Ding! 5 Minute Exercise for Negotiation Anxiety

Does the thought of negotiating for yourself make your hands go clammy, your throat dry and your heart beating fast?

I share the good news about negotiation anxiety, the tough news (not bad, just tough) and a five minute exercise for overcoming anxiety so you can take confident action towards your goals.

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hello! Welcome to the eleventh episode of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I am your host, Jamie Lee. We’ve been talking about the key practices for negotiation success on this podcast, and I shared my free script on how to ask for a big pay raise.

I got unexpected feedback that some people thought it doesn’t apply to them. That this wouldn’t work for them because they haven’t contributed as much value as Karina did in the example that I give in this book. That clued me into the fact that I’ve overlooked one of the most important negotiations that we ever have. It’s the one we have with ourselves. 

What am I talking about? I’m talking about negotiation anxiety. I’m talking about that clammy feeling in your hands, when your mouth goes dry and your heart starts beating really fast before you negotiate, and for some, it’s so bad they just don’t negotiate.

They let that anxiety hold them back from initiating a conversation, engaging and asking for what they want. How do we overcome this? I have for you, the good news, the tough news - it’s not bad news, it’s just tough news that we can process - and then a quick, five-minute exercise for overcoming negotiation anxiety so that you can articulate your value, advocate for your value, ask and get what you want.

So, what’s the good news? The good news about negotiation anxiety is that really, when you boil it down to the essentials, it’s basically just a thought. A stressful thought that causes a vibration in your body.

That’s the good news, because number two: it’s true that you’re not your thoughts. You can have the thoughts. What you feel, what you experience when you have that thought, it’s not really you, it’s just the thought.

And then finally, the third good news is that you can have new thoughts. You can generate new thoughts. This is basically not unlike reframing, when you create new perspectives, new ideas in a negotiation. Just like that, you can have new thoughts in your head.

So, what’s the tough news?

Three key news. The first is that no one teaches us how to do this, really. I’ve read many, many negotiation books, but no one talks about how to overcome your negotiation anxiety so that you can show up with real confidence. They just tell you, don’t be emotional. It doesn’t really help, because emotions drive our actions and our decision-making process.

And number two: the tough news is that without overcoming negotiation anxiety, we’ll never actually feel good, even when we get what we want. In other words, without overcoming negotiation anxiety, we never feel successful, so that’s kind of tough.

The third news is that generating new thoughts and feeling successful, it takes practice.

So, what do we do? What are the four key steps? Think about a stressful conversation or a negotiation that’s causing you anxiety. I want you to hear a bell go off in your head when you feel that dread and anxiety. The clammy hands, the heart palpitating, your shoulders stiffening up, and you feel that negative emotion and the vibration in your body. Feel a DING go off. What is DING? It’s basically an acronym, D-I-N-G.

D - Deep breath. Relax. Try to relax. And you can do it by taking a deep breath in and a full breath out. I learned that when you are feeling anxious, you actually don’t exhale fully. You’re trying to take a breath in, you’re feeling anxious, and you’re going like this (hyperventilating), but you don’t ahhhhhh, exhale fully. So, breathe in for four, exhale for six. Something I learned in elementary school that still works. Take a deep breath. (I do this as part of my morning meditation every day)

I - Identify your feeling. What is that vibration? Where is it in your body? Do you feel it in your neck? In your shoulder? In your solar plexus? In your hands? Just feel it. Identify it. Be with it. Observe it. Own it, so that you can release it. And now, the N.

N - Name that thought. What is that sentence in your head that’s causing the vibration? Ask yourself: what am I thinking? What is the stressful thought? And for many people it’s a variation on: I’m not good enough. I haven’t done enough. I’m a hack. I’m not good enough. There’s something wrong with me.  Okay, so once you have identified your emotions and have named that thought or that sentence, it’s the G.

G - Go change the thought. Now, if you’re thinking oh, she’s gonna be like oh, just turn it around, make it all positive, happy-go-lucky, you’re thriving! No. Actually, no. Don’t turn it around to the positive just yet. And that’s because we want to train our brain to think in a new way, and when we try to give it new, positive thoughts, it just does this reverse thing.

It’s just like: Ugh, it’s too positive, I can’t believe it. In fact, it’s so positive that it turns me off, and I’m just gonna go more negative because I feel I can’t believe it.

So we want to train our brains to have new thoughts by training it to think in increments or baby steps. And so, from having that thought I’m not good enough, go to a neutral place.

A positive change to that thought I’m not good enough might be something like, I’m amazing! I’m thriving! I’m so happy! But when you try to believe that thought, you just feel kind of more turned down, not turned up, so go neutral.

What’s in between the thought I’m not good enough and I am amazing? Completely neutral might be something like: I exist. I do the work that I have.

So from there, go find evidence to support that neutral thought. I do the work that I have. Did you have a task item on your list that you crossed off today? Do you carry the function that you’re assigned to do? What is the evidence that you do the work that you have? What is the evidence that you simply exist? And now that you have a neutral thought, and you have evidence to support this new thought, can you believe it? And how does it feel? 

It might sound a little self-help-y. It might sound something like: Wait, why aren’t you giving me negotiation tips and tricks and strategies? I just want to make the money, I just want to go close my wage gap.

But the thing is, in order for us to close our wage gaps, in order for us to show up as leaders, the kind of leaders that we want to be in the world, we have to have confidence, right? And confidence comes from taking action, but we feel so much anxiety that we’re frozen and can’t take action, we don’t get confident. And where does action come from? Confident action comes from a feeling that you have. The conviction in your body. And the feeling comes from a thought that you have in your head, the belief inside of you that you are worth it. That there is something to take action for. That there is something worth taking a risk for. 

So, I really want to encourage you to take time to feel the anxiety that you feel when you have a negotiation coming up, when you have a difficult conversation coming up. The good news is that you can turn it around, and you can start with neutral thoughts. When you have neutral thoughts you are feeling something different and taking a different action.

So, I hope that this podcast was helpful for you. I hope that I have helped you see negotiation anxiety in a different light, and that you take action on the things that you want, you take action on becoming the leader that you want to be.

Thank you, and talk to you soon!
 

What are the 5 Key Practices for Negotiation Success?

Negotiation skills are leadership skills.

Conscious leadership and value-creating negotiation both require self-awareness, learning agility, communication and influence.

I share my definition of negotiation and five key practices for negotiation success.

Enjoy!

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hello! Welcome to the eighth episode of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I am your host, Jamie Lee. I work as a negotiation and leadership coach for ambitious women. I believe that we are all born to thrive.

I looked up the definition of the word thrive in the dictionary, and it said it means to grow with vigor. I looked up the word vigor, and vigor means vitality, life force, energy.

The word thrive kind of makes you think of something really happy and joyful, but for some reason I keep confusing the word vigor with rigor. It might be because English is my second language, I don’t know, but I got curious and I looked up rigor, too.

Rigor is harshness. Something difficult. Constraints. It kind of makes sense to me that to thrive requires both vigor and rigor. Yes, you need life force. Yes, you need energy. But you also need to overcome something difficult. You need rigor in order to truly thrive. 

I say that because negotiation is difficult for a lot of people. We’d rather not do it. We’d rather avoid it. We’d rather resist it. Or we’d rather approach it with this attitude of defensiveness, anger, righteousness. We put up a fight.

I don’t think this is really constructive. I also don’t think that negotiation is a fight. Negotiation is not about manipulation, confrontation. It’s simply a conversation. A conversation where everyone has the right to say no. A conversation where we try to come to an agreement. That is it. That is my definition of negotiation. That means we negotiate all the time, for little things, big things.

Who’s gonna do the dishes? What are we gonna do for dinner? How are we going to resolve peace, how are we going to come to peace in the Korean peninsula? These are all negotiations, and we have been engaging in these conversations ever since we were able to say the word “No,” ever since we were able to express our desire for autonomy, for self-expression, when we were either one and a half or two years old or for some people three years old.

So, whatever your age is, subtract two from it and that’s how long you have been practicing, that’s how long you have been negotiating for what you want. 

I believe that negotiation is a leadership skill, and so every time I teach negotiation, I start with, “What kind of leader do you want to be?” Next Monday, I have the great privilege of leading a hands-on, interactive negotiation workshop for Smith alums in Philadelphia, and for that workshop, I prepared a one-sheet with five key practices for negotiation success, and I thought, “You know, why not share it with my podcast audience?”

So, a quick preamble here. There’s a wonderful book called The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and it says there are four core competencies of conscious leadership, and I find that these four core competencies are also the core competencies of value-creating, problem-solving negotiation. I learned this from Lisa Gates at She Negotiates, my business mentor, and I think it’s phenomenal, because it really teaches you what you need to bring in order to have problem-solving, value-creating, negotiation conversations. 

So the four competencies are: 

Number one: Self-awareness. Are you aware of your skills, your strengths, your qualities, your tendencies, your conflict style, your communication style? The more you know, the better you will handle, the better you will manage yourself in and throughout the negotiation process.

Number two: Learning agility. The goal of negotiation is to 1) gather information, and 2) influence the behavior of others. So, throughout the conversation, you want to be learning and learning in different ways. So, improving your learning agility will really help you negotiate with success.

Number three: Communication. Negotiation is simply a communication discipline. It’s a communication with a goal, right? So, how do you communicate? You listen. You express yourself. You reflect on what you’ve heard and you try to express your desires so that it is receptive to the listener. Much earlier in this podcast series, I think it was Episode 3, when I talked about the traps of perfectionism, I talked about how there are four elements within communication: What you want to say, how you say it, what people hear, and what they make it mean. So, that’s communication.

Number four: Influence. You want to influence the other’s behavior in a negotiation, right? You want them to say yes* (In the podcast, I say "no," but I mean "yes." Mea Culpa.) or you want them to change their minds if they’re saying no. The thing about influence is it’s not about telling people what to do and in negotiation it’s not always a debate where you want to prove yourself right and prove the other person wrong. Real influence doesn’t work like that, because real influence is when you have an indirect impact on the other person’s perception, decision making process, and in which they feel that they have come to the decision on their own. So, it’s not about telling people what to do. That’s not negotiation, that’s making demands. It’s not about proving the other side wrong. That’s debate, right? It’s really about influencing. In order to influence, you really need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other, see their perspective, and of course that requires empathy.

So, I will wrap this up with, as I mentioned earlier, the five key practices of negotiation success, and what I would like to do in the subsequent episodes is go a little bit deeper into each of the key practices. 

So, number one: the first key practice of negotiation success is to articulate your value so that they see the value of you as a benefit to them. 

Number two: build your alliance. Lisa Gates calls it building your influence posse. I love that. Reaching out to your network. Identifying who are champions who can advocate for you, allies who will go to bat for you, and influencers who will create inroads with the key decision-maker in this negotiation. 

Number three: dig and listen deeply. I know there are a lot of combative negotiators who feel like the point of negotiation is simply to get more than the other side, and it’s all about me, just let me make my point, and I am right. No. Real negotiation happens when you listen and dig deeper into the hidden interests of the other side. 

Number four: anchor first and anchor high. Really good, masterful negotiators understand the magic of telling people what you want and dropping that anchor. It’s a cognitive bias that can work towards your favor.

Number five: get genuine buy-in. That’s what I was talking about earlier when I explained influence. It’s not about telling people what to do, that’s making demands. It’s not about proving other people wrong, that’s debating. Negotiation and true influence is when the other side come to see your point of view, and the other side come to decide for themselves to go along with your proposal. So that’s real, genuine buy-in. It’s how you really get through to people and connect.

I’m really excited about going deeper into these key practices with you in the subsequent episodes, and I hope that you have a wonderful day where you thrive. Talk to you soon!