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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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! 

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.