The reason people don’t negotiate.

Cycling on repeat? Try my Interactive Emotion Wheel to name what’s trapping you.

Try the Interactive Emotion Wheel →

My client Suzanna had been avoiding making the big promotion-and-raise ask for 18 months. When she finally made it — through coaching, planning, frameworking, and practice — she landed it. Which is wonderful, and well deserved.

But she lost 18 months of higher income and bonus.

Another client Raj had been “promoted” in 2023 with additional responsibilities, and the promise of a new title and salary. Three years later, he hasn’t received either and is actually due for another promotion, but now has the complexity of it seeming like a double jump.

Many of my coaching clients come to me the same way … after avoiding a negotiation they need to have for months or even years. What stops them before they start is anxiety, or some other feeling tornado: fear, anger, sadness, resentment, just to name a few.

No one is coming to offer it.

Many of us hope and wait for our bosses to offer us what we deserve. We don’t want to ask, because we’ve been told that asking makes you difficult. “Be a team player” they say, or “If I give it to you, I’d have to give it to everyone.” That fallacy is not true.

The Hard Truth

No one is coming to offer you the raise, the rebalanced workload, or the promotion. You have to ask for it.

And sometimes you’ll spend significant time and energy advocating for it.

So, this week

I want you to think about what negotiation you have been avoiding, and why. What feelings deep underneath are stopping you from making the move you know you need to make?

The Emotion Wheel can help you get started — it’s an interactive tool that will guide you, and you can add as many feelings as you want. Actually, the more the better, because usually we have several feelings tangled up.

Once you’ve named all the feelings swirling around inside you — then what? Label them: write them down and say them out loud, over and over. Research shows that doing this should diminish them. Does it?

If so, the next step will be prep — but that comes once we manage our fear.

If you know you’re providing value, and the data shows you should be earning more, then you’re shortchanging yourself by not making the ask.

Your move this week

1. Name the negotiation you’ve been avoiding — and for how long.

2. Find every feeling underneath it — the interactive wheel will guide you.

3. Label them — write them down and say them out loud. Notice what diminishes.

Work on managing those emotions. Next week I’ll give you a tool to think through how you can frame and approach the conversation in a relational way — one that keeps the relationship strong and healthy, and makes it a positive and collaborative conversation.

Because you deserve it.