The Daily Thrive: A Professional Training Community for Women Who Mean Business

We lauched officially our newest project—The Daily Thrive—on Monday and the response has been fabulous! The early-adopters are great women, and already plugging in to the sessions on negotiation, productivity, balance and negotiation, and getting valuable feedback and coaching. Thank you!

For those of you who want to get in on the adventure, and we know you do...here's the deal:

The Daily Thrive is a training and coaching community for high achieving women whose lives, careers and businesses demand inside-out results.

In short daily sessions, you get premium learning you can implement right now--with coaching and feedback from our experts--focused on the six critical areas women need to master now: 

• Negotiation
• Productivity & Organization
• Balance
• Personal Finance
• Nourishment
• Everyday Technology  

The Daily Thrive is not recycled blog and newsletter content, but carefully curated actionable training material our experts have developed for their clients in their own successful businesses.

If you were to hire our experts for this kind of training and coaching privately, it would cost you an average of $250/hour. The cost of joining The Daily Thrive is $240 for an entire year (that's $20 bucks a month!). 

And the first two weeks are on us so you can vet the value.

IT'S A NO-BRAINER TO JOIN US!

The Daily Thrive Promise

Look, it's a balance thing. Your inbox is cluttered with free stuff telling you what to do, but rarely giving you the how. Or the accountability.We're giving you a chance to cut to the chase, gain control of your life, and for once, get what you pay for. 

Because every session builds on the next, you'll turn your learning from intellectual to practical. And because our experts help you stay accountable, you'll learn it, do it, and thrive. 

So Now What?

JOIN US!

It's $20 a month. No advertising. No hype. Promise. 
And your first two weeks are free. On us.

Learn how it all works HERE.

 

Why Free Information is Mostly a Waste of Your Time

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."  ~ Stuart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

So let’s say you want to learn how to negotiate, get more productive, curb your spending, automate your email, eat nutritious meals, and get your life in balance.

You can read books, download ebooks, subscribe to newsletters, collect blogs in your RSS reader, go to YouTube and Google, and find just about anything you want to know. So why would you pay for learning if you can get it all for free? I’ll give you three reasons:

Quality and Context and Time

Quality

We routinely read blogs and articles about negotiation that advise against being the first to put a number on the table in a negotiation. This is really bad advice because research and experience illustrate that anchoring your price or fee first strongly influences the outcome of the negotiation in your favor. Once an anchor enters the space, the conversation will revolve around that number for the duration.

The problem is we women tend to anchor low, miserably low, so waiting to see what’s offered seems like a good choice. The “nice” choice. You can always counter offer higher, right? Good luck with that. Women also loathe making counter offers and routinely accept whatever they’re offered.

You get what you pay for. And this leads me to context.

Context

Real learning requires interaction with the subject in a way that moves it from intellectual to practical. Anyone can read a book about negotiation and feel armed and dangerous. But until you apply the learning in your real life, it’s a bit shallow and results will be sketchy. Unpredictable.

After training hundreds of women, we know this: women learn best when the material is supported by expert feedback, deepened by a collaborative group experience that allows them to experiment and make mistakes, and when the learning focuses on unwinding our cultural influences.

Time

How much time do you even have to read this post? And aren't you just a bit annoyed that it's longer than 200 words? Your time matters.

Who has time to run all over the Internet and subscribe to yet another newsletter you’re not going to read? Or emails full of advertising? If you’re productivity challenged, and we all are, paying for high quality, interactive online adult learning that’s precise and efficient just makes practical, time-is-money sense.

Our Bottom Line

We’ve just spent a little under a year developing The Daily Thrive learning community to curate the ground zero, actionable learning women crave and we’re happy to say we’re live, launched and loving it.

The Daily Thrive experts deliver daily blasts of learning on the topics of balance, productivity, negotiation, money therapy, everyday technology and nourishment—with coaching and feedback.

In addition to our daily blasts, we have a collection of Jam Sessions (self-study courses) to go in deep on the subjects we teach.

We’ve also gathered women thought leaders and experts for our public, bi-monthly Ten Buck Talks—robust career and business conversations featuring the likes of Gloria Feldt, feminist activist and author of No Excuses; Whitney Johnson, Venture Capitalist and author of the upcoming Dare. Dream. Do; and Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com.

$20 Bucks a Month?

That’s five bucks a week, payable monthly. And your first two weeks are on us. Free. (Ironic, huh? We did that so you could vet free vs. expensive :)

Our money expert breaks it down like this: that's one latte a week, one ATM visit for an Andrew Jackson just in case you need it. Or on an annual basis, that's less than the New York Times, and about the same as a great pair of killer heels.

$20, no coffee breath, no tree killing, and no calf-shortening. And it's ad free.

So ladies, what we're modeling is that you’re worth it and so are we. Join us here.

Busting the Noble Poverty Myth and the Cycle of Underearning for Women

When I was getting my coaching certification, our training leader asked me and my cohorts, "What is your niche, who is your target market and how much do you plan on charging to start."

A lot of ummms and errrrrs. And then one woman said, "I plan to charge whatever my clients want to pay, or can pay. Since my husband is the main breadwinner, I really see my work as a noble service, not a job.” 

I fell out of my chair. 

My feminist blood boiled, to be sure. But our leader saved me, saved all of us really, when he said, "That's all well and good, but there's really nothing noble about poverty. What are you really afraid of?" And that launched a two-hour inquiry--and it's a conversation I continue having with my negotiation clients routinely.

Mikelann Valterra is a prosperity teacher and money coach, and our Money Therapy Expert in She Negotiates' newest project, The Daily Thrive. She describes this approach to setting fees for our services and products as Noble Poverty, excerpted here from a recent post:

When you live in Noble Poverty, you tend to believe there is some unnamed virtue in not having money—or that Truly Good People shouldn’t want a lot of it. Your mantra is something like: "I may be struggling, but I'm a thrifty soul who doesn't need material trappings to love life!"

While there is immense value in avoiding senseless consumption, Noble Poverty takes that principle to an extreme, where the pursuit of comfort or even solvency is suspect. The result is a series of decisions that a) keep you in financial straits; and b) never earn you that halo.

You may be mired in Noble Poverty if: 

• You say you want to earn more, but never raise your rates or pursue better-paying work.
• You "make do" with a beater car, worn-out boots and a toaster that occasionally flames up because you believe deprivation is macho.
• You judge friends with money as bourgeois and slightly sad. 

Because it's easy to justify Noble Poverty as anti-materialism you end up keeping your income low to avoid the danger of becoming materialistic. But materialism has nothing to do with earning money, but how you spend your money!

The real danger is that when we decry the wastefulness in the world, we deny ourselves the money to live a truly full life. If you've taken an unconscious pledge to keep your income in line with your internal financial beliefs, revoke that pledge. When you charge and earn enough money, you can enjoy life, take care of your family, your self and give back to the world. It is time to be bigger. There is nothing noble about poverty. Nothing.

Source: Daily Worth

Our mission at She Negotiates is to end the income and leadership gaps for women. We start with the pocketbook because economic power is political power. And without political power, we have no voice. No presence. No platform. No credibility.

When women are empowered to lead and given the tools and support to do so, they make choices that change history. We bring our natural creative capacities to mend fences, knock down walls, and bridge moats. We teach, heal, feed, mend, fix, and nurture. We create, design, empower and transform.

That's noble.

Learn more about Mikelann Valterra's contribution as the Money Therapy Expert at The Daily Thrive launching January 30--daily blasts of learning with coaching and feedback from experts on the topics of balance, negotiation, productivity, money therapy, everyday technology and nourishment. HERE.

Know the True Market Value of YOU in a Job Share

Imagine you’re a manager with 10 direct reports and responsibility for the results of a worldwide program. You’re considering creating a job share for the purpose of spending a little more time with your growing children and aging parents. And to do this, you imagine you’ll be making half what you were at full time.

With two equally talented women sharing the position, consider these realities when constructing your job share:

• You are still 100 percent responsible for the program. You are only really changing the location of your work.
• Even as you design the job share—shifting the distribution of tasks and responsibilities between you and your job share partner, and identifying areas of overlap, pinpointing communication strategies—you each have a particular set of skills and strengths, as well as your combined institutional knowledge. This alone provides an exponential benefit to your employer in terms of program delivery, productivity and bottom line results.
• You are both professionals, not hourly-wage workers. You will be checking and responding to emails, probably even at your daughter’s dance recital. You will be putting out fires in the middle of dinner and homework. You will be working on projects and reports at your kitchen table.

Don’t lie to yourself.

Your job share is worth at least—at least—two 3/4 time positions in terms of efficiency and productivity alone.

According to the Job Sharing Resource Guide fromMission Job Share, a study from the UK’s Resource Connection and the Industrial Society showed that “70% of job sharing executives were perceived to have 30% increased output over one person doing the same job.”

Mission Job Share also references Lisa Belkin’s New York Times piece, Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent in which she cites the Microsoft study that found American workers really only work 16 hours of the 45 hours/week they spend at work because efficiency decreases rapidly with time spent working.

On the money side we have a bit of grey. Because women have often spent years overworking without regularly negotiating salary increases, it often feels unconscionable to ask for more than 50/50. For this reason  you must first become intimately acquainted with your true market value—what it would cost to hire someone off the street who could hold a candle to you. That means assigning a dollar value to all your skills and talents, the results you produce, time on job, career experience, degrees and certifications, and benefits you receive.

And then what? Convey each line item as a benefit to your employer. That means you have to be willing to negotiate. Sing your own praises. To brainstorm. To plan your concessions and ask for reciprocity.

In your conversation, you have to steadfastly align yourself to the big, fat, big deal reason you’re negotiating in the first place: for the benefit of your careerand your family’s wellbeing, both financially and personally. It is not an either/or conversation. That, my friend, is a mutual benefit conversation that will lead to agreement.

Do you know how valuable you really are?

To get more negotiation, money, productivity, and balance strategies, learn about She Negotiates newest project, The Daily Thrive launching January 30. And if you’re in or near San Diego, join Lisa for an 85 Broads presentation, “The Core 4 Strategies Every Woman Needs Now,” on Feburary 7 HERE.

When You Run the Show at the Daily Thrive

Our collaborators in our special She Negotiates project, The Daily Thrive, have been meeting weekly for months to design a professional, inside out learning experience that takes your career and life exactly where you want it to go. 

Every day starting January 30, you'll get short bursts of learning with coaching and feedback from us on the subjects of negotiation, balance, productivity, money therapy, nourishment, and everyday technology.

In our weekly meetings, we talk about getting things just right, we test our ideas, and when we're content we often say to each other, "okay, perfect." 

The truth is, it won't be perfect until you all knock on our door and say, "I'm in." And it won't be perfect until you engage with the daily learning blasts, get dialed into how the site works, connect with the community, and most importantly, when you start kicking the tires and asking for more. Something new. Something different.

So we think perfect is when you start running the show...

...when you begin generating Forum topics, or telling us about some fabulous thought leader we just have to invite to give a Ten Buck Talk, or when you want to go in deep on a new learning topic.

In our meeting this morning we designed our first forum topics: Perfecting Your Pitch, Give and Get (Self Promotion is a Good Thing), Mentor Match, and Causes We Love. And we know when you arrive on January 30, your ideas will rock the house.

It's the same with our Ten Buck Talks.

To date we've scheduled Whitney Johnson, venture capitalist and author of Dare. Dream. Do. Remarkable Things Can Happen When You Dare to Dream, Gloria Feldt, feminist activist and author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, Lynda Weinman, founder of Lynda.com, Lauren Stiller Rikleen, leadership expert and author of Ending the Gauntlet, Deb Sofield, award-winning speaker and executive speech and presentation coach, Maseena Ziegler, author of Ladies Who Launch, and Judy Martin, broadcast journalist and founder of WorkLife Nation. 

Excited yet? We are! So mark your calendars. Get on the mailing list. And two weeks from today you'll give you the join link. We are so ready for you.

Lisa Gates, Chrysula Winegar, Sara Caputo, Mikelann Valterra, CaZ Zulkosky and Maria Schonder.

The Daily Thrive Tribe
www.thedailythrive.org

Paula Gregorowicz: Why New Years Resolutions are an Annual Bad Idea

So we're now nine days into the new year and the last question you likely want to hear is, "How are your New Year's resolutions going?" This post from Paula Gregorowicz, business and life coach for women with The Paula G Company deconstructs this annual bad idea with humor and truth. Original post here.

To Hell With New Year's Resolutions!

Happy New Year!  I welcome this new year of 2012 with open arms and am energized about the possibilities. Yet, whenever someone starts talking about new year resolutions I cringe, the hair on my neck starts to stand up, and my insides want to prepare for battle.  The other day I started the year by attending a women’s networking meeting. As someone started talking about it being the time to get started with those resolutions I wanted to leap from my chair and scream bull!*$?!  Stop playing that mental game with yourself!

Why do I say this?  Well, first let me ask you…

• How many years now have you been making resolutions?
• How many of those resolutions have been fully realized?
• How many of your resolutions for the coming year sound exactly like the resolutions you made last year (and the year before that, and the year before that…)?

If you are truly honest with yourself this whole game of new year’s resolutions has been nothing but a silly game of psychological warfare with yourself perpetuated through the ages, right?  Something you say each year to feel better about yourself (for about a week or two) in an attempt to get motivated around something that you at  least say you want. There is something approximating an 88% failure rate when it comes to resolutions (and many resolutions don’t even make it out of January).  Why is that and why is making resolutions just a silly game in which you set yourself up for failure and feeling bad about yourself?

Willpower is a Depletable Resource

You cannot willpower your way to any lasting change.  It just isn’t possible.  It is not sustainable. The minute you are fatigued, distracted, or otherwise stressed mentally or physically, willpower goes out the window.  This is why it is so hard to resist all the cookies, donuts, and goodies at the holidays or at work when you’re running on low.  Willpower plummets and the quality of your choices goes out the window. Resolutions by their very nature (“resolve”) are based on willpower.

The Bar Is Set Too High

Resolutions tend to sound like sweeping changes and include huge promises that are doomed to failure by their very nature.  Big promises that entail radical changes are usually empty promises.  (Think: political rhetoric) Behavior change and true transformation requires a systematic plan of achievable and sustainable change. I don’t care who you are, you’re unlikely to go from one extreme to the other in any area of your life whether it is losing weight, redesigning your marketing plan, or meeting your income goals.

Goals are One Dimensional

To me goals have been abused, mistreated, and overrated.  We throw them out there like darts at a board. Sometimes we even get really fancy and make SMART goals (don’t even get me started).  The end result?  Often the same…a misunderstood end point that may or may not get you where you want to go and is likely to justify the end at the expense of the means (and your experience along the way). There is a better, more effective way to do this.

True Commitment is Lacking

Words and ideas are a dime a dozen.  In general as human beings we blow a lot of hot air with what we say.  It’s what we actually do that matters.  Words are cheap but actions speak loudly.  What you make time for and where you invest your money will give you a very clear picture of your priorities and commitments. Most resolutions are just hot air.

All said, the new year is still a great time to plan, vision, and begin to make the changes you most want to see. It’s just that if you want things to be different you actually have to do differently. Here are a few secrets that will have you putting the screws to resolutions and instead being in the 10% of people who actually will make lasting changes.

Bring Meaning to What You Desire

Don’t just say you want something, go beneath the surface.  Why do you want what you want? What will having, doing, or being differently give you that you don’t have now?  Without a connection to a deeper reason for change you will only be relying on willpower which will fizzle out.  A strong why fuels inspiration and energy that is sustainable over the long haul.

Set Intentions Not Goals

Intentions are multi-dimensional.  Far stronger than some goal you can truly paint a picture of what you desire by setting conscious intentions around not only the results you wish to achieve but also the inner experience you wish to have.  This is about who you are and how you do what you do as you move into action around what you want. And if you think this is just some airy fairy exercise that doesn’t hold up to the rigor of goal setting, you can and do break these down into specific and measurable parameters.

Create an Actionable Plan

You cannot climb Everest in a day (or even a month).  Think about how long it has taken you to create the situation you are in or how long you have had the specific habits you wish to change.  Do you honestly think that you are going to wave a magic wand and instantly create a new reality? It doesn’t happen that way.  While the decision can happen in an instant, the work takes time.

Truly Commit

Put your money, time and energy where you say you want to.  Align your intentions and words with your actions. And by all means stop lying to yourself by making excuses. What you are committed to speaks loud and clear.

Get Support

Don’t try to do it all alone. Whether you join a mastermind group, hire a coach, attend a support group, or enlist a small group of equally committed peers by all means tap into the power of being in community and in relationship to others.  The energy and support of others is a natural accelerator for results and provides built in accountability. We aren’t meant to exist in isolation.

So, what I most want for you is to ditch the resolutions and move forward into 2012 so you can create the best year yet in your life personally and professionally.

Need help getting clear on your vision? Want a plan and proven process that actually works to bring about what you want instead of more of the same?  Join a powerful and committed group for the "A New Lens on Life: Reinvent, Reinvigorate, and Rejoice in You"--a group program that begins January 17th.  Learn more and register: http://www.anewlensonlife.com.

Strategies for Working with "Disorganized" Brilliant People

My first real job was as a temp assistant to the head of public affairs and public education for Children’s Home Society. My boss, Charlotte De Armond, was the kind of woman who was always at the top of her game, a woman of firsts (including an Academy Award), but she was dead last in organization and productivity.

Charlotte was exacting and expected the sun and moon with a side of super novas, so when I decided to organize her office one morning, I knew it could have erupted in termination or applause. That was the day she hired me.

Several years and job moves later, Charlotte called to invite me to breakfast at her home in LA. She was retiring, which for her meant she was striking out on her own to open a communications consultancy and she wanted me to do some freelance writing—and organizing--for her.

Brilliant and Disorganized

I showed up at 9 a.m. promptly. She opened the door and immediately confessed that she was on a deadline project, and to bear with her as she explained her needs between calls. Here’s how it went:

I barely sit down in her office when she gets a call. She hangs up and turns to her computer to poke out a few lines, then gets up to get another cup of tea and turns back around to save and name her document. On the way to the kitchen, she notices the pile of laundry on couch, while her dog follows her into the kitchen to beg for a treat. She puts water in the tea kettle, gets the treat, pets the dog, and decides to throw the dog bed covers into the wash, and realizes the wet load in the washer has to be hung on the line (yes, she even hung her laundry in the sun).

After hanging the laundry she stops to dead-head a few begonias and decides to re-pot the cactus that’s outgrown its home. She returns to the kitchen to wash her hands when her phone rings again. While she’s taking an appointment her call waiting interrupts and she puts her client on hold to answer it. Her best friend is coming into town for the weekend. Yipee, all good, but when she flashes to her prior call, the line is dead, so she has to go find her client’s phone number in a contact book somewhere within the piles on her desk. She ferrets around for a minute or so and exasperated, turns back to me.

I hear a loud crash audible to only me signifying the sound of her plans and goals being dashed against the wall. Oblivious, Charlotte continues talking in fits and starts about her new business.

She finally finds her client’s phone number, excuses herself and goes back into the kitchen to find the phone, when the UPS guy knocks for a signature. The phone rings again. It’s her client. She goes to the front door, signs for the UPS guy while confirming her appointment with her client (knowing she needs to find her calendar but really can’t take the time), and heaves the UPS box into the living room.

Once again she returns to the kitchen to make her cup of tea and realizes she never turned the stove on to boil the water in the tea kettle, so she turns the dial and adjusts the flame, grabs an apple and a stack of mail that needs attention and heads back into her office and back to me. She sits for a moment trying to remember what she named her document and which folder she saved it in. The teakettle whistles. It’s now 10 a.m.

Everyone Has a Different Level of Need for Order

It might seem from this story that Charlotte was incapable of producing work or getting things done. The truth is that she was prolific in her output and consistently innovative and she did her best work in the very early mornings and late at night.

So, whether you work in an organization or a small business, take heart: neither you nor the brilliantly disorganized need to change. In fact it’s not a healthy expectation that anybody should orcan change.

Sara Caputo, MASara Caputo of Radiant Organizing consults with organizations to help teams map out the productivity strategies that best showcase each individual’s strengths, acknowledge their productivity personalities, and their unique contributions in service of big picture goals.

Caputo offers 4 Productivity Strategies for Working with Brilliant Disorganized People

1. Hire an Assistant

First, a note to the creative, brilliant, disorganized leader: Hire an assistant who can appreciate your style of getting things done, and give them permission and authority to keep you on task.

2. Develop Razor Sharp Boundaries

And a note to the assistant: Stay clear of shame and blame—your boss’s habits are not likely to change or improve much, if at all. Accept them. And develop razor sharp boundaries to help you resist being pulled into chaos.

3. Manage Expectations

As with the creative leader and her assistant, businesses and teams need vision and leadership, as well as a sense of order and direction. And those needs may not be met in not one person, but within the constellation of the team itself.

Get real and transparent and define the roles each team member will play in service of the overall big picture. That means your visionary, creative, brilliant, and intensely right-brained leader will be best at invention and brainstorming, and unless they’re Steve Jobs clones, they won’t be good at the details. Don’t expect them to change to fit your mold.

4. Focus on Values and Commitment to Innovation over Personality

Everyone has a different level of need for order, and everyone has a different daily work process and style of meeting deadlines. Being rigid and attempting to force others, especially creatives, into line will backfire, cause resentment and kill creativity. If you are the kind of person who gets things done ahead of deadline, and your task depends on a contribution from the creative who prefers to come screeching in at the last second, keep focused on your team’s or organization’s value and commitment to innovation above personality and individual process. This requires a certain level of tolerance for ambiguity, as well as trust that deliverables will be met (one way or the other).

Back in the day when I worked with Charlotte, my workaround on #4 was to hang laundry, prune roses and pot cactus with her and use the time to brainstorm and capture the tasks necessary for implementing those ideas. It was consistently productive process that allowed us to both to do what we were good at.

Sara Caputo's brilliance can be captured in our new She Negotiates adventure, The Daily Thrive, launching January 30. In addition to productivity, The Daily Thrive will offer daily blasts of learning with coaching and feedback from the experts on the subjects of negotiation, personal finance, nourishment, work-life balance, and everyday technology. Follow the links to get on the mailing list to get the scoop on joining us.

Repost: 7 Actions for Becoming More Like Yourself in 2012

via Jessica Hagy at www.thisisindexed.comThe way I see it, there are two reasons we women travel through life losing sight of ourselves. Our diffuse awareness and our other-focused prioritizing. We aren’t likely to change, but when we get conscious and intentional, we make huge shifts in the balance of our priorities.

Generalizing wildly, we women have one beautiful pair of traits that opens the door for these huge shifts: we dream and we implement. We see the big picture and then we go about pinching the devil out of the details.

Before I give you the 7 Actions that will aid you in collaborating and delegating those details, I want to tell you a little story about Jane Doe the CEO (you, that is).

You were born with an inny.

Your parents swaddled and adored you and gave you nicknames like princess and honey love pot and sweetness.

They gave you Barbie dolls and you liked them. Mostly. Your mom told you that the world was your playground and that you could be and do anything you imagined. You built sand castles and mud pies with daisy frosting, and you punched Joey for cutting in front of you in the lunch line on pizza day.

You got straight As in math even thought you couldn’t imagine how it was relevant to, well, anything.

And then you were eleven.

E-leven. The boys were stronger, but you could still hold your own on the flag football team because you were a foot taller and ran like a cheetah. Boys were noisy and loud and gross, demanding the teacher’s attention and wiping their noses on the inside of their elbows, and life was way better when you circled up with the girls in solidarity and sniped out stiletto barbs that could cleave a life in two.

And then you were 15 and nothing made sense.

A yearning something yanked you into imperfect friendships and furtive dalliances. You excelled and failed in equal measure, wished people expected more of you and loathed yourself when they asked for more than you could give.

At 17 the yearning something transformed into direction, flanked equally by doubt and desire. You found your activism and your g-spot almost simultaneously, and for a moment, one excruciating moment, you considered raising chickens, throwing pottery, writing like Jane Austen and birthing babies like you might flip pancakes.

Somewhere in your late 20s, after the B.A. and the Master’s and the year in Costa Rica counting turtles and the job coup of a lifetime, you ran into yourself at an intersection. You had your feet on the ladder, a ring of promise on your finger and endless eggs cueing up to nest in your belly. The light turned green and you gunned it.

You knew you could do it all.

You’d been doing it all since you learned to walk. Promotion lead to partnership, and partnership lead to authority and in between the meetings and the diapers and the arguments and the invitations and the accolades, you realized your weekends with loved ones were spent shopping for cake mixes and power tools and suddenly you’re 43 and just like 15, not one thing makes sense, and your Jane Austen self sits on the curb where you left her, waving at you.

“Who am I?” You Ask

You’re Jane Doe, the CEO of everything, and nothing’s wrong. You’re in the right place at the right time for the right reason. And babe, it’s time to get your life back.

It’s no wonder we women find ourselves here. Even if we were blessed with parents and mentors who helped us discover and navigate the sweet waters of purpose-filled living, we have been aided and abetted by our culture. A culture that doesn’t much understand pause and reflection and stepping away from the madding crowd. A culture that still struggles to come to grips with equality and feminine leadership; a culture that is still fearful of the power of women. And sometimes we’re the last to know.

Navigating the Pivot Points

No matter if you’re household executives or house keepers, freelancers or entrepreneurs, cubicle expats or c-suite brainiacs, or a micro business owner raising goats and selling vegetables in the market in Kenya, we all reach at least one pivot point in our lives in which we question who we are and what our lives are missing.

How well we navigate this passage depends on our willingness to give ourselves what we need. To pause and reinvent. To open our mouths and ask for what we want. To recognize that everything is a negotiation and we’ve been doing it since we were born.

And We’re Good at It

But because we’ve been socialized to be nice and accommodating and selfless and giving; and because we’ve been trained to modulate our voices (read suppress) lest we be found bitchy, strident, bossy or mannish; because men approach negotiation factually and women approach it emotionally, we do our best to avoid it all together. We resist learning and training in the subject of negotiation because we compare ourselves to the way men do things and tell ourselves we can’t compete.

Getting the Keys to the Castle

What this all means is that we have to start where we are and become more like ourselves, not less. We have to know what we value, and in turn we must learn to bend toward our intrinsic values in all relationships—work, family, community, neighbors, etc. As we begin to consciously live from our value(s) we naturally begin to make choices that express our value in the world, and in the work we do everyday. We’ve built the scaffolding for asking for what we want, and we’re beginning to notice negotiation opportunities everywhere.

It’s here, at this point, we find the keys to the castle and begin the process of transformation. It’s here that we finally see that negotiation is just a conversation. A conversation leading to agreement. A conversation leading to a different world. And it all started by talking to and negotiating with yourself.

So Jane Doe, as you unravel the who am I now question, it might be a good idea to let yourself off the hook for landing here, right now, with a big question mark on your forehead. Give yourself a break for having a philosophical moment, a pragmatic pause. Forgive yourself for dithering in quicksand. You didn’t get here because of some fundamental flaw in your nature. You got here because you’re awake, and listening, and ready to shift the balance in your life. Your whole life.

Seven Actions for Becoming More Like Yourself in 2012

1. Create 5 Daily Practices. One for self nourishment; one business or career-enhancing strategy; one thing you want to learn, one behavior you want to replace with another, better one; and one core value you'll be mindful of daily to underpin your agreements in 2012.
2. Say no to most everything that doesn’t connect to #1.
3. Ask for help. As soon as you hit a roadblock, or ask yourself the question that begins with, “How do I…” ask for help. Get direction. Hire a coach.
4. Learn the grammar of negotiation so you can understand and strategically repeat what you’re already good at: having conversations that lead to agreement. You know where to go for that.
5. Start a mastermind group for the purpose of putting #1 in action. Here's a great guide to getting started.
6. Implement daily productivity habits to keep your practices front and center. You need to keep your busyness temperature low, and your delegating and collaborating temperature high. If you need a resource for that, my absolute favorite productivity Diva is Sara Caputo of Radiant Organizing and she has a fabulous ebook worth every penny.
7. Choose the life you have. The only way to keep your agreements with yourself and make major shifts is to choose your imperfections and flaws—and choose to regard them as highly as you do your values and strengths. You are a complete package, as is, right now.

Be more like yourself in 2012, and you'll like yourself more.

You can get ahead of the curve and put all seven actions in action by joining The Daily Thrive learning community—a new project of She Negotiates for high achieving busy women who want results. Daily Blasts of learning with coaching and feedback from experts. Launches January 30, so get on the mailing list to get the details and special perks.

Get Ready for 2012 and The Daily Thrive

As we come to the close of 2011 and grateful that we're once again able to clear the decks and hit the re-set button on our lives, we've developed something special to bring your 2012 into focus and year-long accountability:

The Daily Thrive Launches January 30!

The Daily Thrive grew out of our negotiation courses, and the persistent set of wishes and concerns our students voiced, so we decided to find a way to answer those questions.

We gathered our collaborators—all accomplished women and experts in their fields—and together we've been working for over a year to design and deliver a learning experience that meets the needs of high achieving, busy women like you.

We'll answer questions like:

• How can I get more productive, increase my income and carve out time for savoring my life?
• It’s one thing to ask for a raise, but how do I turn around and put the brakes on my spending habits?
• How do I reliably manage my work flow, and track and handle the mountain of daily to-dos and emails?
• How do I overcome my resistance to networking, leverage my social capital and put my leadership goals in action?
• How do I translate my success into something that impacts the world in a meaningful way?
• How do I learn to say yes to the things I value and no the things I don’t?
• How do I nourish me? How do I do me?

If you’re asking those questions too, you’re in the right place because we’re going to give you the goods, the learning, and the support in a way that won’t suck up your precious time and energy.

The difference is, this time, you’re going to do it.

The Daily Thrive is carefully curated actionable learning in negotiation, balance, productivity, money therapy, everyday technology and nourishment. Every day you’ll get one tiny blast of learning to your inbox. That same blast will be posted online in The Daily Thrive for you to comment on, and connect with everyone else in the Daily Thrive Tribe.

This is where we’ll be too, your experts, standing by to give you coaching, a nudge, a high five, and to help you lock in your accountability.

We like to think of The Daily Thrive as an adult, women-only study hall with the occasional kick in the pants.

We also have a selection of jam sessions or self study courses you can do in your pjs, plus specially curated forums designed to connect you up, boost your leadership, promote your work, perfect your pitch, and put your priorities and goals in serious action.

And every other month, we’ll host tele-classes, what we call Ten Buck Talks, with special guest experts on topics like raising venture capital, building social capital, sponsoring and mentorship, entrepreneurship and fee setting, feminism, leadership and spirituality.

And we’re going to give half of the proceeds of every ten buck talk to an organization whose mission is to forward the wellbeing of women and girls around the world.

It’s all advertising free, no hype, no selling. Promise. 

We’re going to cover female ground zero here women, and you're goint to learn it, do it and thrive.

Please follow this link over to The Daily Thrive to get on our mailing list so we can send you the join link on January 30—and learn about our special perks! 

Something Intuitively Delicious for December

Right smack in the middle of the most festive month of the year is an opportunity to do something delicious for yourselves that will carry you through the holidays and into 2012 with direction and ease.

My good friend and colleague Paula Gregorowicz is hosting The 12 Transformative Days of Intuitive Intelligence™ starting December 1. She wants you to be her guest as she brings together eleven leading experts from North America to learn about how to breakthrough the struggle to greater freedom and far more satisfying results  (and yours truly is one of these leading experts!).

On December 9, I will be leading a session called, "Peace Treaties and Toilet Seats." It's a gift you can give yourself for the holidays to learn a simple, repeatable process for having conversations that lead to agreement, from the dining room to the conference room. I will guide you through a 10-step process for discovering the hidden interests in all conversations (negotiations), how to employ diagnostic questions to seek mutual understanding, and how to use brainstorming to move past impasse and reach agreement.

Here’s more in Paula’s own words about what you can expect to receive from this event….

Like you, I have struggled with making the right choices along my path. In fact I spent years dying on the vine in a corporate career that did not fit who I was; trying to pretend to be someone I was not in order to gain other’s approval and be successful. The problem with this path was that in the quest to feel validated and chase after someone else’s definition of success, I lost myself. I lost touch with what was really special about me.  The very purpose I was put on the planet to live and the reason why I was gifted with my own unique passions, talents, and ways of being in the world. Something was missing and while I appeared successful, confident, and put-together on the outside, on the inside it pained me deeply. I learned how to access and listen to my natural gift of intuition. I deepened my trust in this gift and it has made all the difference. While it didn’t always “make sense” it always pointed to the wise next step.  This is what I want for you too.”

Intuitive Intelligence™ is about harnessing the power of your intuition and your intelligence for exponentially richer experiences and greater results.

This is why Paula has personally hand-picked leading experts from North America to help you in activating your own Intuitive Intelligence™ in all areas of your life and business.  For the first-time ever this powerful group will be together, coming to you live via phone over the course of 2 weeks to share with you their expertise in everything from soul’s purpose to health/weight loss to attracting clients to boosting your bottom line to deepening your intuitive gifts. 

The collective energy created by all of us joining forces over a short period of time will literally move mountains – for you personally and for the world, frankly. Because everything you are and everything you do has a ripple effect. 

The whole summit is only $97—and that's what, $8 per class? So grab your comfy virtual chair here and enjoy.

 

You Have to Be Just a Little Bit Stupid to Negotiate

Reposted from Forbes Woman.

What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong. -- Robin Williams

We tell you to research and prepare, know what you want, get a handle on your bottom line, plan your concessions in advance, and to sit down at the negotiation table ready to anchor high and have a conversation leading to agreement. And we mean it.

We can design an app for that. We can probably find a robot to walk us through the paces of any negotiation, but when beautiful, fallible human beings gather to get a little, give a little, there comes a moment when all bets are off, and the planning goes out the window. If we’re lucky, the whole conversation flows and ebbs and banks and turns, and thanks to the rudder of your intention, everybody walks away happy. Maybe a little wet, but happy.

But you’ve got to be just a little bit stupid to negotiate well.

Negotiation is improvisation, and improv (and theatre) requires a certain stupidity. An empty-headed flexibility. And curiosity-fueled possibility seeking.

The rules of improv are simple: say yes, and add information. Just like any sport or craft or art or profession, practitioners spend a lot of time in rehearsal saying yes, adding information, falling on their faces and getting up and doing it again. But they aren’t always rehearsing outcomes, they’re exercising the muscles of possibility toward an intended, yet uncertain goal. They’re exercising their stupidity.

An uncertain goal? Even if you plan your moves in advance, and get mostly what you intended to get from your conversation, every negotiation has an element of the unexpected. You got a 10 percent raise and an extra week of vacation instead of a 20 percent raise. Instead of a holiday cruise away from in-laws, you’re cruising up the 101 to visit both sets of relatives. Instead of six weeks to design a new project with your team of 10, you get three months with a team of four.

You flub a line, skip a cue and you better be able to improvise or the whole play might end after the first act.

People who like control, certainty and prescribed, tidy boxes will need, well, let’s say much more rehearsal. More wrangling. More concessions. More open-ended questions. But when the curtain comes down, you will hear the applause of exceeded expectations, preserved relationships, happier employees, and thrilled clients.

Stefan Mumaw, a writer over at Parse, a project of How Design, describes the beauty of stupidity this way in his post Walk in Stupid:

In the London office of ad giant Wieden + Kennedy, folks are greeted by an unusual doorman: a mannequin in a pin-stripped business suit carrying a briefcase. Two key oddities are immediately recognized within the manly figure. First, his head has been replaced by a blender. Second, his black leather briefcase is emblazoned with bright pink letters, formed into an easy-to-say-but-hard-to-do encouragement to those who call these creativity-laced hallways their home: Walk in stupid every morning.

The directive’s genesis can be found in Dan Wieden’s own philosophy about innovation and culture, “Sometimes it seems that if you’re never lost you’re never going to wind up any place new.” The phenomenon that Wieden is referencing here is what I like to call Creative Cluelessness, that endearing quality that emerges when folks undertake a creative challenge that they simply have no process to define. It’s a wonderful experience, one full of innocence and joy. But it’s also full of education, which makes it so hard to repeat.

Learning the rules and strategies and tactics of negotiation is relatively easy. Practicing them toward a flawless performance is not the goal. Practice is the goal, and over time, the experience will be perfection.

Take the first step toward negotiation stupidity by signing up for our Tuesday Muse here. Fabulously sensible tips, tools and invitations in one tiny blast. To thank you for your precious time, we’ll give you a slice of our training to help you source and research your right value.

Are You Making Concessions or Confessions in Your Annual Review?

 by Lisa Gates. Originally posted at Forbes Woman.

Jane Doe is at it again. She learned the hard way that making concessions without proper planning—and reciprocity—is like confessing your weaknesses to a wolf.

Jane Doe landed her job as publications manager for large, publicly traded corporation. She’d had a string of editing and writing jobs mostly tucked inside the administrative assistant level, and decided it was time to up her game.

• She nailed her title. She came in mid range between the company’s opening offer and her researched value in the marketplace. Good.
• She asked for telecommuting options to have uninterrupted editing time, and to be productive on days when one of her three children were sick and got it. Great.
• She even convinced her soon-to-be boss that paying for her MBA in year two of her employment would create long-term value for both her and the company. Score.

Almost a year passes and she’s produced more slick content than BP, her workshops and training manuals rock, sales are up, the department is raging busy, and in her annual review, her boss is pissy.

Jane Doe—A secretary with benefits?

The meeting. It seems that “mistakes were made.” A couple of costly errors that required do-overs. Add to that her boss believes the rumors that she’s abusing her telecommuting arrangement and now claims that it was a “mum” arrangement not to be disclosed to her coworkers. In fact, he says, “everyone’s talking about your ‘time off’ and asking for similar benefits,” and claiming that he told her disclosing their arrangement was a fire-able offense. So he nixed the arrangement.

The crown jewel of the whole debacle was that she needed to understand that she was "a manager and not in management." In other words, you’re still a secretary with benefits.

Here’s where things went from bad to worse. When the discussion turned to salary, she made concessions that were more like confessions of wrongdoing. When they moved into the discussion about a raise, he said, “I can’t justify giving you a raise this year. And given the level of work we’re producing, you’re going to have to table enrolling in the MBA, probably indefinitely. And you can forget about telecommuting—it’s ruining morale around here.”

And Jane’s response? “I understand. I half expected as much.”

Fail.

Fail, yes. But why? As we’re fond of saying, every accusation is a cry for help. Jane failed to realize that her boss’s venting was an opportunity to understand the complete story of his frustration and use the moment to solve problems—to take responsibility, offer solutions, make concessions, and demand reciprocity. She failed to manage up. To lead.

She also failed to see that her boss was using her as a doormat for issues, some of which were occluded and very likely beyond even her boss’s control. There was an elephant in the room and both were pretending it wasn’t there.

Here’s how the script could have been written:

JANE: I am so sorry about the costly mistake. I understand how frustrating it is—for both of us. To be fair, that mistake was less than 3 percent of the project budget, and I’d like to offer a solution so that we don’t get into this bind again.

BOSS: I’m not spending dime one on a so-called solution.

JANE: Right. I understand. I have some detailed solutions in this proposal. One element of the proposal is that when we’re at the final edit, I’d like to take the manuscript home and work without interruption, while also getting Dave and Joe into the production process earlier on to handle the sales and administrative details.

BOSS: Look, your title might say “manager” but you’re not management and I can’t have my guys working for you. It’s bad for morale.

JANE: I’d like to offer a different perspective here. Dave and Joe and I work really well as a team, and they’re just as frustrated as we are.

BOSS: They’re frustrated because you’re the only one in the building with a telecommuting agreement.

JANE: I understand the gossip might make it look like that. If we were to be transparent and disclose how and why it works, we’d get buy in from everybody.

BOSS: And then I’d have everyone asking to work from home. No can do.

JANE: I have some research here you might find incredibly valuable about the benefits of flexwork with several case studies about the impact on morale and productivity.

BOSS: The guys don’t need it, and it makes it look like special treatment for an admin role.

JANE: But writing and project management are not admin skills. The more you see the work I do as secretarial, the more it hurts you—and the value of our department. If you want to meet and exceed our sales targets, use the best of my skills where they matter most—and that goes for Dave and Joe too. They are under utilized as well.

BOSS: I’m sorry. Telecommuting is off the table.

JANE: I’m willing to forego flexwork for say three months if you’re willing to support my ideas for re-structuring the work flow with the whole team. If my solutions don’t create the results you want, I’ll be happy to take it off the table permanently.

BOSS: I can live with that. I don’t like it, but I can live with that.

JANE: I’d also be willing to table my raise discussion for three months so we can evaluate my worth as a manager accurately.

BOSS: We can take a look. I won’t guarantee a raise, but I’m open to the conversation.

JANE: With all due respect, the guys don’t have any issues with my role or my ideas. Why do you?

BOSS: Okay. Let’s talk turkey. And you better keep this under your hat. You’re one of the best hires I’ve ever made and things are changing faster than any of us had imagined. I don’t want to lose you to someone up the chain.

JANE: Got it. I’m happy you have my back. It’s the risk we take by managing well, and up. Isn’t it?

BOSS: Get outta here.

Yes, we’ve got some gender issues going on in this scenario, but rather than be undone by them, and Jane took the high road. She focused on the big picture. Sometimes it takes incredible patience and strength to stay at the table until you get at the elephant. Making confessions in place of creative solutions, and concessions without reciprocity not only weakens your future options, it undermines your leadership capacity.

Take the first step toward being a courageous and effective leader and negotiator by signing up for our Tuesday Muse here. Fabulously sensible tips, tools and invitations in one tiny blast. To thank you for your precious time, we’ll give you a slice of our training to help you source and research your right value.

Get Real and Negotiate the Money Value of Your Time

So you're an entrepreneur with a lot of time and a little money. You're making an hourly consulting rate of say $200. To produce that $200 let's say you have an hour of prep and an hour of follow up. Add to that the time and money it took to land that consulting hour (networking, phone calls, lunches, writing and designing collateral materials, printing costs) and the infrastructure costs (office, equipment, website and other technology costs).

Let's also factor in time spent cleaning your house, doing laundry, running errands, cooking dinner, as well as surfing the web, tweeting, facebooking and all the other absolutely necessary non-work work you must do.

you can see where this is going, right?

That $200 is auguring downward rapidly into the negative side of the equation and we haven't factored in taxes. And let's say for practical purposes you're at zero. All the money earned is being spent.

You couldn't possibly hire an assistant, right? Given all of the above, how would you pay for one? And even if you could pay for a housekeeper or a gardener, how can you justify doing so given your current zero budget?

playing with the numbers:

• A $20/hour housekeeper will free up 3 hours a week: $60
• A $10/hour social media marketing intern from your local community college will free up 5 hours a week: $50
• A $10/hour neighborhood kid to mow your lawn will free up 2 hours a week: $20

For $130 a week, you've just freed up 10 hours of possible consulting work. To be conservative, let's say you can realistically generate 5 consulting hours, or $1,000 per week, minus your new expenses. That translates to $870.

time to negotiate with yourself...

• What activities predictably result in generating new clients?
• What activities are a complete waste of time?
• Are you really the best person for the job?
• What activities must you hire out for, or give up entirely, to create the space for more money?

and here's the kicker: 

Do you know the value of your services in the hands of your market? (Translation: raise your fees!)

How many of you have the covers pulled up over your head right now?

Don't waste your time and money. Get our weekly newsletter, the Tuesday Muse HERE. Tips, tools and invites in one tiny blast.

Yes Women, You Should Be Negotiating with Your Friends

Never negotiate with your friends, say the negotiation experts. 

That’s all well and good for men, but we women tend to make friends of our business colleagues, clients and contacts. We also have dozens to hundreds of people in the friendship garden that we’ve been tending since elementary school. Many of our friends have achieved success and many others have developed unique talents by way of which they produce terrific products or provide dynamite services. And they have friends engaged in all manner of work, some of whom it would be helpful for us to know. All of these people are potential sources of business, goods and services that we want or need.

If we women didn’t negotiate with our friends, we would have very few people with whom to negotiate. This might very well account for a significant portion of the wage and income gap. The reluctance to benefit ourselves in any transaction is particularly acute with friends.

So what are we to do? Should we just give up and learn to live within our diminished means? Or should we add the power of interest-based negotiation to our other assets to play a larger role in politics, culture, society and, yes, the economy?

Because you’re in this course you’ve already decided that you want negotiation tools in your garden. But what happens when you want to dig a few tubers growing outside your sister’s house? What to do?

Use women-specific collaborative interest-based bargaining techniques (yes, you’re allowed to share them with men so long as they’re wearing the secret decoder ring!). 

FRIENDS LIVE IN THE NEGOTIATION “GOLDILOCKS” ZONE

If negotiations with friends result in outcomes that are not too big and not too little but just right – that means their bargained-for outcomes are in the Goldilocks Zone. Why would we not negotiate with them? If you’re a lawyer and have a friend in business, why would you not want her to get the best legal advice at the most reasonable price possible and why would she not want to give you her business because she knows you’re going to make her look good.

The research on friends negotiating gives us an extra incentive to be of benefit to our friends in business. You already know the good, the bad and the ugly about your friend’s workplace issues. You know just what outcome she needs at just what price. You know the ways in which she needs to look good to obtain the promotion she’s been angling for since last summer. She knows that your book of business needs enlarging if you are to achieve your goal of making equity partner next year. She also knows that you need to be getting the type of work from the type of company she has available – a copyright action brought by and against two Fortune 50 companies.

The women we teach fear negotiating with friends because they believe they’ll be too nice and suffer harm in their business or too grudging and suffer harm in their friendship. This, however, is not a business problem but a conflict resolution issue.

If you can’t be honest with your best friend, the friendship needs work. And if you’d sell a friend out for a few extra dollars, your soul needs tending. If you’re worried for those reasons, it’s time you start practicing more integrity with people close enough to you that you can try and fail, apologize and make amends and learn something extremely valuable in the process. 

GUIDELINES FOR NEGOTIATION

You’ll notice that these nine guidelines are the same guidelines you would use in any negotiation, business or personal. Your values of patience, creativity and commitment to reaching agreement will give you the foundation and confidence to stay the course.

1. Establish connection and set the tone.
2. Raise the subject of negotiation.
3. Put all items to be discussed on the table.
4. Make sure all stakeholders are present.
5. Make an opening offer that provides a benefit to your partner.
6. Tell your partner what you will do and how it will benefit them.
7. Meet flat refusal with brainstorming and problem solving (more diagnostic questions).
8. Log Roll: exchange things of value. (Something of low value/cost to you may be of high value to your partner.)
9. Close the conversation (take a break or seal the deal).

And here's a great little video from Beach Walks TV about why you should not immediately discount the value of your work because you're negotiating with a friend, but rather provide your friend with your best work at a fair price and thereby preserve your relationship and avoid resentment. 

Teaching People How You Want to be Treated

Let’s say you’re a consultant and a speaker and you’re talking with someone in an organization who wants to engage you for a presentation. You say yes, they say great, you say your fee is $4,000 and they say they have no budget for speakers.

Gloria Feldt is a feminist activist and speaker and author of  No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power. She responds to those who say they can’t pay her fee with this:

I am asked to speak constantly. And I love it. I'm very passionate and committed to this cause. And, I do charge for my speaking engagements. Just as you may have no budget for speakers, I have no budget if I am not paid to speak.

Gloria’s response demonstrates how she wants to be treated. Respected. Honored. And paid. And it’s not the end of the conversation, but the new beginning.

Because of the perplexing fact that many women’s organizations, even those prestigious ones we won’t name here, have a stated policy against paying their speakers, it is vital that we convey our dismay and look for ways to change the status quo.

For those of us who are working for the advancement of women in any capacity, it’s also imperative to identify the elephant in the living room:

Victoria and I might say, “I’d like you to consider revising your policy. How can we walk the talk if we, whose mission it is to train women how to negotiate in an effort to close the wage and leadership gaps, cannot open the door for ourselves? If we are to achieve equity in our lifetime, we need to model it at every opportunity, and so do you.”

It’s bold, imperative, and tells the world how you want to be treated, and how your bargaining partner should also want to be treated.

So let’s get practical. Here are some diagnostic questions that might help you move the conversation forward, equitably:

• Would it be helpful to brainstorms way in which I can meet your needs and you might be able to meet mine?
• What is your budget for this event?
• How might we engage your donors or sponsors to hnor their commitment to you by carrying the expense for my talk?
• If you could have me as your keynote as well as a breakout session, would that sweeten the pot for you and your sponsors?
• What if you were to split the payment in two or three chunks, would that be helpful?

Where are you trading working for living for working for free?

We make going for it easy. Sign up for our Tuesday Muse here. Fabulously sensible tips, tools and invitations in one tiny blast. To thank you for your precious time, we’ll give you a slice of our negotiation training to help you source and research your right value.

Why Everything Apple Equals Love (Repost)

By Lisa Gates ... Reposted from our Forbes Woman blog.

This might sound crazy, but I have a theory/opinion that love is the most desired outcome of negotiation. Successfully negotiating a contract, a new client relationship, a new car, the destination for your next family vacation, a brand relationship between a product and an athlete, a promotion—all demonstrate love as the primary driving force.

Sure, we work for money, we drive our cars in gridlocked traffic for hours, and we endure crushing amounts of intricate and numbing detail to execute contracts. But the reason we negotiate for a raise or a new BMW is the same reason we might flirt with a guy on the train: ultimately, we want to find ways to have and express love.

Not only do we look cool in our BMW, but when we park it in the driveway and walk in the door, we’re grateful the expensive little beast brought us home to our family, even if it’s a TV dinner night followed by homework squabbling.

Stay with me, because this is really all about Apple and two “little guy” stories that illustrate my theory.

We love our brands. I love Via Spiga shoes, but for me they don’t inspire the same adoration that Apple everything engenders. Apple makes people better negotiators because they make people want to negotiate. When you love something, you’ll negotiate like a ninja to get it.

It was the auspicious year of 1984 when Apple’s infamous Superbowl ad ran and  I got my first Mac. An actor friend low on cash needed to sell his brand new love for $300 to finance his move to New York in search of fame. I was doing temp work and theatre at the time and $300 bucks was a lot of money. But of course, I fell in love with the idea of having the coolest little box of possibility, so I negotiated paying my friend $100 a week for three weeks.

Thanks Steve Jobs for providing the tool that financed his dream and gave me the tool to write my first one-person show. More love.

Judy Goldstein is another actor friend who successfully negotiated through a frustrating tech repair for her MacBook back in 2009. Judy works for Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre Program called “CareActors” in Los Angeles and she loves her job just about as much as he loves her MacBook. Indeed she couldn’t do life without both.

When she went to a local Apple authorized repair shop to deal with an overheating problem, the tech guy told her that since she’d “used a coin to unlock the battery” (as directed) and because not only did the battery pop out but so did the piece that unlocks it, she’d have to get warranty approval from Apple. Apple declined to repair it under the warranty due to Judy’s “fiddling.”

Judy, being tenacious, went up the tech food chain and found the buck-stops-here guy who also denied her claim and declared that he was “the final word.” After using the f-bomb and determined to find a solution, she did what any savvy 21st century human would. She asked Google to give her Steve Jobs email.

sjobs@apple.com

And Steve being Steve responded by asking his proxy to handle the repair. Not only did she get her MacBook repaired for free, Steve’s proxy called her a week later to see if she was happy.

And then Judy did what any 21st Century human in love with all-things-Apple would do. She sent a follow-up love letter to Steve:

“This letter is to commend Matthew Klinksick who was a tremendous help to me. After I sent an email to Mr. Jobs, I received a call from Matt who took care of my problem immediately. He followed up with me after my MacBook was repaired and made sure that I have his phone number should I need anything in the future. His actions and quick response changed the situation from Apple losing a 15-year customer to Apple gaining a customer for life.”

So, the rumors were true. Steve was the final word at Apple, the company all about love. Rest in peace, Steve.

Take the first step toward love by signing up for our Tuesday Muse here. Fabulously sensible tips, tools and invitations in one tiny blast. To thank you for your precious time, we’ll give you a slice of our negotiation training to help you source and research your right value.

Mindreading as a Negotiation Strategy

When we're asking for something we want, like a toilet seat in the down position, or a day completely to ourselves on the weekend, or a seat at the table to brainstorm a new project at work, sometimes we resort to mind reading to come in sideways about what we want.

The conversation goes like this:

A: I know you already have your team assembled, and I know you prefer to work with engineers initially, but I'd like to talk about the first meeting for the new project startup.

B: Sure.

A: You're probably thinking I'm a little late to ask to be included, but I really think you're missing a valuable voice in the discussion by not having anyone from marketing at the table.

B: What makes you think we're not? We're just getting started putting the team together.

A: Oh, I didn't know that. I'm really intrigued by the project. What are your needs?

Good question, Ms. A. Good Save...

Most of us are doing our best to figure out how play strong in the disrupt-to-innovate 21st Century. Go easy on yourself--it wasn't easy growing up in the industrial revolution. We all learned that if we were going to raise our hand in school, we better know the answer, or laughter and derision would certainly follow. The result? Our curiosity gene got flattened. To rekindle our curiosity we have to shed our old school habit of knowing absolutely everything even when we don't know much of anything.

In the place of judgment and assumption (and even our intuition) we can practice cultivating a culture of curiosity by using the crown jewel of collaborative negotiation: Diagnostic Questions. Open-ended and full of possibility, they will get you past the word no, through stalled contract negotiations, stonewalling, yelling and confusion, and into problem solving.

We are living in exponential times. So here's a little worksheet to help you build that culture of curiosity in yourselves.

This post is from our weekly newsletter, The Tuesday Muse--fabulously sensible tips, tools and invitations in one tiny blast. Promise. Get it here.

Sometimes It's Just Not Possible to Have a Conversation Leading to Agreement

The Joker and Batman tell the story...

How to Negotiate Your Way into our Negotiation Course...

Sometimes the best way to learn something is to put the cart before the horse. So right now, we're inviting you to negotiate with us for our next 6-week online training course starting Monday, September 19.

If your wallet's a little thin, or you've been out of work for a while, or perhaps you're just back to work and in financial recovery, most likely paying $427 for our course is just not do-able.

We want to help you get what you want and what you're worth in all areas of your life, from your relationships to your bank balance, and all you have to do is ask. Make us an offer. The only hurdle you need to jump over is your resistance...and maybe skepticism.  

• What if they say NO?
• What if my offer is insulting?
• Ewww, negotiation is such a yucky word...
• What if it's just a gimmick?

Empowering women to be savvy askers is a not a gimmick. We are absolutely committed to ending the wage and power gaps, and we LOVE it when women ask for what they want before they know how to ask for what they want.

HOW TO NEGOTIATE YOUR WAY INTO OUR NEGOTIATION COURSE:

Talke a look at our course description for Asking For It: Reclaiming Your Power One Conversation at a Time. Then drop us an email at info@shenegotiates.com and ASK. Or post your offer in the comment box.

The Terribly Beautiful Trouble with Wanting and Asking

Reposted from ForbesWoman.

By Lisa Gates

"Pink Cadillac"Asking for stuff spells trouble. Terrible trouble. Think jobs, promotions, sabbaticals, a homemade cake for your birthday, a pink Cadillac, anything. The terrible trouble is that when ask for stuff, you will not only find yourself agreeing and committing to things, but you might be asked to reciprocate in some way. In other words, you will end up causing yourself to be responsible for the relationship you create by asking.

The question, “Will you marry me,” comes to mind. You ask, and suddenly you are committing to—and responsible for—purple taffeta for the bridesmaids and tighty-whitey Hanes in the laundry and in-law meddling and mewling infants and adolescent car wrecks and suddenly you’re 49 and cavorting at the Marriott like a female DSK and wondering, “How, how did I get here? This is not my beautiful life.”

Or you give your resume to Google. You put your hat in the ring for the Coordinator of Chaos, and they offer you $100K and you roll over with a “sounds great” (agreement) and shortly you realize your real title is “The Butt of Everything” (AKA “mom”) and you’re mad.

You could have just “let the days go by” with nary a desire, and all would be well. You’d be single, living in your condo or cardboard box, strumming your ukulele on the corner or working at Starbucks with no questions asked.

But sheez, you had to go and WANT something. Not only the thing itself, but also the stuff the thing comes with, like happiness, livelihood, respect and social capital.

Well. Hmmm. Our Buddhist friends will tell you that desire is the root of all pain. Paradoxically, our Buddhist friends also will tell you if you want to evolve, get in a relationship.

You see, asking, negotiating, requires relationship and consciousness—the two things that push our stasis buttons into quandary. That said, women are great at creating relationship, and we’re pretty darned willing to be conscious about them. Aware. Mindful of the needs of others.

So what we’re talking about here is the kind of asking that requires you to give as good as you get, and that’s what interest-based negotiation is all about. It’s the kind of asking that thrives on reciprocity and relationship. And it puts your collective wants, needs, desires, preferences and, yes, dreams in the center of a big buffet table of possibility. Together, you and your negotiation partner, sit down to feast on the choices that make you both immensely happy.

You could wend your way through life never really asking for a thing. You could avoid asking your spouse for one holiday without the in-laws. You could avoid the terrible pain of asking Google to review your title and salary. But resentment just isn’t your style. Happiness is.

So girl up and start wanting.

(And learn how to ask before it's too late, here.)