Strategic Conversations, Part 2 - Root of All Behavior

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

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

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

You'll learn: 

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

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

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

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Full Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s so cool.

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

The root of all behavior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what are the five things?

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts are not circumstances. Circumstances are not our thoughts.

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

It felt factual. It felt like a circumstance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we do is driven by what we feel.

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

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

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

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

So let me give an example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what does this mean for you?

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

I want you to write it all down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I have some parting thoughts for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

What emotions are driving your behavior?

What emotions do you want to drive your behavior?

What emotions do you want them to experience?

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

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

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

Thank you and have a great week!

Strategic Conversations, Part 1 - Planning with Future Focus

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

How? 

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

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

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

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

1. WHO are you in the process of becoming? 

2. WHAT results do you want in the future? 

3. HOW can you be your Future Self now? 

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Full Episode Transcript

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

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

Most importantly, they do it without burning themselves out.

How?

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

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

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

Here’s the catch: It’s simple.

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

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

So it’s simple but not easy.

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

Why?

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

I believe that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More of the same. More of your past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing changes if you keep looking into the past.

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

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

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

And here I am, teaching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You only need your own permission.

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

It’s up to you.

If you can imagine it, you can be it.

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

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

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

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

What you think creates your result.

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

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

So the only permission you need is yours.

Who are you in the process of becoming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to have more money.

I want to be a leader in the industry.

I want to be promoted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, when you win, we all win.

It’s a win/win game.

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

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

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

This is a tough one to really believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a six-week program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Focus and Goal Shame

“Why do you need to articulate your future potential as part of your negotiation strategy?” I address this question and explain the importance of future focus for you, for your negotiation, and for your leadership. 

I share my updates for 2018 “Wild and Improbable” Goals and how I am dealing with the shame of not yet having achieved my ambitious goals.

Thriving is not about being “happy-happy-joy-joy” 100% of the time. 

In order to thrive, you need to embrace the pain of growing and the sting of rejection and shame. 

To learn more about my small group mastermind, go towww.jamieleecoach.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 42 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.

How are you?

Today is kind of a gray day here in New York City and I was just commiserating with some of my virtual coworkers. I have a group of wonderful ladies with whom we cowork virtually and we were just commiserating how it’s the kind of day that we’d rather crawl back into bed or turn on Netflix and eat junk food all day.

But instead, here we are. Working. Creating content. Making our dreams come true.

Yesterday, I gave a webinar for a women’s group and I was asked the question, “Why is it important for you to articulate your future potential as part of your negotiation strategy?”

And I thought that was a really interesting question because it seemed almost too obvious an answer to me.

When you think about the fact that you’re negotiating so that you can create a new agreement going forward - in other words, this new agreement will create a new way of doing things from here on out, right? You’re creating a new agreement for the future - you want to influence your negotiation counterpart, whether that’s your boss, a potentially new employer or a client that there is something more coming their way in terms of value in the future.

So you want to articulate your future potential so that they are motivated to change the status quo, to create a new agreement moving forward for the future, right?

And I think this is so important to think about for us who are wanting to become bolder, braver, and better paid in the future because, in negotiation, we want to create a future focus and in order to do that, we have to create future focus for ourselves and that means we first need to be clear on what we want for ourselves in the future.

What do we desire to be different in the future?

What do you desire to be different in the future?

It’s something that I’m thinking a lot about recently because, as you know, as you may know, I am doing a small group mastermind to help and support women who want to create powerful intentions for 2019 and set some wild and improbable goals.

The reason why we set wild and improbable goals is not to set ourselves up for failure but it is to create desire, create momentum, create stretch goals that would help us become more, become bigger, become bolder, become braver.

And so today I thought it would be instructive to share with you some of my wild and improbable goals that I set for myself in late 2017, give you an update, how did I do and what I am learning, and how I am growing from this process.

So, on December 21, 2017, I created some wild and improbable goals and the first thing that I thought of was that I would have doubled my income by the end of 2018.

And I had a very specific number. I thought that I would have earned more than $184,000 and I imagined that this amount of money would make me feel deeply grateful and awed by the contribution I was able to make in the past year.

And I will tell you that I have not gotten there yet and I want to talk to you more about that in a minute.

The other wild and improbable goals I have set for myself is that I have helped another woman or women double her income too and she and I would feel really awesome and proud of the work we have done together to make this possible.

I’m still working towards that goal, the year’s not over yet.

I also imagined that I would have traveled to Japan, Singapore and to the Pacific Northwest. I was very specific in my goal thing, here. And I imagined that I would have had a lot of fun conversing in Japanese with native Japanese speakers in Japan and that this would feel so amazing to see my life partner embrace his family in Singapore.

He has family who is from America but moved there for work purposes. And I imagined that I would experience emotions I didn’t know I had when I embraced by Auntie-hood.

And it’s been true. It’s been amazing to become an Auntie and experience all this pure love for this new and tiny human being.

And I also imagined that I would fall in love with the Pacific Northwest all over again.

It’s kind of funny to read these goals out loud because some of them came true. I did go to Japan. I did speak with native Japanese speakers. I did see my life partner reunite with his family in Singapore and that was so wonderful and in fact, we’re going back. We’re going back to Japan and Singapore, so the goal has been achieved twice, well, by the end of 2018 it will have.

And I did not go to the Pacific Northwest. I went to Arizona. I went to Alabama. I went to these places I hadn’t been to before and I loved that.

Another goal I had set for myself is to write and publish blogs and video posts consistently and that I would have made my dream come true of being a consistent, reliable content producer, that I am in the “flow” more often than not, and this would have helped me getting really close to finishing my book and that this feels just right.

I am not yet close to finishing my book but I have produced a lot of content on the podcast, newsletter, webinars, public speaking engagements and yeah, it feels right. It feels just right.

The book is coming.

And then I had this very specific, concrete vision that by the end of the year, I would “have slightly longer hair than I had in December 2017,” (December 2017 I had cut my hair really short) “and my arms are toned and my body is fit. I feel healthy and I’m close to wrapping up a big project, something that makes the best of who I am and where I come from and all that I can do.”

“I have people whom I admire and people who are helping me get to the finish line. I feel like Zen master boss lady of a company that’s on the up and up and I feel calm, confident, and in the moment.”

“2019 is already set up to blow the roof off of any remaining misgivings, doubt or old thought patterns that hold me back from showing up in the world in even bigger, bolder, and braver ways.”

So that’s what I wrote in December 2017 and it kind of gives me the chills to see that I had such a specific and vivid vision for how 2018 would end and having that very vivid vision motivated me to produce a lot of content, to teach, to set up a new business, to create a new podcast, to do webinars and to grow my hair and to start training in Aikido.

I haven’t talked about that on this podcast but I decided in the middle of the year that I really wanted to become better at Aikido and Aikido has elements of Zen. It’s inspired by Zen, so I’m working towards that vision of becoming the Zen master boss lady.

When I said “Zen master boss lady”, it was more to evoke a feeling in me and for me the feelings that I wanted to create in myself was the biggest motivator in doing a lot of the things that I did this year.

Another thing that’s really amazing is that I realized that once I had the vision, making it come true was so much easier for me. It just came more naturally and I do have people who are supporting this business and whom I do admire, whom I really appreciate, and when I think about those people, like the person who’s transcribing this podcast, I’m like woah, I had this vision and it came true it’s like woah, that’s really cool and amazing!

But at the same time, I had these really ambitious goals and I have not achieved them yet and so I do feel shame about it.

When I think about the fact that I haven’t yet doubled my income or haven’t yet doubled somebody else’s income just yet, I have these thoughts that in spite of all the things that have been accomplished so far and in spite of all the things I will accomplish in the next two months, I have the thought that oh, I haven’t done enough.

And maybe that means I’m not good enough.

And that could also mean that I’m a failure or that I don’t know what I’m doing.

It’s only human!

I should say, I’m only human. And it’s only natural, it’s only normal for me to experience this shame as anyone else might do.

And I want to talk to you about that shame today because I’m going through it right now and this year, I recognize that the things that the shame would actually have me do are not constructive, are not the types of actions that would help me become the Zen master boss lady that I’ve envisioned I will eventually become.

I can still continue to believe in this vision. I can still continue to work towards them. I can still achieve them. It might not be the end of 2018, it might be the end of 2022, but I can still work towards them but if I let the shame and that sense of powerlessness take over, then what I would easily do are the things that my body really wants me to do.

Just avoid any sort of risk.

Avoid taking further, positive action.

And instead maybe go back to bed, go back to the couch, eat a box of cookies, or a whole bag of Doritos and watch Netflix.

And I have to tell you that today, because it is a gray and cold day here in New York City, that temptation is particularly strong and I’ve talked about the 3-A trap in the past. The trap of avoiding conflict, the trap of accommodating and the trap of attacking people because the resentment just boils over, right? In other words, hiding, giving in and giving in to that sense of resentment.

That’s the kind of action that giving into this feeling of shame would have me do.

And I recognize as Dr. Wayne Dyer says that the feeling of resentment is never justified. It comes from believing the thoughts that are created through default thinking.

So, how do I work through this? How could you work through something like this if you are also experiencing goal shame?

What I’m doing differently this year is telling myself that I may want to move towards this discomfort. I may want to move towards the shame. I may want to move towards the feeling of powerlessness and the weariness that it creates in my body.

In other words, I may want to accept negative emotions. I may want to move towards them and allow them to be in my body instead of reacting against them by resorting to avoidance, accommodation and attacking other people.

This might sound counterintuitive because when you hear “born to thrive,” Jamie believes we’re all born to thrive, it might sounds like I think that we’re all destined to become happy-happy-joy-joy 100% of the time but no, that’s not the human experience.

The human experience is that we feel negative emotion 50% of the time.

Half the time we will feel good and and half the time we may feel bad. And the sooner we can accept the balance of emotion in the human experience the sooner we can work through the negative emotions, deal with them and work our way back to feeling better.

I think it’s so important to accept that in order to thrive, you need to embrace the pain of growing. You need to embrace the sting of rejection, the sting of shame, the sting of hearing no, the sting of things not going the way you actually thought they would go.

And I’m inspired today by this Winston Churchill quote: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

The road to success is paved with failure. The way to become bolder, braver, and better paid is to continue taking action even when you hear no. Even when you feel ashamed.

And in order to do that, first, you have to allow yourself to feel the shame instead of reacting or rejecting that shame.

I’ve been thinking about what does it really mean to become bolder, braver and better paid? Why did I pick those particular words and I took some time to think about all the other emotions or the qualities that are associated with becoming bolder, braver, and better paid.

And so, for me, the word bold means powerful, firm, self-esteemed, strong, assertive, proud, courageous, determined, risky, thick-skinned, decisive, individual, unpopular, iconoclastic, confident, moxy, fearless.

And the word brave, for me, conjures up these other sets of emotions: vulnerable - which, if you are familiar with the works of Dr. Brene Brown, you would know that to become vulnerable, you have to first open yourself up to shame. Brave also conjures up feelings of nervousness, anxiety, determined, motivated, afraid but doing it anyway, hopeful and optimistic in spite of the odds.

So, as we near the end of 2019, I welcome you to consider what is a compelling vision you can create for yourself for the end of 2019?

And if you are feeling the mix of emotions around what has been accomplished, what has not yet been accomplished for 2018, I invite you to explore those emotions and allow them. They’re just vibrations in the body.

Thank you and I will talk to you soon.