From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award winning podcast dedicated to personal development.
Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in your work and personal life.
Listen to everyday better on the LinkedIn podcast network, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did you know that small and medium businesses make up 98 % of the global economy, but most B2B marketers still treat them as a one -size -fits -all?
LinkedIn's Meet the SMB report reveals why that's a missed opportunity, and how you can reach these fast -moving decision makers effectively.
Learn more at linkedin .com.
I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process.
Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts.
We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and in life.
Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed.
Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality.
So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything .
Subscribe and listen on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen, let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Alison. Welcome back, my friend.
So fun to be back. Super exciting.
We are very excited to have you back.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
What I do. So I am a professor at the University of North Carolina.
This is my 20 year anniversary.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
I always say it was not my childhood dream.
Started out as a management consultant, got me really interested in the psychology of people trying to think about moving people who did not want to be moved, become a professor, organizational psychologist at UNC.
Been there for 20 years and do a lot of work talking to people about negotiation but more fundamentally thinking just about how to be a good strong advocate for yourself as a tool for living the life that you want and building the career that you want.
A lot of the work that I do now is specifically oriented to women using behavioral science to help women advance.
As you know, none of the advice I talk about is only relevant to women But it's just an audience that I care about very deeply.
And since we last saw each other, I now have a book coming out, and Like a Little Badass, How Women Get the Success they Deserve, which focuses on status and power and thinking about how those things relate to being a good, strong advocate for yourselves.
It's all been really good.
incredible. And listeners, if you've listened to any of our episodes, the introduction you just received, Exactly Why I Want Alison on the Show.
This is great. And also, before we get into the meat of the episode, make sure to shout out the sub stack too.
I do. So I have a sub stack, it's called the upper hand again, focused on behavioral science for women's advancement.
And for you to subscribe, I've started it in 2024, after doing the things you do being on social, and I'm really loving it.
So great. So anyone who wants to come join me, say, women allies, anyone who's thinking about behavioral science to live their best life all welcome.
Amazing. Well, there are so many things that we could talk about, Alison.
And of course, listeners, we'll make sure to put a link to Alison's first episode in the description as well so you could check that out.
But today we're going to focus on status.
What is status? And what does it mean for us as it relates to negotiation and difficult conversations?
So I think what would be great to do is just start off with an operational definition, because the way that we're thinking about status in this episode is going to be different from just common parlance.
That's right. So status, the way psychologists talk about it, is how respected and highly regarded we are by other people.
And if you look it up in the dictionary, you will get that as one of the meanings.
So it's not that psychologists have simply made this up.
That's one of the meanings, but there are other common uses of that term in everyday discourse that are different than the way we talk about psychology.
So status, every time you hear me say that word in our conversation, is how much respect and regard we have from other people, and what makes status really fascinating to me and why it's been part of the things I've studied for 20 years is your status exists only in other people's minds.
You only have as much as other people think you do, yet the consequences of your status, which exists only in other people's minds, are very real and very far -reaching, impacting everything from physical to mental health.
So understanding what it is, and how it impacts our lives, and how we can influence our status, even when we have situations where we might feel or be low status initially, is really, really important to do because it's critical not just to being able to get what you want in a negotiation, advance into your career, but also being able to live the life you want to live.
a great – very well said.
It's almost as if you've been studying this whole – your whole life and wrote a book on it.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just making that up, but yes, that was exceptional.
And I really want to paint this picture before we get into this because I have to concede.
I have a degree in psychology.
I've studied negotiation all my professional life, and status was a concept that was foreign to me until last year.
And once I started to appreciate it, I recognized just how much of an oversight that is in the negotiation and persuasion space.
And now I want you to really paint a picture for the audience when it comes to negotiation and difficult conversations.
What are the risks of not fully understanding and appreciating the psychology of status?
So as a star, when you say that it was a new concept to you, this is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book.
and as just as a funny story is a process, I wanted to call this book, like Lil' Badass, which is the first part, but How Women Win the Status Game.
And my editor said, you cannot call it that.
I said, why? He said, because no one knows what status is, which is why you need to write the book.
And it turns out it's a bad idea to put things on the title where no one knows what they are because then people don't pick it up or they pick it up with different expectations than what they get.
And it was this irony of the reason I was writing it was the same reason I couldn't call it what it was because I had to get them into the book so I could teach them what it was.
So book number two will have something about status in it because then everyone will know.
But what you're pointing out is something that I've confronted a lot.
And even I as a person who studied it, so to your question about what are the consequences of not understanding status in a negotiation?
I've taught negotiation for every bit of the 20 years I've been an academic.
And we think about negotiating often to get more resources and resources are essentially power, right?
When you get paid more, when you get promoted, when you get the price, the discount, you're getting power.
And so we give people a lot of very evidence -based tools to be good negotiators, but here's the truth, which is if you are in a negotiation and the person you are talking to does not respect you and does not value you, there are very few tools that you can pick up in my class or on this podcast that are gonna help.
And so thinking about status as fundamental to getting what we want, because when a person calls you and they want something from you, if that is a person that you think highly of and you respect, it almost doesn't matter what they're asking for.
And they don't need any fancy negotiation tool or strategy to be able to get it.
They ask, it's in your power to do it.
you're much more likely to do it.
So this was a mistake that even I as a negotiation educator was always jumping to the techniques.
You have a conversation tomorrow.
Here are the things you can do.
And those things are important and there's a lot of science behind them, right?
So good negotiation tools and strategies will help us advocate for ourselves effectively and get what we want.
But there's, I always start talking about those as our short game strategies.
Those are the things that you can do in the moment.
But what are the things that we can be doing six months before that conversation, a year before that conversation, to set ourselves up for being a person that's respected and valued?
So when we get to these conversations, we are already starting from a basis of strength.
And so I want people to be able to be strong in both.
And for too long, I and I think other people too had started with only the short game without saying, but wait a second.
How do we start building these relationships from the very second you meet a person to say, here's the value I add, I want you to be able to see it and appreciate it.
And when you do that, that's you acknowledging my status.
And that is going to set me up for success in any ask as much as any particular tool or technique.
I agree 100%. And I don't know about you, but if we were given two options, if we could say in option A, you have every single negotiation skill and strategy at your disposal, but zero status.
And in option B, you have all of the status in the world and no negotiation skills or strategies.
I would choose option B all the time, because if I have all the status, I don't need as many skills and strategies.
That's right. Once people value you, they are excited to give you what you want, a hundred percent.
So I love what we have done with bringing negotiation science into everyday practitioner understanding over the 20 years that I've been privileged to be in that space.
We have done a tremendous service for people, right?
You've done a tremendous service for people.
But I want to now do the same thing with thinking about this other thing that feels harder to control, because the negotiation tactics feel more manageable because you want me to move first, okay?
I can do that. I have full control over whether I do that.
But now my status lives in your head.
And now that's why I'm fascinated by it as a psychologist, but it's also why it can feel daunting for people if I don't control what's in your head.
And the truth is I don't, but I can influence it.
and so just like in a negotiation, you cannot force another person to do something they have no intention of doing, but you can influence them to make it more likely to say, if they're movable, I know how to move them.
Same thing with status.
You get to think about me what you want, but your thoughts aren't random.
From what we understand from psychology, is that your judgments about how much you respect me are based on two things, and if I can start to influence those two things, I can influence how you see me, and those two things are what I refer to as assertiveness, but you could think about it as one's capabilities.
It's one dimension of person perception, it's basically, are you good at getting stuff done?
So that's going to be, are you competent, but also are you organized?
Are you persistent?
Are you decisive? Do you have presence?
All those things, they matter, because they say, if I give you a task, are you going to execute it well?
We respect people when they can, we can give them things and they can do them well.
And then the other dimension is, do you care about people other than yourself?
Are you sincere? Are you helpful?
Are you honest? Are you giving?
Are you likable? All of those things matter, that's a dimension of warmth.
And so, those two dimensions in psychology are foundational to how we perceive people.
And when we see somebody as very capable, and we see them as very caring, that is a winning combination for respect.
And so if I say to you, let's do it in reverse, Kwame, give me a person you respect and you think of a person, then, and I ask you how capable and how caring, you're gonna give them high marks on both because that's how we get there.
So we can start to influence how we show up on those two dimensions.
When we do that, we are influencing the respect that other people give us.
So what I try to help people understand is we cannot control what's in other people's heads.
But if we understand the science of how those decisions are made, it starts to feel not idiosyncratic, but, okay, now I understand when I show up in this way or I do this thing, I either tend to get more respect or less respect from a particular person or my audience.
This is incredible, and I think a lot of light bulbs are going off too, because there might be times where we feel as though we've made - we might have had the facts and the substance and the logic, credibility, and everything in our favor.
But for some reason, we still weren't able to connect.
And of course, people have their interests, there might be some kind of hidden agenda, we understand incentives drive behaviors.
And maybe those things just aren't aligned.
But I think this is ultimately empowering, – even though it's not 100 % within our control – but it gives us another dimension through which we can analyze these situations and recognize, hey, this might be a hidden element of persuasion that might have been missing for us.
And it also helps us to recognize that just like with any form of preparation, a lot of times the mistake we make is that we start preparing too late.
And so even if we're preparing strategically through the lens of negotiation as it relates to getting our baton in order, preparing just in terms of strategically what are we going to do and say in the negotiation, we still might not have begun the preparation process early enough as it relates to the psychology of status.
And so let's say somebody is saying, okay, this is a new concept to me.
How do I start to elevate my status in the eyes of other people?
What would be a good road map for them?
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better difficult conversations.
At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top -tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands -on training for your team, we've got you covered.
Don't just negotiate.
Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute.
Click the link in the description to find out more.
elevate, negotiate, and succeed.
Hey you, I'm Andrew Seaman!
Do you want a new job or do you want to move forward in your career?
Well, you should listen to my weekly show called Get Hired with Andrew Seaman.
We talk about it all, and it's waiting for you, yes you, wherever you get your podcasts.
Small and medium businesses don't have time to waste, and neither to marketers trying to reach them.
On LinkedIn, more SMB decision -makers are actively looking for new solutions to help them grow, whether it's software or financial services.
Our Meet the SMB report breaks down how these businesses buy, and what really influences their choices.
Learn more at linkedin .com backslash meet dash the dash SMB.
that's linkedin .com backslash meet dash the dash smb absolutely so this is what i talk to people about so i say everything that people know about you so i'll use you call me as an example everything that people know about you comes from one of two places things that you have put out into the world yourself i'll call that your self -promotion or maybe just your self presentation, things that originate with you.
That's every word you've ever said on a podcast. It's every social media post. It's what's on your website.
It's what it's like to sit next to you on the airplane, or at dinner, whatever it is.
You put out all this information into the world, whether you intend to or not.
And from that people draw conclusions.
The other source is things other people say about you, often when you are not around.
Okay? As we were sitting here, preshow, getting ready to catch up, we chatted about a bunch people we know in common, right?
How are they doing, how are they doing, right?
So okay, I got a story.
Here's what someone else is doing that's really neat, whatever.
And that's another source of information.
So once you start to think about the idea that what people know about me comes from these two channels what I help people think about is let's start to control what's in the two channels.
So the first one is the information I put out there into the world about myself.
I always say to people at every moment when you're interacting with somebody, like, what's the thing that I can do that will help me show up as both as capable and assertive and also as warm and other oriented and to think about tweaking my behavior.
So, sometimes it's not doing things that might be our first instinct.
So, I'll give you a very specific example.
It was recently you'll, as a speaker, you'll probably resonate with us.
I went to a large conference.
I was speaking. I was speaking on two different topics at the conference.
I had two different sets of slides.
The organizers of the event, particularly lead organizers, sent me an email, will you please send me your slides?
Perfectly reasonable request. Yes, I do.
I sent both slide decks.
Slide deck A and slide deck B.
I wake up in the morning.
I go present in the morning on topic A.
They show the slides.
There's a several -hour delay before I'm going to talk on topic B.
And in that delay, I get an email from a different member of the organizing team who was not on the original email, can you please send me the slides for session B?
It was not accusatory.
It was not, you're late.
But my first reaction, and I think this is very much how people have in a negotiation was to be so like, but I just want you to know that I already did send the slides on session B to your colleague yesterday because I just didn't want my competence, my capability at all to be in question.
And there was a draft of this email that I started to write in my head, which was, I sent them to your colleague yesterday but here they are again.
And I realized in this moment, because I think about these things a lot, that my capability was not being attacked.
And I didn't, to your point of always saying, like, I always want to have the right answers and do this.
I say, I'm already showing up as quite capable.
I just had a great session this morning.
I did my job. There is nobody around here questioning whether I can do what I can do.
I don't need to point out simply for the sake of being right that I had already sent the slides.
It wasn't in dispute.
I just said, here they are, exclamation point, and sent them along.
I had to take a pause in that moment to recognize there was this story I was telling.
I was putting something out there about myself.
Was it going to destroy the relationship?
Probably not, but was I taking an action that might have me be seen as less warm because I was essentially saying, you're disorganized, right?
You're asking me twice for the same thing.
Even though it was put in a different way for no possible benefit.
And so when you start to analyze small things of how you show up and say, okay, how am I presenting myself here?
Is there a way that I could think about which of these dimensions do I really need to showcase at this moment do I need to showcase them equally or is one really much already kind of in -hand and I really need to focus on an opportunity to do the other, to try to think about those?
And so I help people think about things to take out of your stories, things we say, like this is a small example, that say that might not serve you well, things to put in your stories and then also how to think about how to get other people to say good things about you because that's a huge way in which Stinos has built.
So you have this happen all the time in your world, right?
You have this big platform.
A lot of people get introduced to you by people you already know.
And when someone says, call me, this is the next person you must have on your podcast. And the person that is saying that is someone you value.
You're much more curious about what that person has to say because they'd come to you, that's all their promotion.
And so that person that's, who knows what they were doing?
Playing around a golf, taking a nap off doing their work.
And now all of a sudden their status has been built in your eyes because of that Intermedia Party.
I try to help people think about how can we start to affect the way we show up.
So we get more of those people doing more of that while we sleep.
Oh, this is so good.
So I think let me try to give a quick synopsis.
You tell me if this is landing, because essentially in order for us to begin to even play the status game, we need to overcome the egocentrism that causes us to see things only from our perspective.
And so we focus exclusively on ourselves and not how other people are perceiving what it is that we're doing or saying, and if we start to give that a little bit more thought, then we can start to make maneuvers do and say things that are more likely to resonate for other people.
That's the first part.
How am I landing on that?
That's 100 % correct.
So status, it exists in other people's minds.
So I need to understand how they typically make the judgments and then work backwards to say, OK, if people respect me, when they see me as capable and caring, now I'm in this moment right now, I'm in front of this person, I'm emailing this person, whatever it is, what can I do?
On the margin, I always say start with just being your awesome self and then think about how you can make a little tweak.
This is not overhauling who you are, because you're a person that is worthy of respect, but it's about saying, how do I showcase that?
So start with what you do, think about a tweak that's going to hit your audience as you being maximally capable and caring.
Oh I love that. And then the next thing is, when you do this well, it's you create these unpaid, eager surrogates for you that go around the world and promote your message.
That's right, and that builds your status because when we have to promote ourselves, it's always going to feel some version of uncomfortable.
Even though we can do it artfully and there's lots of different ways to do it.
But what other people are essentially saying to the world.
Allison, Kwame, these are people worthy of respect.
You really need to know them.
That's a win -win. I mean, if we talk about, that's a term we like to talk about in negotiation.
That is a win -win. When other people are saying great things about you, one, it's super efficient because if there are 8 billion people in the world, you are just not going to know them all.
But I always say, if you have 2 ,000 people who sing your praises to 2000 people who sing your praises to 2000 people, that's 8 billion.
I can find 2000 people.
And then if all I can get them to do is tell one other person and then they to tell one other person, boom, 8 billion people.
We're a household name.
So, that idea of how can you influence that?
And that part is another thing that we can control in our status.
And I always say there's three things you gotta do to do that.
One, people need to know who you are.
Because if someone does not know you exist, that person cannot build your status to other people.
So when we start to think about networking, which is something every human being has been told to do, But as you build the base of people who know you exist, you set the stage for them to possibly build your status with other people.
The second thing is, they themselves need to respect you.
So you do have to do some of the work yourself and think about, how do they see me as a person of value?
And then the third one, which is back to our space of negotiation, I always say, it's not just for houses, cars, and salaries.
It's a toolkit for advocating for yourself and getting what you want.
And one of the big mistakes I see people make in negotiation is not realizing that all these other asks that benefit them are negotiations too.
So everybody, particularly women, is saying, if you've been told you should negotiate for more comp, 100%.
Have you been told that you should negotiate for how your fan club talks about you?
Maybe not. So one way to get other people to promote us, they need to know we exist. they need to see us as a person of value, they respect us, and they need to be motivated to pick up the microphone because there's a lot of people that you think positively about and I think positively about, but when I say, when's the last time you said something good about that person to someone else?
For some people you'd say, I don't know.
And it's not cause I don't care about them and it's not because they're not great, but how do we get the last step?
And one of the tools that I talk about is among others is ask them, right, people who think you've already built your status with one person and you say, I want you to help me build my status with another person.
You don't have to say it that way, but here's what I could really use from you.
I'm doing really great work, and I'm not sure that person over there knows it.
Would you be willing to tell them about the great work I'm doing and the impact it's having?
And that's a negotiation, every bit as much as trying to get more money.
And when you say those things to people who do value you, they are tripping over themselves to say yes because they are happy to help you and you've given them a very easy thing to do.
It's not hard for me to go say something I truly believe that's positive to another person and that's going to make you happy and that's going to endear us.
Of course I'll do that.
So thinking about that as an ask in a negotiation, which is I'm doing some great stuff.
I'm not sure other people know about it or appreciate it.
Could you help me? They really respect you.
Your words will a great deal.
Could you do that?" And I've taken that on myself as I've started to think about understanding status and the importance of building it as something I do when I teach negotiation.
So I always think, and I'm sure you think this way, too, if I won't do it, I certainly can't teach anybody else or expect them to do it.
So I really do believe you got to walk the walk when you do this stuff.
And I do it, and not a single person has ever said no because you want to help people that you care about.
So thinking about negotiating how your fan club talks about you.
I think is a powerful way to think about a negotiation frame on building stat.
This is great. And it's so funny because as soon as you said it, I was like, duh.
But the, for me, I love this saying the sign of a brilliant insight is that it's obvious in hindsight because it is so true.
And still we don't do these things and it's not a big ask.
Cause you're not saying, Hey, I want you to deliver some tangible piece of value for me.
I'm saying, Hey, this is just intangible.
You see that person over there?
I'm just trying to get on their radar.
Can you just say, Hey, this person is pretty solid.
Check them out. That's it.
It's like a little whisper campaign, right?
But it can do so much. And you're absolutely right too.
Cause when you think about persuasion negotiation and everything, one thing that we often forget about is just efficiency.
And so we often take the path of most resistance.
And when you when you thought about, hey, if somebody gives a good word, if that person is who's giving the good word has enough status and respect in that situation, that could be all you need.
Because every day we get like five to 10 pitches from different people who want to be on the podcast. And what I told my team is the answer is no, unless they're exceptional for everybody.
Right. But if somebody like you or Scott or Julia that we talked about, if they say, hey, you should have this person on the podcast. I don't do any research. You might say, yes, of course I trust you.
And the answer is yes.
So I really like this because now we're talking about how we can actually operationalize this and negotiate for status.
This is powerful. And well thank you.
And this is how it has felt to me to do it and to the point to educate people about this is absolutely, we are doing bits of this.
Every single one of us all the time.
But what people often lack is their awareness.
Some people are great at it.
some people need some more coaching, but we often lack the conscious awareness of the relationship between, I just did X and I got outcome Y, oh, let me bottle that and let me try that again.
So what I try to do is not giving people tools that they didn't know exist, but to put a name on it and say, sometimes you've done this, think about the consequences, let's do more.
So, offer you another one in this space because I know you and I both care very deeply and believe in negotiation, right?
Of this idea of reciprocity and you have to be giving and getting.
So, asking somebody to promote you is generally very effective because people want to know what makes you happy.
And if you tell them X will make me happy, then they know that if they do X, they're getting credit in your eyes, they're much more likely to do it.
But the other way to do it is just to put the good out there first. So, I have a rule that I live by, which is that any time a positive thought enters my head about somebody else, I do not let it die there.
I either tell them, so I give them positive feedback, or I try to find an opportunity to tell somebody else.
So whether that's an email complimenting them or to tell a friend the next time I see somebody, because what I'm doing is I am being another promoter without being asked for the people who I think have the saddest in my eyes.
Now that's a safe thing to do.
No one ever resists me on that because that's just putting more good out into the world about what people are doing.
But here's the part that is it's very authentic.
I never say anything I don't think is true, but what's strategic is the idea that I say, that I could just think it and let it go.
But I know that saying it is strategic.
It's authentic because it's a good way to be a human.
But the strategic pieces that I know and you know, that reciprocity is one of the strongest governing rules of relationships, and people do for you what you've done for them.
when you go through a double set of doors in a building and you hold the door open for a stranger, a hundred percent of the time that stranger will go to the next door and hold it open for you.
Right? This idea of when I promote you and I say, Kwame's amazing and then you hear about it because eventually you will, you are much more likely to promote me in turn.
One of the other ways to approach the same goal of building our status through these third parties, who tell our story, is simply to just start telling other people's stories.
And that doesn't require as much courage or vulnerability as it does to ask another person.
And so when I have somebody who has a very hard time advocating for themselves, I will always start with, just put more good out into the world about what other people are doing.
Because that will also come back to you, because people tend to reciprocate by doing the thing for you that you did for them.
You know, you buy someone's lunch this time, and they're always like, I'm getting the next one.
They don't have to reciprocate like for like, but that's how we often think about it.
So my other promotion to you about you is more likely to engender your other promotion to me.
And so that's where I think strategy and authenticity can come together in these really powerful ways that you can say things you truly believe that are positive and generous into the world.
And you also know that because of how human beings are wired, some of that is likely to come back to you in ways that really are going to build your status as well.
Incredible. And Alison, I could talk to you about this forever.
But before we wrap up, I want to focus in on one thing that you've touched on, but I want to give you some time to discuss it explicitly, which is authenticity.
Because there might be some people who listen and they say, okay, well, if I'm constantly focusing on the perception of that other people have of me, then I might start shape shifting in ways that are unnatural.
So how do you manage your status in a strategic way while at the same time being true to yourself and authentic?
Absolutely, so This advice that we've often been told to not care about what other people think about us and I thing every parent says the hat I and my parents said and I repeat it It's genuinely terrible advice.
It's but it's well -intentioned terrible advice and the idea is we I mean It is ludicrous to think that what people think about us doesn't matter It happens, whether like, whether you can get the deal, get the job, get the friend, get the date, whatever it is, what people think about us matters a great deal.
But there's a difference between simply sitting and ruminating or allowing their opinions to define us versus to say a sense of control that says, I can influence the way people see me.
And what I'm really going for, is to get people to see me as I really am.
So I don't know if it has come up in anybody's talked about it on your podcast so far, but there's a Bob Cialdini who we know has done a tremendous amount of work and influence in psychology, gave a great analogy that I think is useful here.
He talks about bunglers, smugglers, and sleuths.
Because this idea of, if we teach people negotiation skills, I mean, you could say the same thing.
If I'm teaching you to be a really great negotiator, am I teaching you to manipulate other people?
Is it a bad thing I'm doing?
And he says, well, there are three kinds of people in the world.
Bunglers are people who have no idea what they're doing and so they can't influence anybody to save their life.
Smugglers are who are very skilled, and they use their negotiation skills or their influence skills for bad ends.
And sleuths are people who are very skilled, but they use it for noble ends.
So if I understand, right, that giving my kids three choices of what vegetable they're going to eat is going to make them more likely to eat a vegetable, I would put that under being a sleuth because I truly believe that eating the vegetable is a good thing for them to do.
I'm not trying to put them in and do something they don't want to do.
So, thinking about managing your status as being a sleuth, right?
That I'm not asking people to be seen as something other than what they absolutely are, which is a person who puts good out into the world and cares about other people, but that's not always obvious to people.
So what you're trying to do is to say, I want you to see me as I really am, and that's authentic.
The second piece of authenticity is why I'm always getting deep in these conversations into the science behind it is that when we give people tools, do this and don't do that, and we don't explain the why, then we might give them a tool that doesn't work for them.
And then they're left in a pinch to say, well, I've been told that this is a good thing to do, but it doesn't feel authentic to me, I don't like it.
And when I like explain the science, I always say there is another way.
The non -negotiable when it comes to status is the more you show up as capable and caring to the world, the more people will value you and the better that will be for your ability to get what you want.
And getting what you want is not just a selfish thing.
It gives you resources to put more good out into the world.
That's non -negotiable.
But how do you show up as capable and caring?
There are infinite ways.
And so what I help people think about is what's your authentic way?
And then I always say, start with what you naturally do and what you're good at and what you like to do.
And then think about where there's a tweak.
Whether it's, I need to apologize less.
I need to compliment more.
I need to make more introductions.
I need to think less about telling people I'm right when no one said I was wrong.
Whatever it is. How could I tweak something on the margin that allows me to show up that way?
And that's where I think the magic is.
You might have to have a momentary piece of discomfort, but never to the part of being a smuggler in Cialdini's terms. If it feels icky, I always say, do not do it.
There is another way.
So good. Professor, I feel like I'm back in school with all the notes that I've taken a spot in this interview.
Alison, masterclass as always and hypothetically, if there was somebody who wanted to perhaps read a book or subscribe to a newsletter on such topics as these, do you have any suggestions for them?
Wow, great question.
I would suggest going to my website.
That is the one -stop shop for all the things that I am doing.
So, AlisonForGale .com, my speaking work, the book is there, the link to sign up for the newsletter is there.
The links to follow me on social are there.
Link to reach out to me directly is there.
AlisonForGale .com. Amazing.
Alison, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah. Amazing. Thank you.
Congratulations! You've just joined an elite club.
By listening to a full episode, you're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team.
So welcome aboard what most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show the best things in life lay on the other side of difficult conversations Keep learning keep practicing and keep getting better Your relationships will improve your career will soar and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations Again, thank you for joining the team.
We're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode I'll catch you later.
