How to Get What You Want
Your career isn’t built by waiting for someone to notice your value. It’s built by learning how to advocate for yourself with confidence.
You’ve been told your work will speak for itself. Yet despite doing everything asked of you—and more—you’re still feeling overlooked and uncertain about your next step. Leadership isn’t just about managing a team; it’s navigating the complexities of internal relationships and consistently advocating for your growth.
On Get What You Want, Susie Tomenchok is your silent partner, empowering you with the mindset and tools to negotiate your career—and life—with intention.
Unlike podcasts that focus on climbing the ladder or hustle culture, this show is for women who want to own their careers authentically. You’ll learn practical strategies for everyday negotiations, from asking for what you deserve to confidently handling tough conversations. Because negotiation isn’t just for raises or promotions—it’s how you navigate every opportunity in your career and beyond.
Susie is a negotiation expert who understands the challenges of being in a male-dominated industry and the struggles women face when advocating for themselves. She’s helped countless professionals unlock their potential and will show you how to do the same.
If you’re ready to stop waiting for your career to happen to you and start creating the opportunities you want, hit follow and join Susie each week to build your confidence, advocate for yourself, and finally Get What You Want.
How to Get What You Want
Turning difficult conversations into growth opportunities
Are you ready to crack the code on mastering tough dialogues? Let's dive deep into the aspects that often make a conversation difficult - relationships, emotions, timing, and most importantly, our own assumptions. Guided by insights from the book Difficult Conversations, we unravel how we often end up in a battle over intentions and how a slight shift in our approach can greatly enhance the outcome of these discussions.
Today we emphasize the importance of framing these conversations with care and understanding, ensuring they don't escalate into fights. Moreover, as leaders, we have a crucial role to play in making people aware of their impact on others. This episode serves as a robust guide, helping you navigate and master difficult conversations, whether you're a seasoned leader or just embarking on your leadership journey. As an added bonus, we also discuss seeking support and setting a regular rhythm of conversations, giving you all the tools to succeed in this art of conversation.
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🚀 Ready to Get What You Want?
Listening is great, but real change happens when you take action. Join my newsletter for exclusive negotiation strategies, scripts, and real-world case studies you won’t hear on the podcast. Sign up now at www.negotiationlove.com—it takes 10 seconds and will change how you view and negotiate forever.
📖 Continue Your Professional Growth with These Resources:
Get my Book: The Art of Everyday Negotiation without Manipulation:
www.susietomenchok.com/the-art-of-everyday-negotiation
Work With Me: Speaking, corporate training, and executive coaching:
www.susietomenchok.com/services
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Remember, negotiation is more than a skill—it’s a mindset.
💕Susie
www.linkedin.com/in/susietomenchok
Welcome to the Leaders with Leverage Podcast. I'm your host and negotiation expert, suzy Tomonczuk. It's time to be your own advocate and negotiate for what you really want out of your career, not simply the next role or additional compensation. I want to show you that negotiation happens each and every day so that you opt in and say yes with confidence. Together with other business leaders, you'll learn the essential skills you, as a leader, needs to become that advocate in growing your professional skills, to increase confidence, gain respect and become the future leader you're poised to be, and when you face a high-stakes situation, you're ready, no matter how high those stakes are. So let's do this. Let's lead with Leverage. Hi, welcome. This is Leaders with Leverage. I'm Suzy. I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:I'm curious to know if you looked at the title and you saw difficult conversations and you thought I don't need any help with difficult conversations, or if you thought I need to think about difficult conversations like what was the catalyst to get you here? And maybe it's just that you just wanted to hear what I would have to say about difficult conversations and what I would say. That is, we have a relationship with difficult conversations and I have this experience with it because I've been doing a lot of conversations with teams about difficult conversations recently. So it's really been top of mind for me and it's made me reflect on the topic of difficult conversations and one of the things that I've recognized is that difficult conversations are really complex. There's a lot of things that go into that complexity, those nuances. It could be the relationship we have with the other person. It could be that there was something that was really a big thing that we needed to talk to them about and we put it off and we made excuses because we didn't want to do it. And then a little thing comes up and you're like, oh, I don't want to have that conversation because I never had the bigger conversation. And so we get into this whole dialogue with ourselves about when are we going to have this conversation, when it's the best time? And then the other aspect is do we consider when it's the best time for us versus the best time for the other person? And I'll tell you, my normal tendency and actually my daughter called me out on this not that long ago is when I need to have a difficult conversation with her about something that's bugging me, I wait until she does something that really makes me mad or triggers me, and then I pile on because I find that when I'm there or I'm emotional or I'm mad, it's just easier for me to say all those other things. So difficult conversations.
Speaker 1:I often get leaders, especially HR leads, that say, hey, can you come talk to my team or the population within the organization at the certain level about how to accept difficult feedback or have difficult conversations because they need to learn and it's so funny to me because everybody needs to be better at that and you have to, as a team, be in the same room sometimes when you're talking about this topic so that you can get better at it. And I wanted to. When I was meeting with this team this last week, I wanted to say if you go through this training or you give yourself a little bit higher exposure to some of the components of what's going on in your mind, what's going on up here, what's going on with the other person, then can you decrease the difficult in difficult conversations. And I really think that difficult conversations are always a challenge to some degree. We get better at them, but we have to continue to have them and they'll always be difficult. So I wanted to talk about what are some of the things that you can do to decrease that stigma for you, and you may need to just kind of think about what of these things are really getting in my way.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to start by talking about timing. I have this one client a few months ago who we were talking about timing and how, when we put it off, in our mind it seems like a rational decision to go. Well, they seem pretty defensive about something else right now, or I know that there's a stressful. Let me just give more context. If it's somebody that works for you and you have to give them have a difficult conversation, it's not a performance issue, it's just that you need to set expectations, you need to give them some feedback, and so it is a difficult conversation. Any time it makes us feel nervous or it triggers us, that's difficult.
Speaker 1:So in this situation, she needed to have a difficult conversation with one of her director ports, and she rationalized well, I know there's something going on with her daughter and so this wasn't the right time. So she put it off another week and then it was right before she was going on vacation, so she didn't want to have it then. So it was pretty soon this difficult conversation she needed to have just about a performance just kind of a tweak became a big thing in her head, because it had been weeks before she even got to it. So it became this big thing. So by the time she went to it, she walked into it and really signaled that this was hard for her to the other person. And it was interesting because when we talked through it what we realized is because this is a normal pattern for her that she waits a really long time and then she feels really bad and then she signals in her words to the other person that this is going to be hard for her to articulate to them. This person would kind of ski into the signals that were coming toward her and tell her that this was not the right time or be like, oh my gosh, this is too much for me right now. I have this going on. And she learned that if she signaled that she didn't want to get the feedback, this woman would retreat immediately. So it became this vicious cycle for this leader that just made then giving difficult conversations. It made it even a bigger topic for her to the other parts of her team and then those people kind of talk amongst themselves and it's just become this nest of difficulty. And I think about that because I think that happens to us sometimes, especially if there's a personality on our team or a peer of ours that kind of gets to us or triggers us. That can become this cycle of bad habits, of not moving forward.
Speaker 1:And I read the book Difficult Conversations. It's by the authors of Thanks for the Feedback and it's Harvard-based. It's a great book. I started reading it and one of the things they talk about are the mistakes that impact us and it's the battle over intentions. Now listen to this. This is super interesting. One thing is that we judge more harshly when we believe that the person did it with intention versus mistake. Yeah, both people and the world have the right to think. Anybody who can do something right and we have the greatest impact on that know that we may label it as they did this on to intention, instead of just not Doing it because they forgot and Gosh this.
Speaker 1:This happens to me all the time, especially with close relationships with people you know they may not have, they may have made a promise to me. It could be as simple as let's go Go to a movie or let's go go do something together and they never follow up and they forgot. And I'm like you know what they don't care enough about me because they didn't follow up. We have to be careful that we don't label their intention as intention, and that's part of the reason we need to be open to the conversation so that we can understand. We need to figure out how do you take the facts of the situation before you go in and dis Entangle the impact from the intent. Hey there, love this podcast. I'm taking 10 seconds out of this episode to ask you to leave an honest review. More reviews on the show help us to reach More professionals who are ready to lead with leverage. Now let's continue the conversation. So the impact is in this situation is that I feel hurt that they forgot about me, that they don't care about me. I can create this a huge story in my head about what is the impact that it had to me, because I believe that was their, their intention, but they may have just forgotten. So the more I sit in that place, the worse it gets and the bigger the stories I tell about that being an intentional toward me. So being being careful about that another Another example was we assume the worst, and the example in the book was that if you go to a doctor's appointment and they have to you had it scheduled and it's something that's very important to you, maybe it's I recently had some skin that needed to be looked at that they found out was cancerous, and so that's a heightened Concern of mine.
Speaker 1:And you go and they have to, they have to reschedule the appointment because the doctors Out of town, out of the country, and you automatically think they must be in Hawaii, and Then so weeks go by and you're like I can't believe that. They put themselves before me and you have all these things that happen. And then you find out that they went to a third world country to help build a hospital, and that changes your impression of why they did it. We didn't we assume the worst, isn't that so true, and that might be a drastic example, but I bet you can think of something that is closer to what happens to you every day.
Speaker 1:The other thing they say is that we treat ourselves more charitable in so many situations, and when I first read that I was like I don't know that that's true until they set the example. An example was if you ask your partner to go bring in the dry cleaning or go send that package is probably more applicable these days and they forget to do it or they don't do it for the reason we automatically think they're lazy, they're like how dare them. This is one thing that I ask them to do, but if it's our responsibility, we're more likely to frame it around. I was busy, I had something more important. This wasn't as important. So the way that we take that very same situation, we give ourselves more of a charity, and you know why? It's because we have more context to what's going on in our lives versus somebody else's. So being careful about how we again it goes back to those intentions, those ways that we interpret the facts of the situation as we understand them.
Speaker 1:And so the other thing is and I think this happens in our everyday and we've all in our everyday professional roles is it's really easy for us to just label people. They just they get defensive all the time. They're mean, they're kind of snotty, they're defensive, they have bad character. It's really easy for us to take one situation or if somebody else said something about somebody else, we continue to perpetuate that same label that we have for that person and that might not be the facts, that might not be the right way, that the assumptions that we're making cloud our ability to see the facts, which then inhibits us from moving forward. Because we've created all this stuff that's heightening our emotion around it, our apprehension, our just anger or frustration with that person.
Speaker 1:And we've gone through I know you have. You've gone to a situation where you're just like ready to go at it because you've lived in your own thoughts and created all of the storyline around the intentions the other person had. And then you go into the conversation. They're like, oh no, not at all, nope, just oh, my gosh, just totally forgot that I said that I was gonna commit to putting something on the calendar for us to get together again and all this time like see what I'm saying, this equation, this math that goes on in our own head, in our own circumstances, when we do that first mistake, that we battle really ourselves over the intentions and then we don't move forward, so that timing becomes even more critical.
Speaker 1:So if you're gonna take one thing from this, is when you take time to think about what difficult conversations are you avoiding and when you think about those, try to disentangle the impact, the action, what happened, the impact that it's had on you and the assumptions, so that you can move forward and really talk about that and talk about the impact that it's had. We avoid that, but that's the best place to start. Hey, listen, I don't know if this was your intent, but this is the situation as I saw it and this is what impacted it had on me, and don't pretend that you don't have a hypothesis about what you believe happened to them. We avoid that too. I do that a lot, and if we say, yeah, you're right, I really felt like, because you didn't do this, this is what my impression or my assumptions were. That opens up the dialogues to just being more open to them, understanding where you're coming from, so that it doesn't feel like you're just labeling, you're just blaming, you're just trying to start a fight.
Speaker 1:So difficult conversations will always be difficult. I'm probably gonna come on here and just talk about these different angles around difficult conversations, but I just want you to think about what are you avoiding? Think about timing and how do you separate that impact, how you're judging, how can you move forward quicker so that you don't become your own worst enemy around this? Difficult conversations will always be difficult and as leaders, it's our responsibility to understand and embrace the fact that we need to have them so that people get better. We're the only observer that experience of the people around us and as leaders, they expect us to help them understand what other people see our experience in being around them and when we can frame it that way, maybe that can help us move forward quicker, because it's our investment in them, it's our responsibility as a leader and then when we practice these best practices of doing it on a regular basis, really thinking about how to frame it in a way that's going to create the least defensiveness There'll always be defensiveness, but the least amount and do it from a place of being really caring for the other person, not so much what they do to me, but how can I help them understand what they impact it had on me and how can I help them understand that that activity might have impact to others around them. So, just trying to help them illuminate that situation so that they can get better moving forward.
Speaker 1:I hope this was helpful. I would love to hear from you. This might not have touched on what's difficult for you in difficult conversations, so feel free to reach out to me and tell me what are the questions that you have, what are you struggling with, what has been a challenge, or even what is your best practice. Oh my gosh, those stories that other people share is so impactful to people around us, and I'd love to be the person that is able to share that with others via this vehicle to help people get better, because that's what it's all about.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. Thanks for just making the time, because when you make the time, that's saying that you want to really think about, make the space for you to get better, and just to think about some of these topics that we shouldn't avoid. They are difficult, but together we can figure out what's the best way. I think everyone should advocate for themselves. It'd be lovely if you shared this with somebody else that needed to hear it, or even share it with somebody that you need to have a difficult conversation with and say let's use this as a way to move into some of the things that we need to put on the table. Make it a regular cadence, make it a regular conversation and reach out to me anytime. Let me know what's going on with you so I can make sure that I have service so I can provide the biggest impact here that is possible. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Leaders with Leverage. If you're ready to continue your professional growth, commit to accelerating your career development and say goodbye to that anxious feeling in your stomach anytime you need to advocate for yourself, then get my book the Art of Everyday Negotiation Without Manipulation. In this book, you'll learn the essential steps to take before entering into any negotiation or conversation, any interaction. In your day to day. You'll discover what the other party really needs and be clear about what you're going after. You'll bust through your fears and boost your confidence and embrace that negotiation truly happens all around us. Head to the link in the show notes for more, and you can even get a bonus if you buy it today.
