Forget Yes or No. Allow Yourself to Negotiate and See What Unfolds
This is the advice I wish someone had given me.
When I first started work, I was so happy to have a job it didn’t even occur to me that I could make changes. I took what was offered and, if it didn’t suit me, grumbled about it afterward. Or quit.
The same thing went with relationships. Early me was just so happy to be in a relationship, it didn’t even occur to me to negotiate to get the kind of relationship I wanted.
And don’t even get me started about family.
In all of the major areas of my life, I thought that what was offered was what I had to take. Life for me was like constantly being in a restaurant where I had to choose between the menu item with no substitutions or going hungry.
The end result of thinking in absolutes like this is that it ultimately saps your power.
It also makes you move around a lot
Sure, you can always leave if you don’t like what’s happening, but what if your didn’t have to?
I would like to say that I didn’t go through years misery before stumbling on this one small shift in thinking, but I’d be lying.
If you’re frustrated because you’re not getting what you want, stop for a second: Have you actually flat-out asked for it? If you haven’t, stop complaining. You can’t expect the world to read your mind. You have to put it out there, and sometimes putting it out there is as simple as just saying, “Hey, can I have that?”
— Sophia Amoruso —
It took me years to realize that I could ask for precisely what I want in life. And now I am finding, more often than not, I can get what I want — or some reasonably close version of it. It doesn’t have to be “Yes” or “No” — -It can be Yes, and…
One thing I love about millennials is so few of them make this mistake
The first turning point for me came when I was listening to friends complaining about the millennial staff they were dealing with.
“They just don’t want to work”, one friend said.
“No, it’s not just that,” another friend amended, “It’s that they want everything their way.”
And that’s the golden ticket.
Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is raise your standards…If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life you’ll find it easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve. Whatever happens, take responsibility.
— Tony Robbins —
The problem with the millennials is not that they’re selfish — it’s that non-millennials don’t see their behaviour as responsible. Yet it is.
To ask for the work/life style you want is to take full responsibility for the way you want to live. It’s a “yes, and” move.
We complain about the very thing we need to make our lives more manageable.
It’s not just about work — it’s about relationships too
I recall the first time a male friend of mine started talking about his desire to have multiple polyamorous relationships with women.
I kind laughed at him in my heart at first.
After all, isn’t that the player stereotype most single men in their twenties have to deal with? How would he get any woman to agree to that?
But I wasn’t actually listening to what my friend was saying. He was saying he wanted open, loving, caring relationships with multiple partners.
He got what he wanted, and I have never seen him happier.
And if the level of success he is experiencing is any measure, the women he is with are happy too.
Truth bomb— not everyone wants to live like a princess married to a prince. And maybe it’s about time we rethought the ending to our own fairy tales. I’m not saying to kill off the whole “happy ever after” myth, but maybe it’s not for everyone.
The first step to getting what you want is to have the courage to get rid of what you don’t.
— Zig Ziglar —
Even thinking about if this is what you want your relationship to be like will put you miles ahead of most others. Knowing what you want makes you way more likely to get it.
Relationships are hard work, and negotiation is one of the biggest skill sets that allow them to flourish.
This is especially true when you think about people in relationships as two separate people wanting to flourish as individuals while experiencing intimacy and love with another person.
What happens when you shift from a yes-or-no mindset to a yes+ mentality?
Your life starts to transform.
My first attempts at negotiating were awkward and uncomfortable. At the first sign of a no, I pulled back, almost apologizing for my brazenness.
Another challenge I didn’t anticipate was how hard it was to think about what I wanted.
As I write this, I think this may sound weird, but I had learned so well to think I didn’t have a choice, I stopped thinking about what I would choose if I did.
Because I had learned to accept the limits of my cage, it took me more work than I want to acknowledge to start to think about what life beyond the cage could be like.
But it is work worth doing.
Changing your mindset is a process. Start small. Practice big.
This technique is so simple a child can do it. It just requires a moment of thought. And a small shift in your consciousness.
Instead of agreeing or disagreeing to something, take a moment to think about what you want out of it.
Here’s some examples:
Your family wants you to visit over for the holiday. You want to see your family, but you are have too much work, and you don’t want to break your morning routines or the self care you have been working in to your life.
You say, “YES!” because you really do want to spend time with your family, “AND” then you start working out what you want that time to be like. Maybe you set a limit on the hours you will spend (I can be there from 5–7) or maybe you say I need quiet time from 7am –8am —( let’s meet for breakfast at 8:30am!).
Negotiation is about give and take.The trick going in is to know what you are willing to shift and what is non-negotiable.
Non-negotiables can range from getting in a workout and time to meditate, work on a project, or write to not being around your abusive aunt. The power to decide is yours.
With practice, I became more skilled at knowing what was non-negotiable, and better skilled at holding that ground so I could be flexible around matters that were less important to me (but maybe more important to others).
It’s not about winning or losing, it’s about finding the big win for both parties.
My greatest insight from changing my mindset is that it isn’t what I thought it would have been. I thought asking for what I wanted was selfish. It’s not. It’s being self aware.
What is more, this entire process makes you more aware of what others want from you as well.
This is straight from Stephen Covey. Learning to ask for what you want up front can not only save you a lot of heartache, but it also teaches you to see what others want and need from you.
Our greatest ability as humans is not to change the world; but to change ourselves. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
The Takeaway — three things you can do right now
- Dare to dream — I’m a fan of journalling, or finding a way of recording what you want your life to be like. It’s a good idea to do this at least once a year for all of the major categories of your life (work life, fitness, adventure, love, contribution…)
- Decide what your non-negotiable asks are (you have to be willing to walk away if you can’t make this work). You should also know these for your major areas, especially work, love relationships, friends and family.
- Start practicing. The best time to practice this is at the onset. It’s way easier to negotiate before you’ve started a job or a relationship than to try to change the rules mid-stream. It’s not that change isn’t possible later on, but if you have already accepted the terms, then you are asking people to change some things that work for them, and the obstacles to success are greater than if you walk in fresh with no precedent set.
