How to Tame Your Inner Mammal with Dr. Loretta Breuning

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

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

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

Learn more at InnerMammalInstitute.org 

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

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Full Episode Transcript

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

How are you?

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

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

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

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

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

And she said YES.

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

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

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

Jamie: Hi, Dr. Loretta!

Dr. Loretta: Hi! Nice to see you!

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Loretta: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Loretta: Inner Mammal Institute.

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

Dr. Loretta: It’s fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie: Yeah.

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

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

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

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

Jamie: Yeah, that’s really interesting.

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

Jamie: Okay.

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

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

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

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

Jamie: It really got complicated!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Loretta: Yeah!

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

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

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

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

Jamie: Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie: Yeah! Please continue your awesome work.

Dr. Loretta: Thank you, thank you.

The Human Brain: How Neurotransmitters Impact Negotiation Behavior

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

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

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

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

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Full Episode Transcript

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

How are you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Serotonin

2. Oxytocin

3. Cortisol

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

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

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

Thank you and I hope you enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Circumstances that are neutral and provable.

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

• How we think influences how we feel.

• How we feel influences how we act.

• How we act creates our results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, let’s talk about the human brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now this may seem counterintuitive, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what about you?

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

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

So now let’s talk about oxytocin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, what should we do?

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

You and I both work in this particular industry.

You and I both work for this particular person.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, it totally sucks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You've Gotta Ask

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

In week 17, the affirmation is: 

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

Some of the useful tips on asking include: 

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

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

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

Or email me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com 

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Full Episode Transcript

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

I believe we are all born to thrive.

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

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

I just know it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait...it gets better!

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

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

1. Ask as if you expect to get it.

2. Assume you can.

3. Ask someone who can give it to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I want also wants me.

What I want also wants me.

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

This is a really powerful mindset shift.

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

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

Do you know what the biggest pitfall in negotiation is?

You guessed it. Making assumptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if You Lowballed Yourself? #SalaryNegotiation

What if you took the job without asking for more? What if you find out only later that you’re getting paid under-market rate? I’ve done this a few times early in my career. In this episode, I share my own experience, insights into shifting your mindset, and concrete strategies and script for renegotiating your pay by articulating your value with confidence and framing for mutual benefit. Please register for next week’s free webinar (9/12/18, 12pm EST) here: www.jamieleecoach.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 34 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

My mission is to help ambitious people like you become bolder, braver, and better paid. And in service of that, I talk about negotiation skills in the context of leadership skills because I believe that when you lead, when you influence, when you negotiate, you thrive, which is exactly what you’re born to do.

Yeah, I believe that.

Tonight, I will be leading a negotiation workshop for the Association of Corporate Councils. This is really interesting. This is kind of funny to me because the event is called “The Power of the Purse: Negotiating as a Woman,” which I love.

And the phrase “power of the purse” reminds me of my mother who came to America as an immigrant around the age that I am now with three little girls in tow and she, while speaking English a little bit worse than Margaret Cho’s mother - Margaret Cho is an Asian-American comedian who does a hilarious imitation of her mother’s broken English, and literally my mother speaks English a little bit worse than that - and yet, she ran her own business.

As a single mother.

As an immigrant.

She worked intensely with an iron-clad work ethic and she managed to put all of us girls through college. She did it single-handedly and it’s still, every time I mention it, it’s like woah. How’d she do that? She did it. She used the power of her purse.

It’s funny to me because, when I was growing up, I realized my mother really valued her purses. She loved, I should say she still loves, her Louis Vitton bag and it’s very valuable to her. I remember being a judgmental teenager and saying, “Mom, why would you do that? Why would you spend hundreds of dollars on a purse? Don’t you want to go on a vacation?” She valued that purse over vacations because that’s how important it was for her, and it’s symbolizes her work ethic, her dedication to excellence, and I’m sure other things.

But when I think of the phrase “power of the purse” I think about my mother and how much she worked, how much she showed me the power of being diligent, believing in ourselves and setting a really powerful example of what is possible for women, for mothers, for immigrants.

And the second part of this event, the second part of the title, is “Negotiating as a Woman,” and I love that. When you read all these articles online you could get the impression that negotiating as a woman is something to be overcome, not to be celebrated.

I am of the opinion that who you are, however you define yourself, as a woman, as a she, as a he, as a they, it is to be celebrated. And it is an asset that brings value because of who you are uniquely in this world. You bring a different perspective, a valuable, a unique perspective to the conversations, to the negotiations that you partake in.

So, that said, I want to talk to you briefly about what to do if you’ve lowballed yourself. What if you didn’t negotiation your salary before accepting a job because you needed to pay the bills, because you needed a job, whatever? You didn’t even realize you were lowballing yourself until later you see that your salary is below market value.

I’ve done this a few times in my career. I’ve had about ten different jobs before I settled on becoming a coach and speaker and I’ve done this a few times. So, I want to offer some strategies today on how to address this.

And the first, the most important thing, is to understand our mindset around this. Now, when we use this phrase “lowball your salary,” what does it make you feel? What are the thoughts that are associated with that? Do you feel that you lost the negotiation by forfeit? That you left money on the table and gosh darn it, you screwed yourself?

Now, nobody wants to be a loser. Especially in our culture that loves to herald winning and success. Negotiating for yourself, negotiating for money can feel like a really precarious walk on that very fine line between failing and losing, winning and succeeding.

And so no wonder so many of us are reluctant and so many of us are anxious to negotiate because we don’t want to fail. If you want to stay safe from failure, it’s tempting to not take action, it’s tempting to not assume any risk, it’s tempting to not risk.

And so the first thing I want to suggest, if you have the thought that you’ve lowballed yourself, is to get clear on your thinking. If you’ve been listening to my podcast for awhile, you would know that my philosophy around this is that your thinking is extremely powerful and your thinking generates the results that you see in your negotiation, in your leadership, in your career, in your life.

So, if you have the thought that you lost, I want to challenge you to reframe that thinking. Get curious about yourself. Why did you do what you did? Why did you not pause to consider whether this was going to be a good offer for you, that this is going to be a good fit?

Is it possible that you had the thought that, “Oh my goodness, if I don’t take this job, I’ll never get another job”? “If I don’t take this job, that means that I would be a failure.”

Also, when I get still and ask myself, okay, why did I do what I did back then, early in my career, take these offers without negotiating for more, I see that I almost unconsciously had this thought that I don’t deserve a great job like this. And before somebody finds out, I’m just gonna take it so that they can’t take it away.

And the emotion that this thought had created in me was fear, anxiety. And from that place of fear and anxiety I just impulsively accepted the offer and the result I had from taking this action was that I had more feelings of unworthiness because then now I realized oh, I didn’t negotiate my salary so I’m a terrible negotiator, I screwed myself and so this thought that I don’t deserve it creates the kind of results that support the thought that I don’t deserve it.

It’s a cycle.

It supports itself.

I want to offer to you, if you can relate to that kind of thinking pattern, I want to offer to you that, no matter the circumstances, no matter how much money you’re making or not making, no matter what your job is, you are enough.  

Why?

Because you are. You exist. You exist and therefore you are enough. Period. You’re breathing. You’re existing. It means that you are here for a reason. You were created and you are enough. It’s not a matter of deserving or undeserving or being a winner or a loser. You are enough. You are okay. Period.

And from there, it takes work, it takes consistent effort to generate new thinking that will help you, that will empower you to renegotiate your salary. Because everything is negotiable. Your job description. Your compensation. How you do your job. Who you do it with. It’s all negotiable. I believe that.

And so, what is the thinking that will help you?

For me, I see that I needed to recognize my own value. I had to own and believe that I add value as a contributor at this organization.

When you think about it, of course you do! Because otherwise, why would they have hired you? Why would they have invested thousands of dollars in the recruitment process, in the interview process. Thousands of dollars, many hours of several people to recruit you, to tell you about the job, to sell you on the job and then to make you this offer, a lot of time, money, effort was invested to get you there because the employer can see that you will add value and that having you in this job, in this company, creates more value than if they had not hired you.

Companies hire you to see a return on investment because they recognize that having a person in this role that you’re in right now creates a multiple of value compared to the money that they’re paying you.

So own it!

You are there because you add value.

You bring value to the table.

And when you can believe that, I think it will help you feel confident and brave. And from this confident and brave place, I want to encourage you to initiate a negotiation or to renegotiate. And in the process of negotiating for a different compensation package or additional perks or benefits, whatever it would take to help you feel that you’re being compensated fairly, you want to demonstrate, you want to articulate, and you want to advocate for the value you bring.

You want to demonstrate that you have brought value in the past, whether that means at past jobs or within the past couple of months or a year, however long you’ve been with this company. You want to show them that you have brought value and you want to articulate what it is that you help them do because a lot of employers, especially busy managers, they don’t realize how much value you’re adding.

Are you helping to resolve problems, to bring in more revenue, to create technical solutions, to bring innovative solutions? Are you helping to solve problems and save money? However it is that you’re adding value, you want to articulate it.

And you want to also advocate for the future value you will add. And I want to stress that because when you go to renegotiate your compensation, a key strategy there would be to show that you have outgrown the job description that you were originally hired to do. The scope of work has increased and therefore the compensation will also increase. Makes sense, right?

I have a client who is a purpose-driven leader in her company and she is really driven by her values of creating positive change in the world. And so the pay is secondary. For her, doing that purpose-driven job is so much more meaningful than money but at the same time, she was getting paid at a level that was below her actual job description.

Even her manager, when he found out that she was at grade x and not grade x+1, he was surprised. He said, “Oh, I thought, you should already be at pay grade x+1. We should really address that.” So, for her, having that ally, her manager, who recognizes her value and agrees that she should be paid at a higher pay grade is definitely beneficial.

And so if you don’t have that ally, go create one.

Demonstrate your value. Articulate your value. Advocate for the value that you are bringing and help your ally see that you would be best served by being at a higher pay grade level because when you are being compensated at a level that is commensurate with the contributions that you bring, not only will you be happier, not only will you be more motivated, but the employer would benefit as well from having retained an engaged employee.

I hear this statistic all the time, I don’t know how true it is, but only 20% or 30% of employees are actually engaged, so if you are engaged, if you are motivated to do good work and to contribute more value, it is a win-win solution for you to be compensated at market rate.

So, having said that, what else should you be curious about? We just talked about getting curious about your own thinking, how to pivot your thinking or to reframe your thinking to see this negotiation as a win-win solution. Also, you want to be curious about the employer.

Why do they do the thing that they do? Why do they offer this below market-rate salary? Now, it’s really tempting to start going into judgment and blame and thinking, “Oh, they don’t deserve me, they don’t value me, blah blah blah blah blah,” right? But that doesn’t help you negotiate in a way that creates connection, understanding, a better reputation, a better relationship.

Just, really get curious without the judgment. What were they thinking? Maybe they didn’t realize how much leadership potential you have.

I coached a client, and she works in the software industry, and what she really wanted was to be a technical solution architect but she didn’t know how to articulate it. She got an offer, she kind of thought, “It’s okay but what would really make this offer great was if it was $15,000 higher and I had a bigger scope of role because I want to grow into that.” And so I coached her and she told them what she wanted.

She said, “I want to grow as a leader. I want to be a technical solution architect because I have these skills and I know that these skills and experiences will benefit both the employer, both you, and our clients.” And the potential employer, when they heard this, they were really happy. They were excited to hear that she wanted to grow as a leader because they hadn’t thought of it. They didn’t realize that that’s what she wanted and so when she said that’s what she wanted they increased the salary offer by $15,000. They gave her a bigger title, Technical Solution Architect, and my client was really happy. So, it’s possible that when your employer gave you the offer that they had, they hadn’t realized that you had this leadership potential, that you could be doing more, that you could be contributing more, that you do want to do this. Because you hadn’t told them!

It’s not too late, if this is the case. Let them know what you’re capable of. Let them know what you want to grow into. Articulate your future potential.

And also another thing to consider is, okay, beyond what I want, beyond what they want and what is possible, are there hidden constraints?

I have done some operations consulting work for tech startups here in New York and sometimes there is cash crunch with these tech companies because for them, demonstrating the value, demonstrating their value proposition is a higher priority than making a profit. And so they invest a lot of money into hiring the best people, into growing their company, but the top-line growth is not there, so there’s no profit. They’re funding the company with investors’ money and sometimes they use up more of the investor money than they can earn and so there can be a cash crunch.

So is there a cash crunch at your company? Are they going to be strapped for money? And if that is the reason why they can’t afford to pay you the going market rate, how can you help address that concern? Can you help them create more revenue at a faster pace? Can you help the company save more money? And if this is the case, could you consider equity compensation? Could you consider other types of compensation? Could you consider a flexible work schedule? So, this is where creative solutions come into play.

And finally, I want to offer just a few concrete strategies before wrapping this up. First is asking for an accelerated performance review schedule. Usually companies do performance reviews, salary adjustments once a year but if you feel that the salary you’re getting is not commensurate with the level of your contributions then maybe you can ask them to do a 6-month review or even a quarterly review.

Say, “Hey, you know, I’d really like to do this because I really feel strongly that the value I’m bringing is beyond the scope of role that I was hired to do, so it would really help me be up front with you and also maybe revisit the compensation structure because I’m invested in the long-term growth of this company.” I think it’s really important to underline how both your interests and the other side’s interests are in alignment.

And of course, the second thing you can do if you feel you’re undervalued is get another offer. Get a competing offer. This is a lot of work and also you don’t want to do that unless you are 100% ready to take that other job if you cannot renegotiate a higher salary with your current employer. But sometimes having that best alternative to a negotiated agreement really helps and it can also create a very clear, absolutely clear signal that your market value is higher than what you’re getting paid now. So this is kind of a last resort, but also a very powerful option that you have.

And finally, the third strategy is use this as a learning opportunity. Every negotiation, every conversation is a learning opportunity. And what have you learned from having so-called lowballed yourself, having accepted a job without negotiating for more?

Perhaps you have learned that you really want to negotiate for more. You really do want to articulate, to demonstrate and advocate for your value and ask for more because getting paid fairly, getting paid the high end of the going market range makes you feel so much better about doing an awesome job. And when you do an awesome job, you do a more awesome job and the employer benefits from your awesome job and their clients benefit from you doing the awesome job, so it’s a win-win-win solution.

So, the three strategies, I just want to reiterate: First, you can ask for an accelerated performance review. Number two, you can consider the ultimate last resort which is to get another offer to signal to your current employer that you really need to have a market rate adjustment, otherwise you will walk. And only do this if you are 100% ready to walk and take that other job. And third, use this as a learning opportunity.

So, I hope this podcast was helpful and I want to let you know that next week I will be doing a webinar, a free webinar, on the seven core elements of negotiation framework. What that means is I’m going to walk you through the seven steps of the at-the-table strategies. At the negotiation, what are the seven key things that you want to see happen? So if you do want to renegotiate your salary, how should you set the stage? What happens at that conversation? I’m going to walk you through the steps and explain how this framework applies to both salary as well as everyday workplace negotiation situations.

Please register at jamieleecoach.com and I look forward to seeing you there and I hope you have a wonderful week. Talk to you soon!

Interview with She Negotiates' Lisa Gates: How to Name the Elephant and Lead Negotiation Conversation

Lisa Gates is my good friend and mentor who taught me nearly everything I know about teaching negotiation to professional women. She's also the co-founder and chief inspiration officer of She Negotiates, a leading negotiation consulting and leadership coaching company for women. In this interview, she shares timeless tips and pearls of wisdom on how women can cut through unconscious bias in the workplace, lead the conversation, and signal their potential for career advancement through storytelling. Learn more about She Negotiates at www.shenegotiates.com

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 30 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. I’m your host and coach, Jamie Lee.

This episode is being published late because I had a last-minute business trip this week. I was in Huntsville, Alabama to deliver a keynote speech for the U.S. Women in Nuclear Conference as well as a day-long workshop on everyday workplace negotiation skills.

It was a phenomenal event and I got this gig through Lisa Gates, She Negotiates co-founder and negotiation and leadership coach who also happens to be my good friend and mentor. She was booked to deliver the keynote and the workshop at U.S. Women in Nuclear Conference this year. Due to an unforeseen circumstance, she couldn’t make it and so I replaced her. She called me last Thursday morning and on this Monday, so four days later, I was on a flight to Huntsville, Alabama!

It was a phenomenal opportunity for me and it just goes to show how awesome it is to have people in your network who know you, who know the caliber of your work, who trust you to even fill in for them. And it was a tremendous opportunity for me to connect with some really amazing women who are doing cutting-edge work in the forefront of clean energy.

Today, I have a special treat for you. Lisa couldn’t make the conference but before the event she and I recorded this interview and in this interview, she shares some really timeless tips and pearls of wisdom on how women can cut through workplace biases and get heard and lead the conversation and signal their potential for career advancement within the context of a workplace negotiation.

Lisa is a negotiation and leadership coach and she sees her role as Chief Inspiration Officer. She operates under the radical philosophy that there is nothing wrong with women, which I love. In fact, she likes to ask, “What would the world look like if everyone negotiated like a woman?”

Hmm.

I like that question.

She combines storytelling, career development strategies, and collaborative negotiation best practices and then she nests them in women’s lived experiences to come up with solutions that help them become daily askers and confident actors in work and life. Lisa is amazing. So, without further ado, here’s the interview with Lisa Gates, co-founder of She Negotiates.

Jamie: Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hey, Jamie Lee, how are you?

Jamie: I’m doing well. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Lisa: I’m really glad you invited me. Thank you.

Jamie: I’m really glad you made it. So, I want to hear from you about a negotiation that had the biggest impact in your life or career.

Lisa: In my life or career...probably both. You know this story because we’ve talked about it, but this is a really the story where I learned that I was actually in a negotiation and then how to duplicate it later on with great mentoring by a boss of mine.

Jamie: Okay.

Lisa: Yeah, so I was working in a public relations firm as the Coordinator of New Business, working for the VP of New Business. I was kind of a glorified secretary and I had a commute. I was living in LA. I had this really long commute. It was actually only about 18 miles but it would take me an hour, an hour and a half, and by the time I got to work I was always frustrated and angry from the drive.

And this went on for several weeks, about six weeks, when I went into my boss’s office really in a kind of breakdown. I was crying, which is really a great way to start a negotiation, had I known I was in one. And you know, I’m whining and I’m crying and I’m saying, “I hate this job. I just can’t stand the commute and it’s just really difficult to land and do anything of value for about an hour. So it’s just this huge waste of time.”

And he looked at me and I’m babbling and he says, “Do you have a question in there?” And I was just sort of dumbfounded. I thought I was just gonna get to complain and he was gonna wave the magic wand. And I said, “No,” and he said, “No. Think about it. What kind of a question do you need to ask me?” And it took me a minute to think and finally I said, “How about if I come in at say 10 or 11 o’clock and leave at, say, oh, I don’t know, 6 or 7?”

His answer was, “Okay.” I was completely shocked that he would even consider that. I thought I was being funny. And then he added this little piece where he said, “Tell me why that would be of benefit to me? Why would that be of value to me?”

Jamie: Oh!

Lisa: And I said, “Well, I can be your closer, right? I can make sure everything’s buttoned up at the end of the day, all the straggler pieces are kind of nailed down for a presentation that might be happening the next day.” And he said, “There you go.” He said, “You gotta ask and your ask always has to have a benefit to your conversation partner.”

Jamie: Mmm, that’s a good lesson.

Lisa: It was a huge lesson and I can’t say that in the moment I was completely aware that oh, this is a negotiation strategy but as I went through my career and started to learn more, I always harken back to that experience because it had so much value in so many ways. Just asking, period. Noticing that there’s something wrong and that you might have a solution. So, that was the other piece of it, he would always tell us, “Turn your complaints into solutions.”

Jamie: And benefit, offers of benefit.

Lisa: Offer a benefit and you and I both know that’s the key to a good ask.

Jamie: Right. I mean, now we know it because you and I both work as negotiation coaches.

Lisa: Right.

Jamie: You are the mentor who really taught me everything I know about how to teach negotiation skills, especially to women professionals, so it’s my deep privilege to have you and share your awesome insights and wisdom with us.

So, I’m curious. For the benefit of our listeners, would you share with us what your journey was that led you to become a negotiation coach for women?

Lisa: Thanks for that question, and I just have to back up a little. I really appreciate that you say that I was your mentor. You had so many chops when I met you, so don’t undersell yourself. You’re pretty amazing in your own right.

Jamie: Thank you.

Lisa: I trained and certified to be a coach around 2005, 2006 and after a few years of coaching mostly women I started to notice this pattern. Women were super fabulous at designing a career strategy and creating accountabilities and plans and they knew where they were going. That was the work that we did. But when it came to asking for promotions or raises or workplace kinds of things that were important to them to achieve, they just kind of stumbled.

They resisted, they avoided, they said, “I really can’t do this. It makes me nervous.” So, I decided to learn myself, what is this negotiation thing and why are women so afraid of it? And the first book I read was Women Don’t Ask and Victoria, my business partner and I had this similar reaction to it. We got about seven pages in and threw it across the room because it was so annoying to read all the statistics about how we behave and what was stopping us.

Jamie: And was it maddening because it was true or because it’s not true?

Lisa: Oh, because it was true. And also because we couldn’t believe it was true. These things are hindering and hampering me and everyone else? Really?! So a piece of self-awareness started to just percolate and we started to just rewind through your whole life, your whole career and look at all those places where, oh yeah, I didn’t even know that I could ask. I didn’t even think to ask.

So, there was that piece and then Victoria and I had been friends for a while. As writers, we followed each other around the planet, on the internet planet, and I called her up one day and said, “Why don’t we build a workshop for my clients and whoever else we want to invite from social media, people we know out there in the world?”

So we built this six week, online workshop and after the first session, we hung up and I called her back and said, “Oh my God, this is not a workshop, this is a business.” Because just in that first meeting, women were so hungry, it was like a sponge, they were like sponges devouring the water, you know, the negotiation water. There was a lot of desperation and confusion, so that’s our birth story.

Jamie: Now I’m curious. What was the biggest confusion around negotiation?

Lisa: Part of it was, it’s a thing that happens in two parts, even still with clients today and when I teach and train and do workshops, it’s apparently sort of confidence issues, self-awareness about your capacities, your strengths, all of the things that you bring to your role that you might not have your arms wrapped around well enough, right?

And then the other piece is actually the actual strategies and tactics, you know, getting super pragmatic about when do I anchor and how do I frame this in a way that helps them see a possibility for themselves or helps them see me in the light that I want to be seen in? So those are very tactical things that we have to learn how to do and as you know from working together, we like to simplify and make it as easy as possible to learn these things and not make it so complex that it feels like you’re in a hostage negotiation, right?

Jamie: It can definitely feel like one.

Lisa: Yeah! Help me out of this! I’m gonna lose my family! They’re gonna kill me! They’re gonna kick me out! I know. So, it’s those two places, the emotional place, the self-awareness, the self-acceptance, all of that, yeah.

Jamie: So on that note, what top three pieces of advice do you have for women who want to close their wage gaps and sidestep gender blowback?

Lisa: Ohhh, sidestep gender blowback, let me tackle that one. I don’t think you can sidestep bias. I think you have to be willing to walk through it, right?

Jamie: Interesting.

Lisa: Because you become aware of bias doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen, right? So you can’t tiptoe around it and get where you need to go. You need to name that elephant as it happens. So if you’ve been passed over two and three times for a promotion, are you just gonna take it? Or are you actually gonna be transparent and talk about, look I’ve been passed over a few times and each time, Joe and Dave and Don get the role? I can’t help but think this is gender-based, help me walk through this. How do you see it? What would you do if you were me?

So, I just feel that especially now with the Me Too movement, in a way corporate America has sort of co-opted the initial meaning of the Me Too movement. There’s this other leg of it, which is economic disempowerment. The biases creating roadblocks to our financial well-being, so we have to talk about it. We have to bring it up when it happens. You know, somebody is mansplaining or talking over you or interrupting you in a presentation, you need to deal with those things as they happen or soon after they happen.

Jamie: So instead of sidestepping it, step right through it!

Lisa: Like a cow patty!

Jamie: Right, because bias is something that we all struggle with, isn’t it? I mean, who among us is not, I mean, people will say, “I’m not biased,” but…

Lisa: Oh, right! I mean, you walk out your door and you have an opinion about the person who just walked in front of you. You’re making judgments about what they’re wearing and where they’re going and who they think they are and why they’re walking so fast. We have all these opinions, we’re human, it’s not something that we can change, but as our awareness ratchets up and especially collective awareness in our workplaces due to the work we do on gender bias training and implicit bias, all of that, anything we can do to ratchet up our ability to see it as it happens is great.

Jamie: So first, walk through it. I like that.

Lisa: Yep, walk through it. Name the elephant. And then the other thing, I think, is to take a leadership role in your interview process and what I mean by that, I wrote about this recently, that I think there are two questions we need to ask our prospective employers, or even if it’s a promotion conversation, asking: What is the company’s commitment to gender balance? Not only in leadership roles, but all along the path to promotion? What is your commitment? And let them explain who they are and what their vision is. And sometimes that might be kind of a stumping question, they might be stumped by it and not be able to answer it terribly well and that should be a red flag. Or you might hear some corporate speak that sounds okay, good, but it doesn’t have a lot of substance so you really have to perk up your ears for that answer.

And the other question I would ask is, what assurances can you give me that your offer will be in alignment with what men in similar roles are making? You just come out ahead of those questions.

Jamie: That’s a really good one.

Lisa: You kind of signal to them, hey, I’m expecting a market value offer. I’m expecting something in alignment with my experience, education, contributions, all of that. It’s similar to the first one, a lot of transparency and a lot of self-leadership.

Jamie: I know it’s, I’m going to be mixing up the metaphors here, but it also shows a lot of balls.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly! It does demonstrate, your directness demonstrates who you are as a leader and how you’ll be for the future in that company. Now, if somebody kind of gets squirmy about that and feels like oh, wow, she’s kind of ballsy. She’s kind of bitchy/bossy/demanding. Well, maybe you just don’t want to work there. There are other fish in the sea and move on. Move on. It’s time for you to take care of yourself, to put yourself first.

Jamie: This reminds me, I have clients who are disheartened. People who work in technology, women who work in technology and they see management is all dudes, no women. And they want to work for companies that have gender diversity. They want to see that, not only are they saying they’re going to honor diversity, they’re actually doing it.

Lisa: Yeah and it’s kind of invisible, right? In many tech companies. So, bro culture is so on steroids that it’s hard to kind of push your way through by yourself, which is hard. This might lead into another tip, which is to really, really be building alliances and building your influence so that when it comes time for project x or new project y or a promotion or a raise conversation, that you have people in your back pocket that will back you up and echo your value. And that, I know, is difficult when there isn’t anybody who looks like you, right? So, it is not an easy task in many companies and instances to develop that kind of influence, but it still needs to be a part of your plan.

Jamie: This happened to me in the last tech company I worked at. I was the manager and I did have a person reporting to me who looked like me. She was a young, Asian woman in her 30s and she wanted a raise and she asked me to pitch on her behalf for management because I met with them every day as part of the daily management meeting. So I did, and I remember when I brought up that she wanted a raise, they looked at me and they said, “You’re sure this is what she wants?” I’m like “Yes, this is what she wants!”

Lisa: Oh, interesting little turn there. Curious how they turned it on you, or was it more about, “What do you mean she’s asking for a raise?”

Jamie: You know, it’s possible that I may have asked for a little bit more than…

Lisa: Oh, what a great manager to have!

Jamie: Yeah, I went to bat for her and then I just, I don’t know, I fattened the ball? It’s a terrible metaphor. And then they were like, “Wait, is that what she wants?” I’m like, “Yeah! That’s what she wants! Of course, she wants more!”

Lisa: First of all, that’s a great use of influence and I’m curious, when she asked you that, did you have any little bias hackles going up? Did you have a perception about her?

Jamie: It’s possible that my perception, you know, it’s true, my bias may have been that she’s asking for too little.

Lisa: Oh, wow, okay! How interesting. You were really protecting her. You were a good manager. And that’s what we’re talking about, how great it is to learn these skills, it’s not just about advocating for yourself, although put your oxygen mask on first, right? But advocating for others and having the, not just the chops to do it, but the understanding that thereby you build engagement and longevity in your employees.

Jamie: Right. And you know, she did end up taking over for me when I left and she did...for three, two more years, I think? So, yeah, just as you mentioned, longevity, engagement, it did happen.

Lisa: There you go. That’s awesome.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah.

Lisa: I love that story. I don’t remember you telling me that one. That was great. You know, okay there’s another point... The third point then, or the third tip is to learn how to tell great stories. So you’ve told me two stories, I’ve told you the birth story and the negotiation story. These are critical to people buying what you sell, loving what you offer, getting to know who you are. And I’m talking about a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Crisis, drama, and resolution.

So, it’s one thing for somebody to say, “Tell me about yourself,” and you say, you know, give them your career credentials, but if you can back up your credentials...usually if you do that, you sort of say who you are, people will say, “Well, give me an example of when blah blah blah,” and that is an opportunity for a real, live story. Think of Cinderella is a rags to riches story and she’s forced to go live with her mean old stepsisters, and then, lucky her, she gets this invitation, she gets to go to the ball and complications set it. The crisis and drama starts to happen where she doesn’t make it in time because of the pumpkin, she loses her slipper and everything works out in the end because the prince saves her.

Well, that’s not a great, feminist story to tell, but we can turn it on its head to look at how you want to have those kind of elements in your story so that people can see how things were working, how they broke down and what kind of strategies you employed to turn things around. And lessons learned from that process.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a good point because I’ve been reading this book, Conflict Management, and in it, it says that MIT researchers found that feelings is the most influential factor in negotiation outcomes. People are influenced by how they feel about their partner, how they feel about the negotiation outcome, how they feel about themselves and how they’re doing in the negotiation. And stories is the best way to get people to feel.

Lisa: That’s right! You know you think about the old, what is it? Logos, ethos, pathos? Right? You use logic but logic with emotion is, human beings connect with that kind of thing, we need it to make decisions. And it’s part and parcel of all the work I pretty much do with every single client is to really get at all the accomplishments and contributions and the history of your work and what those accomplishments reveal as your strengths, your capacities, your skills. And those accomplishments have a story behind them. The better ones have stories and it’s about identifying those so you can tell them in the interview process but also as part of your ask when you actually get to the point of saying, here’s what I really want.

Jamie: That’s really interesting because I know you have an acting background and when I watch emotionally gripping dramas on Netflix or whatever, there’s always a story that the hero tells as they’re coming to a critical decision or they’re reaching this shocking agreement with the enemy. Basically, they’re negotiating!

Lisa: That’s exactly right and we have come to expect it. We want logic and feels. How many times have we read, maybe it’s in old literature, but you know, do not be emotional, do not… you know, feeling is different than being emotional. Inducing feeling through story causes the other person to...it’s one thing for me to say, “Hey, I’m really good at building Lego sculptures,” but if I tell the story about the last time I built a Lego sculpture and how many times it broke before I actually got it right, the other person is making all kinds of judgments and assessments and they’re making up their own story about your value. They’re seeing things that you might not even be meaning to convey. It’s like how somebody will read a piece of poetry and one person will say, “You know what I got out of that?” and they’ll talk about it and it will be completely different than what the author might have intended.

Jamie: Right, right.

Lisa: So it just allows people to...it’s show versus tell.

Jamie: Show versus tell.

Lisa: Demonstrate versus just the facts, ma’am. Yeah, it’s super powerful.

Jamie: Yeah. You do powerful work with your clients. So, I’m sure people who are listening to this podcast are saying wow, this is really great stuff. I want to learn how to tell better stories. So, where can they go to learn more about you, your work at She Negotiates?

Lisa: They can knock on my door in California and say hi. They can take a train from New York to L.A., no, you can find me at SheNegotiates.com and right from the homepage, leadership coaching and negotiation coaching are the two things we provide. And the occasional workshop, public workshop, so come on by. Sign up for the newsletter. Read the blog. See what you can learn. Lots of resources are downloadable on the website and come say hello!

Jamie: Alright, excellent. Well, Lisa, this has been really valuable and I really appreciate you taking the time again, and I will talk to you soon!

Lisa: Thank you so much, and great job on a really fun podcast.

Jamie: Thank you!