Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Today, we are talking about negotiation, asking for more money, bargaining, stating your worth. So let's real talk for a second. How many feel like when I say asking for money or asking for your worth or negotiating, it makes you a little bit nervous? Okay, you are not alone, so this course came about in kind of an interesting way, different than any other course and I just wanna briefly share that story with you, so last year, I was teaching a course to entrepreneurs. It was a four-week course and it was a big promise: zero to funding in four weeks, so me and some other instructors were providing all the lessons, and I was in charge of the people skills, so pitching, public speaking, talking to customers, interfacing with investors, the personal branding, the psychology of their branding, and by the end of the course, they were going to pitch five real investors who were gonna offer them offers, kind of like a real-life Shark Tank, which is a show that I love. So at the very last day,...

the competition day, there was one gentleman in our class and he was a complete dark horse; he kind of came from behind. He started off, he was really introverted, very technically brilliant; he was an engineer. He built this amazing app, and he had just made the most amazing deck; he really tapped into the why of the story. He pitched his heart out and he won. He got four of five investors to offer him money. I mean that was insane; we were hoping that one person would offer money to one person. So he got four or five investors and I'm proud mama bear. (audience chuckles) I'm like yes! I'm like crying, I'm like so excited for him and at the end, they walk into what I call a roomful of money. So a roomful of money is when you have something to sell that people really wanna buy. That's what I call a roomful of money. So he was about to walk into this roomful of money to suss out which investor he would go with, the negotiation, the terms of the deal. So off he goes, I'm like, oh, my work is done. I'm so excited, and afterwards, a couple of days go by 'cause he had to have followup meetings, I text him. I don't hear anything, call him, email him, nothing. Finally, I get a hold of him and he's like, "I lost it," and I was there was four offers. You couldn't have lost everyone and he was, "Every single one, they were great, the pitch was going "really well, and as soon as we starting talking "about the money, the deal terms, the nitty gritty," and he said, "the the back-and-forth it just died," that playing catch, which we're gonna talk about later. He's like, "The deal died, I lost every single one." And I was like, okay, okay, okay, we can fix this. We can fix this, so I realized in that moment that negotiation and specifically talking about money and that playing catch that happens is kind of a hidden people skill in a certain way. There's a very civic psychology to it in how it works, so I pulled together all of my personal tips and tricks for negotiating and then do a little dive into the research and I find, whoa, there is a lot of negotiation research out there, way more than I ever thought but no one is reading it; no one is reading it. No one is using it, so I pull it together. We offer a fifth bonus class for all those entrepreneurs who were in that little workshop with us. I go through it personally with him. I call up all the investors and I asked them, will you give one more shot? One of the investors agreed; he's like, "I'll come back in the right now and I'll do it again." He was able to renegotiate, he got a seed funding deal so it was like took a little bit, it took a little bit. We got him there and what it made me realize is there's this huge problem when we talk about negotiation of money, which is two things: one is we don't really think of negotiation as a skill, it sort of assumed that you'll kind of pick it up along the way, that if you're brilliant, if you're a good job candidate or you do really good work, that your clients are gonna be willing to pay for it or that someone will see it and then give you a raise or bonus as you are due. But actually, it doesn't usually work that way and what happens is we end up losing out. He almost lost this money that was on the table for him purely from somehow the mechanics or the psychology of how he was approaching the money. So my goal is to remedy this and make negotiation a skill a very learnable framework, specifically, and these are the three things that I'm going to be trying to push against for the next few hours. I do not think we're taught the skills and negotiation is a skill, talking about money is a skill set and we can learn it. I do believe it's that way; I don't think it's something that you can guess or learn by osmosis. Second, worth, so if we're gonna talk about money, we have to talk about worth and it's hard to separate out the mechanics of how to ask for money and the feelings of asking for what you're worth and valuing what you're worth, like those things go hand-in-hand, so I wanna both show you your worth, help you find it and also feel like how you talk about it in a humble, authentic way, so it doesn't feel like you're overly selling, that car salesmany technique and lastly, we do not just pick it up eventually. That's why you're here, at the end of this three hours, four hours with our bonus material, you will have this skill, it will be done. It was a framework that I think we can master. So no more anxiety about talking about money, no more hesitations, I want to make money something fun to talk about and I actually think that today, we can do it. I have over 100 pages' worth of activities. We're gonna be doing a lot of really interesting things that hopefully, you've never done before, and the way that I like to think about negotiation is actually gonna help us when we talk about how we pitch to clients, clients or bosses and by the way, when we talk about negotiation, this could be negotiating for a car, negotiating for a house, increasing your rates. It's the big and the small; they're same skills. There's two ways to think about negotiation and this is how I want you to start thinking about it for the people you're pitching with. Vitamins and painkillers, maybe you've heard this concept before, we're gonna be talking about a lot. So painkillers are those things that you want and need right away, if you have a headache, you're like, "I need an Advil now." You'll rip through your purse. You rip through (chuckles) every medicine cabinet to find that pill and you immediately take it. It's 'cause it's an instant need that you wanna have filled. So I want this course to be a painkiller. I want you to think about something in your life, everyone home watching, what is something immediately that you want to get done? So that could be: I have an interview. I have a raise, I wanna get a new client. I wanna raise my rates, I have a specific negotiation coming up, I wanna buy a car or house. Those are painkillers, immediate things that we can do. The other aspect of this is the vitamin, the good for yous, right, so vitamins, we're not nearly as desperate to take our vitamins, right? We're like, oh, I really should take that calcium pill. I really should, and we have it out on our kitchen counter and when we're feeling bored or like we're listening to NPR, we open it up and pop one. (audience chuckling) Right, it's like that's how I take my vitamins. So this is also a vitamin course, so if you're watching and you don't necessarily have something really specific coming up, that is okay too. I also feel like this is a back-pocket skill. This is one of those skills that it's just nice to have it. So this is a framework that you can use no matter what in any case, it's a very simple three-step framework. There's multiple steps, of course, in those steps, but it's a very simple framework you can move through. I also think that once you start to learn these skills, you'll be surprised how often you use it. So once I started reading the science of negotiation, the actual studies are out there, I was shocked at how much those issues and those things came up. As small as negotiating with my spouse on where to go to dinner or like the negotiating with the waitress, whatever it was, I was like, wow, these skills are coming up all the time. So I hope it will come all the time for you and as adults, as we are adulting, I also think it's something that all adults should have and I really think it's something that every 18-year-old should learn before they're released into the world (chuckles) along, when a teenager gets a credit card or college students get a credit card, they should also be able to get these negotiation skills. I believe they come hand-in-hand. Just kick us, in life, you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. This is a really important concept. I have no doubt that you have a lot of skills and a lot of talent and I wish it worked the way where you can do your best work and will go, "Yes I want to pay you a lot of money for it." Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way and I think that if we don't learn to ask for what we are worth, we don't always get it and so you are deserving of all of it. The question is how do you ask for it in the right ways? When I started teaching negotiation, again, it was an accidental skill, I asked people what is negotiation, it's one of my favorite questions. Whenever I'm teaching courses, I'm like, what is this? All kinds of interesting things come up when you ask people, what is negotiation? Debating about money, fighting to prove your worth, a heated discussion, something hard. (audience chuckles) That was a formal response. What I'm bad at, which I thought (laughs) was amazing. What happens when I lose money. (chuckles) Oh. (sighs) That framing we've gotta change that framing. A stressful conversation, almost always, when I talk about negotiation, this idea of stress or confrontation or that tension, that give-and-take comes, and that is actually not what negotiation is. If you actually look at the real definition of negotiation is it just a discussion aimed at reaching agreement. That's a very different framing for negotiation. It doesn't include confrontation. It doesn't include anything stressful. In fact, the entire goal of negotiation is agreement. It's not necessarily winning or losing. It's not trying to take something from the other person. The entire thing we're gonna be talking about today and everything underlying we're talking what is agreement. And we're gonna be talking a lot about partnership and how that works that we feel good about our negotiations, that no one's walking out a loser. Science, are you ready for some science? So these are the studies that no one is reading and there are incredible databases full of these studies that no one is using, so I take a very science-based approach. As you know, I'm a science junkie in our lab. First one, really easy, self-efficacy. When you ask people, do you know how to negotiate? Their answer to that question predicts how good they are at negotiation, whether or not they actually know how to negotiate, in other words, our mindset or our perception of our skills is predictive of our negotiation ability. So the good news is is everyone who is watching, you will now know how to negotiate. So already, we're gonna increase your chances of getting it up because there is a framework. Once you know the framework, just having that self-efficacy gives you a nice set of confidence. The other thing to think about here is actually the science for earning and saving is the same. In other words, if you go into a negotiation trying to earn more money, you're asking for a raise, you're trying to get more money from your clients, it is the same science and the same framework as trying to save money if you're buying something, like buying a car or buying a house. That is very convenient for us, right? That works out well so whatever your goal is, whether it's on the saving or the earning side, it works for both. Here are my specific goals for the next few hours. First, I wanna remove the anxiety from money in negotiation, especially the difficulty. I don't think it has to be difficult and I've had some really intense long negotiations with big-money values and I would not call them difficult after using this framework. Second, hacking the science, using the best of the best research to be able to get control. I think that one of the biggest thing that causes a lot of anxiety is we go into the room or we go into a room full of money, clients or a boss and we know the money's on the table but we don't know how to get control of the situation. We don't know who said the first number, right? We don't know what to say first. We don't know how to transition into talking about money. We don't know what to say after someone has come back at us with a challenge, so I wanna bring control back into that conversation so you know what to say. Knowing and showing your worth, which I talked about and this is two different things. Knowing your worth is one thing. Being able to talk about it effectively is the second. Bottom line: get you more money. So it's interesting, every course I taught at CreativeLive has kind of been indirectly talking about money, right, like people skills, if you have good people skills, it gets you money, if you have good body language, that confidence can help get you more money. Happiness and we talked about the science of happiness. The happier people earn more money. This is the first and only course I've ever done directly related to getting you more money so I am very excited to finally share some of these tips with you and I will be sharing some my personal tips and tricks for how I negotiate all of my contracts and lastly, your goal. And this is when I'm gonna toss it to you. So you came in here; you clicked on this class with something in mind, some specific thing, maybe you know you're due for a rate raise, maybe you want to go in and talk to your boss about something, maybe you wanna renegotiate your rental lease, whatever that goal is, I wanna help you with that. There are two buckets here when we're talking about goals, of course, the obvious business goals so asking for a raise, pricing your services correctly, getting the right pricing, negotiating for benefits so compensation is not just about a dollar value. There's other aspects that we negotiate for, bargaining for better deals and deliberating with clients, business we get, but of course, there's the life ones too. Airline counters, making sure you get that very last seat on that flight that you want, garage sales, your lease, buying a car, chores with a partner, getting someone to vote, like all of these things happen. These are all basic negotiation strategies so they fallen into two different buckets. Right now, I want you to think about what is your goal and I'm hoping you will tweet it with me at home. The audience, I'm gonna ask you in a second for your negotiating goal; at home, tweet me @Vvanedwards. The CreativeLive team is watching. I'll be watching at lunch, tell me what your negotiation goal is, why you decided to watch this course, so my lovely audience, I would love for you to say hello, introduce yourself, and tell me in as specific as you can get, what are you here for? What do you want more or what do you want less of? Hello, I'm Erika Marie. Hi Erika! All of these goals, I need them all and I need to get the anxiety and stress out but one specific thing I'm looking for is to, after I'm done with a client, their contract's over and I've raised my rates, how to handle that situation with them if they're gonna continue on with me. Almost like the re-upping or the renegotiation? Right, and my rates have increased. I love it, okay, perfect great. Someone else, a specific negotiating goal? Introduce yourself, say hi, yes, yes, right behind you, oh, right next to you. You got it, you're perfect. Okay, hi, Vanessa. Hi. My name is Jinal Sampat, I'm actually a landscape designer so my question is regarding branding, so when you have a product and after you rebranding, it takes so much work, how do you do pricing adjustments after that? Ah. Because it's such a stark difference so that's why I-- So that kind of falls in the question of what do you charge, either for a first product or a rebranded product or a new value product, which is actually similar to after someone is done working with you, how do you get them to restart with you? Let me get one more goal, yes, yes? Hi, I'm Karrie Porter, I'm a wedding photographer in Key West, Florida, and one of the struggles that I have is sort of balancing, sort of having that rapport with a client that you have a very close connection with but then being able to set the boundary and say, but I do have to get paid and so balancing out that negotiation versus being friendly with the person. Right, the warm and the competence, right? Having the friendliness but also being like and I charge for my services and then transitioning to money, actually, the transition from rapport to money talk is a big sticking point for people, like you can be really great at banter but then how do you transition into the money talks? We're gonna talk about that transition. Hopefully, throughout the course, I'm gonna get to address your goals at home as well as hear more about each and every one of your goals here as well. Some other specific questions I'm gonna answer, if you're thinking about this at home. One, what's the best time of day to negotiate? I'll be answering questions you didn't even (audience laughing) think that you had. (laughs) That's gonna be the best part. There's some really amazing science out there. Who should stay the first price? Who drops the first number? How should I open a negotiation? How do I deal with deadlock? So, deadlock, and we're gonna be talking about this in our bonus section is what do you do if you're, neither person wants to budge? Both person thinks that they're right and no one's giving and you wanna make a deal but you can't. What do you do in those deadlock situations? What should I charge, how do we price our services? How do we do that in kind of a different way? I think about pricing and charge in a little bit different way than most people. And can I use these negotiation tips with negotiations via email, face-to-face and phone, are they the same? So there are a lot of similar things but there's also some slight different things between phone, email, face-to-face, which I'm gonna be addressing. There's a couple buckets also with mistakes and successes so let's get these out on the table. The most common mistakes I see in any kind of negotiation, whether you're earning or you're saving, undervaluing yourself; I cannot tell you how often we undercharge which gives us absolutely no room to negotiate, when we don't have enough space in our budget, we get really closed up. We go into a scarcity mentality and it makes it really hard to negotiate in a really healthy partner agreement kind of way. Taking it personally; this is a really hard one, especially if you are asking, you're selling services, it's very hard to separate your services from yourself and so we're gonna try and talk about how to make a little bit of distance there with being able to know that your services are separate from you. Leaving money on the table and this fine line between being overly aggressive and a pushover. There's a really interesting study we're gonna be talking about later in the course about people, how they perceive themselves as being overly aggressive in a negotiation and how they're actually perceived by other people, so we have a really hard time figuring out how people see us. Successes, feeling more confident, being in control, hopefully earning more than you expected, going into a higher expectation and lastly, there is this learning piece; this is the vitamin part of the course, this isn't the painkiller part. I do hope that in this short course, you can learn a little bit more about yourself, about where your hangups are, where your sticking points are and what the easy things are for you and learning more about your partner, learning more about your boss, learning more about the person you're talking with, learning more about your clients, how to be a better provider for them. Hopefully, that's another vitamin piece as well. So the first big concept of the course, it's called the Partner Mindset, this is in your workbook for you. If you wanna follow along, I have all of the kind of skills throughout, the Partner Mindset: your partner is not your enemy, not your opponent, not your antagonist; we work with them, not against them. For the rest of the course, from this time forward, I will call the person you're talking with your partner, your negotiating partner; they're not your opponent, right? And that's a really important mentality that's gonna set the stage for it, so they are our partner, why? We have to work with them to find creative solutions on how we can best work together. If they're a partner, they talk to you. They open up, they can get creative and strategic with you and that's what we want. When you think about negotiation, I'm curious in the audience, if you had to pick a metaphor (laughs) for negotiating, would you pick A, playing a ballgame game or would you pick B, going to the dentist? How many people pick A, playing a ballgame? How many pick B, going to the dentist? (audience snickering) (chuckles) All right, that's okay, I saw you raise your hand at home too. I saw that, so when we're talking about this metaphor, these are completely different mindsets. Going to the dentist is a very passive, terrifying experience, right? I love my dentist, I actually talk about my dentist on my blog a lot, there's a lot of psychology that goes into dentistry but it can be a very passive thing. You go in, you're kind of like, "What are they gonna find? "What are they gonna find," right? Like maybe you come in with sensitivity. You lay in the chair and they just stick stuff in your mouth, like you're not doing anything except like (vocalizing) like you're like bracing yourself to be done, that is how I think most people go into negotiations is they go in with a little bit of sensitivity; they're hoping to solve something but they're like, "Okay, do what you will," right? I have no idea with a problem is gonna be. I think that we should think about negotiation as playing a ballgame, I think this mindset is much more helpful because both teams win in a certain sense, like, yes, someone wins the end of the game but as we play, we get better and better, right? We can practice; we can hone our skills. We can have positions for different things. We also enjoy the process like the whole part of the game is the playing part and we have this playful mindset. I think it helps us get into a much better frame when we're actually interacting with people. Researchers at UC Berkeley found that people who believe their negotiation skills can improve with time are more successful than those who think negotiation skills are fixed, so we know this. I'm sure you've heard about the growth versus fixed mindset. I talked about it in one of my other courses. The growth mindset is incredibly important. So no matter where you are right now, whether you think that you're a zero or a hero when it comes negotiation, everyone can learn these skills. You do not have to be born with them. Let's reframe negotiation as a fun challenge. This is the first thing that we can do to make us a better negotiator. I also believe that this course is your secret weapon and I love having gifts for my audience so I have a couple of secret weapons that I wanna hand out. I'm sure you were wondering why we would have these. So everyone take a sword and pass it down. You wanna grab, if you'd grab the bucket, yeah, thank you. Let me give you this side too. Take a sword and pass it down, so at home, I know that I can't give you a sword but pens work really well as swords too, so you can wield it. So I do believe this is something you can keep in your back pocket, like a samurai, you can strap it to your back. You can tuck it in your belt and so I want you to think about this and you can take this with you and we're gonna do a couple of affirmations. Are you guys is ready for couple affirmations? At home, grab your pen and thrust away as we talk about some of these things, okay? (audience laughing) So when I ask this question, we're gonna say yes at the end of loud as you can, are you ready? All right, are you worthy of more? Yes, are you going to get more, are you gonna ask for more? Yes, are you going to get more? Yes, okay, cheers your person next to you. I promised the CreativeLive producers we would not be doing any sword fighting. (audience chuckles) I'm leaving my sword right there. You can put it down and any time you question, you're welcome to raise her sword up. (audience laughing) Yeah. Easy way for me to see you over the crowd (laughs). Okay, so my other thing I wanted to talk about here is when I was writing this course, I wanted it to be an investment; your time is very precious. Every minute you put in this course is a minute away from something else, so my goal is that this course will pay for itself at least 10X, hopefully that is with your negotiating goal but it might also be down the line, right? In the car negotiation or in that garage sale negotiation, at least I want your time and your financial investment to pay itself off and I love being able to teach that way 'cause it makes it feel like it's a real investment. You also might be wondering, how does this fit into your other courses? I have all your other courses, I got a couple questions. I have all your other courses, am I gonna learn anything new? Yes, so there is zero overlap in this course. So I specifically built it so that it is a piece of this skill set, it is sort of the bonus chapter to captivate the extra money piece to People Skills and body Language, so there is no overlap. In fact, I will be referencing some of the other courses but not reteaching from them so we can get completely new material; the other special thing is everyone here and everyone at home, yay (laughs). (audience cheers and applauds) I really wanted to do that, okay, I promise I'll do that over there, so everyone who buys the course and thank you for CreativeLive for doing things together for me, everyone who buys the course while we are at Live is going to get a free copy of the book. We have free copies for you, by the way, the book is not even out yet, so these are early, early copies and they are going to be special signed additions for you so I'm very, very excited. I cannot wait to have it out there. Labor of love, that little beast, okay, so (mumbles) special we will have it there. Let me talk about how I organized the course so we know what our framework is today. We have a lot to cover, first, I'm gonna be talking about before the negotiation. Most people don't think about doing much prep work. I actually this is sort of the hidden area that we need. So the first section is gonna be what you do before you walk into the room to prepare to have the best possible negotiation? Second, during, right this is the big one. How do you open, how do you build rapport? How do you transition from rapport into asking for money? How do you do that back and forth? We were talking about the during and then at the very end, after, what's your postmortem? How do you follow up, how do you make sure that you close a deal if you didn't, you weren't able to close in the room? What you do afterwards to make that relationship last? Extras, so we also decided I want to keep the live portion of this course pretty short, three hours. I've never done a half-day course before. We will also have a couple of bonus sections if you need them, I wasn't sure everyone needed these sections so we decided to have them as kind of extras, specifically, we have a section on de-escalating anger, if you ever, not everyone does, if you have people who get a little bit heated during their debates. Negotiating via email, that's something that you do a lot in your business, I'm gonna have a special section on the science of negotiating via email. There's a lot of research on that and a couple back-pocket questions, things to keep for you. I've also had a couple of my people in my life write articles for you on negotiation strategies in specific areas so our realtor Alexis Wolf wrote a whole article and tutorial in the workbook for you on how to negotiate for a home. My insurance agent (chuckles) Alex aka-pin-te wrote a whole tutorial so I actually said to them, let's write out exactly what they would need so if that's for you, if you're need to get insurance for your business or get a home, they have special tips for you in that bonus section; those are in the workbook. Let me talk about the workbook for a second so it's long, as you know, for a three-hour course, they were like, "Oh my gosh, it's over (snickers) 100 pages." (audience chuckles) So when I first contacted CreativeLive to do this course 'cause I had written it for these entrepreneurs, I was like, here's what I wanna do. I want to try to write at the bonus chapter to captivate as the negotiation extra chapter. I was like 15, 20 pages. (audience laughing) Brevity has never been my strength (snickers) so we went overboard. I decided that everything that I couldn't fit in the slides, in addition to what I could put in the slides is in the workbook for you, so you can follow along, in addition to a lot of activities that we won't have time for.