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!

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.

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.