Tag Archives: Authenticity

Women negotiating

The 5 Cs to Authentic Negotiation

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Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the Vancouver Chapter of Lean In Canada on the topic Master the Art of Negotiating and Get the Yes! Vancouver Chapter President Florence Yeung neatly summarized the key points from my talk on her own Blog. Her article so nicely captures my five-point authentic negotiation model I am sharing it here in full, with Florence’s permission:

Can you use better negotiation skills?

I think all of us can. Most women are afraid of negotiating and are 2.5X more likely to feel anxious about it than men.

I recently attended an event where the guest speaker, Carrie Gallant, taught us the 5 C’s to negotiate authentically and found these tips to be helpful so I want to share it with our readers with Carrie’s permission.

CLARIFY TO AMPLIFY

Be clear about what it is you are negotiating about. Are both sides clear on what is at stake and what is being negotiated? Laying out a clear and focused foundation for the negotiation helps set the stage for a successful negotiation.

CONNECT TO PARTNER AND PROFIT

When we think of negotiation we often feel like it’s us against them, it’s a win-lose situation. What needs to change with your mindset is that negotiating can be a partnership. A true ‘win’ in negotiation is when both sides get the majority of what they want, not when both sides ‘meet in the middle’.

So connect with your partner and grow the pie bigger, through understanding their objectives, how they want to be treated, and truly listen to understand their needs.

COLLABORATE TO CREATE YES

It can be as simple as using language such as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in your conversation. Similar to the point above, you want to take a collaborative approach, how can you both get what you want and grow the pie bigger overall? You will need to get creative with your options and potential outcomes, but that is what negotiation is supposed to do, flesh out all the options that could work for both parties.

CRAFT THE CONVERSATION

The best approach to take is to be calm and assertive. Easier said than done of course, but if you put in the necessary prep work to think through every possible scenario, every possible question and potential answer from your negotiation partner, you are much more likely to achieve success.

Some tactics would be to consider your openers, building your questions strategy, testing assumptions, and when to make an offer (whoever makes the first offer places an anchor for the negotiation).

One tool that is often overlooked in negotiation is silence. After you make your offer, don’t be in a haste to jump in and justify your needs, just stay silent, and wait for the other party to respond. Silence is golden.

COMMIT AND CELEBRATE

The end of a negotiation is perceived to be the point when both parties shake hands, signaling that an agreement has been reached. However, in Carrie’s words, a sprinter doesn’t stop right at the finish line, their adrenaline takes them far beyond the finish line before they can come to a complete stop. Agreement is great, but now you need ‘commitment‘.

  • Who is going to do what?
  • When are they going to do it?
  • How are they going to do it?

You need to outline all the next steps that need to be actioned to get the ball rolling, THEN you can celebrate.

While we have outlined some of the key negotiation principles Carrie shared with us during the event, there are many benefits to schedule a one-on-one with a negotiation expert like Carrie. They can help you built your negotiation strategy to get the most out of a salary negotiation, taking you further in your career.

Original article posted on Florence’s site at Pendulum Magazine.

If you’re looking to build your negotiation and influencing muscles, check out the E.A.R.N. Your Worth™ Leaders Lab online program.

Take a Holiday From Your Inner Critic

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Delighted to share this Guest Post from my friend and colleague, Tana Heminsley, over at Authentic Leadership Global.

This Holiday season, we invite you to step back from the sometimes frenetic pace of the visiting, the baking, the cooking, the shopping, and invite a little more ease and compassion into your space, into your inner world, into your relationship – with YourSELF.

One of the most insidious aspects of personality or ego that I’ve come across in my career as a coach, is the critical inner voice that hides deep within each of us. As distinct from our intuition, which is helpful in it’s guidance in our lives, Sarita Chawla, in this video shares how the inner critic can misguide us by keeping us small or holding us back.

It’s the inner voice that goes beyond constructive to be cruel and mean. It says “You’re not good enough”, “That was stupid”, “No one will like you” or “Work harder – you’re lazy”.

I think about the effects it’s having – on individuals, their families, their teams and organizations. And I imagine the possibility of a world where the mind naturally is kind in its orientation, rather than being naturally negatively oriented, as the author of Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hansen Ph.D., reminds us.

The inner critic, or the superego as described by A.H. Almaas in the workbook called “Working on the SuperEgo”, is a psychological construct – merely a thought.

It develops in our mind when we, as children, get a reaction where we feel shut down or shamed. It’s too painful for us to experience this reaction coming from others who love us, so we create a critical voice internally, “doing it” to ourselves first, which is less painful.

The Inner Critic feeds the individual and collective painbody and thus perpetuates negative energy in the world.  Eckhart Tolle talks about the unresolved, unhealed energy as the pain body in his blogpost in the Huffington Post (Eckhart Tolle, “Living in Presence with your emotional painbody”, Huffington Post, 10/6/2010.)

“There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “painbody,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.”

What can you do about it?  How can you take a holiday from your Inner Critic?

It’s totally possible and worth the investment of your time.

I’ve been aware of and actively engaging with my Inner Critic for the past 10 years and here are a few things I’ve found that help:

  1. Cultivate resiliency – it will help to keep your inner critic at bay. On the days I have had a good sleep, eaten the right foods to build my energy rather than drain it, done a short meditation practice to quiet my mind, I notice I have much more perspective and can notice and more easily let go of the critical voice.
  2. Stop the cycle – as quickly as you become aware of the messages when they arise, become aware of what it’s saying, how it feels, and then see it for what it is. It’s just a thought – one you can choose in the moment to let go of.
  3. Self-manage to choose a different thought – Byron Katie’s groundbreaking work on the inner critic, focuses on reframing in the moment using 4 simple questions:
    • Is it true?
    • Can you absolutely know it’s true?
    • How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
    • Who would you be without that thought?
  4. Find your own way to take a holiday from your inner critic – for some, it’s helpful to be compassionate with the voice, once they become aware of where it came from (well-meaning parents, teachers or others who influenced us). For others they need to scream at it inside their mind (and sometimes out loud if they are in a place where they can yell), for others it’s about laughing at it as they realize how it no longer fits with their quest to be their authentic or best self.
  5. Imagine what your life would be like without it – reflect on how much energy you spend on managing your inner critic currently. How different would your life be if you spent just 10% less time on it. What would you do (or not do) with that unleashed energy and time?
  6. Practice daily – talk to yourself like you talk to your best friend. It says it all. Be kinder to you and you’ll be kinder to others.

Imagine a world where we all let go of our inner critics more of the time – that’s the world I’m striving for.

Tana Heminsley

Tana is an executive and entrepreneur with a passion for building businesses and developing leaders. As the founder of Authentic Leadership Global, Inc. she supports authenticity and emotional intelligence as business differentiators for 21st century leaders. Tana is also the author of the recently published book “Awaken your Authentic Leadership – Lead with Inner Clarity and Purpose“