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
Leveraging silent feedback
Ever wondered how others perceive you? In this episode, we unlock the secrets of feedback, exploring both spoken and silent cues to guide your professional growth. Today we delve into the invisible influence of unspoken feedback and learn how to decode its subtle language for a better understanding of your professional interactions.
Think of feedback as a mirror reflecting both your visible traits and blind spots. We highlight the importance of seeking and being receptive to feedback, emphasizing the need to understand its context. Not all feedback is accurate or unbiased, so cultivating self-awareness is crucial. Get ready to use feedback as a powerful tool for personal and professional growth!
In this episode, you'll learn the following:
1. The significance of seeking feedback as a leader and professional
2. Practical ways to consider silent feedback.
3. The importance of actively engaging with others in the workplace, expanding connections, and seeking advice to enhance self-awareness.
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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, this is Leaders with Leverage. I'm Suzy. I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:I thought I would spend today talking about feedback. People, especially professionals that want to get better, are always looking for feedback, and one of the things that you should do as a leader, as a professional, as somebody that is really thoughtful about your career, is asking for feedback from all over the place and listening to what you hear and understanding the context of it and just having this awareness around how it feels to be in the presence of you. I've said this before and this really made sense to me is that blind spots are just that. There's things that we can't see, and I always like to say that it's like the back of your head. You've seen pictures, you can feel it, you've seen it in the mirror, but you will never, ever, see the back of your head in person, yourself, in real life. So this collection of feedback is this ability to see yourself from other perspectives, and we will never understand what it's truly like to experience ourselves, because we'll never have that opportunity to be outside of us. So getting feedback is an exploration to understanding yourself more, and self-awareness is a huge part of that, because there is feedback that is not contextually accurate. It can be biased. We can't listen to everything, but we need to be thoughtful about what we need to hear, and it always strikes me.
Speaker 1:I try to think back on feedback that I've gotten and think about how it lands for me today, but I try. It's a hard equation because I try to tell people to take feedback all the time, but you also need to understand the balance of it, of how to take it, understand it and ask for it. But we're all works in progress and we all are adjusting every single day. We're not the same person that we were 10 minutes ago. So look at that and think about how do you get the feedback that you need.
Speaker 1:The one thing that I did want to talk about also is silent feedback. Feedback is all over the place. It's how people interact with you, and so many times there's feedback that goes unspoken. So thinking about what is silent feedback that's around you, how do you see it, how do you look for it and how do you understand it, and so that's what I wanted to explore today is just thinking about what that is, and it's the unspoken language. It can be not getting invited to meetings.
Speaker 1:Getting invited to meetings, being on the in some group that you're with. It's being trusted or not. It's thinking about where you sit in the circles and what are the things that you can observe that can give you data. And even if you notice somebody is not trusting you with information or you hear through the grapevine that somebody was talking about this situation, but they didn't bring you into the fold, you can't just go up to that person and just say, how come you didn't tell me? It's not like you're going to unlock something that then you can get more information about, but it's about being observant to what's happening around you. So just noticing that gives you great advantage in thinking about where you're going, and the reason that self-awareness is so important to that is that if you are practicing getting better, self-awareness is something that we very often people think they have and it's not something you're just born with. It's something that you can, that can grow with you, and so practicing it's really important, and part of practicing self-awareness is journaling, it's being reflective, it's meditating. Some of those things are even understanding yourself by taking like a strengths assessment or insights or disk. Even having that data source about you helps you understand yourself, and that self-awareness is the ability to see and understand the way you interact with the people around you. 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.
Speaker 1:So self-awareness is important because when you observe silent feedback, like those things I mentioned about not being included or being included, those are ways to reflect and think about. What do they mean? Are they valid? Am I reading too much into this. Am I seeing something that I had noticed before? Because silent feedback is just that it's things that happen around you that are telling you how people interact with you or how they want to interact with you.
Speaker 1:So some of the things to think about, some practical ways to consider silent feedback. One is doing the reflective journaling Thinking about who are those people around you that are important. What do they think about you? Do they trust you? You being invited to things I'm talking about in the office, things that are important to the success of your role or what you do. I mean it can be personal too. I think that can get a little bit. You don't want to analyze too much because there's a lot of nuances there, but just kind of thinking about that. And then when you notice a trend with somebody that you might need to build a relationship, with a trusted relationship, what can you do to insert some kindness or give them something, understand what's important to them and be their partner in some way? So the first one is reflective journaling and just starting to be intentional about thinking of feedback all around you as a part of that.
Speaker 1:The second one is being really observant in meetings. We tend to go from meeting to meeting to meeting. We're doing so many things. We have emails coming at the same time, so if we find ourselves in a meeting that we're not active, not an active participant, many times we go to our phone or a computer or just our to-do list and that's a missed opportunity. Observe what's going around you. Why are you not being involved in the conversation? Should you be? What are the different relationships around you and are they important to you? Just thinking about how you fit in the bigger picture and what are those communication paths that are coming to you or not? So thinking about just being active, being an active observant to what's going on around you in meetings, zoom meetings in real time, how people interact with you.
Speaker 1:And then the third is just being really savvy about your network. You should be thoughtful about the people that you know internally. Who should you know? What influence do you hold? I work with teams and have them do an influence map and thinking about who do they interact with on a regular basis. And sometimes we're so stuck in what we do every day we don't take time to make those interactions or those expand our network to other people that could be important to us. It could be important to them.
Speaker 1:Being a part of an organization is not just doing your job, it's how can you help others be at their best as well. So having kindness, but also finding a sponsor and mentor to help you see yourself from the outside. Sometimes, if you get a person from internal, they can shed some light on if you have questions about hey, why do you think I'm not being invited to this? Or why do you think that this person trusts me or not? What do I need to understand about what it's like to be around me? And so those people could be so helpful to you.
Speaker 1:So it's journaling or practicing self-awareness, thinking about the things you need to know, who you need to connect with those observations that are happening to you. The second is being an active observer of the meetings, the things around you, the emails, instead of just reading the bulk of the email. Who's on it? Do they include you, did they CC you? Just being aware of what are those nuances of things that are happening around you and what do they mean. And then the third is your network.
Speaker 1:Who can you learn from, who could be your advisor, your sponsor, to be able to see some of these things that are silent to you sometimes and maybe help you understand them a little bit better, because people on the outside have additional context to what it's like to be around you. So those people can fill in the blanks for you, especially somebody that you can really trust and be a part of that network, and people that you don't know well, so that you understand what it's like and ask them what if you heard about me? What do you think about my work? Or you don't even have to be that direct. You could even say have you heard about the project that I'm working on? What did you hear? And be not just an observer but be a reporter to find out what you can about what people are saying around you, about what it's like to work with you.
Speaker 1:So it's kind of a there's not a best way, but just having that awareness around silent feedback and how you can tap into it's a great source of information and it's you have to be careful because you don't want to overinterpret something that's not true or not real, but you also don't want to be naive to some obvious signs or signals that you might need to make some adjustments or understand better what's going on without you. So think about that. What silent feedback do you have to pay attention to, think about, journaling about it, be more observant around you, see what's going on and then make those right connections internally and externally to get advisors that you can trust and perspective that you don't normally get in your everyday. I hope this was helpful to you. If you know somebody that could benefit from silent feedback, maybe share this with them. If you've gotten this from somebody, maybe it's something that you should talk to them more about or just be observant of. That's kind of funny. If you do get this and you need to talk about, if somebody forwarded this to you and you want to have a chat with me. This is a permission slip to do just to reach out to me, but I really appreciate you taking the time. I really value people that have taken an interest in getting to know me through this venue, if you will, and I really appreciate the feedback that I'm getting. So I would love to hear from you. Let me know what's on your mind, what you'd love me for me to talk about, and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm there, I love connecting with people and I would really, really appreciate hearing from you. So remember to think about the silent feedback that's around you.
Speaker 1:This is Leaders With Leverage. Until next time, my name is Susie and I appreciate you. 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. So 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.
