Asking for More. . .
Dear Sisters and Friends,
Welcome to new subscribers! Thanks for joining us here.
I am the lucky person who has both an excellent therapist (Debby) and an excellent financial advisor (Melissa). Both could charge a lot more for their services, but they don’t even though they are the best I have ever experienced in their respective fields. Just because you charge a lot, or you make a lot of money, doesn’t make you some kind of superstar. But it’s complicated, especially in my country.
As you probably know by now, I have been in the negotiation and conflict biz for over 30 years and have had a successful run of things. Nonetheless, in full transparency, when I was married, I used to give the power to manage our family money over to my ex-husband. Now I do it myself (with a bit of guidance from Melissa), I do it well, and I feel great about it. I am more empowered and in charge of my life, at least as far as money goes, than I have ever been in the past.
Money isn’t power, but it’s a good metaphor for it. How we are around money can say a lot about how we are about power.
When we had our annual check-in meeting the other day, Melissa announced a very reasonable and I thought well-deserved rate increase. She wanted to work less and make the same amount. Good idea! She commented how much better she feels charging what she is worth and not apologizing to anyone about her rate. She feels better, looks better because she has more time for self-care.
Our ability to take care of ourselves and our self-esteem so often comes from money.
Titles like “Asking for More”, “Negotiating Salary” and the like, resonate with many women for a bunch of reasons. We often think that negotiation is about money, but it's way more than that. We have both internal and external obstacles to deal with about what we are entitled to ask for.
Strangely, the strongest message I got about money from my family of origin came from food. My mother, like many women of her era that were especially dependent on the male gaze for their survival, was always in “fighting trim” as she put it. When food was put on the table, the largest plate would always go to my father and brother, and the smaller portions would go to my two sisters and me. Indeed, my Mom would glower at me if I put too much food on my plate. It’s no accident that this translated later to my brother being super rich and lavish with money, and my two sisters and I suffering from both physical anorexia and serious under earning given our education. The message was, accept less money and resources. Make yourself attractive for men and take care of men so that they will take care of you.
Early messaging like this can run deep and affect us in negotiating and asking for what we deserve. I loved this comment from a colleague, Alex Carter who teaches negotiation (and who wrote a book by the same title as this post)
. . . I realized, at a certain point, that I was great at negotiating for other people, but I still struggled to do it for myself. I've talked to a lot of professional women who have felt the same way. Then something happened to me, for the first time ever I went in to negotiate my salary. I was super nervous, and then their number came in above what I thought! I kept my face neutral, told them I’d run the numbers and left. Then I called a senior woman in the field and I said, “What do I do?” She told me, “Go in and ask for more, because when you do you teach someone how to value you. You teach them how to value all of us. So, if you're not going to do it for yourself, I want you to go in and do it for the woman who's coming after you. . . think of it as doing community service.”
So, we have internal obstacles, but we also have external ones. The world has gotten used to our free, or seriously discounted services.
As the celebrated financier Warren Buffet was quoted by his wife as saying ‘sooner or later women are going to wake up and realize that they are the slaves of the world.’
Follow the money and you will see pretty clearly what’s going on in the world and how it is impacting women’s lives everywhere, and what we might do to change it.
Susan Coleman
To continue with the food metaphor, there are powerful messages in the zeitgeist about female appetite -- who should have, who should receive. These can be hard to release from our neural pathways as well as to not take in in the first place.
One day, a summer or two ago, at a country picnic, I happened to sit next to a young, good-looking white guy in his 30’s. He was wearing a golf cap on his head that said St. Barts, (a fancy Caribbean playground for the rich and famous.) He had just gotten a new job and was bragging about the great perks and salary. When I mentioned something about gender, he assured me that he got what he got because he asked. “Women don’t ask”, he said.
He was smug, and annoying. And I could feel how much our culture likes to pay these types of guys. Money just flows to them naturally like a moth to a flame.
While there is some truth to his comment, it also defies the subtle and not so subtle cultural codes about who should be able to ask, and who should be able to receive.
I am not proud to admit that, over the years of parenting my two kids – a daughter and a son – there was a subtle way that I was inclined to give more to my son than to my daughter. When I began to notice this, I stopped, horrified. There is absolutely no reason he deserves more than she, just deep conditioning inside me that I should give the money to the guy so he can take care of things.
We need to re-balance the money equation on the planet both because it will move us toward true gender equality, and because there’s some evidence that women do different things with money when we accumulate more than we need. For instance, financial expert Barbara Stanny Huson, who has consulted with women around finances for decades, says that when it comes to money, “women are motivated by different things than men. They will yawn and glaze over when it’s just about money for money’s sake but get more fired up when they begin to see the power of helping their families and communities.” That’s why Barbara’s target audience is women who want to create wealth because they are purpose driven and know, as Mother Teresa said, that it takes a check book to change the world.
Barbara also says, “money doesn’t give you power”, it’s more the process you have to go through to build wealth. I don’t completely agree with this. Having resources gives you a negotiation BATNA, i.e., the ability to walk away — from an abusive husband or situation or what have you. I call this our money BATNA. Our ability to walk away is at the heart of what gives us power in negotiation.
So, we need to clear away the internal and external obstacles that get in the way of asking for and getting what we deserve for our time and expertise, but we also need to ask ourselves, “what is enough”?
I don’t believe Elon Musk should be the metric or any of the other billionaires who we give godlike status. We need to stop putting these people on a pedestal and enforce good tax codes.
A recent study from Oxfam, called "Inequality Kills," finds that the world's 10 richest men more than doubled their fortunes during the first two years of the pandemic – while income levels for the 99-percent of people around the globe actually fell.
Income inequality has gotten to obscene proportions and other humans and our planet can’t sustain it. I heard Gloria Steinem, speaking at Cardozo Law School in 2023, say something to the effect that she would like to go to Harvard Business School and try to convince them that money is boring.
By asking for more, we don't need to replicate the extreme financial inequalities of a patriarchal world culture, but we do need to insist on equal pay for equal work, doing the inner work to know in our bones that we deserve it, having an equal say in how we spend planetary resources, managing our individual and household money well, and paying attention to having a money BATNA — the power that comes from being able to walk away. I personally aim to have enough money to have what I need, including some extra, so as not be owned and controlled by any individual or larger system — to hold onto my freedom, my pleasure, my contribution, and my ability to walk away.
In abundance,
Invitation to reflect. . .
What are your internal obstacles to having the money that you need and want?
What are the external obstacles that you experience?
What do you think is enough?
Do you have a money BATNA?
Prefer to listen? Just press the play button above.
p.s. I welcome your likes and comments (either here or to me directly).