UFYB 305: NEGOTIATION & COLLABORATION FOR PROFESSIONAL WOMEN OF COLOR (AND EVERYONE ELSE): A CONVERSATION WITH EXECUTIVE COACH JAMIE LEE

Welcome to Unf*ck Your Brain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism, and coaching, to rewire your brain and get what you want in life. And now here’s your host, Harvard Law School grad, feminist rockstar, and master coach, Kara Loewentheil.

Listen up, you all, if you are a certified coach from any certification or you are a therapist or social worker, psychologist, psychotherapist, any therapist who works with cognitive based approaches, I have something for you. It’s free, it’s essential, it’s concise and powerful, and it’s coming soon but you have to opt in to get it. I have created a brand new private podcast called How to Coach Like a Feminist: Adding a Feminist Lens to Coaching or Cognitive Based Therapy.

So whether you are a certified life coach or a licensed mental health professional, this is essential listening if you work with women or people socialized as women. You may not identify as a feminist, but society identifies your clients as women if they are women or socialized as women. And that means that their brains are being impacted and your brain’s being impacted by how society thinks about and treats women. That is why having a feminist lens on your coaching or on your cognitive based therapy is so important.

So in this private podcast, I’m really distilling down to the essence, the most important powerful points on kind of every stage of having, especially a coaching. But also some forms of a therapeutic relationship from how you market and describe yourself and your services from a feminist lens. How you create the container and the relationship with your client with a feminist lens, which is something that is so often overlooked. How you actually coach or provide services and kind of tools.

How you help clients deal with setting goals in the container of coaching or therapy from a feminist perspective, given all of the complex socialization that plays into how your clients or patients will think about themselves and where they’re trying to get. It is totally free, but it is on a separate podcast feed. Listen to me, it will not air on this podcast feed because it is very specialized to people who are coaches or licensed mental health professionals so you need to opt in to get it.

Episodes start airing on September 18^th. This is a limited series, so you want to sign up now, get access while the getting’s good. Send your email to +1347 997 1784, if you prefer to text. And then when you’re prompted, send the code word coach. Again, that’s send your email to +1347 997 1784. When you’re prompted, send the word coach. Listen to me, I want you to use your good email. You know what I mean.

I just signed up for something the other day and I was like, “I’ve got to give them my real email so I actually see this email because my send stuff to this email, email has 300 messages in there a day and I’m just deleting everything.” So you want to get access to these episodes, you want to know they’re happening. Don’t let them get lost in spam about shoe sales. Send your good email address. Or you can go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coach, nice and easy, unfuckyourbrain.com/coach, come sign up because I’m going to be dropping some wisdom and you’re not going to want to miss it.

Hello my chickens, I’m very excited for this interview but just to keep it real with you, both myself and my guest, Jamie Lee came on today. We were both like, “Oh yeah, one of those days.” I was like, “Maybe we should just take a nap on the podcast. Would that be helpful to people?” So if you’re feeling like that listening to this, you’re not alone. No matter how much thought work you do, no matter how well your business is doing, no matter what else, there are days that you’re just like, we were just talking about how being in a witch hunt in the woods sounded like a really good situation.

No internet, just a lot of twigs and a book to read. So if you feel that way, it’s normal. Alright, that’s not really what we’re going to talk about today though, we’re not doing the myth of Baba Yaga. We are here to talk with Jamie Lee, one of my favorite coaches and people who is also a graduate of the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching. And she specializes in working with ambitious women and teach them how to ask and advocate for what they want, whether that’s raises or promotions or changes in their duties or job structure or whatever that may be.

So we’re going to get into her framework and what she teaches, but Jamie, do you want to tell people a little bit about kind of who you are and how you came to this work?

Jamie: Yes, I am a future witch hunt dweller.

Kara: That’s going to be the next certification, how to become a witch dweller is my new program.

Jamie: I’m also a triple certified executive coach and I help smart women who hate office politics get promoted and better paid without throwing anyone under the bus. And I do it by doing three things, which is blending the best of mutual benefit negotiation strategies with practical neuroscience techniques from an intersectional feminist lens.

Kara: We’re going to dig into all of that. Were you yourself, were you in the corporate world and were you that person who hated office politics?

Jamie: Absolutely.

Kara: Tell us about that and kind of how you got into coaching.

Jamie: Yeah, I really struggled in the workplace. First of all, I was a minority and I worked in finance and then I worked in tech startups where pretty much 95/98% of the leadership were male, pale and sometimes Yale.

Kara: I’ve never heard that. I’ve heard male, pale. I’ve never heard, and sometimes Yale, as somebody who went to Yale and also is pale. I really love that.

Jamie: Yeah. One time my direct manager was male, pale and Yale. I’m like, “Okay.” And they would all go to lunch together, the male and pale folks would all go to lunch together and I’m like, “Wow, I feel left out.” And this is something that I teach for women who hate office politics, which is that, unfortunately, or fortunately, based on your perspective, these informal conversations are what drives the needle most times. It’s like, how do we get ahead of the formal meetings, the formal discussions?

Because I feel like for people like you and me and for smart women who love to read books and who have excelled in academia that we have this mindset that’s like we’ve got to do that performance review. We’ve got to do that really well. We’ve got to check the boxes really well. But then we kind of miss out on, no, there are these informal conversations that do move the needle. It doesn’t always have to be going to lunch with the guys or golfing with the guys, but you have to be willing to engage in those conversations.

But am I answering your question? I think your question was, did I hate office politics? Absolutely. And I realized as soon as I encountered thought work and the moment I learned about Byron Katie, and the model I realized, yes, this is the root cause of my suffering because I have many thoughts and most of them fictional. But they’re so compelling to me because I’m usually like, “What, somebody doesn’t like me. They didn’t wave hello. They didn’t give me a smile when they walked into the office, they must hate me.”

There was a lot of internalized self-doubt, internalized even misogyny, because I’ve got to prove myself twice more than the next guy who’s male and pale just because I’m a woman, just because I’m different, just because I’m immigrant, whatever, Asian, young. And so yes, I hated office politics. And I realized as soon as I encountered thought work, yes, my own thoughts, my fiction that I was unintentionally weaving in my brain was the root cause of so much of my suffering. And that’s why coaching was, it’s such a great answer for me and for my clients.

Kara: I love that point that women are, it’s funny because on one level, women are socialized to believe that we’re very relational and good at relationships, but that’s sort of supposed to be non-professional. And then in the professional context we’re socialized to do exactly what you’re saying, which is put your head down and work and wait for someone to approve you or think that you just have to do it by the book and excel in this particular way.

And not understanding that whole kind of off the books or outside the performance review network that is so important to getting ahead. So how do you think that professional women in particular, professional women of color, Black or Indigenous professional women, can raise their awareness of how social conditioning impacts this? How does social conditioning impact how we internalize the gender and the color wage gap?

Jamie: That’s a really interesting question because just yesterday I hosted an open call for women of color who want to accelerate their leadership and advance their careers. And I feel like women of color, especially Black Indigenous people, I call them women of the global majority because 85% of the global population actually are Black Indigenous, mixed heritage, Asian people of color.

And I think you mentioned this, Kara, I learned this from you when I took Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching, which is that women of color know a lot more than many white women do about how white women can be biased, how society can be biased against people of color. So I don’t think understanding the socialization is so much an issue as opposed to how do we override? How do we interrupt the pattern of continuing that unintentional thought patterns that holds us back that keep us linked to that internalized bias? Does that make sense? That that keep us [crosstalk] to that?

Kara: Yeah. No, I mean, I think so. I think my experience has been that sort of people who are in a marginalized identity or population will be aware obviously, of the bias. But I think that we don’t always connect the dots to, my insecurity comes from that. We sort of are like, “Well, I have my own personal insecurities”, which are whatever they are.

And then there’s this sort of injustice in the world, those things are actually connected because when you live in a world that’s constantly telling you what’s wrong with you and that you’re not good enough and implicitly and explicitly, of course, your brain develops around that. So I know that you have kind of a critique of the mainstream media and how they cover the wage gap. Because I feel like a lot of people probably that’s where they get their information from about the wage gap or about negotiation in the workplace.

So I’d love to hear kind of what your thoughts are on what’s wrong with how we’re usually talked to about this?

Jamie: Well, I used to read a lot of articles, especially before I decided to become a coach, to get certified, I used to read a lot of the mainstream media. In fact, I was a hedge fund analyst where it was my job to consume 3,000 articles all day long. And I realized at the end of the day my nervous system was fried because I was just getting triggered by all the fear and greed that it was intentionally triggering inside of me. Because a lot of the media is intended to get a reaction out of you, to get you to click, to get you to feel something and then to buy or to take an action that the advertisers want you to take.

And recently it was just a month or so ago, it was Black Women’s Equal Pay Day and I was really jarred by reading some of the articles that get printed every year that we come across Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. And The Oracle cited folks who were saying, “I feel like it’s my gender and my race that is holding me back.” And that is someone’s real experience. That’s someone’s actual thoughts and opinions and that’s totally valid.

But the problem, especially for folks like me, we’re sort of sensitive, perceptive, and everything that we read and hear sort of becomes our hypnotic command, and we internalize a lot of things. We read that, and then we think, yeah, my gender and my race is holding me back too. Because I remember feeling that way even though I’m not Black. I used to think it’s because I’m Asian, it’s because I’m a woman.

And this is something that I learned in Advanced Certification for Feminist Coaching that really blew my mind, which is that being exposed to all these opinions and characterizations in the media, unintentionally leads to my brain collapsing my identity with victimhood. And so this is a very nuanced thing that I’m saying and I almost feel like I might get in trouble for saying this.

But I think it’s really important that we read research, we read newspaper articles with a lot more nuanced perspective. That yes, that is some people’s experience, but not everyone’s, that is some women’s experience and their opinion but not necessarily mine.

Kara: Yeah. I mean, I think the way I think about it is I think it’s fact, not opinion at a statistical level. But that the statistics, this is something we work on all the time in ACFC. The statistics don’t determine the individual person’s ability to change their life, which is where coaching comes in. Because if you’re absorbing that media and what you’re hearing is, well, it’s always 80 cents on the dollar or it’s always 90 cents on the dollar or 75 cents on the dollar. And you believe that that constrains and determines your potential outcomes.

Then you’re not going to try to learn either how to play the game or how to go around the game or how to start your own game or whatever it is you need to do. So that gap exists and exists because of thoughts in people’s minds, the people who are paying less. And then also the people who are believing, well, that’s the best I can do or it’s going to be the same everywhere.

That is I think a thing where people absolutely are in particular firms, organizations, institutions, where they are being discriminated against based on their gender, their race, whatever else. But what makes us, I think, what really keeps us stuck is when we believe, well, it’s like that everywhere so there’s no point in trying to go somewhere else, talking to a headhunter. It’s sort of the globalizing of it.

Jamie: Yes, the globalizing of it and then reducing our agency in the situation unintentionally. I, like you, I coach smart women and they have advanced degrees, NDs and PhDs. And I once coached a woman of color who had an MD and she was able to, I think she had a PhD and an MD. I think she had a PhD and an MD. She was degreed up [crosstalk].

Kara: Well credentialed yeah.

Jamie: Extremely well credentialed and she went from working in academia, not making a lot of money to working for a foundation where she, I think, doubled her salary. And so she had done something really smart. She had doubled her salary. She’s making multiple six figures, but she saw that someone, a predecessor, was earning maybe, I don’t know, 10% more before she replaced the predecessor. And then that’s when that collapsing the thoughts came up, even though she had improved her income.

Even though she had these avenues of even more improving her income, further growing her income, she had this unintentional thought, I shot myself in the foot. I’m a victim of the wage gap. And that was the moment I realized, not reading all of these articles, not taking it all in at face value could be more useful. Because I think I said that sort of inarticulately, but I think you get my drift.

You want to be more judicious. And so in that coaching session I helped her see, sure you have this thought, but let’s just investigate what is the real impact of that thought. Whereas you can choose, I’m actually doing really well.

Kara: And that doesn’t mean that you don’t then go and try to get that extra 10%. The point is, when you think, I shot myself in the foot, then you’re already in this negative shame mindset which is not going to help you go to whoever it is, the provost and be like, “Actually, here’s the value that I’m bringing. Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what I know about compensation previously. And here’s what I want.” When you’re already coming from, I already did it wrong, I shot myself in the foot, then you are sort of starting with that emotion, it’s not going to kind of carry you through the way you want.

Jamie: Right. And I think kind of going back to what you were saying earlier, how can women understand the impact of socialization on their thoughts? I think that this is where it can become really useful to just recognize, we think that thought because we’ve been taught and conditioned to think that thought by the media we have consumed but not necessarily the choice we intentionally made for ourselves.

Kara: So I know that you teach something that you call your three circle framework. Can you teach us a little bit about what that is and how that works?

Jamie: So the three circle framework is when you think about advocating for what you want in your career, negotiating for a pay raise, promotion, more resources, a different job, whatever. People worry. People worry about, what do I say so that they don’t immediately shoot it down? How do I approach this so that I don’t come across as being greedy or selfish? And I teach this concept, this philosophy that self-advocacy is an act of service.

How you advocate for yourself when you use the three circle framework, you make it super clear that you’re doing it from a place of adding more value, of presenting the benefits that it has to the employer or to the other people, to the other parties in that negotiation. So the three circles, the first circle is of course, what is the value you’re already bringing? So again, it’s let’s reclaim that agency for self-validation and take stock of our contributions and think about, here are all the ways that I am adding value, but don’t stop there.

Think about what is the future impact? What is the future benefit, the beyond benefit, beyond what’s immediate and what’s clear? What else can happen? What else can happen a year from now, three years from now, five years from now? Because every time you negotiate and advocate for yourself, your employer or your counterpart is thinking about what’s in it for me in the future. So that’s the first circle. The value that you bring and the future impact of that.

And then the second circle is of course, what are their goals? What do they want? And you want to get really clear about what it is they want, what is it that they don’t want by getting curious, asking questions, making observations about how they prioritize decisions and resources. And then at the end we’re going to make a Venn diagram.

Venn diagram with the third circle, which is of course, what is it that you want for yourself? So these things all overlap and it’s the center overlap of how what you want adds more benefit and drives the goal of your employer, helps them see the value of your ask.

Kara: That’s so important because I feel like I see so often even in my own employees and my own team, that when people want a promotion, they want a raise, whatever it is, they come and they tell you what they’ve done. But it’s not put in context of how it’s advancing the business goals, what they’re asking for would help move towards those business goals. They’re missing that whole piece. And when you are asking for a promotion or for a raise or whatever it is you’re asking for, you’re selling something.

You’re asking someone to give you something and they want to know what’s in it for them, how does it benefit them, the business, the goals, the team, whatever it is. And I feel that that is so often missing, it’s from that same, it’s almost going through academia especially just gives you these blinders that are sort of like, well, I did well on the test. So now I should get into the next thing. This is my good performance review so I should get a promotion as opposed to well, how is my promotion going to help my boss look good to their boss or move towards their revenue goal or towards their team goals or whatever it is.

So I think that’s so smart. So I imagine this is related, but one of the things that I feel people want to know is how they can make their request feel, I think you talk about kind of how to be collaborative and then ask as opposed to just being like, “Here’s what I want.” And then you get a no and then, well, now I’m sad and I feel ashamed and that’s the end of that. What thoughts or advice do you have about how to create openings for your manager to kind of collaborate with you when you have an ask rather than just like, I want this, this person says no, that’s the end of the conversation?

Jamie: Well, really simply, just get curious. And going back to what you said earlier, you were talking about how women are taught to or socialized to be relational. And in fact again, we want to be judicious with how we absorb and how we use research. And we have to acknowledge sometimes the research can be useful.

So I think what I’m thinking about is gender researchers, negotiation researchers at, I think, Duke University and Harvard University. They put out a research paper showing that when women take a relational approach to their ask, it’s better received. And at the end of the day, what all it means is that just as you summarized, being able to articulate, this ask, this promotion or this raise, this resource that I’m asking for, it’s going to help us.

It’s going to help you achieve, you the boss, achieve your goals faster. It’s going to help the team be more productive and more efficient. And this is the reason why I’m making this ask. And then you ask them, “What are your thoughts about that?” And if they say for whatever reason, “Well, that’s great, but right now is not a good time.” You don’t say “Never mind”, you give up.

Kara: Sorry I even asked.

Jamie: Yeah. You say, “Okay, I hear that now is not a good time. And I’m curious, when would be a good time to follow-up? When would be a good time to have the next part of this conversation. You tell me, “Well, you know what? That’s great, but I’m not the person who makes the decision.”” And this is something that happens quite often with my clients, if they are at managerial or director level and they report to the VP. And the VP says, “Well, actually the real decision maker is the CFO or the CEO.”

And they’re like, “I’ll go have a conversation with the CFO but we’ll have to see what they say.” That’s when you get curious, ”Okay, so what I’m hearing is that the CFO is the person to make this decision, would it be alright for me to go have a conversation with them directly?” This is actually something one of my clients did. And the boss who was the VP said, “Yes, go ahead, you have my blessing.”

Kara: Yeah. So good or even, and what would make it easier for you to have that conversation with the CFO if a director isn’t optional? Part of what I love of what you’re saying is it’s like anything else. When you take a ‘rejection’ or a no or a not now, whatever, personally, when you’ve gotten yourself all worked up to ask and you’re very anxious. And then if you don’t get a positive response right away, you feel crushed.

If you’re doing this with an unmanaged mind. You’re not really able to be curious if you truly, if you really are approaching it from a completely emotionally neutral place where you actually are just like, “I’m just trying to figure out what path do I take through this labyrinth to get to where I want to go?” And if there’s a stop up at this path, I’m going to look around it. I’m going to be curious. I’m going to ask questions.

I think that’s why thought management is so important. It’s not just get brave enough to ask. It’s to be able to keep your chill the whole time and actually be curious. Actually think of it as, this is a collaborative problem solving and I am almost like a detective going for information about what I need. What is it they want? Who’s in charge? What I need. It’s almost like thinking about that first conversation more as just initial investigation, not necessarily the end all be all.

Jamie: I think that’s so good. And just to complement what you’re saying, there is this perfectionist mindset trap. I think you called it perfectionist fantasy.

Kara: Yeah, perfectionist fantasy.

Jamie: Yeah, I’m pretty sure I learned that from you. And so recently I shared on a post that I’m a failure too.

Kara: Join the club, man.

Jamie: Which is just owning, that the best of us hardly ever get 100% of the shots we take. It’s Wayne Gretzky, whose quote is always used in negotiation seminars, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. But he never got 100% of the shots he did take.

Kara: It’s like you miss 99% of the shots you do take, but 100% of the ones you don’t. So if you want to make 1% of your shots, you have to try.

Jamie: Yeah. And in my coaching practice, what I do is I encourage my clients to celebrate the very act of having taken that step, initiated that investigative conversation, that very first step. That is a game changer. Another thing I learned from you, Kara, is that infinite 0 to 1%. That is a game changer because what has happened for me, what has happened for some of my clients, even when they get a no, sometimes you’ve already dropped an anchor. Anchor is both a negotiation strategy and a really powerful cognitive bias.

The first reasonable information that enters into the negotiation, people will remember and they will come back to it when they can. So in my life, in my example, I negotiated for a 25% salary increase when I worked at a tech startup. And they were like, “Yeah, we’d love to. We just don’t have the funds right now.” But when the company raised the money they gave me that 25% rate. So even though I got a no, it became a yes, eventually. So if I was like, “Oh, my God, they said no, I’m terrible. I should have never done this.” I could have collapsed it on myself. But I’m like, “Okay, let’s just keep on going.”

Kara: And having that, I think it can get to and feel so adversarial. And we’re sort of encouraged to think adversarially, I think about our bosses and about kind of the companies that we work for, especially these days. But your bosses are also just humans, and most of them aren’t actually sociopaths. What they may want to be able to give you what you want, or maybe they do need to be convinced, but whatever, it’s a human interaction rather than kind of an aggressive adversarial like, “Well, I shot the cannonball, but he was able to block it and now that’s that.”

Jamie: I’m so glad you brought this up because I coach women who hate office politics. And when we hate office politics we hate the power dynamics and how it makes us feel. And that is why I was thinking about two things, I just want to remember. The first thing is a brain technique, brain rewiring technique that I teach my clients. That’s so simple and effective. Gosh, what was the second thing? When you’re in your 40s you get a little forgetful.

Kara: Tell us the brain rewiring, the other one will come back.

Jamie: Yes. So the thing that I teach them is sometimes our nervous systems get activated, especially if you are sensitive, a woman of color. Have you ever experienced any sort of trauma in the workplace, a boss is saying something, pushing back on you? And it feels as if they’re taking over. And how we think about things also relate to the modalities in our brains, in our visual modalities, our auditory modalities. And so when I ask my clients, “How does that feel and what is the image that you see?”

And I ask that question because our brains always think in images and thoughts. They see their boss sort of towering over them in their face. And it feels intimidating and they’re again, anxious and feeling not great. And so let’s just notice this is memory. Every time you recall a memory, your imagination is activated. And so I have my clients, what I ask them to do is put that image of their boss on a small screen that they visualize in their mind’s eye. And then turn that image black and white and sometimes even play some clown music.

Or better yet, see that boss as the five year old version of them. Because I hate to say it because I know you’re a boss, but I’m just going to say it out loud, not all bosses know how to manage people. Not all bosses are excellent and perfect at communicating and managing other people’s emotions. Because at the end of the day I think we bring all of ourselves and we bring all the ages we had been including when we were five and we didn’t want to get yelled at for doing the wrong things or we wanted all the attention and the approval.

And so for that reason, I have my clients visualize their boss, make that image smaller, shrink that screen, turn it black and white, and just notice how differently that image feels to them. And if they wanted to manipulate it even further, add some clown music, see them regressing to their five year old self. And then they will notice that, yeah, I feel more calmer. I feel more calmer right now. I feel like that’s not such a big deal. We’re just having a conversation. We just said some words. They had an opinion. It’s not the end of the world.

Kara: Yeah. I’m just thinking about all the people who are emotionally destroyed when their five year old has a tantrum too. But I love that idea of the shrinking it down. I mean I think there’s also this sort of historical socialization level of there are centuries and centuries of it being very dangerous for especially a man to be mad at a woman. I think that there is sort of some level of epigenetic trauma in women from centuries and centuries of… And this can come up even sometimes bosses do yell or do something abusive.

Sometimes they’re not, they’re just saying no. But that’s sort of putting yourself out there and then getting a no or a rejection or anything that feels coded as at all forceful from a man in authority. I think for some women can contribute to that larger than life kind of feeling or experience, yeah, because of that history.

So I think the other thing that’s coming up for me is for people listening who are bosses or are managers because of course, often people who are reporting to a VP or RVP or people below them also. How do you show up as a manager or as a boss when you’re approached with this kind of thing? How can you be more responsive? How can you, I mean I think one of the things that I’ve learned is how to really give a sort of fleshed out vision of what would be required.

If somebody, for instance, so I’ve had an employee come to me who wanted a raise and in my opinion, she was currently doing her job at an A minus level, it was commensurate with her salary. It was fine. For the kind of raise she wanted I was like, “You’d have to be doing an unbelievable job.” But that’s not helpful to her. How does she know what that is? So I really sat down and thought about, what would make that worth it to me?

What would be the unbelievable performance that would make that kind of a raise especially in this sort of position, which isn’t necessarily always super highly paid, what would make that worthwhile to me? And then I was able to give her this really pretty clear vision of this is what would need to be happening. This is how it would need to be contributing towards the company goals, improving whatever, this part of the business or my experience or my workflow. And she really totally stepped it up and she got half her raise already. She’s going to get the other half.

Jamie: This is a success story.

Kara: Totally a success story, yeah. But I think we have to, some of us listening to this are direct reports, some of us are managers, some of us are both. And to really think about when someone comes to you, not just sort of, I could have just been like, “No, that’s too much. And you do your job fine, but it’s not worth that.” Versus me thinking, if I want her to get what she wants but it has to be worth it to me and the company too, what would that look like?

It’s being collaborative, if you’re listening to this and you’re a boss, it’s also on you to be open to that, to be collaborative. It’s easy to have that knee jerk, I think, especially when you’re an entrepreneur and you own the business. So you feel more kind of just connected to how’s the money being spent, where is it going? What is it bringing in? It’s easy to just sort of like ah, no, I can’t afford that or that’s too much or whatever it is. And having that, well, is there something that would be worth that? What would that be like? Can this person deliver that? Coming at it from that collaborative perspective is important.

Jamie: I love that. This sounds like a dream come true scenario really. I’m thinking about my clients’ perspectives because they want that timeline. They want metrics. They want to be told or they want to collaborate with their manager on a plan that they feel is a bit of a stretch, but it’s still achievable. That will make them feel like, yeah, I’m going to go work at it. I’m going to go hit it out of the park and show them, yes, I am delivering even more value. Hence this raise that I’m asking for is just the percentage, is just the fraction of the total value that I’m bringing to the table.

Kara: How would you say that going through since you have that through the Advanced Certification, how would you say going through the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching changed how you coach or how you approach your work?

Jamie: It made me less afraid to coach on these big scary topics. It made me feel like I can help clients. I have clients who are rock stars in their field, and they encounter the problems of internalized biases from a different angle. It’s not always they’re reporting to male, pale and Yale guy and they’re feeling left out. Sometimes it’s, no, they feel like other women in their workplaces, penalizing them for having achieved the status that they don’t yet have.

So I feel like I’ve gained a nuanced perspective of thought work where I don’t have to, and I don’t gaslight my clients, into believing, if you just thought this thing you’ll be better. And another thing that really helped me is enabling the client to make a choice inside the coaching session. So we empower them from the get-go of, hey, everything here is a choice. You get to decide, would you like to go here or would you like to go there?

Kara: And that’s modeling that collaboration for them. I mean, if somebody needs coaching because they are afraid to take kind of agency in their career negotiations or they’re afraid to continue a hard conversation or whatever it is. Having a top down coaching dynamic is not really going to help them. It’s just you’re the authority who then tells them how to talk to the other authority versus helping them develop the ability to feel like they can guide and direct where they want to go, feels so important.

Jamie: Yeah. And I think one last thing that I learned that was so helpful is that it’s okay to be angry. It’s a very powerful thing to know that, of course, it’s okay to be angry. But we want to be angry and empowered as opposed to angry and disempowered. I think that is the whole crux of my point about reading the research and the articles from a more nuanced perspective, equipping yourself with brain techniques and doing thought work.

All of that, yes, we know that there is a problem, but how can we still be empowered? And this is again, another thing of so many things I’ve learned from you, Kara, a really wonderful and useful thing that I’ve learned.

Kara: I love that. It’s like know ‘your enemy’, which isn’t your boss, just like the wage gap or the gender inequality. But know your enemy so that you can do better than that, defeat it, not so that you just give up, so good. Is there anything that you wanted to share that we didn’t get to or wish I’d asked you that I didn’t?

Jamie: Well, I guess, just to close the loop on the conversation about these visualization techniques, I think the point that I want to make is that, yes, socialization, systemic oppression, patriarchy, sexism, they’re real. And the statistics are not lying, but we want to have agency over our own nervous system so that we can approach these conversations, both sides of the table, employee, manager, both sides of the table from a regulated place where we have agency to be able to calmly approach this business conversation, which is what a negotiation is.

So that we can really stand side by side as if we’re looking at a game strategy board and we’re here, how do we get to that other end of the goal post, the other goal post in a, as you said collaborative way? So I think yeah, I think that’s what I want to share which is that the tools as well as mindset tools, thought work. All of this is geared towards helping you have greater agency, more calm, more grounded-ness, more confidence. So that you can have a say and you can have more influence in your own career trajectory.

Kara: So good. Where can people find you?

Jamie: People can find me online at my website J-A-M-I-E L-E-E C-O-A-C-H .com jamieleecoach.com. I also have a podcast, It’s called Negotiate your Career Growth. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well as on Instagram.

Kara: And your podcast is everywhere they find podcasts?

Jamie: Yes, it’s everywhere, you can, yes, Amazon, Spotify, Google, Apple. Yeah, and all the ways will be in the show notes, right?

Kara: Yes, everything will be in the show notes. Go check Jamie out and go negotiate for what you want, honestly, beyond your workplace, all of this applies. We could have a whole other conversation about how this all applies in other areas too.

Jamie: Right, because it’s a meta skill, it’s a life skill.

Kara: Yeah, but of course we’re out of time for today. We’ll do that another time. Thank you for coming on my friend.

If you’re loving what you’re learning in the podcast, you have got to come check out The Clutch. The Clutch is the podcast community for all things UnF*ck Your Brain. It’s where you can get individual help applying the concepts to your own life.

It’s where you can learn new coaching tools not shared on the podcast that will blow your mind even more. And it’s where you can hang out and connect over all things thought work with other podcast chickens just like you and me. It’s my favorite place on Earth and it will change your life, I guarantee it. Come join us at www.unfuckyourbrain.com/theclutch. That’s unfuckyourbrain.com/theclutch. I can’t wait to see you there.