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
Matching the energy of the room
What if you could instantly connect with anyone, even in high-pressure situations? Join me to explore emotional awareness, a powerful tool that can help you navigate difficult conversations, build trust, and avoid misunderstandings.
Listen and learn how acknowledging and assessing others' emotions can foster connection and bring about fantastic results. So, gear up for an episode filled with valuable insights on the importance of mindful and intentional communication in high-stakes situations that can positively transform your professional life!
In this episode, you'll learn the following:
1. The significance of recognizing and matching the emotional energy in a room or situation.
2. How acknowledging and validating the emotions of others, individuals can build trust, foster understanding, and create a shared ground for collaboration.
3. How to create harmony and facilitate effective outcomes by understanding and addressing the emotional aspects of any given scenario.
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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, I'm Suzy. I'm very energetic today. I just realized that when I said it. This is Leaders with Leverage and I am so excited that you're here. So thank you for being here. This has been really fun for me to kind of be in your ear and tell you what's going on in my role that might apply to yours. So thank you for taking the time. I'm going to make this short and sweet, but as always.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to talk today about something, obviously, that has happened to me recently. I was meeting with a client and we were talking about matching the room, the energy in the room, and this client was telling me he's in charge of a big organization and there was a really bad outage. And he said he walked in the room and he goes. He was very proud of the fact that. You know, I can go into any room and if there's negativity and a lot of intensity I can just ignore it, stay calm and move forward and he goes. But what happened was my boss kept getting more angry and more angry at me. It seemed like it started coming at me instead of at the outage that we were trying to resolve. And when we unveiled or kind of pulled away the layers of what had happened, we realized that his leader was getting a lot of pressure about the outage and was really really frustrated. So when my client walked in and went right to solutioning and getting done and staying calm, the boss didn't feel like he really understood how important this situation was. And had he just taken a few moments to kind of dwell or show some signs to his boss that he is also concerned? Oh wow, this is really bad. I've never seen it like this and showed some emotion around it that would have allowed his boss to kind of see that he sees how important it is, match his energy and then go to the place he needed to go in order to go into solutioning and staying calm. Whether we like it or not, we need to match the energy sometimes that people in the room, because when we don't, we miss this opportunity to connect and no matter what we do, no matter what we say, it may be misunderstood by that person because they're in an emotional state that feels unmatched and they need somebody to kind of see them. It's something that you should just think about what are you walking into and what emotion is being displayed? Because if you don't pay attention to that, you may respond in a way that might be effective in the situation but may not build the trust and camaraderie that you need with that individual. I know it sounds crazy.
Speaker 1:Another example I remember just this is so blatant to me I worked in a startup and I had these great developers that were on the team and one had really really high positivity. He actually had this really nervous what's it called Little habit that he would kind of giggle out loud. So when we were in front of our clients, we realized that we had done something that had literally wiped out all their data. They had manually put their data into our system and something happened with our system that it just cleared it all out. And so this client we had to bear the news of this. And so this developer wants to go right into what they need to do next.
Speaker 1:And before he started talking, he kind of laughed nervously because that was just kind of his tick. And then he started going into what happened. He didn't not what happened, what needed to be done and the steps to do it, and because he didn't say in the moment oh my gosh, this is really bad, or, man, we need to work together. We will do what we can to help you and support you. This is unprecedented. This is something that I can't even believe happened. This is really going to be a. This is going to take hours that you are going to have to dedicate, and I know that you've already had already spent a lot of hours here.
Speaker 1:Had he at least given that space and time it didn't have to be long he would have allowed, they would have allowed him to move into solutioning, because at least they would have felt seen. And what happened instead? The client was mad and called me and said that this developer didn't care, that they in fact they thought it was intentional like the nervous laugh was then seen as something that was really mean and not spirited in the right way. So it was very bad and it could have been. I couldn't at that time explain in context because it didn't matter, the damage had been done. But had that developer just taken a few minutes to just be like? I talked to him after and he said oh, I need to just learn to kind of. It's hard for me because I'm not very negative and so why dwell in that? But he also hadn't gone through the pain and agony of putting all the data in and then hearing that it was gone. 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, thinking about that energy in the room, the emotions that are going on, even if you aren't that person that gets angry or gets excited or even is calm, how can you match the energy in the room? And, if you need to, what it does is it builds bridges because it matches that energy and kind of allows that connection to be made without other person and so that they feel like you're meeting where they are and then you build together from there. It is commonly used in negotiations. It is that way of creating common ground and sometimes emotion or shared experience can help somebody feel like you're especially if you don't know them well that you're starting from a common place. So always think about that common ground. How do you get on common ground? So the benefits are you get that empathy, you make them feel seen and that that fosters understanding and it allows a person to kind of break away from that because it gives them. When you share that energy with them, it makes them go through it faster and then it helps you move through it in a way that will be helpful to both parties.
Speaker 1:And when you don't, again it's like not having a connection. There's misunderstandings and they might explain something that that might have made them really mad and they might then focus on one thing that went wrong, and focus on that because they don't have the words to say or understand that their emotion wasn't seen or validated, and so then they look for something, a misstep, and you don't want that. You need, when you're in at the heat of the moment, for there to be trust so that you can walk through it in a way that you're partnering and not that they're looking for something to point to. So I would say the takeaways for this one is to have this mindfulness around the emotion in the room. So, whether it's before you go in and you see this flurry of emails, or you've talked to somebody on the phone, even if you're in the conversation, all of a sudden you're like whoa, this is a lot different than I expected it to be.
Speaker 1:Start observing and even labeling for yourself not out loud, maybe, in just in your head up, the emotion that you're seeing. Okay, there's a lot of tension here, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of calm in here, and I'm not calm and actively understand the emotional tone in the room and think you have to think quickly, but assess quickly. How can you be able to see eye to eye with that person so that they know that you see them, acknowledge the tension, acknowledge the mist up to say, oh my gosh, this is bad, but we are going to get through this. Man, this must be really hard for you. I know that there's a lot of pressure on you right now. Let me partner with you. What do I need to know right now, even giving them some space to share some things? So observe, see what you need to do, slow down.
Speaker 1:And the second one is to adapt and align. Figure out what you need to do. What do you need to say, what can you say to them to make them understand that you see them, you understand where they're coming from, so that you can align together and just like what I mentioned with my developer in that moment, moving through it and then going back, there was not a way to really explain what happened in those moments, the damage was done. So doing this in real time is really key. It allows you to adjust in real time. And this is a real important one this emotional math that all negotiators need to do to identify, because in a negotiation, and as in any conversation that has high stakes, it's important to create objectivity for yourself so that you can understand what the other party needs. But you also don't want them to be emotional, because any kind of emotion, no matter what it is stress, excitement, sadness, whatever it is clouds our judgment and you want the other party to be as clear as possible. So acknowledging and getting them to get to as objective place as they can, so they can start solutioning, is the way to create great outcomes and just objective decisions to move through a problem situation.
Speaker 1:So I want you to think about that. Think about the energy in the room for effective outcomes. So the things to think about is, as you walk into a situation, quickly assessing what kind of emotions going on and what you need to do. Two is adapting and aligning really quickly. What do you need to do to do that in real time? Acknowledge it. How long do you just sit in it? What do you need to do? And then timing is key, because what you want to do in that moment is get all parties, including yourself, to be as objective as possible. So, matching the energy. Match the energy so that you can create harmony for great outcomes.
Speaker 1:I thought that I hope this was helpful. You know this is a great topic around the holidays because we all know there's just people that might get the best of us. They might catch us off guard. Low stakes family meal may become high stakes very quickly, depending on the topics at hand. So thinking about this in every situation, assessing the emotion, acknowledging it and doing something about it are the keys to really unlocking that connection and great outcomes, whether in a negotiation or in any life situation.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. I'm 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. You'll bust through your fears and boost your confidence and embrace that negotiation truly happens all around us. Click to the link in the show notes for more, and you can even get a bonus if you buy it today.
