people even still do that? I don’t know.

I got a restaurant hostess job and I got paid $12 an hour, so I went back in pay, but that’s okay. And I made it work.

But of course this was a temporary solution because I realized, hey, I’m college-educated, I speak all these languages, I can do better.

And so the belief I had back then when I was doing this hostess job was, hey, this is temporary. This is temporary.

And eventually I got hired by a Korean company as a purchasing assistant and I was buying really fancy things like steel copper plates. And I got paid $30,000 annual salary. And I was driven then by my desire to play to my strengths and I taught myself how to type and write business Korean.

I’m ethnically Korean, I was born in South Korea. I came to the United States after having just learned the Korean alphabet, basically. I was in the second grade and, yeah, I had just learned how to speak, read and write and then I left, so my formal education in Korean is extremely limited.

I’m fluent in American English. I can speak conversational Japanese because I studied it in college and because I got this job at this Korean company, I’m like, okay, I know some Korean. This is my mother tongue, technically. I can do this.

I had the belief that I can do this so I taught myself how to type and I remember I went and got these little stickers for my keyboard so that I knew which alphabet corresponded to which letter in the Korean alphabet and I taught myself.

It took time but I did it and now when I look back, I’m like damn. I’m impressive.

And I also taught myself how to do negotiation with business people.

I taught myself how to do international business negotiations because I was taking the orders from the headquarters in South Korea in Korean. I would then translate that into English. Well, you know, most of it was already in English but I would translate the demands and the asks and the requests and I would convey them, I would communicate them with my American vendors with whom I had a really great rapport and so I learned firsthand how important it is to have good personal, interpersonal relationships.

Catalyst also supports this. It really boils down to the interpersonal relationships that have an outsized impact on your career success.

I didn’t have such a great interpersonal relationship with the Korean people back in Korea because they were so far away and there was a culture gap because, mind you, I’m Korean-American, you know? I’m not really a Korean from Korea if that makes sense to you.

If you’re an immigrant or if you’re intercultural, you would know what I mean, right?  

So, I eventually decided that I wanted to move on because I believed that I can earn more money. I was making $30,000. That’s not a lot of money. I also believed that I can enjoy my job more. I believed that I can do it. I was feeling a lot of misery but I also was driven by this belief that I can earn and enjoy my job more.

And so, eventually, I did find a job at an American company as a purchasing agent and I ended up earning $43,000 in annual salary. They first offered me $40,000. I negotiated and I said, “Hey, is there room for more?” and they immediately responded with $3,000 additional dollars, so hey, there’s a salary negotiation tip for you. Just ask them, can you do better? See what happens. And for me that was nearly 10% more in salary.I was super happy about that.

And at this American company where I was working as a purchasing agent, we had a new CEO and the new CEO was very charismatic and he wanted to rally the people. He wanted to really connect with the people.

And so he had every one of us fill out a quick survey and I think he took these from coaches because I realize he asked a coaching question. It said, “What do you really want out of life? What do you really want? What really drives you?”

And I wrote down...I thought really hard about this. How do I answer this question? What do I really want? And I wrote down, “I really desire to grow. I really desire growth as a person, as a professional. Personal development. I really want growth.”

And later on, I found out he gave a town hall address and he was like, “Oh, thank you so much for taking that survey, and I found out” - this is what the CEO said - “I found out, to my relief, that nearly all of you said that your family is the most important thing.”

For me, it wasn’t family. I was a single woman living in an apartment share in Queens at that time. For me it was growth. It still is!

And it’s no wonder now, when I look back, I realize, now I make the connection how I ended up where I am today.

I eventually did make $60,000+ when I got a job as a hedge fund analyst and again, it was through Craigslist. Somebody at my old company when I was a purchasing agent, told me that she posted her resume on Craigslist. I don’t know if people still do this. I wouldn’t advise it, in fact.

But I did it and I got a call from this hedge fund that was seeking a qualitative analyst and basically, that’s just a fancy way of saying that they wanted someone to read like two dozen newspapers, research reports, and organize information, just consume a ton of data and digest it and that’s exactly what I did.

And I was making $50,000 annual salary, which I later found out was half of the going market rate but I did earn close to $20,000 in bonus, so that’s how I made my first $70,000. And at that time I had a lot of desire to make money. I still do. I love my desire to make money. My parents taught it to me and I’m really appreciative of that.

But I also was driven by my desire to learn and to work hard and to take a risk. My life partner at that time, I’ll just say my ex-husband at that time, told me not to do this. He told me not to take this risk. He told me not to go for this job.

But I knew that it was worth taking a risk because I can earn more, I can learn more and I can really grow. So now I work as a negotiation and leadership coach, public speaker and I absolutely love what I do and I want to continue to grow personally, professionally, I want to grow my income. I want to become bolder. I want to become braver. I want to become better paid, just as I want to help my clients do the same.

I had a blast from the past this weekend.

As I was mulling over these talking points this weekend, I went to brunch in Manhattan and just, completely coincidentally, my coworker from 12 years ago when I first worked for this Korean company, she came and sat right next to me at this restaurant. Completely out of the blue. Completely at random.

And I found out she is still there. She still works there but she’s been now promoted to senior manager. And it’s really fun to think about, how come she had that trajectory and I have had my own trajectory? And I think it’s because of what we think and believe are so different.

So, what about you? What are you thinking and believing now?

What are you thinking and believing today?

And this is something really important. This is something for you to be really mindful of because what you think and believe, what you desire now will create your future.

What do you want in the future? What do you want your 2019 to be?

How awesome will it be?

Here are some things I believe today:

I believe that the work I do changes lives.

It’s not just about a bigger income. It’s not just about a bigger paycheck. It’s about changing your mindset and when you change your mindset, you change your perspective, you change how you see your world, your world changes.

I believe that I can create my future, not my circumstances.

I believe that all of my failures up to now - and I’ve had many failures, I’ve made tons of mistakes - are as worthy as my achievements. Because my losses are more instructive than my wins.

I believe that my business will grow as I grow as a person, as a professional.

And you know what? I grow.

Like a big, hairy beast.

I just had my seven-month-old nephew come visit me today, earlier today, and every time I see him, he acts differently. He’s now crawling, he’s making funny faces, but it’s just mind-boggling how quickly he is growing. He’s growing like a big, hairy beast and you know what?

So am I.

As a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as a person.

Every day I am growing.

I believe that the words I use create my world.

And the best words are the ones that crack me up. And when I was preparing for this, I chuckled, I was like, oh, this is really good! I like this. That’s how I know that I’m using the best words, because they make me laugh.

I believe that every day I am living into the impossible.

What is impossible today will become possible later.

I am quoting my own coach, Brooke Castillo, and when I think about my own life, when I think about the fact that I am an immigrant, I’m from a culture where women don’t have rights. My grandmother, she wiped down the floor with a wet rag and I live a life completely unimaginable to her.

And, by the way, I’m not saying that women in South Korea don’t have rights, I’m saying I come from a past, I come from a different past where the opportunities that I have today to work from home, to talk to people all over the world, to coach scientists and entrepreneurs and executives and engineers and people literally all over the world. I mean, I just coached somebody in Switzerland.

I live a life that was impossible, that was unimaginable for people just a few generations ago.

So, every day the impossible is becoming a possibility. I am living into the impossible every day.

And I believe that my dreams are in the process of coming true, except only always. Except only always.

So it is up to me to dream big and to desire big. What do you desire for your future?

What does that little voice, what does that little inkling say?

Don’t pay so much attention to what society says, what schoolbooks say, what rulebooks say, what parents say, what teachers say, what your bosses say. But listen to that little voice inside of you.

What does it say? What do you desire? What is your dream?

I believe I always get what I want. There’s nothing I truly want that I can’t have.

And I believe that 2018 was a miraculous year. It really was.

It’s incredible that I am now working for myself. My business is growing. My coaching practice is growing. My mastermind is launching. I am speaking at these leadership events and, wow. It’s something that I would have thought - I did think - was impossible in the past, but not only is it possible, it is my reality.

I believe 2019 is going to be even more awesome.

What do you believe? What do you think? What is your trajectory? What is your desire? Who are you becoming?

I will talk to you soon. Have a good one.

How to Use Future Gratitude as Networking Fuel

What if you can decide how you want to feel in the future? What if you can use gratitude to fuel your strategic interactions so that you can become bolder, braver, and better paid? In this special episode, I share a quick five-minute exercise that you can do ahead of a networking event to transform how you think, how you feel, and therefore how you show up.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 44 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.

I think when I do my 50th episode I should throw a party. Want to join?

It’s been my awesome privilege and pleasure to be hosting this podcast for 44 episodes and I plan on doing more podcast episodes in the future into 2019.

And I’m just really grateful for those of you who listen and those of you who have given me 5-star ratings on iTunes and those of you who come to my website, jamieleecoach.com.

Thank you.

Today I want to talk about gratitude because it is the topic of the week and I want to offer you a fun twist on it.

I think for most of us, when we think about gratitude, we think about what we already have, what we have received, and how we have expressed and experienced gratitude in the past.

What if you can decide to feel gratitude in the future?

And I think this could have a really powerful impact on your negotiation success.

In fact, I want to offer you a fun exercise that I dreamt up for one of my clients who is working towards a better paying job and he had to go to a networking event but the idea of showing up to that networking event - it was a very important one for his job search - it filled him with dread and anxiety and he didn’t really want to go. And at the same time, he knew that it was important, that he really should go.

So, of course, I coached him around that and then I dreamt up this exercise and offered it to him and after he did it, he went to the event and he wrote me that as a result of having done this exercise, he enjoyed all of his conversations at the event and he came out of the event feeling happy and satisfied with what had happened.

He was able to be in the moment at this networking event and really see every moment with the people and what was happening there as an opportunity.

And I think this is really important because when I ask my coaching clients,”How do you want to feel about your career? How do you want to feel about your leadership? How do you want to feel in the moment of negotiating for what you want?,” they all say the same thing, which is: present, calm, in the moment, focused, in the flow.

And so the impact of having done this exercise for him was all of that.

So, here’s the exercise. If you have a networking event or a social engagement coming up, I want you to go into the future. I want you to go visit the day after this event that’s coming up for you and I want you to get a piece of paper or a card - a thank you card - grab a pen and all you really need after that is your imagination.

So, when you do this exercise, go to the future. Go to the day after that specific event, okay? So, if you have an event coming up, let’s say on December the 6th, you are going to visit December 7th in your imagination.

And then pick one person. Pick one person with whom you will be conversing.

Maybe this is a future mentor, someone who could champion for you, somebody who is an influencer who can make connections and inroads in your career strategy.

Just pick one person and write a thank you card to this person today but it’s dated in the future.

And genuinely thank them for their insight, for the information or the story they shared with you on the date of this event.

So, again, just to be clear, you are writing a thank you card from the future for the event that you’re about to attend.

You’re pretending that the event has already occurred and you are already feeling grateful for the key strategic insight, that amazing information or really inspiring story this person shared with you.

And feel free to make up the details of this. Again, this is just you imagining, just making believe that this has already happened. There’s no right or wrong here. You’re not being graded.

Tell them how you enjoyed the meaningful conversation you had with this person at this event and imagine you really enjoyed it. Tell them what you learned from this interaction and what you appreciate about them and about this event or this company, whatever.

What do you appreciate? Appreciate in advance.

Again, make it all up. The only rule here is to be genuine in your emotion of gratitude. You want to be genuine in your emotion of gratitude but not needy. You’re not gonna be like, “Okay, so you’re gonna set up that interview for me, right?!”

No.

Lose the attachment to whatever outcome that you really want.

Just feel the gratitude.

And then end the card with, “I look forward to the next time we speak…” and fill in the dots here as you like. Again, make it all up.

And if you have a card, actually write it in a card. I think there’s something really powerful and magical about writing it with your hand as opposed to typing it up. But that’s my personal bias for writing things on paper.

If you feel more comfortable typing it or maybe dictating it into your smart device, go ahead.

And just sit with it. Or if you want to send me a picture of your thank-you-in-advance card, feel free to email it to me. I’m jamie@jamieleecoach.com.

So, why is this so powerful? Why is this exercise so powerful and why is it effective?

First of all, it’s because what we know is not what we do. It’s what we feel that drives our actions in the future.

You know, most people think the circumstances of their lives is what they react to and that circumstances dictate what you do and how you do it but that’s not true.

If you have a networking event that you have to go to and if you are feeling apprehensive or dread because you have the thought that you’re not gonna be impressive enough or you’re not good enough or other people will look down on you, then it’s the feeling of dread or insecurity that’s going to drive your reaction. And from that feeling of insecurity or dread, you might show up small. You might avoid small talk. You might not engage fully, right?

And from there you create more evidence to support the thought that you’re not good enough or that people don’t like you. Whatever the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee is whispering into your ear to make you feel small and not good enough, right?

So, how do you generate emotion on purpose so that you can take action on purpose?

You can imagine the future. The future belongs to you. The future has not happened. The future never arrives because we’re always in the present moment. We’re always dreaming of the future, right? So the future is whatever we make it up to be in the now.

And so, it’s really up to you what you can dream of, what you can imagine.

One of my favorite books is Finding Your Way in the Wild New World by Martha Beck and in this book she talks about how imagination is one of the four technologies of magic that help people create and live their best lives and I think this is so true.

And we are programmed in our brains for negativity and we are programmed to think about the worst-case scenarios.

That’s the first thing that will come to your mind if you try to do something risky or do something new, including negotiating, including networking, including asking for what you want, right?

But if we can trick the brain and tell the brain, you know what? What if we can feel appreciation? What if we can be grateful? What if the best thing can happen? And just let our imagination run wild in that direction, I think something amazing really can happen.

And that is because - this is something that I learned from master coach instructor Rich Litvin; he’s also the author of the book The Prosperous Coach, which is another one of my favorites - it’s always easier to come from a compelling vision rather that struggle to achieve a vision that you feel is unachievable.

So, the best way to come from and achieve it as if it’s already done is to imagine the end goal and feel it and see it and experience it from an emotional place because, like I said, it’s that emotion that’s going to drive you toward action and if you can create and imagine a positive future, then you can use that positive emotion to fuel your action towards the future that you most desire.

And gratitude is like this miraculous emotion, I think, because when I think about gratitude, there is joy, there is wonder, there is this feeling of being receptive, open, light, present and warm.

So, I wish you a really wonderful, warm, light, joyous holiday season, holiday week and I am grateful to you in advance for subscribing, for rating this podcast and giving it a 5-star rating on iTunes.

I’m really appreciative of that.

I’m really appreciative of you coming to check out my site, jamieleecoach.com, and I’m really appreciative of you showing up in your life and challenging yourself to that future vision, to become more of who you are, which is bold, which is brave, so that you can become better paid in the future.

So, thank you and with a warm heart, I will talk to you next week.

Future Focus and Goal Shame

“Why do you need to articulate your future potential as part of your negotiation strategy?” I address this question and explain the importance of future focus for you, for your negotiation, and for your leadership. 

I share my updates for 2018 “Wild and Improbable” Goals and how I am dealing with the shame of not yet having achieved my ambitious goals.

Thriving is not about being “happy-happy-joy-joy” 100% of the time. 

In order to thrive, you need to embrace the pain of growing and the sting of rejection and shame. 

To learn more about my small group mastermind, go towww.jamieleecoach.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 42 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.

How are you?

Today is kind of a gray day here in New York City and I was just commiserating with some of my virtual coworkers. I have a group of wonderful ladies with whom we cowork virtually and we were just commiserating how it’s the kind of day that we’d rather crawl back into bed or turn on Netflix and eat junk food all day.

But instead, here we are. Working. Creating content. Making our dreams come true.

Yesterday, I gave a webinar for a women’s group and I was asked the question, “Why is it important for you to articulate your future potential as part of your negotiation strategy?”

And I thought that was a really interesting question because it seemed almost too obvious an answer to me.

When you think about the fact that you’re negotiating so that you can create a new agreement going forward - in other words, this new agreement will create a new way of doing things from here on out, right? You’re creating a new agreement for the future - you want to influence your negotiation counterpart, whether that’s your boss, a potentially new employer or a client that there is something more coming their way in terms of value in the future.

So you want to articulate your future potential so that they are motivated to change the status quo, to create a new agreement moving forward for the future, right?

And I think this is so important to think about for us who are wanting to become bolder, braver, and better paid in the future because, in negotiation, we want to create a future focus and in order to do that, we have to create future focus for ourselves and that means we first need to be clear on what we want for ourselves in the future.

What do we desire to be different in the future?

What do you desire to be different in the future?

It’s something that I’m thinking a lot about recently because, as you know, as you may know, I am doing a small group mastermind to help and support women who want to create powerful intentions for 2019 and set some wild and improbable goals.

The reason why we set wild and improbable goals is not to set ourselves up for failure but it is to create desire, create momentum, create stretch goals that would help us become more, become bigger, become bolder, become braver.

And so today I thought it would be instructive to share with you some of my wild and improbable goals that I set for myself in late 2017, give you an update, how did I do and what I am learning, and how I am growing from this process.

So, on December 21, 2017, I created some wild and improbable goals and the first thing that I thought of was that I would have doubled my income by the end of 2018.

And I had a very specific number. I thought that I would have earned more than $184,000 and I imagined that this amount of money would make me feel deeply grateful and awed by the contribution I was able to make in the past year.

And I will tell you that I have not gotten there yet and I want to talk to you more about that in a minute.

The other wild and improbable goals I have set for myself is that I have helped another woman or women double her income too and she and I would feel really awesome and proud of the work we have done together to make this possible.

I’m still working towards that goal, the year’s not over yet.

I also imagined that I would have traveled to Japan, Singapore and to the Pacific Northwest. I was very specific in my goal thing, here. And I imagined that I would have had a lot of fun conversing in Japanese with native Japanese speakers in Japan and that this would feel so amazing to see my life partner embrace his family in Singapore.

He has family who is from America but moved there for work purposes. And I imagined that I would experience emotions I didn’t know I had when I embraced by Auntie-hood.

And it’s been true. It’s been amazing to become an Auntie and experience all this pure love for this new and tiny human being.

And I also imagined that I would fall in love with the Pacific Northwest all over again.

It’s kind of funny to read these goals out loud because some of them came true. I did go to Japan. I did speak with native Japanese speakers. I did see my life partner reunite with his family in Singapore and that was so wonderful and in fact, we’re going back. We’re going back to Japan and Singapore, so the goal has been achieved twice, well, by the end of 2018 it will have.

And I did not go to the Pacific Northwest. I went to Arizona. I went to Alabama. I went to these places I hadn’t been to before and I loved that.

Another goal I had set for myself is to write and publish blogs and video posts consistently and that I would have made my dream come true of being a consistent, reliable content producer, that I am in the “flow” more often than not, and this would have helped me getting really close to finishing my book and that this feels just right.

I am not yet close to finishing my book but I have produced a lot of content on the podcast, newsletter, webinars, public speaking engagements and yeah, it feels right. It feels just right.

The book is coming.

And then I had this very specific, concrete vision that by the end of the year, I would “have slightly longer hair than I had in December 2017,” (December 2017 I had cut my hair really short) “and my arms are toned and my body is fit. I feel healthy and I’m close to wrapping up a big project, something that makes the best of who I am and where I come from and all that I can do.”

“I have people whom I admire and people who are helping me get to the finish line. I feel like Zen master boss lady of a company that’s on the up and up and I feel calm, confident, and in the moment.”

“2019 is already set up to blow the roof off of any remaining misgivings, doubt or old thought patterns that hold me back from showing up in the world in even bigger, bolder, and braver ways.”

So that’s what I wrote in December 2017 and it kind of gives me the chills to see that I had such a specific and vivid vision for how 2018 would end and having that very vivid vision motivated me to produce a lot of content, to teach, to set up a new business, to create a new podcast, to do webinars and to grow my hair and to start training in Aikido.

I haven’t talked about that on this podcast but I decided in the middle of the year that I really wanted to become better at Aikido and Aikido has elements of Zen. It’s inspired by Zen, so I’m working towards that vision of becoming the Zen master boss lady.

When I said “Zen master boss lady”, it was more to evoke a feeling in me and for me the feelings that I wanted to create in myself was the biggest motivator in doing a lot of the things that I did this year.

Another thing that’s really amazing is that I realized that once I had the vision, making it come true was so much easier for me. It just came more naturally and I do have people who are supporting this business and whom I do admire, whom I really appreciate, and when I think about those people, like the person who’s transcribing this podcast, I’m like woah, I had this vision and it came true it’s like woah, that’s really cool and amazing!

But at the same time, I had these really ambitious goals and I have not achieved them yet and so I do feel shame about it.

When I think about the fact that I haven’t yet doubled my income or haven’t yet doubled somebody else’s income just yet, I have these thoughts that in spite of all the things that have been accomplished so far and in spite of all the things I will accomplish in the next two months, I have the thought that oh, I haven’t done enough.

And maybe that means I’m not good enough.

And that could also mean that I’m a failure or that I don’t know what I’m doing.

It’s only human!

I should say, I’m only human. And it’s only natural, it’s only normal for me to experience this shame as anyone else might do.

And I want to talk to you about that shame today because I’m going through it right now and this year, I recognize that the things that the shame would actually have me do are not constructive, are not the types of actions that would help me become the Zen master boss lady that I’ve envisioned I will eventually become.

I can still continue to believe in this vision. I can still continue to work towards them. I can still achieve them. It might not be the end of 2018, it might be the end of 2022, but I can still work towards them but if I let the shame and that sense of powerlessness take over, then what I would easily do are the things that my body really wants me to do.

Just avoid any sort of risk.

Avoid taking further, positive action.

And instead maybe go back to bed, go back to the couch, eat a box of cookies, or a whole bag of Doritos and watch Netflix.

And I have to tell you that today, because it is a gray and cold day here in New York City, that temptation is particularly strong and I’ve talked about the 3-A trap in the past. The trap of avoiding conflict, the trap of accommodating and the trap of attacking people because the resentment just boils over, right? In other words, hiding, giving in and giving in to that sense of resentment.

That’s the kind of action that giving into this feeling of shame would have me do.

And I recognize as Dr. Wayne Dyer says that the feeling of resentment is never justified. It comes from believing the thoughts that are created through default thinking.

So, how do I work through this? How could you work through something like this if you are also experiencing goal shame?

What I’m doing differently this year is telling myself that I may want to move towards this discomfort. I may want to move towards the shame. I may want to move towards the feeling of powerlessness and the weariness that it creates in my body.

In other words, I may want to accept negative emotions. I may want to move towards them and allow them to be in my body instead of reacting against them by resorting to avoidance, accommodation and attacking other people.

This might sound counterintuitive because when you hear “born to thrive,” Jamie believes we’re all born to thrive, it might sounds like I think that we’re all destined to become happy-happy-joy-joy 100% of the time but no, that’s not the human experience.

The human experience is that we feel negative emotion 50% of the time.

Half the time we will feel good and and half the time we may feel bad. And the sooner we can accept the balance of emotion in the human experience the sooner we can work through the negative emotions, deal with them and work our way back to feeling better.

I think it’s so important to accept that in order to thrive, you need to embrace the pain of growing. You need to embrace the sting of rejection, the sting of shame, the sting of hearing no, the sting of things not going the way you actually thought they would go.

And I’m inspired today by this Winston Churchill quote: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

The road to success is paved with failure. The way to become bolder, braver, and better paid is to continue taking action even when you hear no. Even when you feel ashamed.

And in order to do that, first, you have to allow yourself to feel the shame instead of reacting or rejecting that shame.

I’ve been thinking about what does it really mean to become bolder, braver and better paid? Why did I pick those particular words and I took some time to think about all the other emotions or the qualities that are associated with becoming bolder, braver, and better paid.

And so, for me, the word bold means powerful, firm, self-esteemed, strong, assertive, proud, courageous, determined, risky, thick-skinned, decisive, individual, unpopular, iconoclastic, confident, moxy, fearless.

And the word brave, for me, conjures up these other sets of emotions: vulnerable - which, if you are familiar with the works of Dr. Brene Brown, you would know that to become vulnerable, you have to first open yourself up to shame. Brave also conjures up feelings of nervousness, anxiety, determined, motivated, afraid but doing it anyway, hopeful and optimistic in spite of the odds.

So, as we near the end of 2019, I welcome you to consider what is a compelling vision you can create for yourself for the end of 2019?

And if you are feeling the mix of emotions around what has been accomplished, what has not yet been accomplished for 2018, I invite you to explore those emotions and allow them. They’re just vibrations in the body.

Thank you and I will talk to you soon.

The People-Pleasing Trap

How differently would you show up to ask for help, work, or money if you didn't have the need to please people? 

My bet is that you'd be bolder, braver, and as a result, better paid. 

I have a lot of experience with the people-pleasing trap, because I'm a recovering people-pleaser. 

In this episode, I explain how this fear of displeasing others holds us back from asking, receiving, and thriving. 

You'll learn: 
- Why and how the life-long training to please others started 
- Why our brains confuse other people's displeasure as a threat
- Why it's impossible to please others with who we are, what we say, or what we do 
- Three ways we can get triggered to sabotage our outcomes 
- Three ways we can work ourselves out of the people-pleasing trap 
- Five of my recurring stressful thoughts around pleasing people 
- How I turn these thoughts around to instill a new mindset of growth, appreciation, and confidence 

Come check out www.jamieleecoach.com for details on Small Group Mastermind, private coaching, and speaking services.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 41 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I am your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

I find it really auspicious that I’m recording Episode 41 on November 1. I like that number and it reminds me to renew and refresh my commitment to delivering and creating exponential value to those who come in contact with this podcast, with my workshops, with my coaching.

And I also have been thinking about numbers a lot because there is now exactly two months or eight weeks remaining to 2018. I am going on vacation at the end of the year and I realized there’s only about 40-something days before I leave and having that very concrete deadline, the numbers are motivating me to create things of value, to deliver more value, to be focused so that I can become bolder, braver, and help people become better leaders.

How about you?

What is helping you become bolder, braver, and better leaders or better paid? Those things can be synonymous, I think.

As we are nearing the end of 2018, soon we will be talking about 2019 goals and what do we want to achieve in 2019, so I think this is a really exciting time for us to be working hard towards our goal while also thinking about what else is possible in the future.

So, with that in mind, I have created a small group mastermind to support those who want to set powerful intentions and wild and improbable goals for 2019. People who want to surprise themselves with what they achieve in 2019. And if you are thinking about being supported in this way while also being held accountable to take concrete action and to start the year in high gear with high momentum, please reach out. I’d be happy to talk to you about what that is going to be like and how you might benefit.

You can also come to my website: jamieleecoach.com. I’m also continuing to book 2019 speaking engagements and private coaching clients, so it is all happening. It is all happening.

We are born to thrive. I believe that. And I believe that negotiation skills are leadership skills that can help you thrive.

The thing that holds us back from doing what we’re born to do is so often fear. And today, I want to talk about a very specific type of fear: the fear of displeasing people. The fear of losing the approval of people, especially those in a position of authority.

Think about going to ask for help, asking for work, asking for money, and if you have the fear that your ask might upset the person who has the authority to say yes or no, how likely are you to go for it? It just takes more courage. It takes more thought-work, I think.

And yesterday, I was exchanging emails with a client. I let him know that the homework assignments that I give this person, it’s not intended for him to please me. It’s not about me, coach Jamie. It’s about serving the needs of the client and the client was shocked. He was like, “Woah, how did you know that I have this need? I’m really curious how you were able to get out of this mindset, this pitfall of needing to please others because I see that it’s holding me back.”

And I wish there was a shortcut.

I wish there was a quick “fix-it”.

But there isn't. There isn’t. I don’t believe there is.

I believe I’m gonna be working through this myself for the rest of my life. But I’d be honored to tell you how I think about this need to please others, how I experience the pitfall of needing to please people, and how I am working through it so that I can still ask for help, ask for work, ask for money, and still show up bold, show up brave, and get better paid.

So, I want to say, first of all, that the need to please others, when I reflect on my life, it started from the very first day of my life. The first day, my parents met me and they said, “Oh, you’re such a good girl!”

I was trained from a very young age. I was fortunate to be trained from a very young age to please my parents, to be good, to listen, to behave, to make mom and dad proud.

I was very fortunate because my parents trained me for a really good reason. They trained me to seek their approval, to please them for a very good reason.

They trained me this way to keep me alive.

When I was one, when I was two, when I just started to gain my bodily functions and be able to walk and talk, that’s when I was most vulnerable to hurt myself.

Don’t play with knives, you’ll hurt yourself. Be good. Don’t go into the woods with strangers. Those are the kinds of things my parents told me and they told them to me so that I would survive. I would continue to live and continue to grow. That was their number one objective.

So, they trained me to please them for a really good reason. This is not bad parenting. However, in my very young, impressionable brain, I interpreted these lessons in this way: that pleasing others, especially those in a position of authority is essential to my survival and safety because without my parents I cannot survive as a baby, as a toddler, right?

And this served me really well when I was a very small, very young person. The problem is that I have now outgrown the situations where making that mistake of playing with knives or going into the woods with strangers would cost me my life, would potentially cost me my life.

I have outgrown those situations but my brain didn’t outgrow the groove that was created when this lesson was repeated over and over to me for my own good. And so, what happened was that my brain - the not-so-evolved part of my brain - is associating the risk of displeasing others with the risk of my own survival.

And when my brain thinks that my very own survival is at risk, this triggers this primal fear or the amygdala hijack and, as discussed in previous episodes of this podcast, what can happen is that it can trigger either the freeze, flight or the fight response.

And when those responses are triggered, that’s when I end up sabotaging my own outcomes.

So, let me give you some examples.

Freezing because I’m afraid of upsetting people. I encounter this when I’m networking with very successful people and this not-so-evolved part of my brain is frozen with the fear of not being good enough or displeasing these new people who are more successful and therefore in a higher position of authority. At least that’s how my brain is interpreting, right?

And so what happens is that I freeze up. I kind of get really awkward, I get weird, I say the wrong things and then I go home and I’m like, “Ugh, why did I say that? Ugh, that so awful!” And I didn’t get to make the ask that I wanted to ask.

Number two is flight. Basically, when I avoid speaking up, avoid asking out of fear of making people around me unhappy. It’s something that I’ve had a lot of experience with and I know some of my clients experience as well when they have this irrational fear that if they make their ask, they’re going to make people upset.

Now, this is rooted in the misconception that I can cause people unhappiness. It’s simply not true. Now, I know that when you hear this, you’re like, “What?! Of course it’s true! My parents told me that I made them upset and unhappy over and over again.” I mean, I’ve heard it, too. Believe me, I’ve heard it too.

Most people have the misconception that somehow you can cause other people’s unhappiness or that you can displease other people. But I’m here to say that is a myth. That is simply not true. Why is that? It’s because people are displeased not because of what you are or what you do. People become displeased because of the thought they have about what you do or what you say.

I think about how when I was dating this person, this particular person, I did not tell my mother that I was dating the person because I was afraid of displeasing my mother. So, even though I was, in fact, dating this person, my mother did not have the concept that I was dating the person and so she was not displeased particularly about this topic, right?

And then when I did tell her, it wasn’t until she had the thought that this would not be a good match for me that she was displeased.

It wasn’t because I was dating this person. I mean, I had been dating this person throughout the time that she didn’t know, right? It was only when she had the thought that this wasn’t a good match for me that she was displeased.

So, the point I’m trying to make here is that when we avoid making the ask out of fear of displeasing people, we are genuinely confused about the cause of people’s displeasure. The cause of people’s displeasure is not what you do or say. It’s what they think about what you’ve done or said and that’s something that you cannot control. That’s on them. You cannot change how people think.

So, in other words, when you avoid making an ambitious ask out of fear of displeasing people, you are essentially giving up your power because you’re saying, “I’m giving you all the power to make me feel safe in my brain.”

It’s funny, right?

Okay, so the third response is fight. And I’ve done this. I’ve talked about in this podcast how early in my career, I bungled my salary negotiation and then I felt resentful at my employer because of the thoughts that I was thinking and then I got adversarial with my manager instead of taking a collaborative, problem-solving approach and that adversarial approach, when I just went into the office and I said, “I demand a reimbursement,” it completely backfired.

And I took this adversarial approach because I was reacting from the fear of making people upset. I reacted by doing the very opposite thing that my brain wanted me to do.

So, watch out for these pitfalls. The pitfall being that you either freeze, you flight or you avoid, or you pick up a fight when the best thing is to approach this conversation in a calm and collaborative way.

So, now let’s talk about how to get out of this pitfall. Like I said at the beginning of the podcast, I do not believe there is a quick fix to this.

We’ve been trained from day one, from the very get-go to please our parents and to associate the pleasing of people in authority with our own survival. And so this is something that is deeply rooted. There’s a deep groove in our brains associated with this thought pattern. When I please people I am safe. When I please people, I will be able to survive and be okay, right?

It’s just that this thought pattern no longer serves us. In order for you to brave uncomfortable and difficult asks, you have to be willing to risk them thinking whatever they think when you make that ask. You have to be willing to risk rejection. You have to be willing to risk no in order to get to yes.

So, how do we get out of this? There are three parts.

Number one: Just notice. Raise your self-awareness around your own need to please people.

Number two: Deliberately decide that you are going to create a new mindset - a brave mindset that will help you make the ask.

Number three: Practice this new mindset with intention, focus, and diligence as if you’re learning a new language. Practice like you’re learning Japanese.

So, number one, notice. Just raise your self-awareness around your need to please others.

I notice that I get weird. I get awkward. I get needy. I get nervous. I get anxious. And I also notice that when I’m triggered by my need to please people, I am constantly checking email.

Do you hear me on that? Can you relate to that?

And I realize this because, for me, when I get an email from somebody, there’s like this dopamine hit in my brain and I’m addicted to that. And so I keep checking my email over and over again and I keep wondering, why? Why am I doing that?

It’s because I want to hear from people who want to work with me or from clients or opportunities and I associate those emails with approval and that I have pleased people and that I am okay.

And I also notice that when I am triggered by my need to please others, I often feel resentful because I want them to give me something that I can’t give myself. And so I’ve created this manual in my head that they should respond to my email. They should acknowledge me. I need this person to say thank you. I need this person to write me back immediately. I want this person to do x, y, and z so that I can feel happy, so that I can feel acknowledged, so that I can feel safe.

And so, number one: raise your self-awareness. Just notice when you get triggered like I do with the email checking and the neediness and the resentment.

And then write it down on paper. It’s so easy to overlook this part and I think it is possibly the most important part of raising your self-awareness. Just, when you notice that this is happening, write down the stressful thought or the problem that you think you have.

I did this the other day and it was so interesting what I wrote down because I realized it was all coming from this need to pleasing, this need to get approval.

I wrote down, “I’m scared of looking bad.”

I wrote down, “I’m scared of getting fat.”

“I’m scared of being disliked by people I don’t actually know or like all that much.”

“I’m scared of disappointing people.” (In other words, displeasing them.)

“I’m scared I won’t be able to produce good work, so I can be liked and respected and comfortable with myself.”

I wrote them down. And I realized that every time I think I have a problem, it’s almost always a variation on one of these stressful thoughts. I’m scared of looking bad. I’m scared of disappointing people. I’m scared I’m not good enough, basically.

So, number one: raise your self-awareness. Just notice when you are triggered and be compassionate. Be kind to yourself. This is a lifelong training that we’re trying to undo here.

So, number two: Now that you’ve raised your self-awareness, you want to deliberately decide on a new mindset. In other words, deliberately decide the new thoughts, the new beliefs that you want to have.

Belief is simply a thought that you have over and over and over again.

If you were free of your need to please others, if you were free from the fear of disappointing other people, what thoughts would you have?

Perhaps you would think:

I am good enough just as I am.

I am lovable just as I am.

I am safe as I am. I am worthy as I am.

I am powerful.

I create value.

And if those thoughts are not yet quite 100% believable and easy for you to say, “Yep! That’s me. I’m completely free of the need to please other people,” then you can also explore some thoughts to bridge the gap.

And I start with:

I am here.

I am simply here.

I am okay.

Except for my need, except for the stressful thoughts that I have in my head, I am always okay.

I am human.

Here’s another strategy: Once you have written down your stressful thoughts or the problems you think you have, you can also think about, okay, what is one reason to be grateful to have this problem?

This is a tip that I took away from an article written by James Altucher who is a writer and entrepreneur. He wrote this phenomenal article in 2011 about how all the successful people in life and in business are grateful. That’s the number one commonality they all have. They’re always grateful and that gratitude is the ultimate miracle.

And he talked about how you can develop a gratitude muscle and one of the things that he suggested you do is write down the problems you have and then think of one reason why you’re grateful for this. It’s kind of bonkers but it twists your brain and it makes you see your so-called problem, your perceived problem from a new perspective.

And so I did this too. I wrote, “I’m scared of looking bad.” And I realized I can be grateful for this because I get to be seen by people. How awesome is that? And I get to allow people to judge me, judge my Asian face, my open bite or whatever shortcomings that people project onto me. It’s a great opportunity for people to have their own thoughts. It’s a great opportunity for me to simply be and be seen, so I’m grateful for that because, at the end of the day, people will judge. It’s fine. That’s up to them. I am not in control of that and it’s the way things are and so I get to allow things to be the way they are. It’s great.

Number two: “I’m scared of getting fat.” It’s this irrational fear that gets triggered every Fall because in Fall things become more delicious and I want to have more sugar. And I am grateful for this because, hey, this means I have a body. I have two arms, I have two legs, I have two healthy lungs. I have a body, I have muscles, I have fat, I have organs, I have a brain. I have everything that I was born with and I still have them all...well, except for my baby teeth.

That’s pretty cool.

Number three was “I’m scared of not being liked by people I don’t actually know or like all that much.” And I can be grateful for this because this shows me my own neediness for approval, right? I was talking about how you need to raise your self-awareness and so this problem, ironically, is helping me because it raised my own self-awareness. And it helped me realize I still have this attachment to a random concept, to the misconception that somehow I can cause other people’s feelings. And just noticing it is half the battle, so I’m grateful for this.

Number four: “I’m scared of disappointing people.” I’m grateful for this because...GOOD! I get to disappoint people! What a privilege. The more I get to disappoint, the more I get to learn about how to serve. The more I get to learn about how to become better. The more disappointment I create, the more and deeper my learning is.

So, I’m grateful for that.

Number five: “I’m scared I won’t be able to produce good work so I can be liked and respected and be comfortable with myself.” And I’m grateful for this because I get to ask myself why do I want to be so liked and respected and comfortable? And when I ask myself that, I realize, hey, I tell people that the key to mastery, negotiation mastery, is losing the need to be liked, to be respected, and to be comfortable.

And so then this helps me realize, wow, I still have a way to go before I fully walk the talk that I give. This gives me a ripe opportunity to learn, to grow, to stretch myself, and to see how hard it really is to walk the talk that I give. This gives me a deeper sense of appreciation.

So, this helps me, ironically, listing my own problems, my own stressful thoughts and then being grateful, finding ways to be grateful for these, help me instill a new mindset of growth, learning and appreciation.

So, number three is to practice with intention the new thoughts and some of my new thoughts are:

I walk the talk that I give.

I have a body.

I am here.

It’s a privilege to disappoint people.

Yes lives in the land of no.

And I am okay no matter what.

What I want to say about this is I think it really helps to be future focused.

I talked about my goals for 2018. I talked about how I’m starting to think about new goals for 2019 and it’s really motivating to think about how I want to feel at the end of 2018. How do I want to feel on December 31st, 2018 while I’m on vacation, when I look back on the progress I’ve made, when I look back on the brave asks that I made over the next coming two months?

And I realized I want to feel proud. I want to feel accomplished. And all of my clients tell me this as well. They want to feel proud. They want to feel accomplished.

So if you are feeling proud, who have you become? What are you thinking? What have you done?

Think about how you can please your future self. Make that a priority rather than pleasing other people which is an impossible task, right? I mean, think about how your parents have these mile-high expectations, if they do and it’s an impossible task because at the end of the day, it’s not what you do or say that pleases them, it’s what they think. It’s what’s in their mind which is out of their control.

So, instead of setting yourself up for failure and disappointment by trying to please other people, what if you tried to please your future self? What would be possible then?

My bet is that you will become bolder, braver, and better paid.

I look forward to speaking with you again next week and I wish you a marvelous week.

Bye!

Interview with Vivian Giang: Six Common Negotiation Mistakes

If you're a pragmatic negotiation geek like me, or if you want to improve your negotiation skills so that you can thrive, you won't want to miss this interview with Vivian Giang. 

Vivian is a business writer covering how the changing workplace has impacted the way we work and live, in areas related to automation, robotics, team dynamics, executive leadership, and management. She asks, "How do you navigate these waters while also creating credibility and relevance?" She writes about these topics for business publications, like Fast Company, Fortune, Quartz, Dealbreaker, and Marie Claire.

In this value-packed conversation, Vivian and I addressed each of the six common negotiation mistakes as highlighted in this Fast Company article: www.fastcompany.com/90225908/all-the-things-youre-doing-wrong-in-negotiations 

We discussed: 
- Why it's important to start with your why before asking for the what
- The impact of anchoring effect on the bargaining range
- How making assumptions creates negotiation pitfalls 
- Why you may not want to accept the first offer 
- How to differentiate between short-term and long-term wins
- How negotiators can prepare strategically to avoid these mistakes 

You can find Vivian on Twitter at @vivian_giang.
You can learn more about my negotiation coaching and training services here www.jamieleecoach.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 40 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

I believe that negotiation skills are leadership skills and that through negotiation we can collaborate, unlock more value, and contribute in a bigger way.

And so, when we negotiate effectively, we can lead, we can influence, and we can thrive.

And if you’d like to learn more about who I am, what I do, and how you can work with me, come check out jamieleecoach.com.

I am launching a small group mastermind at the end of this year and into early 2019 to help you set some powerful intentions, goals, and build the negotiation skills to make those goals come true.

And thank you to those of you who have rated my podcast on iTunes. I want to say every single one of those ratings counts and they mean a lot to me.

Today, I have a must-listen episode. I consider myself a pragmatic negotiation geek. I love studying, I love reading about negotiation and thinking about how I can apply it to my life and how I can help my clients negotiate so that they can thrive.

And I read this wonderful article on Fast Company. It’s titled All the Things You’re Doing Wrong in Negotiations and each of the six points that the author brought up resonated with me and it’s something that I teach whenever I talk about and hold negotiation workshops for working women.

And so I reached out to the author, Vivian Giang, and she graciously agreed to come onto the podcast and expound, tell us a little bit more about each of these six common mistakes and how we can avoid them.

Vivian Giang is a business writer and journalist covering how the changing workplace has impacted the way we work and live. And she covers areas related to automation, robotics, team dynamics, executive leadership, and management. She asks the question: How do you navigate these waters while also creating credibility and relevance?

That’s a really good question.

She writes about these topics for business publications like Fast Company, Fortune, Quartz, Dealbreaker, and Marie Claire and I think you would really find a lot of value in this conversation. What I took away is that a lot of the common mistakes that we make are in our minds, in our assumptions. So, without further ado, please enjoy this podcast interview with Vivian Giang.

Jamie: Hello, Vivian?

Vivian: Hi, Jamie. Can you hear me?

Jamie: I can hear you now. How are you?

Vivian: I’m doing well, how are you?

Jamie: Third time’s the charm.

Vivian: Yes, that’s what they say.

Jamie: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining the podcast.

Vivian: Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Jamie: I’m really excited for this conversation.

Vivian: Yeah, me too.

Jamie: And this is a question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast: Would you tell me about a negotiation in your life or career that had the biggest impact on you? And I want to preface that by saying I define negotiation simply as a conversation, not a confrontation, where you’re trying to reach agreement where everyone has the right to say no. So, it doesn’t matter what the outcome was as long as everyone had the right to say no and there was intention to reach an agreement, I would say that’s a negotiation. So, what do you think?

Vivian: Yes, so negotiations…I’ve been thinking about negotiations before I even knew that what I was thinking about was negotiations, I think. I graduated during the economic recession and I was trying to navigate the job market, trying to do something that I love, journalism - already a very low-paying profession. So, trying to convince someone to hire me at the time and pay me a living wage, that was something that I thought about in my first job, I believe. I just didn’t know that it was called negotiations at the time.

But I think, as dubious as this sounds, the negotiation that has impacted my life the most is probably the one that I have with myself. I think that we try to think about what the other party wants from a negotiation so often but we often forget to do that with ourselves because we think we know what we want and I have woken up unhappy before by the fence because I assumed that I knew what I wanted, I assumed I knew myself and what I valued but that’s not always the case.

So, one thing that I do - and I’ll give you an example - that is something that I learned from a professor of management at Stern at New York University, Batia Wiesenfeld, she told me this and it really stuck with me. It’s that you should always search for the why and ask yourself why you’re doing something and it allows you to see information from various different angles. It allows you to readily adjust when you need to. So, asking yourself when you make a decision, when you make a choice, why am I doing this? Which helps bring you closer to your goal.

So, let’s say you are teaching a workshop, right? If you asked yourself, “Why am I teaching this workshop?” and the answer is “To get paid,” then you ask yourself, “Why do I want higher pay?” And if the answer is so that you can have a better life, then you ask yourself a third time, “Why do I want a better life?” and if the answer here is “To be happy,” then maybe teaching that workshop isn’t going to lead you to happiness, maybe there’s something else that leads you to happiness.

So, I try to think about that often in the choices that I make and try to be thoughtful about the decisions that bring me the most value in my life and who else it affects - my decisions - who else it affects other than me.

Jamie: Beautiful and I’d also say that that’s an example of self-coaching because, as a coach myself, I ask my clients why all the time and, as a negotiator, not only do you ask that question to yourself, why and why and why, right? You asked it three times in a row. I think it is beneficial to ask of your negotiation counterpart. You might want to use different words because not everyone likes to be asked why. Ultimately, I think what your professor and what you’re trying to say is get clear on the ultimate interest, the why behind the what.

Vivian: Yes because, if you think about it, we go through life whenever we meet our loved ones, our friends, our colleagues, we always ask them about their lives and why they did certain things, right? Like, we push them to think about their actions and how it impacts their lives so that they can be better because we care about them. But we often don’t do that with ourselves because, like I mentioned earlier, we think that we know ourselves but we all change and sometimes we assume we know what we want and what we value but oftentimes we don’t.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Here’s another thing I learned from coaching, is that we have different aspects in ourselves, right? We have the sort of animal brain or I like to call it the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee that’s pushing you to stay safe and small, not to take any sort of risk. Anything that is a change can be a threat to its identity. And then there’s the so-called higher self where that enables us to have a vision and take action and be courageous and show up, regardless of what that Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee says. So, yeah, that’s a great example. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I just want to reiterate, I asked you to come on the podcast, I’d love for you to share your insights from this wonderful article that you wrote for Fast Company. It’s called All the Things You’re Doing Wrong in Negotiations.

Vivian: Yes.

Jamie: Yeah, and that’s catchy and it definitely caught my attention because I think a lot of us worry that we’ve done something wrong. In any case, the article hits on so many of the key points that I teach in my workshops and so I’d love for you to take us point by point and share what did you really take away from capturing the six key things that people often do incorrectly. So, the first thing in your article is: Not making the first offer when it’s beneficial to do so.

Vivian: Yes, so the common mistakes in this article is from a course that I took. It’s a two-day negotiation course at MIT taught by Jared Curhan which is amazing and the knowledge that I gained from the class just completely blew my mind, so I figured I needed to share. But, yes, the first point is not making the first offer when it’s beneficial to do so.

I think we’ve all been at this place, right? Where we enter the negotiation room and I’m sure a lot of us have heard the piece of advice not to make the first offer, right? It puts you in a vulnerable position. You need to hear what the other person is coming from, where their head is at and, really, giving the first offer is providing information that you’re offering them information but you haven’t received any information in return so, ultimately, that’s giving someone else the leg up, right? However, there’s research that tells us, there’s actually numerous research that tells us that providing the first offer can actually greatly influence the rest of the negotiation so it’s a principle called the anchoring principle.

Jamie: Yep!

Vivian: And it shows that there’s a strong correlation between the first offer, what the other party counteroffers, and also the final results. And in this class, Jared Curhan mentioned that you should only make the first offer if you have a lot of market information, you have a lot of market research, you’ve done the preparation, so introducing that information makes a lot of sense, right? Otherwise, it’s really unwise to do so.

There’s a particular study that he had mentioned in the course from the University of Arizona that tested this anchoring principle on real estate agents who are trained to know property values and also trained not to be influenced by this anchoring principle but the research shows that every single one of them were impacted and this listed price in this study had an effect on all of their final decisions.

So we see that the anchoring principle is very powerful and you can definitely use it to your advantage and you can even do so without tying it to your offer. For instance, if you’re trying to sell something, you can bring up that number without...So, if you’re trying to sell a home, you can differentiate the anchor from the offer by saying, “Hey, there’s another home that I saw with a similar value,” without actually saying that, you know, that’s the offer on your home.

Jamie: So, for example, you could say, “Hey, you know, I know that a home like this will sell for $10 million.”

Vivian: Yes, exactly.

Jamie: “However, you get to buy it for $750,000. It’s a great deal!”

Vivian: Right, right. Or you can just, you know, let the other person infer what they want to infer after you’ve introduced that number. You can do this in a job negotiation by being similar salaries to the position that you’re interviewing for or just about anything. So, it’s introducing and using that anchoring principle but not actually tying into your offer, not saying that it’s your offer.

Jamie: Absolutely. So, you could say...I actually had a client who was responsible for about $13 million in digital sales for her company and so she prefaced her ask by saying, “I brought in $13 million in revenue and in comparison, my salary is less than 1% of that and all I’m asking is to be compensated according to the value I’m bringing.” And that was a very powerful anchoring effect that she had created by mentioning the amount of money that she had brought in for the company.

Vivian: Right, right. Yes. That’s smart.

Jamie: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. This is something that is so often overlooked because I think people kind of worry that if they anchor, they’ll encounter pushback and so the strategy that I advise is yes, in fact, prepare for the pushback. Know what you’re gonna say when the say, “Oh, it’s too much.”

So, tell us about point number two. The second mistake people make is: Focusing too much on ideal outcomes. What does that mean?

Vivian: Yeah, so, this actually goes back to the anchoring principle that we just mentioned. Since 90% of negotiations is in the planning, so, if you’re doing a good job of planning, of doing your research, of coming up with everything that you need to come up with to prepare you for this negotiation, oftentimes you’ll have specific anchors in your own brain before you walk in there. So, one of those numbers could be a walkaway point or what’s called the reservation value or number and the other one is what’s called your BATNO or your best alternative to negotiate offer. So, basically, your second choice, right? Your runner up.

But because we have those values so implemented into our brains, sometimes they end up affecting our negotiations because we’re so focused on them we can’t see outside of them. We have no peripheral vision anymore and often we end up rejecting even more profitable offers that could come in the process because we’re so deeply ingrained, we’re committed to these numbers. So, the second point is just to say don’t focus too much on what you consider your ideal outcome because you never know what the other person’s gonna bring to the table.

Jamie: Yeah. I guess, put another way, it’s don’t fixate on the dollar values.

Vivian: Right, right. Mm-hmm.

Jamie: The way a deal can become more profitable is that you expand the scope of agreement to include non-monetary items, things that really satisfy the deeper whys that you addressed at the top of this interview.

Vivian: Exactly. That’s exactly what I was gonna say, Jamie, actually, is it goes back to the why, right?

Jamie: Yeah.

Vivian: Like, if you have these numbers in your head, or they might not be number, they might be something else. Whatever value it is, if you have them there then why do you have them there? And tracing that back and making sure that you are getting the most value as well as giving the other person value, too [inaudible] at the bargaining table.

Jamie: Yeah. So, money is important. Absolutely. Money is awesome and at the same time we have to be clear on what this money means for us and what we want to accomplish with the money so that we don’t just fixate on this dollar value. This is a great point, thank you so much.

Number three is: Accepting the other party’s first offer too quickly. I’ve seen a lot of my clients make this mistake, so tell us more.

Vivian: Yes. As frustrating as this sounds, when someone else accepts your offer too quickly, and when you accept someone else’s offer too quickly, that will decrease the satisfaction. So…

Jamie: That’s counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Vivian: Yes, definitely. I think that happens because negotiation is not something that comes natural to a lot of us. Once we think that we’re getting a good deal or getting something that we want, we immediately agree because we want it to end, right? But research actually tells us that if we accept too quickly, it does not make the other party feel great about what just happened and research also tells us that how we feel, which is a subjective value, actually is worth much more than the objective or economic value that we get from the negotiation.

Jamie: That is so fascinating to me and I know that Professor Curhan also said the four most important factors in a negotiation is how people feel about themselves, about their counterpart, about the process, about the outcome. So, that’s really fascinating and I’ve heard that there needs to be about one or two...going back and forth in a negotiation in order for people to feel like, okay, this is probably the best deal.

Vivian: Yes. It almost feels kind of like a game, right? But, you know, it’s just how you feel that you fared after you walk away from something is going to make a more lasting impression and research also tells us that it actually keeps someone more satisfied if they’re entering a new job, a new position, that economic value is not going to be something that really ties them, right? It’s going to be how they feel. How they feel they fared, how they feel that they are getting the most value for themselves. That’s the most important part, that’s the satisfaction that’s gonna last.

Jamie: I just saw somebody ask this question this morning: I already got an offer. It’s already at the high end of the market range. It’s already more than I was making before. Should I just accept it or should I ask for more? And the advice from career experts is to yeah, ask for more, because it signals to the hiring people that this person is very confident and that...the hiring people would also have the satisfaction that, oh, we really did the utmost we could to get this best talent. And for the talent, it’s also satisfying to know that she did the best that she could and got the most value.

Vivian: Exactly. Because at the end of the day, we all want to feel appreciated and respected when we walk away from that interaction.

Jamie: Yeah and I worked briefly in HR for these little tech startups in New York and people would intentionally create wiggle room because they anticipated candidates to ask for more.

Vivian: Right. Mm-hmm.

Jamie: Right, so this is a really great point that you’re making. I absolutely love it. So, number four is: Using the same tactics in both short-term and long-term negotiations. This is really interesting. Tell us more about that.

Vivian: Right. So, this idea comes from when we’re thinking about how we’re dealing with something in the short term and the long term, there are two different tactics to that, right? And so often we leave that at the door when we’re going into a negotiation room because we think that we should just follow all the same rules but in reality, rational behavior in the short term is not so rational in the long term. This goes back to the prisoner’s dilemma which is a game theory that says it doesn’t make sense for people to act against their self-interest, right? So, the faster they act in their self-interest then the better off they’ll be and whoever acts first has the greatest advantage, right?

Jamie: In the short-term.

Vivian: In the short term, yes. But that doesn’t always work in the long term. So, for instance, if in the short term your best interest is always to choose Option A and it always hurts your opponent to choose Option A, that’s the game theory, right? That’s the Prisoner's’ Dilemma. That might work in the short term, but if in the long term your strategy is to prevent your opponent from choosing Option A because if you choose Option A it hurts them, if they choose Option A, it hurts you. So, if your strategy is to prevent them from choosing Option A, then maybe the best way to encourage that behavior is not to choose Option A for yourself so you might want to choose another option to prevent them from choosing something that will hurt you if that makes sense.

Jamie: In the long term or in the short term?

Vivian: In the long term.

Jamie: In the long term. So, in the long term, even though you’re acting not in your best self-interest, for the long-term picture it actually makes more sense, even if you don’t choose Option A, you’re going to gain more value over the long term. Is that what you’re saying?

Vivian: Yes. Kind of think about it like, I hate this word, but winning, right? In the short term, winning means something different than winning in the long term.

Jamie: Oh, right.

Vivian: So, winning in the long term could mean that you’re all faring well off  compared to everyone else, right? So that’s not you winning by yourself, right? You need people around you to help you do that. So, maybe an option is more beneficial for you in the short term but in the long term, that same option isn’t going to be beneficial for you because you’re just burning everyone else along the way.

Jamie: I think for...again, this is a really beautiful example of people who want to grow their careers in a conscious way and there is the conflict in the short term of oh, I need to make money! I need to make a lot of money! I need to pay off my student loans! And in the long term you also want to be creating a body of work, a reputation, a really strong and healthy network and in the long term you may actually want to, for the benefit of the long-term growth, you may want to take a pay cut.

Vivian: Right, right. Or you want to be creating value, right?

Jamie: Right. You want to be focused on creating value instead of gaining value for yourself immediately. So, yeah, I think that’s the dilemma that a lot of people would experience in their lives. I mean, I have, too. I once took an unpaid internship after leaving a hedge fund because I wanted, in the long term, to make a career pivot out of finance and into entrepreneurship and even though I wasn’t gonna be paid, but in the long term I gained a lot of value because I made some really valuable connections in this new industry.

Vivian: Exactly, yes. What’s the saying? If you want to go fast you go alone, if you want to go far, you go with others, right?

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Vivian: So, yes, so it’s thinking about how to choose and negotiate and being thoughtful about those tactics depending on the negotiation terms.

Jamie: Right, and where you are in your career as well.

Vivian: Exactly. I mean what you want out of the negotiation, right? If the negotiation is so that both of you leave feeling very respected, high subjective value, then that might mean that you’re using specific tactics that you wouldn’t be using for a one-off type of interaction.

Jamie: Yeah. I’m thinking about the book Give and Take by Adam Grant and he talks about how very successful people are givers and at the same time, very unsuccessful people can also be givers. So, givers who are very successful, they know how to give in a way that is strategic and also mindful, they’re not always just blindly giving away resources and information and contacts. They’re able to set boundaries around that mindfully, so yeah, I think that’s a really important point for a lot of people as well as me. Thank you. So, number five: Judging others based on their actions. This is a big one! How is this a pitfall?

Vivian: Right. So, this often happens because, and I feel like we’ve all dealt with this situation at one time or another, where we’ve asked someone for something and they say no, right? And, in turn, we come up with a dialogue in our head as to why they said no, right? And so, for instance, if you asked your boss for a raise and she says no, despite the fact that you prepared, despite the fact that you brough tin market research, despite the fact that you’re very persuasive, you’ve been working really hard, you know you deserve this raise. You might automatically think that her action makes her a jerk.

Jamie: Yeah. Yup.

Vivian: And, you know, you can go on with your day and never think about that again. But instead, if you dig into why this person said no or what could have led her to say no, the situation that she might be in that might result in her no, that could actually help you get what you want. So, for instance, if your boss is saying no to you, could it be budget restraints? Could it be your boss answering to her boss? If you are able to identify all the potential parties that are involved in that no, even the ones that weren’t there in the negotiation room, right, then you can get to the yes. So, not always judging others based on their actions that you can see but trying to link it back, farther back, as to how they came to that answer.

Jamie: I love this so much. I think it’s one of the most important things in negotiation because we are so easily clouded by our judgment of other people and don’t always make the best kinds of decisions in a negotiation and the trigger word, no, is involved and that is why in all of my workshops, I have people practice hearing no and doing exactly as you say. Not getting defensive but just getting more curious and asking an open-ended question: Okay, tell me more about that. What’s behind your no? Who else do we need to have involved in this conversation? And from there, you can take that information and reframe and re-ask and you can come up with creative solutions that really satisfy their reasons as well as your why.

Another thing that I love about this is I really appreciate how you pointed out we really shouldn’t judge people based on their actions because we don’t know why they’re behaving that way. We don’t know how they really, really feel and what are they thinking that makes them do that?

Vivian: Right, right. Exactly, Jamie. They say that we judge others based on their actions but we judge ourselves based on our situation. So when you are explaining to a friend or a colleague why you made a specific decision, you can say, “Well, I did that because of this. I took that job because I really needed to pay off that student loan,” or whatever it is. But we don’t think about that when it comes to others. So if we’re able to do that, if we’re able to just push ourselves a little bit to be a little bit more thoughtful, we can actually help people help us. We can help people get to that yes by thinking about all of these other factors that come into play when they are sitting right in front of you.

Jamie: Beautiful. So good. This is so good. So the last point is assuming you know what’s most valuable to the other party.

Vivian: Right.

Jamie: So this is tied to number five where we judge people by their actions and then we also assume we know what’s most important to the other people. Tell us more about that.

Vivian: When I learned this, it just blew my mind, like, my mind just exploded. I feel like I can never explain it well enough but it’s...what happens to all of us when we are coming to a negotiation table with someone, we think that in order to get something it comes at the expense of someone else, right? It’s this win-lose mentality. If I win, you lose.

But thinking about it from a different lens - a win-win - so, you can’t assume you know what’s valuable to the other party. You can only assume, when you assume this, then it actually affects what you’re also giving, so it can affect...you might think that if you accept a lower offer that your boss will be happier, right? Or walk away with a higher subjective value, they don’t like pushing back with you. You think that you’re giving them something but you actually don’t know what’s most valuable to them.

Jamie: That’s true.

Vivian: So assuming that isn’t going to help you get anywhere, really. So, for instance, if you want to...you might assume that, in a job offer negotiation, your boss doesn’t want to give you flexibility, right? Or your boss or the other party doesn’t want to give you a higher salary. It’s only through clear and trustworthy communication can you actually determine what the other party’s preferences really are. So, one way to do that is ask open-ended questions. You mentioned earlier trying to really figure out what the other party values. If you ask a few questions based on their responses, you can determine what the patterns are, right? You can sort of guess what they may value most out of the negotiation but assuming you know actually is sort of a lose-lose type of situation because you have no idea what the other party wants coming into negotiations.

Jamie: This is so good because can we ever really know what is going through someone else’s head? And I think the answer is no.

Vivian: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Jamie: The art of communication, it’s almost like we’re trying to do magic right? We have something that we want to say inside of us. We say it. People hear it. But people don’t always hear everything we say. Often they mishear what we say.

Vivian: Well, yes!

Jamie: And then they interpret that to mean something and what they interpret that to be can be something so different from what you originally intended. Yeah, so for you to assume that you know what’s going through other people’s head is such a fundamental mistake, I think, that we often make, pretty much on a constant basis, on default. I think about my most common miscommunication defaults that I have with my partner, right? And I always think I know what’s going through his head it’s like, “Does he mean to make me feel bad?” Of course, he never intends to make me feel bad and so this is such a good one.

Vivian: Yes and they say that if ten different people walk away from the same conversation, they all have different interpretations as to what was communicated, what was the message of the conversation takeaway, right?

Jamie: Yeah. Ten different interpretations.

Vivian: Exactly, right? So, when we assume that someone wants something before we even get there, we assume that we know what’s most valuable to them, that actually affects the way that we approach the negotiation with them, right? We go, we bee-line in, we think that we know exactly what’s going to be most valuable to them, what’s going to be most valuable to us and this actually hurts in the end. Especially if it’s negotiating for more a long-term relationship or something that’s a little bit more complex than choosing Option A, B, or C.

Jamie: Yeah. This is so good. The way I help my clients to get clear is that often we make assumptions, we don’t even realize we’re making assumptions because we feel that what we think is true.

Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Jamie: But the facts of the situation are usually very simple and facts are something that everyone will agree to be true. It can be proven in the court of law. But our thoughts, our opinions, our judgments, our assumptions are what is most often in our heads and cloud our judgment and how we perceive the situation. So, usually I have my clients just write down their thoughts on paper and then separate the facts and something really funny happens. It’s like they have a long list of thoughts. Oh, this person thinks I’m this. I am not good enough. Or It’s gonna all not go well, blah blah blah. You know, all the thoughts that we have so often and then we just write down the facts and the facts are like, there was a conversation. This person said x. I said y.

Vivian: Exactly, Jamie. Yeah, it happens so often. It really does and I think if we just think about negotiations as more of having both parties walk away feeling like they got the most value out of the conversation, out of the negotiation, I think that’s really important. Especially today, when it seems like we’re gridlocked over everything, right? Whether that’s business or social, political, whatever. I think it’s really important to think about how we approach these conversations and to ask open-ended questions so that we can have a better idea of how we can come out of it, both of us coming out of it feeling like we’re appreciated and valued and respected.

Jamie: I am so appreciative of this article. I’m appreciative of the research, the length you went to to gather this valuable information and how you made it succinct, relatable, useful to the audience. So thank you so much, Vivian. Where can people go to learn more about what you do?

Vivian: People can go...and thanks so much for saying that, I’m really happy that the article resonated with you. I had a lot of fun putting it together. So, People can learn more about me by either following me on Twitter. I’m @vivian_giang. Or they can read my stuff on Fast Company.

Jamie: Excellent! Well, thanks again, Vivian, for your valuable time and for this great article. I will be sharing it in the podcast notes as well as with my newsletter audience. Have a wonderful day!

Vivian: You too. Thanks so much for having me Jamie.

Jamie: Bye bye!

Vivian: Bye bye!