Jan 6 2024

How to earn what you're worth in 2024

This should take: 4 minutes

Hi.
This one is about how to build a strategy and habit of advocating for yourself this year.

Who doesn't want to earn more this year? Raise your hand.

Hand not raised? Okay, take a minute to skim this and then dig in.

I want to give you 2 actionable steps to moving forward on the goal of advocating for yourself more this year.

• How to arm yourself with strategy
• How to create some small wins so you're motivated
• Then make a plan for change

Let's start with figuring out why you aren't where you want to be (yet!)

Hard truth: There's likely a part of you that doesn't believe you're worth it.

There's a part of you that also doesn't want to believe this. I know that's true for me. We all struggle with different things and I think the hardest part of writing out my goals for 2024 was coming up with the reasons why I haven't done X already.
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And it's likely not time, attention, or volition. It wasn't in my case.

1. You have to believe in yourself first.

Imposter syndrome is a real thing. And in a world where everyone posts their wins (but not so much their losses)... it's easy to get a distorted view of reality. It's normal to feel like you're behind the ball sometimes or that you are having to learn in real time while everyone else seems to know what they are doing.

The best way to gain confidence is preparing for your worst fears and building small wins. It's like tearing down the walls from the bottom up and the top down.
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I work with my clients and students to write down the things they are most afraid the other side will say or do, and then we have a strategy in place for each one. And we rehearse it. See step 2 for strategizing.
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Building up small wins is important because you can't just imagine being more confident and become so. Instead, start with implementing the new strategies in super low stakes situations. See step 3 for details.

2. Arm yourself with strategy

All the desire and belief in the world won't help if you don't have any idea of how to execute a simple ask.

The truth is that you need a way to change your behavior and some strategy is necessary.

The good news is that strategy for learning to negotiate or advocate for yourself is fairly easy to find. I put out a lot of it myself.

But beware... there's a lot of regurgitated drivel from the 80's that sounds like bad hype music. Things like:

It's not that this is specifically wrong... it's just often ineffective. Sure you can "show improvement" and "bring documentation" ... but is that how you think all the people ahead of you got ahead?

Instead, focus on influencing the person, rather than trying to change their mind with facts. Human's are emotional animals who think we are logical. Not vice versa.

If you want to dig more into strategy, here's a FREE 5-Day course on negotiating with your manager:

3. Create a small wins. Build on them.

Too often we only think of improving on our ability to ask when we are about to meet with our manager for the annual review.

Instead, find the places where practice is easy. This means choosing a strategy and implementing it in conversations with your friends, your partner, your family. It doesn't have to "be a negotiation" for you to get better with your words.

Here's an example to try: Try paraphrasing or summarizing what they say and direct the conversation with questions, rather than just parrying back and forth with your own thoughts. It's a crucial skill to building influence before a negotiation.

Instead of:

Try this:

Take the lessons from your strategy learnings and apply just one a day. Getting better is about putting in the reps.

See you next time...

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