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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to Aspire. Today, we are continuing the Career Girls Guide. This series is all about giving you practical tools to navigate every stage of your career, from your first job to the biggest opportunity. Now, in this episode, we're covering all aspects of negotiation, one of the most important skills we use, but one of the least talked about.
Now, negotiation impacts how much we earn, how we're valued, and what opportunities we say yes or no to. And yet so many of us are taught to be grateful, patient and quiet instead of prepared. Now to help us break this down, I'm joined by someone who lives and breathes this work. Joining me today is Maury Terrapore, a negotiation expert professor at Wharton and author of Bring Yourself.
Maury has spent years teaching people how to negotiate with confidence and clarity. And today she's here to teach us. Before we get into the episode, please don't forget to like and subscribe. The Start With Yourself Tour kicks off on April 15th in New York City. Tickets are on sale now at emagreed.com.
So Maury, I am so happy to have you here today because I feel like this is probably the most requested episode subject that we could ever cover on this show. Every single woman that I speak to has some horror story in negotiation. And so when I went out to, you know, my followers, when I speak to my friends, they're like, please do me a favor and do an episode on negotiation.
I thought I'll go one better than that, which going to do just a series, a series that really ultimately should serve as, you know, a career woman's guide, a career girl's guide, as we would say on Aspire. And there is nobody better than you to talk to about negotiation. But it's true. It's true.
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Chapter 2: Why is negotiation considered a life skill rather than just a tactic?
I did my research. I called around. I was like, who really knows this? And honestly, your books have been so seminal, so incredible. I feel like they've really honestly helped so many women. Thank you. But I wanted to ask you, why do you believe that negotiation is a life skill that every woman ultimately needs? Yeah, first of all, you have no idea how thrilled I am to be here.
I think I have manifested you for sure.
Chapter 3: How does fear of rejection affect our ability to negotiate?
So I am grateful for all of that that you just mentioned. But it's really exciting to be here and have this conversation with you because we negotiate every single day. Yeah. Literally, from the time we were babies, we come into this world negotiating. And I think what's really interesting is that we have so much practice. We know so much because it's something that we practice every day.
And yet, as we go through life and we have negative experiences, people get divorces, people lose jobs, people have scars, whether it's childhood trauma, whatever it is, that we really start doubting our relationship with negotiations. We start doubting our own ability.
And so, you know, if this is something that we do every day and it connects people, it gives us voice, it gives us power, it gives us opportunity, it is an absolute necessary life skill. It's just that we start really fearing it and really account those negative experiences as being the story of We start counting ourselves out.
So it's like the thing, the skill you must have and the one that we start doubting ourselves the most with, even though we're actually quite experienced and really quite good negotiators.
Chapter 4: What challenges do people pleasers face in negotiations?
I couldn't agree more. How did you personally find yourself in this world of negotiation? I was graduating from the Wharton School and my negotiations professor my very last semester said, I think you should teach negotiations. And I was like, I think you're crazy. Yeah. I'm an introvert. The notion of standing in front of a classroom saying anything just scared the heck out of me.
And I really had to ask, what was it about me? Or what is it about... What do you see in me that makes you think I do this well? He said, one, you totally leaned into this class. I have a very competitive edge, by the way. But he said, and you took the mistakes that you made really seriously insofar as you learned from them. Growth was really important to you.
And I was an entrepreneur at the time. And he said, you've had so much experience. I think you'd be great. So the imposter syndrome thing set in. And I was like, no, I can't do this. And here I am 22 plus years later.
Chapter 5: How can we stop taking 'no' personally in negotiations?
And I found my purpose. How did you know that you had something and that you could help other people? To be honest, the first few years of teaching were really difficult insofar as I really doubted myself, my ability, right? When you do something you never imagined yourself doing. So I was very scripted. You know, I had the syllabus. I was like, I'm sticking to this no matter what.
And, you know, everything was like on time and presented in a certain way. Then I looked up one day, a couple of years later, I was like, this is not fun. And I don't know if I'm really fulfilling my duty to my students. I was teaching undergrads at Wharton at the time and I love them. And I felt such a sense of responsibility to them. I think it's such a privilege to do this.
So I said, yeah, you're going to try this one more time and you're going to do it your way. If that doesn't work, then this wasn't meant for you and this was a chapter and we move on.
And I remember as I prepared for that sort of semester coming up, I really looked inward and I thought about all the times I've negotiated in my life and what in particular negotiations meant to me and for me in my life. And I realized every big move, every big conversation, every big decision for good or for bad, they'd really come from a place of negotiations.
Every big decision I made, I'm one of those people who ruminates, unfortunately, to a fault sometimes. And that's a negotiation. Should I do this? Should I not do this?
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Chapter 6: Why is the biggest negotiation always with ourselves?
Why am I doing this? Should I do it this way? Maybe not. And those are all negotiations. And I really started understanding that the minute I reframed what I thought negotiations was to what it had been in my life, it brought me the sense of power and legitimacy and experience. And I trusted myself all of a sudden. I trusted my gut because I fed it.
I learned so much and I discounted all those things. I thought like negotiations was a transaction. Yeah. you know, maybe even combativeness. I thought no more negotiations was your power. Negotiations was the way you show up in the world and tell people what you want. And it's the way you fulfill a promise to yourself. Oh, I love that reframing.
You have to say that again for me, because I believe that so many people think that negotiations have to be combative. And if I look at the questions that were sent through to me, So many of them were anchored into this idea, like, how do I not do this and have an argument? Or how do I do it without seeming ungrateful?
So there's this kind of like double-edged sword that you're doing something that you shouldn't do.
Chapter 7: How does perception influence leverage in negotiations?
And it's got to come with either one of those outcomes. Right. So how are people going to know what you want and need if you don't talk about it? And if you don't, you can't present yourself to them in that way. So, you know, I really had to go again through all the different conversations I've had, all the examples of negotiations for me.
And that's when I realized like, this is the soundtrack of my life. We've done this forever. And it's funny when we're kids, I was talking about the fact that, you know, I don't have kids, but I've had enough experience around kids. And I know that, and I remember myself, it's like, I remember pictures of me in childhood and I was so sassy.
I showed up in a way that it was like, I was meant to be here. This is what I want. And you're going to have to make a really good argument as to why I can't have this, right? And at that point, nobody's ever told us you don't have a place at this table or you're not allowed to negotiate for this. We sort of walk in, show up, and show out. And that's who we are as kids. So we're courageous.
And then the other thing is that when we don't get what we want, we always want to know why. Oh, yes. So if somebody says no to a kid, it's not like it's personal humiliation. That's true.
Chapter 8: What strategies can help you ask for more without guilt?
you know? And we don't take it personally as kids. As kids, we think, you better have a good reason why you're saying no to me because I know the answer to this is eventually going to be yes. So how are we going to get there, right? And when we grow up through life and we hear, unfortunately, a lot of no's, and again, we have the bad experiences, right? Life sort of happened to us.
So what happens to us along the way? Because if we start out in a place where, you know, and I know this firsthand because I have four kids and they love to ask me, why not? So what happens to us that stops us from being able to self-advocate? We are judged first by society and then ourselves. Those no's start to leave scars. Mm-hmm. We really take, we internalize the no's.
And personal rejection is what we associate with the no's. And so I think that over time, instead of letting those no's become lessons, they become rejection. And again, the wounds, right? And then we don't let the scars heal. We start picking at them because we sit there and think, oh God, I should have. And why did I not? And all, again, the rumination.
And so what happens over time is that that lessens our ability to be courageous, but we also start internalizing and we start thinking less of ourselves, right? We don't give ourselves credit anymore. We don't really believe in ourselves anymore. And I got to tell you, you know, teaching this, I'm very confident in how I teach and what I teach.
But I always tell people is that if you can't be your own best advocate, there's really nothing I can do for you because that is your duty. That is your single most important duty to yourself in negotiations. Nobody is meant to take care of you. You're supposed to take care of yourself.
fearlessly and, you know, with great intention, because especially for those of us that are people pleasers, I don't know if that's where you are. I mean, absolutely not, not a bone, not a bone of pleasing in this body. And you're lucky. There's a lot of... It's funny, when I first wrote my book, I have a mentor who said, Maury, you will never know what chapter is going to be the most popular.
So don't start thinking you can figure that out. You let the audience decide. It was a chapter on people pleasers. Everybody's like, I'm a people pleaser. I didn't know this. This chapter was meant for me. Man, woman, whatever. Interesting. Yeah. And then when you are that person who's in service of other people... what you no longer are in service to yourself.
When you started this work, were you aware that there would be like a specifically female track when you start to think about negotiation? I think so then. I don't think that as much now because I think that anybody who considers themselves to be an other, anybody who doesn't feel like they have that seat at the table, and whether it's societal, whether it's parental, whether it's cultural,
I think that's sort of the same experiences that women have had forever, right? Very interesting. Yeah, quite right. And so though I speak to a lot of women, and I know that, of course, some of these things I've experienced through my own life, I do think that this notion of self-confidence, that's sort of the through line. right?
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