Do Women Find Negotiating More Stressful Than Men Do?
Often yes! Why?
Because of our capacity for empathy; we are generally better at it than men. We are more sensitive to subtle signals and we constantly read others’ energies, feelings and reactions while doing whatever it is we are doing.
That’s the case even when we are heavily involved in technical or analytical work. For example I remember years ago being involved in financial analysis teams. Even when we were fully concentrating on our data analysis, evaluations and logical deductions, the women on the team knew “the lay of the land” mood-wise in the department.
Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that women are weaker negotiators. We may know how you feel, but we’re also very dedicated to getting the job done: great prices, great contract terms.
In the process of negotiating a lower price on the purchasing contract, a woman wouldn’t have just managed the flow of the interaction and handled objections while keeping both her objective and bottom line in mind, she would have also identified and processed the various parties’ emotions. Which means she would have had to also manage her reactions (even if only internal). Feeling the conflicts more acutely, she is bound to feel more stress.
What kind of person finds negotiating enjoyable and easy? He or she is able to focus on the goals and process while detaching from the feelings (or believes that the other side’s wellbeing is none of his or her concern).
I don’t know about you, but most women don’t fit that description.
Once again, that does not mean that women are poor negotiators. As I said earlier, we tend to be very responsible so we won’t let our side down. Also, history has proven countless times that not taking the “losing” party to the cleaners is most often the best strategy in the long run. And that’s a point that women in general, understand quite well.
Regrets Aren’t a Bad Thing
Have you ever asked anyone whether they have regrets? The most common answer is a forceful: “I never have regrets; I did what I did and don’t dwell on the past.”
I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, at least not fully. Yes, living in the past is useless if you get stuck in it, but regrets can help us uncover what we really value or want.
For example, if you let yourself feel the sadness at having lost friendships through neglect, being too busy to find time to hang out, you might be motivated to take “friend-time” today.
So yes, let’s not live in regret but let’s not push them away without contemplating what we can learn from them. Isn’t that the point of making mistakes?
We Could Be Happy If We Didn’t Have to Work
The freedom to get up when we want, do what we want. Not to have to worry about getting ahead, or even keeping our jobs or our clients. Not having to solve problems all the time.
Can’t you feel the relief? No wonder the hammock swimming from the tree is such a frequent setting for ads.
But is it really true that people who don’t have to work are happier? To make it a fair comparison, you can’t look only at retired people but also at people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are, as they say, independently wealthy because of inheritance, marriage, or prior lucrative businesses (or even lottery winners, but that’s a story in its own).
And guess what: once a basic lifestyle has been secure, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness.
Isn’t that counter intuitive? We’ve all said “money doesn’t create happiness” but the vast majority of us deep down really thought: “But I’d be different. Give me the money to free me from my rat race and I’ll have it made.”
We want the freedom to play, create, and have flexibility. The trouble is, many of us forget what we wanted to have money do for us in the first place. We might travel, buy nice things and entertain ourselves, but when we take time to reflect on it, our life feels rather aimless.
In his best seller book, “The 4-Hour Workweek” Tim Ferris says that when he goes on one of his extended stays in a foreign country, he always creates for himself both a physical and an intellectual project. His life purpose seems to be to challenge himself and to learn.
That sums up rather well the psyche of the human spirit.
And you know, we can do that even if we still have to work.
Other People’s Success
The last sentence on last week’s post caused a reaction: I was listing a few problems faced by affluent children, and said that it was another example of how success can cause problems if it’s not managed properly. But it was their parents (or earlier generations) that were successful, so some thought it wasn’t a good example of a success trap.
True enough; but there are similarities in the corporate world. For example, what if you got transferred to a division that has been the star performer for years; don’t you think you’d be affected by that success even if you didn’t personally contribute to it?
Managers in those circumstances feel the pressure of having to keep up the same rate of performance or be branded as the ones who broke the winning record.
What if you found that the high performance was attained at the expense of long term financial health and/or practices detrimental to the environment or employees’ well being? What if these practices could continue for a few years yet before things start unraveling, giving you enough time to get a big promotion?
You’d have important decisions to make, decisions that would impact you personally, and all caused by other people’s success.
Are Children of Wealthy Parents Good for Nothing?
You know the stereotypes: spoiled brats or without ambition. We’ve heard it often enough and I don’t have statistics to prove either way. Whether or not they run into difficulties more than other people, affluent kids do face certain issues because of the family’s wealth:
- They have more money and often also more time to get into trouble (not having to work to fund their education). We all know teenagers have a design flaw: they have a seemingly irresistible urge to sow wild oats, to experiment. The more hangout time they have, the more exposure they get to dubious ideas (theirs or their friends’). And the more money they have to party with, the fewer external limits on drugs and alcohol.
- Many feel entitled to whatever they want; they pretty much always did get it, so why wouldn’t that continue. That can create a number of serious problems: they haven’t learned how to push themselves which makes them lazy; they aren’t very resilient in the face of defeat because they haven’t faced adversity; they can be, well, unlikeable because of their arrogance; and they might also lack in empathy which makes them highly flawed human beings.
- On the other side of the coin, some are burdened with heavy expectations: maintaining the family tradition of excellence, and that might not suit the type of personality they were born with.
- Not only that, they may not feel like they have a choice of career; they are not allowed the right to follow their life purpose if it isn’t one of the “acceptable” paths. So their choice may be either to live with a squashed spirit or to rebel.
Of course, there are many affluent children and young adults who are delightful, well adjusted and a gift to their community, and others who are just plain average.
My point here? This whole subject is just another example of how success can bring a new set of problems if it’s not managed properly.
I Got What I Wanted; Why Am I Not Happy
That’s what a client of mine once said. She had just gotten divorced under “great” circumstances: it was what she wanted, the children were grown up and on their own so there was no custody issue, and there was plenty of money for both spouses so divorce wasn’t a financial trauma. She finally had the independence she had been craving. And she was lost.
It’s not like she had gone through the anger and sadness of having been ditched and replaced by a younger model or that she missed their life together. She was bright and quite capable of managing on her own. But there is one thing she didn’t have.
You see, though she looked like she had “a life” and quite an active one, she really had never developed a sense of personal purpose. Her purpose was tied to her marriage: she was the prominent wife; that was her identity even when the marriage had cooled off to a point where they didn’t spend much time together.
The good news is that she had the time to explore who she was and what she really wanted, and the resources to act on her findings.
The bad news is that if she tried to fill her life without purpose, she could end up very busy but feeling rather empty without knowing why.
Major life transitions like divorce can be difficult (she was one of the few lucky ones!) but they also are great opportunities to reinvent ourselves or discover who we always were.
Why Would High Marks at School Be Bad For Your Career?
For one thing, the ability to relate to people is the main success factor in business (more about that in later posts). Many of us paid the price for high marks with long hours of concentrated work, leaving little time to pursue other interests.
I know that I would go through my MBA differently knowing what I know; I would spend a lot less time with my nose in books, and a lot more being involved in various activities with people. Of course, it’s a balance.
Making high marks a priority can also prevent a student from experimenting with a new subject and with taking risks on choosing a project topic. Looking back, I see I missed great opportunities to learn a lot more than what I did, not only about subjects, but also about how to think your way through more uncertain territory. (Thankfully, I came to my senses later in life).
Finally, I’ve observed that many people who have worked hard at school and then in their careers don’t know themselves that well. They never devoted time and attention to exploring who they really are, and can find out that they spent their lives climbing the ladder only to find that it’s against the wrong wall.
Electronic Leash
I was traveling for most of May, partly for business and partly for pleasure, and the month flew by. I had decided that writing blog posts was not my highest priority; looking after individuals’ needs was as well as taking a break.
But I felt like a slacker for not posting, which of course is ridiculous. It’s just another example of how we let electronics keep us on a leash: checking our e-mails and bringing our blackberries and laptops on our trips.
Yes, if we don’t deal with them the e-mail volume gets ridiculous; and there may be a deal going down. But by being so available, we trained people to get us involved rather than deal with matters themselves. And taking an electro-break is absolutely essential to our wellbeing and future performance.
Did you know that our brain recharges best when we give it a change of pace? It wants us to do something different and checking messages on our blackberry while we’re on the beach spoils the whole thing. Sort of like looking at our watch when on a romantic date.
“I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up”: Laughing at Failure
Remember that commercial, sometime in the 80s, I think. It’s been spoofed many times since, more than it deserves to be. I mean the acting isn’t Oscar material, but it isn’t bad enough to warrant the kind of derision it got over the years. So what’s going on here?
For that matter, what’s so funny about someone slipping on a banana peel? Mainly the fact that it’s not us doing it. Laughing expresses our gladness that we’re not in their boots, and also maybe is a bit of an “exorcism” of something we don’t want for ourselves. Laugh and it won’t seem like a big deal.
Now unless your body is vulnerable (age, injuries), slipping on a peel doesn’t cause much harm. But being elderly, alone, and unable to get up, now that’s frightening when you think of it.
And that’s the point: laughter prevents us from thinking about it. It distances us from the fear or being alone and vulnerable. Of lying there in pain, not knowing how to get help.
Why am I talking about this here? Because it reminds me of how we fear failure.
We fear it and either discount its possibility too much by refusing to consider how to minimize its likelihood or impact, or we give too much energy to trying to prevent it even if it’s a remote possibility.
And for many of us, it’s particularly hard to bounce back after setbacks, personal or professional. It’s a skill I was never taught in business school; I think because of the usual mindset, you know the one that says: “Failing is for losers and don’t think about being a loser or you’ll become one.” Yet it’s a skill we really need to learn. We are going to fail many times in our lifetimes. That’s for sure, unless we do nothing, risk anything. And that’s the biggest failure of all.
So how do you bounce back when you feel like a failure? That topic was so interesting to me I chose it as my contribution to a book I co-authored with other coaches. Here’s the link if you want to look into it: http://www.topcoachesshare.com/volume3/HeleneDesruisseaux
Nothing is as Tiring as Pointless Work
My most draining days have been when they were full of long, hard work of the kind that I dislike doing, and either:
- I didn’t see the point of it all
- Or I didn’t see when it would end.
It seems like nothing is as tiring as pointlessness. We humans are problem solving machines. We need context. We function better when we see a cause and effect, a beginning and an end. After all, we think in stories and stories have a plot, some logic to them.
So why wouldn’t we understand why we do the work we do?
- Because our environment is too full of confusing and ever changing circumstances,
- Because the decision makers aren’t sharing the information,
- Or because we are too busy to remember the reasons why.
In the first case, we have to learn to navigate through chaos better (and that’s quite a skill). In the second case, we can ask; most people would respond well to constructive questions. If they don’t, it’s a clue we might want to work elsewhere.
The third case requires us to take time to identify or remember our purpose. What’s the real goal of this project/job/unit/company again?
That applies to our overall business or work as well. Knowing why we do what we do is probably the most essential requirement of a good life. And making a living isn’t a good enough reason.
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