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Hey, 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.
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Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Vies, thanks for joining us today.
Oh, I am so happy to be here.
Very humbled and very honored.
Thank you for having me.
No, it is my pleasure.
And listeners, we have been vibing for the last 48 minutes.
So we're going to put some of the clips of our earlier conversation at the end of this interview.
So check this out. I was excited to chat with you before, but now I'm even more excited.
So how about you let the listeners know about yourself and what you do?
So my name is Vies Bradby.
It's a funky combination of my very Dutch background.
Right. My first name Vies and then Bradby is due to my very British husband.
I have grown up here in the Netherlands, lived across the globe for about a decade, both in Asia and in Switzerland.
We were for many years and there I combined my background of being a lawyer.
So we were talking about this before right here on this in our earlier chat.
So I was a lawyer for many years because I was obsessed with negotiation.
That led me to become a lawyer.
And then when I left the law for very good reasons, I went into HR and I combined both those backgrounds rights of the negotiation piece with the HR piece and the fact that I'm a raging feminist together in the work that I do now, which is I run a business called Women in Negotiation, Win, where we
coach women to negotiate their careers and their salaries.
And we do that with great big freaking success.
Last year, the average salary increase that my winners, as we call them lovingly, reported was 93%, which is fairly insane in my book and testament to what can happen when you invest time and energy into this very important life and professional skill.
Testament to the great power of a community of women coming together and supporting each other.
So I'm incredibly proud of that.
And I'm having a ton of fun doing it we talked earlier about hacking life i really feel like i have life in getting to do this work yeah this is great and also make sure you let them know about your podcast too oh yes yes yes i have a podcast as well i should say we have a podcast because katrina my dear
friend and podcast producer is the behind all of this yeah the podcast is called winning with the spread b and it basically what we do in the sessions that we have is that we have coaching sessions, very intimate coaching sessions that I do with women at various stages in their career that are struggling
with various challenges.
And I help them in those sessions to overcome those challenges, right?
I help them move forward.
And that's proven to be really quite useful for our listeners.
We often get feedback of, yeah, so based on episode four, I did X, Y, Z and that worked out tremendously well, et cetera.
It's very practical, very hands -on role modeling basically of how you can have these challenging conversations at work.
It's also a lot of fun actually producing it.
So yeah, there's that.
I love it. Well, let's dive right into what it is that you do because your focus is coaching women.
Incredible success rate.
Listeners, I want to reiterate this.
93 % success rate. That is an A plus on average.
Yeah. There are salaries.
It's insane. Yeah. That's great.
It's so important. That's just so encouraging for all of us because it shows that it's doable.
Once you have the mindset and skill set and you put it into action, then you can achieve the success that you want.
And I think that's a really important thing for people to take away.
Yeah. Now, I love that you're stressing that, right?
Because it's so true.
It started off with me, obviously, obsessing about this subject in my own life and career, right?
Wanting to negotiate my job offers and the promotions that I made, combining my knowledge of negotiation with in those situations, right, I was able to get great results for myself.
And based on that, my friends and people around me started asking me for advice.
And then they were at least as successful as I was.
So I realized it isn't some kind of magical thing that I had been taught for all my years as a lawyer and going to law school, etc.
That it was some kind of special thing, special skill that I had that others didn't, that it was replicable, right?
That others could do it as well.
I mean, my results didn't even come near the 93%.
I was already really proud when I got a 35 % salary increase or whatever, right?
But these results and the consistency of them as well, right?
I think showcases that indeed, this is a skill that anyone with the right commitment, because that is important, there's no shortcut, there is no quick and early tip and trick that's going to give you this massive results, right?
It is hard work, but when you commit, everybody can learn it.
genuinely everybody can learn it so first of all i agree with everything that you just said and i love everything that you just said and i realize i might have misunderstood your percentages so are you saying that 93 of the people who work with you are successful or the average increase in salary is 93
percent wow okay so there are so many layers to this because first of all shout out to negotiation power of negotiation that's great but also tell me what you think about this might also suggest chronic underpayment of women in the workplace yeah well we have those numbers right we know that across
the world if we're looking at the general pay gap that it sort of hovers around 20 for white women if we're extrapolating to women of color if we're extrapolating to other minorities the numbers get even more depressing i get emotional i get really freaking angry when I think about I got now because bombs
all over and not the good kind, right?
Like how hard these women have to work to get equal pay, right?
Yeah, that is a huge issue.
I often have women coming to me at the point where they're just incredibly pissed because they've just found out that they have been replaced.
For example, they're leaving their job and they're replaced by somebody who gets 50 % more, 60 % more.
We have these things, right?
I have women who, where the issue isn't necessarily that within their bracket, right, within the range that they have, that they're that underpaid, they're still within the range, maybe not at the top end, or maybe not even at the median, but they're sort of hovering at the bottom, but they're still
within the range. So we can't really say too much, but they should be two levels higher.
They've just been not recognized, for what they're capable of doing.
They are super underpaid compared to the value that they put out, compared to what in real life or in reality they should be on.
And that culmination has led to these wild increases is that we don't just look at the skill of negotiation within your bracket, within the range for your role.
Can we get a couple of dozen percentage points more, right?
But what we actually do in the program is raise the ambition, raise the expectation that they have for themselves and their place in the world so that they start jumping or making much bigger jumps.
That's where it gets really fun, because once you start doing that, we're not talking about, oh, yours 15 % more, yours 20 % more, 30 % more.
Now we're talking the doubling or sometimes tripling.
We've had women who tripled their salaries in one jump, right, in one move doing that, which is both testament to indeed the potential of taking this particular piece of your career seriously, namely to getting recognition for it.
Right. But it's also testament, of course, to how bad it was before, how they were under appreciated before.
Yeah. This is incredible.
It's disheartening, but also encouraging that you're able to do this work.
And I think one key word that I want to focus in on is program.
You have a program, not because I'm just shouting you out and making sure people who could use your services go to you, but also because implies that there's a process.
There is a replicable model that you can put in place.
And I think it is fascinating that you started off with ambition, raising their own ambition.
Can you go into that piece?
Yeah. To your first point, right?
Yes, there is a program.
I basically developed a communication model that covers the entire spectrum from figuring out what do I want, what's my place in this world, what's possible for me, where is the best match with my unique talent, skill set, expertise, all the way to then having the other side see that, understand that.
than wanting you desperately, being willing to pay whatever it takes to get you on board, negotiating, sort of entering, right, the negotiation room with that spirit on the other side and you being completely confident in your own capacity yourself and then having that negotiation, right, all the way
to signing. So it's a piece of communication, right, so to say on that journey is what we cover in the program.
And that is intense.
That is hardcore. That's 10 weeks.
I always say I own your ass for 10 weeks.
You're mine. I am not a coach in the traditional sense of, well, you have all the answers inside yourself.
Let me just help you surface them.
I am the kind of coach, more sort of trainer, like this is what you do.
This is how you're going to do it.
I'll hold your hand, but you're going to do it.
And now you can do it yourself, right?
That's what's led to these results, right?
That model works for all women in their career negotiations.
So they learn that, right?
It's really training them on that.
Like I said, right, I tell them every step of the way what I need to do.
And then the other piece where they have to work really hard is not just internalizing that, learning that, but it's then personalizing that, for lack of a better term, to their specific situation through these homework exercises that I have them do that are pretty intense.
Right. But where they have this model that always works, but they make it perfectly fitting their situation.
And so that I think is part of everyone's success is that they have kind of a tailor -made system right for them.
And then what's also beautiful about this system is that a year from now or in two years from now, right?
When they are ready for their next step they can do those exercises again and then they're ready for that new step, right?
It perfectly fits that new situation.
So they can keep using it again and again and again which is super fun to watch, right?
I've got clients who did a program five years ago And they're now on their third or fourth promotion.
Well, it's incredible work.
And then when you think about just practically how that changes people, it's not just that it changes their financial status, it can lead to generational wealth that they can pass on.
Those are all true things.
But really what it sounds like too, is that it starts off with changing the way that they see themselves.
And so there's a complete transformation, not just financially, but also internally through the process.
Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
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100 % warm and fuzzy, tree, huggy, Oprah, Winfrey, right?
Let's kumbaya element to it, which I always feel a bit funky about.
I mean, for me, negotiation is there's a science to it and there's art to it for sure, but it's all kind of hard skill.
This is the bit where it all gets a bit fuzzy.
And yet I got to be real with you.
This is where indeed the transformation is and where the real upside is.
It's all mindset. And I say this all the time.
I bore everyone around me, right?
Everything is mindset, but it really is.
80 % of the work that we do inside the program isn't that skill, isn't that strategy, isn't the tactics.
It's important. It's a foundational piece where credits do, right?
It's a really important piece.
And the biggest thing that we do is indeed focusing on mindset or confidence right sort of another word for it and really working through all these limiting beliefs that they've been building up and growing up and being raised a certain way as girls we get a very different upbringing from the one that the boys
get right and so working through those stories ripping them out right at the core and then replacing them for much more empowered beliefs about themselves and indeed what they're capable of.
And that's the piece that always tremendously surprises me is that I work with phenomenal women and I think it's my unique skill in this world.
Like I said earlier, I'm not that special.
There's one thing I can do better than most other people and that is that I see the light in others.
I see how great they are.
So when I speak to my clients, right, the first time around, because we always have a conversation at first to see if there's a mutual fit, right?
I'm very selective in who I work with, specifically related to people's commitment, right?
To do the work. Are they ready for that?
I can see often very clearly what they're capable of.
And sometimes they are very high up in their respective trees, right?
In their careers, they are already very far advanced.
Sometimes they're much more junior.
It's a very diverse group of women that I work with, but consistently, whether they're high up already, or whether they're still starting out, They don't see it.
And I'm sitting here scratching my head going, you are magnificent.
You have so much to give to this world, right?
But bringing that to light so that it isn't just me seeing it, but that they really feel it, that they really not just know it intellectually, but own it, right?
Genuinely feel it, internalize it.
That's the energy that I need them to have.
And when that happens, that's the good stuff, huh?
That's how we get to these massive steps in their lives.
What's interesting is that a lot of the women that come to me, they may come because they're frustrated and they're unhappy with what they're earning.
It's never about the money.
When we ask for feedback, right, I've got 100 % success rate in the sense that I've never had somebody not be happy with the outcomes that they got, right?
Sometimes it takes longer than 10 weeks, right?
It may even take quite a bit longer, especially when they raise their ambitions massively, which I wholeheartedly encourage.
And I'm a big fan of, right?
But then it may take a little bit longer than the program, or sometimes a lot longer.
But at any rate, I've never had anybody be unhappy or dissatisfied with what they've achieved.
And what they often focus on is what's happened inside of them.
And that's the fuzzy bit, right?
Where I have this sort of love hate relationship with Wu, as I call it, right?
With all of that, can't really touch it intangible stuff that as a lawyer, you know, everything I do is research -based, right?
I'm really focused on bringing the data, not the drama, as I always say, right?
Like really being data -driven in everything that I do and really being results -driven.
And now we're entering that fuzzy era of, I feel so much more confident.
And I'm like, how does that show up for you?
How can we make that real, so to say?
But it's always that vision that they have then for themselves that that increases through what they're able to do through the program.
And I live for data.
I just, it's the best.
It really is. And much better than, I mean, the numbers, like I said earlier, I'm a freaking hippie.
The numbers are important to me because they signal results, right?
I like the data, but more importantly, because of what I can do with the money, right?
It's to your point, generational wealth creation, right?
I love it when a client says, I can now buy a house for my family, Or I can send my kids to university, which I didn't believe I could do before.
Or really, what is the freedom that you get through changing your financial status, right?
I think that's the interesting piece.
But maybe more importantly than just, quote unquote, that is the bit where they truly do see all of a sudden how much value they put into the world and because they see it And because they also know how to communicate it, they are able to have so much more positive impact in this world.
And that's the bit what I live for.
And that's the bit where I feel so tremendously privileged being able to sit there and to see them all in their respective worlds, right?
Do all this magic. Yeah, I love it.
Such a beautiful thing.
This is great. This has been incredible.
I really appreciate you sharing your insight, taking a ton of notes here, which is awesome for me.
I'm learning a lot too.
and before you go make sure to shout out the podcast and
