5 Weddings and A Baby

A favorite professional friend who generously shares his wisdom every quarter with my MBA class talks about the importance of relationships and says "you need different people for different reasons during different life seasons."  This is true professionally and personally.  For those of you who haven't discovered the Strategic Network Audit Guide and the WiLD toolkit, it is a great way to do some reflection on your "tribe" and yourself.

Today I am personally celebrating the tapestry of my "tribe" and how rich I feel because of the different people I get to know and love.  This year they are wonderfully illustrated by 5 weddings and a baby.

Wedding 1--60+ friends who found each other after being single for a while

Wedding 2--daughter of dear college friend who I travelled around the US with in my Ford Courier pickup named Barney

Wedding 3--dear friend of one of our daughters--SO juicy to love my kids' friends!!!!

Wedding 4--the perfect cowgirl princess wedding of my niece on the ranch I grew up on with so many of the people I grew up with (image in the field near my childhood bedroom holding J Wally)

Wedding 5--son of friends we met when our kids played Peter Pan and Wendy in the middle school play

The baby is my newest grandchild, Jackson Walter (aka Noodle, J Wally, etc.) whose birth added SO much joy to this messy and imperfect Boos Bunch.

What I know for sure is that relationships matter.  Recently my husband Wally got that tattooed on the back of his calves--surprised us all with the tattoo--not really with the message.  I am grateful for this year of celebrating all the different people who have shown up for me and walked with me in different seasons, for different reasons.

I am grateful for each of you who read this.  My hope is that you are invited to invest in the relationships you want to nurture in this season.  Make that call, send that text, affirm someone you love most for the things you love about them. 

Sideways Santa & the EASY Button

Happy 2021.  Hopefully it will indeed be a happy new year for you.

I do love new beginnings.  They can happen at whatever time you want to mark them.  I have walked with so many as they created new beginnings in their profession, in their leadership, in their 'next chapter' of life.  It is the privilege of my life to walk with people as they choose to be intentional in growing and designing the work, life, and impact they want. 

This week I have been reminded a number of times of a key element in creating vibrant new beginnings.  The "EASY" button.  Taking the path of 'ease and flow' and/or choosing to 'lean in' when there may be some discomfort.  Be curious.  Follow your heart.  Get in to your body and your heart and connect to your 'why' as you make forward choices.  Pay attention to what gives you energy and what drains your energy.

That doesn't mean that it won't sometimes feel a bit scary.  It should be that good kind of scary that happens when you are just outside your comfort zone.  It is called “Eustress” and is the good form of stress that can create growth. Perhaps that will be initiating a conversation you haven't had before, saying ‘yes’ or maybe ‘no’ to someone or something, pursuing that new thing that has drawn you for years that may not make practical sense, or just trying something new.

It seems like a relief to say goodbye to 2020.  Late in the year I heard one of the best illustrations of 2020.  When asking to see more of the Santa Photo display in the zoom background I got the story of a lovely compilation of three matted and framed chronological series of vertical family Santa photos with blanks for 2020 and future.  This was all done as the kids were sent off to get this year's photo.  Physical Distancing meant horizontal Santa Photos this year.  So 2020 is on its side among all those vertical years.  Isn't that just perfect?!  

2020. The year when life as we knew it got turned on its side. One client aptly said his organization has been experiencing ongoing "tsunamis of change" and they have grown weary. It becomes almost hard to list all that shifted. A question I have been asking myself and my clients is "how do you want to be telling your story of 2020?"  What did you learn?  How have you grown?  

And how do you want to be framing your hopes and intentions for 2021?  Hoping the reminder of the EASY button will invite you to give yourself and those you care about and work with empathy, a healthy dose of hopefulness, and maybe new commitment to take the path of ease and flow in this new beginning.

Living in This New Normal

 Change is coming so fast it is challenging to assimilate it all. As we are called to show up to this new normal of what it means to be a responsible citizen, it has been so interesting for me to watch my own response to this crisis, and to be with friends, family, and clients as they navigate these times.

What I have noticed for myself is that my emotions are high and I can easily go from my characteristic "Paula Positive in Pink" to sadness and a bit of fear.  Things that trigger a shift for me are things like events that I looked forward to being cancelled like the World Happiness Summit in Miami, or the news that my Orange Theory classes are gone for a while, or client meetings changing/shifting/cancelling, or talking to one of my kids, clients, or friends who is having their own struggles with isolation, front line emergency room healthcare, or having to learn how to teach special ed virtually.  The present and the future can feel so scary. Acknowledging that life as I know it is changing is essential.

What I know for sure and some reflection questions…

I am happier, more resilient, better for myself and others when I am taking care of myself with things like taking long walks outside while listening to favorite podcasts or books, and calling to check in with family, friends and clients, laughing, expressing gratitude,  gardening, and praying/meditating.

What are your "happiness hacks"?



There IS great opportunity for growth in this.  I see growth for myself in learning better how to use the Zoom platform to teach my classes and host virtual community meetings. I am also using the time to do some virtual learning that wouldn't have been in the schedule. 

Where do you see your growth happening?

I want to be contributive in as many spaces as possible and perhaps in new ways during these changes.  Service, growth and relationships are my highest values and I want to be living them daily--especially now.  I have and will be offering free services and finding ways to brighten days one person at a time. 

How are you considering what you can do to be of service in your world or add “light” to dark or fear filled spaces?

I need to first be aware of what I need and then be able to communicate it in order to be present consistently with love.  When I receive a text that feels judgmental (my default negative emotion) or like they are trying to "fix me/direct me/solve it", I need to check myself and assume positive intent.  I am called to even greater compassion and curiosity right now. 
What do you need and how are you proactively communicating it?

We WILL make it through this…and good things will come of it…it will get a lot harder probably before it gets easier.  Kindness, compassion, proactive movement, forgiveness and grace, connection--WITH social
distance, and lots of Leaning in to Love will get me through it. 

What intentions do you hold for "who" you want to be during these unprecedented times?

Thank you for your presence in my world. I wonder what this holds on the other side?

7 Tips to Manage Your Career in The New Year

Originally posted SU Alumni Voice Blog

The new year is a great time to take stock and reflect on where you are professionally, what you have done well in the past year, and how you want to grow or change in the coming year. It is a time to assess and make some proactive plans. To do a thorough audit, I encourage you to consider how you are doing in the three domains that intersect to ensure career success and satisfaction:

• Follow your curiosity (values and growth)

• Do what you love and what you are good at (strengths and contributions)

• Stay connected to the people who you like/respect and who like you (ratios and relationships)

Following are seven tips to consider as you intentionally move into 2019.

1. Get clear on what you want to be moving "toward" and why. This may include asking for a promotion, raise, or a new role in your current organization, or pursuing a change to a new company or track. Begin with the "why" by getting clear on your values and decision drivers and then defining your options. Learn how.

2. Identify and name your growth choices for 2019. This may be adding skills through a new project or promotion in your current company, pursuing education or certification, identifying new behaviors to adapt or influence differently, or making a choice to exit and move to a new company and role.

3. Make the time to create and/or refresh your list of favorite accomplishments and professional outcomes or contributions. Make sure to tune in to what made them your favorites. What were the skills you were using and your strengths that shine? Knowing what you are good at and love to do is essential. It is also important to know the metrics of success and be able to include vivid stories that include both the data and the engaging narrative. Identify your strengths.

4. Update your marketing collateral and content with your most recent accomplishments. This is the perfect time to update your resume and polish your LinkedIn profile. Thoughtful Personal Branding is even more important in our digital world. Learn how to build your personal brand online.

5. Consider your ratios—self, personal, team—for optimal problem solving and creativity. Individuals need to experience 3 to 1 positive to negative emotions. For healthy primary relationships we need 7-10 positive to 1 negative interaction, and for healthy team functioning, we need 3-5 positive to 1 negative.

6. Research continues to confirm the value of focusing on wellness as the most powerful way to avoid sickness--physically, emotionally, relationally and spiritually. Committing to incorporate regular self-care behaviors like exercise, gratitude, meditation/prayer/mindfulness, journaling, laughing, and any others that enhance well-being will make the biggest difference in your year.

7. Update your Relationship Map to identify your key players/partners and make your plan to connect proactively with them. Ensure you are actively cultivating mentors and that you have your version of your personal and professional board of directors. Include those who inspire you and challenge you and most importantly offer you important feedback. Map your plan for consistently engaging with and nourishing your professional network.

Just do it! You know what it is that you most need to do for your professional development and growth. Change can be hard. Forming new habits takes energy—and growth is essential for all of us! Commit to yourself and find an accountability partner who will support you through your change.

Curated Wisdom...Embodied Leadership...Richard Strozzi Heckler

What a gift it was to attend Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco this month!  This begins a series of posts that reflect my notes and reflections on the extraordinary learning and insight gathered during our weekend.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler is the founder of the Strozzi Institute. He teaches, lectures, and lives the somatic practices he teaches in his framework of Embodied Leadership. He modeled his framework in the talk he delivered to the Wisdom community. It was a powerful reminder of the insights we can gain when we "tune in" to those gut responses and body sensations that provide us important information. Our bodies speak loudly--to ourselves and to others--one of my favorite quotes begins with "happy girls are the prettiest!" Indeed it is true. We can see and learn SO much when we tune in to the body language we experience and observe. We can also change our outcomes by consciously choosing how we want to be present and thereby communicating it with our body language. Whether we choose consciously or not, our body language speaks more loudly than any of the words we choose.

He began with a powerful demonstration of a physical mindfulness practice that invited us to be present to our length, depth, width, and center, and to connect our self to our world in those dimensions.  Then he asked the questions...

How is it that there is a growing separation of haves and have not's?  One of the reasons is that we are out of touch with our bodies.  How is it that so much conflict ends in violence?  We are out of touch with our bodies. We feel through our body.

Culture has placed so much value on rational thought.  What we have sacrificed in between is the capacity to feel and sense.  James Joyce, Irish author, in his collection called the Dubliners, tells the story of Mr. Duff who lived a short distance from his body.  Absent from emotional life and deep intimate connection with the natural world; James Joyce talks about those who have been trained to live a short distance from our body.

This animating force of the body has a repository of intelligence and wisdom.  Inter dependence and inter connectedness has value because we understand the importance of reciprocity.  In planning and intellect we may not take this into account.

The body and the self are intimately linked together; we see the image of the perfect body and our intellect invites us to compare, contrast and fall short.  The way we see our self shapes how we make contact with others and how we take shape.  The shape can change.  We can shift it to have more intimacy with deeper wisdom that is in us.

He then used the example of putting our hands together naturally and then shifting it to a different way.  It is the example of the discomfort between who we are now and who we are becoming.  We want to practice so that we can do both right away.  He used a sports image of  the Brooklyn Dodgers Carl Furillo and Howard Cosell when Cosell asked Furillo, "How can you play the right field wall at Ebbets Field?"  Furillo answered, "I friggin practiced!"  

Practices--are the ones we are doing at this moment going to take us to where we want to be? Somatics teaches us how to get to new habits.  Knowledge is only a rumor until it is in the body.  Knowledge is only a rumor until it is in the muscle.  How can we leave with this embodied wisdom?  How can we take this out into our worlds?

He closed with this powerful invitation...

Take it easy, but take it.

We DO get to choose to change!  I am personally grateful to have witnessed so many extraordinary changes.  They take practice.  Using the wisdom of ALL of your dimensions supports moves into new ways of being.

Following is a link to a clip of Richard Strozzi-Heckler

Richard Strozzi-Heckler talking about Practice and Transformation.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you!

The stillness, simplicity and sparkle of this image speak volumes.

My hope for you--and for me in this new year…

--for stillness that will provide you sanctuary and sustenance

--for some sparkle that will feel like success in the life dimension you are thinking about most

--for self-discovery about where your heart sparkles most

My intentions for this year are…

Peace, Prosperity & Purpose

What are yours?

Build Yourself a Great Career—Element One--Values

Much is made these days about what it takes to build a great career. There are lots of ways to consider this question and engage in the conversation. Based on my 25 years of experience (my “10,000” hours) in working with professionals considering this question of “what it takes” to build a great career I have developed a framework to guide you in being intentional about what you do to achieve and maintain career success and satisfaction. It has been fun to refine and polish this model in the Professional Development class I am teaching at Seattle University.

The Framework includes six elements--Values & Growth, Ratios & Relationship, and Strengths & Contributions. This is the first in a series of publications examining each element and providing resources for you to use as you choose to be intentional in your career management.
 

VALUES. Start with a firm foundation.
What matters most to you?

1. What are your core values? Begin with understanding your own values and how they influence your decisions. Connecting back to your values consistently will ensure that you remain aligned with what is most important to you. An exercise that I use is a Managing with Values worksheet that was adapted by my colleague Martha Duesterhoft and slightly modified by me. You are welcome to email me to ask for this worksheet if you are interested. There are also online Values assessments many of which are based on work originally done by Milton Rokeach
   

2. How do your values inform your decisions? Sometimes the practical realities of life dictate where we work and the choices we make as we align with our values and choose what is accessible to us at given points in the life span of careers. Family relationships came first when I made the choice to leave IBM to stay home even though the practical reality meant changes from two incomes to one impacted our lifestyle. The flexibility to put the meaningful relationships first has been a primary decision driver for me. A decision support tool can be used to evaluate different choices. You name your decision drivers (like flexibility), give each a weight and then assess each option on each factor to come up with totals. This is a way to incorporate your “left brain” analytical resource, and then your “right brain” emotional/relational dimension will respond. This is another tool I am happy to share if you email your request.
   

3. What is your career vision? How does your work support your vision? It has been consistent that the clients with the clearest vision are the most successful in achieving what matters to them--from the graphic designer whose vision 10 years ago was to illustrate children’s books and is now on his fourth publication to the local leader working for a global firm headquartered in Florida whose mantra was to “stay here and be VP”--your clarity and conviction will activate your vision. In the video clip below, Dan Pink suggests it is “your sentence” and your clarity about it makes all the difference. The most successful companies spend time refining their “mission, vision, and values.” it is worth your time to do the same.
   

4. Other ways to tune in to your values would include reflecting on the cultures in which you have felt most aligned. Capture the essentials of what worked for you and look at the organization’s stated values. I still remember “Respect” on the wall at IBM, and how I felt “respect” in the way we were trained to listen to our customers and to honor each other as part of the corporate culture. Healthy relationships have always been most important (highest value) to me and treating others with respect aligned with that. How DO you name what matters most to you and keep it front and center as you are making career choices?
   

5. How do your choices reflect your values? This begins with each day and the priorities you choose. What is your life--personal and professional--saying about what matters to you?

Some of the research/writing that I use
and find meaningful includes:

Dan Pink’s book “Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”
Following is a clip that I like to use and connects back to the idea of having your own personal vision statement. The clip from the book Drive by Dan Pink encourages you to consider what “your sentence” is. Your sentence can be inclusive of your values and your legacy. It is like your personal Vision Statement and is a powerful way to activate what you want in your career.

David Brooks' Ted Talk (watch here)
This is a great reminder of your lived values and to me it speaks to the importance of congruence. You can’t separate who you are at work from who you are in your life. Your life and your everyday behavior should speak to what you value most. When you align your choices with what you most value it may not always be the easiest path. It will consistently be the most authentic and you are more likely to remain peaceful and grounded.

Job Crafting
A recent discovery is the concept of Job Crafting outlined by Yale researcher Amy Wrzesniewski. She talks about the difference between a calling, a career, and a job. Her suggestions align with Pink and Brooks as she talks about the importance of having choice in crafting your tasks (autonomy), influence in who you work with and how you get your work done (mastery or relational crafting), and it is essential that we find meaning (purpose or cognitive crafting) in the work that we do.

Personal Branding in a Digital World

Much is written these days about Personal and/or Professional Branding. For many years this has been an implicit and explicit topic covered with clients—whether they are leaders considering how they are “showing up” in their role, or professionals choosing change. Over the last few years I have been invited to speak about branding, often oriented around practical instruction about LinkedIn. I call myself the “unlikely evangelist” for LinkedIn because of how it enables you to communicate your “brand” and to stay in touch with and/or connect with people in the professional world.

What is your “personal brand”?

My framework for considering this question has evolved since before the marketplace started naming it personal branding. It contains three dimensions:

• How you show up in person in your work and your personal life. Congruence matters. Body language speaks volumes. Actions do indeed speak louder than words! It is no longer reasonable to try to completely separate your work person from your away from work person in our digital world. This includes your personality style, your image, your reputation, your values, and your background. What is the first and second and third impression people have when they interact with you?
• What impact do you have with your communications? How does it align with what you value? You have so many choices today about how, when and where you use your words. Whether you text, email, skype, FaceTime, call, tweet, or any of the other ways you communicate, you are impacting your reader/listener with every communication.
• How are you managing your digital presence? Whether you want it or not, you will make an impression by how you present yourself digitally—especially if you are a professional and you do NOT show up digitally. You WILL be searched. You can and should proactively manage what is found about you.

So what can you do to proactively manage your brand?

Certainly there are many things to consider since your brand includes all of the components in each of the dimensions above. Following are some tactical “must do’s” for professionals:

1. Know your response to the “tell me about yourself” question that gets asked in networking events and interviews. Your response should align with your LinkedIn summary and your Executive Summary on your resume and include:
   • What you love to do, are best at doing, and/or value most in work.
   • Your depth and breadth of background or your interest as it relates to your credibility for the work you do or want to do.
   • The work you do or want to do and/or your perfect role, client or company.
2. LinkedIn Absolutes! Leverage LinkedIn to manage your digital brand. You will be searched and this is what will come up first if you are an active user. It is the place professionals go first to check you out.
   • Get a good photo! Not having a photo or having a poor one may be the first impression you make.
   • Edit your headline and your url.
   • Include a summary.
   • Populate skills intentionally.
   • View the help webinars if you are new to LinkedIn or want to learn more.
3. Resumes. What matters? They continue to be the professional “gold standard” for marketing collateral though that is beginning to shift.
   • Align with the norms of your industry.
   • Remember that it is the top half of the first page that captures your target audience…OR NOT.
   • Understand how your resume serves you, the importance of keeping it up to date with relevant accomplishments, and how it fits in pursuing possibilities.
   • Consider what type of marketing collateral is most useful to you in how you will communicate. It may not be a resume.

Because LinkedIn is the digital, professional “elephant” in the marketplace, your presence there will often define the first impression you make. You will present yourself most authentically and powerfully if you actually think about how you “show up” in your world and make a plan for it.

Wisdom 2.0 Highlights

My husband and business partner Wally and I recently attended the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  It was inspirational, engaging and motivating.  The conference itself was well done and included speakers who appealed to a broad range of people.  Speakers ranged from Pete Carroll and his sports psychologist, the former CEO of EBay, and CEO’s of Aetna and technology companies to mindfulness thought leaders like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield and Byron Katie to the designer Eileen Fisher and the founder of Indiegogo (fundamentally changed fundraising).  It included practical science and ideas for application for individuals and organizations in education, non-profits, and traditional businesses.

Following are some of my favorite content takeaways from the event followed by personal reflections…

Content TakeAways

Meng, the "Jolly Good Fellow" taught us that Joy is a highly trainable skill. 

• The bare minimum for achieving healthy benefit from mindfulness is one minute.
• Physiologically--you breath more slowly and more deeply--heart rate goes down.
• Psychological--to experience regret you are thinking about the past; your worry is in the future; in the time you are focused on the breath you are in the present--you are free from worry and regret.
• Kindness is intrinsically rewarding.  He offered the example of a person in his workshop who did the homework of each hour spending 10 seconds wishing joy for someone.  This person who previously hated her job emailed that she had the best day ever at work with 80 seconds of thinking kindly.

Mark Brackett was fun, funny and completely compelling in his discussion of emotional intelligence. He offered a simple 4 quadrant framework measuring energy on the vertical axis and pleasantness on the horizontal. He invited us to become an "emotion scientist".

Emotions matter for

• Attention, memory and learning
• Decision-making and judgment
• Relationship quality--when we display emotions we telegraph
• Physical and mental health--how we feel influences health
• Everyday effectiveness--there is a focus on perseverance

He has proven that emotions matter as much or more than cognitive competence in student's ability to learn.

Trudy Goodman and Jack Kornfield.  Exploring the Shadow.

• "People do things. And so do we."  This was her mindfulness teacher's response to her righteous indignation about the mistreatment she'd felt from her "wasband" (her ex-husband).
• She talked about "scoreboard" people and our opportunity to respond to them and offered this quote "It never hurts to see the good in another.  They often act the better because of it."  Nelson Mandela
• There was a discussion about the neuroscience of compassion with a distinction between empathy and compassion.  Empathy is the ability to feel with another which can just make us feel sad.  Compassion adds response or action and physiologically changes the brain.  It includes "how can I respond?" and leads to feeling empowered and refreshed.

John Donahoe, former CEO or EBay suggested that we “Presume Trust” and told his personal story of being compared to a Nazi prison guard in the heat of tough changes.  He used the phrase, ”in the tech crunch you are a hero or you are a zero.”  His message was compelling. 

Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna spoke on a panel with John Kabat-Zinn and Tim Ryan, Congressman from Ohio.  There were all kinds of juicy gems in this one like…

• I believe in life BEFORE death
• Re-define work--Instead of working for "the man" you work to help each other
• To lead you have to trust; in order to get trust you have to give it
• You can't be great unless you are vulnerable
• Leadership comes from followership, not from being anointed
• We don't need to go further left, we don't need to go further right, we need to go deeper--Pastor Jim Wallace
• Ashanti had us all crying reading the letter that began his talk and ended it.  He has a non-profit that teaches boys of color how to engage with the education system through understanding emotions and the masks we are conditioned to wear.
• I LOVED the videos at NatureRX.  These are playful looks at the importance and value of getting outside.
• And if you like to laugh you need to watch the videos that playfully look at meditation, communication, and other life experiences at www.jasonheadley.com/

Personal reflections…

One of the less relevant personal takeaways was that I LOVED that the women on the stage in my demographic had wrinkles and smiles that looked completely natural and felt authentic and real.  I do believe it to be true that “happy girls are the prettiest!”

I appreciated the connection to spirit and all the ways that the conference confirmed and connected to the Jesuit tradition of the faith practice that I prefer.  The Jesuits have had this wisdom for their entire history.  So much of what was taught aligns with the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

I laughed.  I cried.  I laughed until I cried.  I learned.  I got to share it with my best friend and the love of my life.  It was a perfect way to celebrate a milestone anniversary and to learn forward for the next 30 years.

Mission, Vision, and Core Values

Author: Walter Boos

In a previous post we talked about the importance of hiring and keeping the right people (right people on the bus —> in right seats). An important component of getting this done is to be intentional and thoughtful about defining your organization’s mission, vision, and core values.

We all understand it is always important to write a job description that itemizes the required skills and experience.  That is the equivalent of making sure the right people are in the right seats.

But what is sometimes overlooked is defining the personal qualities and attributes in a candidate that will make them “fit in” with their new colleagues. In other words, should that candidate be on the bus at all? What are your company’s values? It is only when you KNOW your company values that you can then assess potential new hires and their compatibility with those key values.

Tim Cadogan is the CEO of OpenX. In a recent LinkedIn post he had this to say about company values:

“Taking the time to define values, breathe life into them, personally exemplify them and keep them fresh and essential is one of the most important things we can do to make our organizations thrive, whether they are companies, sports teams, classes, charities or volunteer groups.”
-Tim Cadogan, CEO, OpenX (read the full article here).

Southwest Airlines publishes their core values. They are:

1. Warrior Spirit (Work Hard; Desire to the best; Be courageous; Display a sense of urgency; Persevere; Innovate)
2. Servant’s Heart (Follow the Golden Rule; Adhere to the Basic Principles; Treat others with respect; Put others first; Be egalitarian; Demonstrate proactive customer service; Embrace the SWA Family)
3. Fun-LUVing Attitude (Have FUN; Don’t take yourself too seriously; Maintain perspective (balance); Celebrate successes; Enjoy your work; Be a passionate team player)

In being public about their core values Southwest is accomplishing at least two things:

1. Potential job candidates can read and understand what’s important to the company – and determine if they can be comfortable on that “company bus”. 
2. Southwest employees who interview candidates can assess their alignment with the company’s core values.

Define and document your company’s core values.  And equally important – assess your job candidates in light of those values.  By doing so you will increase the odds of getting the right people on the bus – so you can then focus on seat assignments.

Just Ask! Raises & Salary Negotiations

Negotiating is consistently one of the topics my business graduate students put at the top of their list of what they want to learn.  The mystery of how to navigate the sticky question about money is one that can unnerve even the most confident professional.

This piece from the Today Show quotes a statistic that 56% of employees have never asked for a raise and 49% of candidates accept what is offered.  My anecdotal experience is that well prepared professionals—whether they are asking for a raise or negotiating based on their value for a new job—most often get what they ask for.  The tenet “ask and you will receive” does apply here most often.

http://on.today.com/1VMcdUv

Key points in `preparing for negotiating include:

• Know your worth.  Do your research to know what the salary norms are for professionals at your level in your industry.  Sites like Glassdoor, Salary.com, PayScale, and job search sites like Indeed and SimplyHired all have salary data.  The US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics and GuideStar’s Non-Profit Compensation reports are also places to find relevant data.

• Always start with your value.  List your accomplishments/contributions including the value to the business so that you are clear about your value proposition.  This is always the place to begin.  Know who you are talking to and start with them in mind and what you will add, or have added to their business or team.

• Be prepared to negotiate for other things like working from home and adjusted schedules if you believe that higher compensation may not be an option in your company or situation.

• Compare apples to apples when you look at total packages as the salary number is only part of the total compensation.

• The time to negotiate an offer typically is between the time the offer is given and the time it is accepted.  Sometimes compensation conversations will happen before an offer is written to ensure the terms are acceptable on both sides.  Be prepared for these types of conversations.

• DO ask and DO Negotiate!  If you have questions or concerns, get help from a professional or trusted colleague.