Your Secret Fear: Negotiating for What You Want

Your friends and colleagues see you as a strong, brilliant and successful woman. They don’t know you have a secret: it takes all your courage to ask for what you want. The little voice in your head wants you to shut up, don’t make waves, don’t step out of line. You hesitate and maybe miss the opportunity to ask for the raise, the help you need, or time off. When you can’t ask for what you want easily, clearly and without hesitating, you’ll end up with much less than you deserve.

You can change that right now!

The fears that you as well as many other women have about negotiating are your biggest obstacles.

  • Negotiation is scary for women because your mothers did not teach you how to negotiate. Instead they taught you to accommodate others in order to be liked. You don’t know how negotiation is supposed to work.
  • You have defined negotiation as confrontational and unpredictable, so you don’t take the time to prepare.
  • You believe you need to have years of experience, training and a black belt in negotiation to make a case for getting what you want. With these beliefs, you will let the other person take control of the negotiation. You postpone asking for what you want. You cross your fingers, hoping things will be fair or else you try indirect ways like dropping hints so the other person will ‘hear between the lines’ and give you what you need.

When you are stuck with these fear-based beliefs, you are sabotaging your success. Here are two tips that will have you negotiating with confidence and grace in a matter of minutes.

 

Two Tips To Defuse Your Fear of Negotiation

Tip One: Negotiation is a conversation

Negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want through dialog, problem solving, and joint decision-making with others. In other words, negotiation is about talking! Whoa…you are all masters at talking. You are ready to negotiate.

 

Tip Two: Negotiation is a process that you can mapnegotiation map

Negotiation has five basic stages that take you from beginning to completion. The stages are not always sequential. However, to get to completion, you need to move through all of these stages.

  1. Planning
  2. Sharing information
  3. Proposing solutions
  4. Resolving
  5. Completing

So draw yourself a map and use it to track where you are in the conversation and where you want to go. It is perfectly fine to say aloud in the negotiation conversation, “I’m ready to talk about solutions now” or “I’m ready to wrap this up” because these are legitimate and necessary stages of negotiation.

Remember

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. W.I. Thomas and D. S. Thomas

 

 

 

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