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!

The Human Brain: How Neurotransmitters Impact Negotiation Behavior

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

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

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

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

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Full Episode Transcript

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

How are you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Serotonin

2. Oxytocin

3. Cortisol

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

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

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

Thank you and I hope you enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Circumstances that are neutral and provable.

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

• How we think influences how we feel.

• How we feel influences how we act.

• How we act creates our results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, let’s talk about the human brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now this may seem counterintuitive, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what about you?

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

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

So now let’s talk about oxytocin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, what should we do?

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

You and I both work in this particular industry.

You and I both work for this particular person.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, it totally sucks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You've Gotta Ask

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

In week 17, the affirmation is: 

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

Some of the useful tips on asking include: 

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

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

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

Or email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com 

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Full Episode Transcript

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

I believe we are all born to thrive.

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

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

I just know it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait...it gets better!

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

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

1. Ask as if you expect to get it.

2. Assume you can.

3. Ask someone who can give it to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I want also wants me.

What I want also wants me.

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

This is a really powerful mindset shift.

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

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

Do you know what the biggest pitfall in negotiation is?

You guessed it. Making assumptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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