Craving Balance

Turning Over the Keys to the Castle

2010-08-26T17:00:17Z

Some would say it's crazy to start a business in the middle of a recession-depression. I've found it to be profoundly energizing and smart, and doing so has enabled me to take a great big leap into a new adventure. In the next few weeks I will phase out Craving Balance, and finish the work of creating the LLC with my business partner Victoria Pynchon at She Negotiates.

So how did I go from Balance to Negotiation?

In my work with women I began to notice a repeating theme. We can answer the questions "who am I" and "what do I want" with relative ease. We can connect our values to our daily choices, and prioritize the mountain of tasks of daily living. We could achieve a certain level of balance, but the remaining question, "how do I get there" was a trail full of pebbles, rocks and boulders, sometimes tall rock walls that often seemed to end the trail abruptly. So we stepped over the boulders and in many cases bushwhacked new trails.

Deep into this trail we find ourselves having to ask for what we want, and stay diligent and focused and persistent. And here's the rub:

We women do not like to ask.

It's not nice. It's pushy. We don't want to be strident. We have internalized (agreed with) the culture's whacked out perspective of what it means to be a woman. We've swallowed it whole and are suffering an indigestion of the soul. In our everyday lives it looks like this:

We hope that someone will notice how wonderful we are at our job rather than ask for a promotion or a raise and so we suffer being passed over and forgotten and become overworked, underpaid and bitter.
We don't ask for a small business loan because we have to project our value in the marketplace, and this value feels uncertain.
In our families and our workplaces, we put our needs and wants and dreams aside to be of service to others.
We fail to notice and take stock of how the world changes for the better when we are in charge of our destiny.

Learning to negotiate gives us the keys to the castle and holds the possibility of transforming our relationships, and our work in the world. Negotiation allows us to express ourselves purposefully. And that purposefulness, above anything else, is what we will refer to when we're taking our last breath. "I'm happy I contributed something of value to the world."

So now, I'd like to turn over the keys to the castle. Here's my offer:

Take Craving Balance and start your own business in the middle of the recession-depression :)
Learn to negotiate by taking one of our phenomenal virtual, interactive courses.
Leave a comment and tell me your thoughts.
Email me to discuss any of the above: lisa [at] shenegotiates.com

Busyness in Balance Virtual Course: Save the Date!

2010-08-23T22:04:16Z

Busyness in Balance
Tools to inspire productivity Oct. 4—Nov. 14

with Sara Caputo, MA
Productivity Consultant, Trainer and Coach at Radiant Organizing.

Twitter: @radiant

This six-week virtual productivity course takes place at Balance University and is designed for women executives and solopreneurs who want customized tools and support for getting and staying organized. You will identify your organizational challenges, unclog your systems, and create new structures that honor your strengths and support your natural tendencies toward living and working.

Get in deep with the four pieces of the productivity puzzle:

Physical systems

Time and calendar

Tasks and to-dos

Planning and maintenance

Weekly Practicum Call Schedule:

4 Thursdays October 7, 14, 21, 18 and November 4, 11
1 p.m. PST | 4 p.m. EST
All calls are 50 minutes, and will be recorded if you have to miss one!

Register by Sept. 24 to get Early Bird Special $117
After Sept. 24 $147

Spending the day with Jane Doe the CEO...a seriously busy person...

2010-08-13T04:47:33Z

I'm reeling. I spent the day recently with one of my dearest friends, the CEO of a major "disease" nonprofit. She does things I have long since forgotten were necessary evils of corporate life, like dry cleaning and weekly car washing, coordinating child care with teenage caregivers—one who drives and one who doesn't—and timing excursions to the farmer's market for a dinner party with longtime donors.

My friend has asked me to witness her day...

Because she can't see "one thing, not one little thing" she can let go of or change to make the busyness stop." I accept her invitation. Her challenge. I joke that it will be like going on the scariest roller coaster ride at Magic Mountain. She smirks and tells me, "This is serious. I want you to take this very seriously." I knit my eyebrows together and say, "of course."

The iPhone hyperventilates with alarms and calendar reminders and texts apologizing for late meeting arrival as we drive from meeting to meeting, assistant in tow with laptop, yogurt cups and cashews. The assistant drops her own iPhone into the toilet at a gas station pit stop and "sheeeeit" is the most exquisitely correct word we can all find.

I get pressed into service with my iPhone (disclaimer: I should be working for Apple). Her assistant pleads to use my holy grail of connection and sends texts by enlisting her prodigious capacity to remember everything and I say to my friend, "No matter what you're paying her, it isn't enough." Her assistant says, "They'll replace my iPhone, but a raise is out of the question." At 24 I cringe at her cynical wisdom. And yet I wonder...

Busyness is self induced...

The job description for CEO never includes all of the foregoing. But we assume a break-neck speed and an accompanying level of consumption is what's required to do the job. Other than an inflated sense of self importance (I should back that up, but I'll wait until part 2), the day revealed some obvious "system" flaws:

4 meetings, twice at the same location at different times of day
Forgotten agenda items at each meeting requiring email follow up and response from a team of 3 to 5 people.
Children under the age of 10 over scheduled with two after-school obligations 4 days a week.
No scheduled pauses or wiggle room to accommodate the way life really works.
No scheduled pauses to ponder the massive to-do list and recalibrate and reconsider.
No breathing.

"So, give it to me straight."

I pause. I breathe. I say, "Jane, you absolutely love your job and you are well loved by all. You are doing a beautiful job. Really. And the level of stress you place yourself under is one of the major causes of the disease you're fighting."

She stops me, on the verge of tears and says, "It's so damned ironic and sad, isn't it?"

I say, "Yes. And you have a productivity puzzle, not a wrong job, wrong fit puzzle, and that's a good thing. But what you also have is a chance to make a huge shift in your leadership and how you run your organization, and I think the training wheels for this is in how you lead your children."

Tears. Many more tears, beautifully flowing tears.

"You don't need more feminine mommy guilt here, you are a working woman by choice, passion and commitment," I say. "You just need wiggle room and breathing. And so do your children. What are the changes you can make at home, and how can you duplicate those changes at work? What would Jane the Leader do?"

Jane Doe the CEO is pondering some serious stuff. Internal pondering. She's sourcing her value system and the impact of her leadership on her family, her work ecosystem and even, yes, even the impact of her busyness on the environment—from driving to dry cleaning.

Our next meeting is at the beach, a place she hasn't been for six months, even though her home is two blocks away from the sand. Stay tuned for part 2.

21 Reasons It's All Up to You

2010-07-28T20:41:40Z

What are you craving? Balance again? Seriously? Are you kidding?

What about purpose? Joy? Organization? Flex? Productivity? A great oatmeal cookie? A belly laugh? Health? Happiness? A job? A raise? Children? Vacation? Savings? Lung capacity? Fresh air? Conversation?

I don't have the time or will to name everything under the sun, but everything under the sun that you want is up to you. It's all up to you. You have to create it. And brilliant women, you have to ask.

So here are 29 really obvious reasons why:

If you don't set boundaries around the way you spend your time someone else will do it for you and you won't like it.
If you don't ask for what you want, someone will assume what you want, and your complaint meter will rise commensurate with your lack of asking.
If you settle for a J-O-B you don't like, what good is flextime?
What good is a stellar career and gazillions in the bank if you have no friends or family at the end of the road?
If you keep asking but how? you're not really serious.
If you don't study the masters, you'll continue to paint by numbers.
If you don't say no to the guy with the scissors and a comb-over, you'll get a haircut just like his.
If you don't order french toast, you'll get milk toast.
If you don't sit on the planning committee, you'll get another strip mall.
If you don't hone your leadership skills, your co-workers will annoy you.
If you want redwoods and begonias you'll have to move out of Mojave.
If you want love, start by being lovable.
If you don't listen, people won't hear you.
When you say "that's just the way it is," it's time to get out.
When you say "I have no choice" it's a red flag warning for the exact opposite.
When you sing your own praises, it wakes people up.
When you sing your own praises and list your accomplishments, people listen.
When you sing your own praises and list your accomplishments and ask for what you want, people say yes.
When you ask for what you want, people follow your lead.
When people follow your lead, they feel loved, heard, satisfied, honored and compensated.
When people are loved, heard, satisfied, compensated and honored, families, communities, workplaces and countries thrive.

Asking for what you want changes everything.

Benefits of combining journaling with virtual learning

2010-07-19T15:00:28Z

This ain't your mother's e-course baby!

We've got the e-course thing down. You sign up for a course and your inbox fills with content. After the first few deliveries your enthusiasm begins to wane and your attention wanders to the next problem-solving idea.

We've also got the webinar thing down. A talking head or two delivers material like a human buzz saw while we check email, change diapers and drive in traffic.

And we've got the social/networking community thing down. We join a professional online group, upload our photos and noodle our profiles, post a few forum comments and read some blog posts, and two months/six months later, we wonder where we put the login and password.

Interactive Learning Environments (like Teaching Sells and Partnering for Profits) take things a step further by capturing a group of willing learners and providing content and resources in multiple learning formats. Written material is supported by audio, visual and presentation tools, as well as forums to connect with other participants, teleseminars, etc. It's a beautiful model for learning.

The missing piece

What coaches, teachers, trainers, consultants and specialists are missing and need most in their digital offerings is a way to connect people to themselves, other participants, and make their learning practical, specific to individual needs and private (no Google juice please). That's where interactive journaling is making such an impact.

Interactive journaling

Abundant research proves the benefits of journaling--from self awareness to stress reduction to psychological clarity. And when journaling is combined with learning material delivered in multiple learning formats, absorption, retention and practical application accelerates dramatically.

James Pennebaker, a pioneer researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, believes the power of words changes the way people actually think and helps them create a coherent, congruent narrative that carves a path for new understanding.

In my coaching practice and course work with students at Balance University, I have noticed a dramatic shift in learning process--most notably the depth and speed at which people learn, grow and change. Quite simply, journaling creates momentum and stickiness.

Balance University

When we launched Balance University 8 months ago, we started with free basic membership (it is still free to join) and offered weekly journaling prompts to stimulate connection, community and self-inquiry. We soon added our premium signature course, Purpose Changes Everything. From there we added a few self-guided courses, plus She Negotiates, a month-long course that gives women the tools, support and practice in negotiation, and now have several other courses in the pipeline.

Every offering includes journaling, but it's not a one-way conversation. All learning content includes questions and inquiries and homework with requests that participants journal on their progress and challenges. Coaches and teachers interact with clients and students and comment on every journal entry.

In every course, participants have been phenomenally grateful and complimentary about the process (read here and here). Here's a recent favorite from our last She Negotiates course:

"The She Negotiates team of Victoria Pynchon and Lisa Gates triggered a personal catharsis for me as a businesswoman. Their interactive course gave me the tool and techniques to catapult my confidence and transform my negotiation skills. It gave me the courage to be the master of my market value, resulting in bottom-line results within the first week of the course." Judy Martin, broadcast journalist, speaker and work-life consultant

The Balance University runs on a journaling platform created by JournalEngine and masterminded by coach Kim Ades of Frame of Mind Coaching. If you coach, teach, consult or train, I encourage you to check it out.

P.S. Disclosure: I am a huge fan of the fabulous team behind JournalEngine, and an affiliate.

a new kind of negotiation: capturing value by honoring values

2010-07-18T22:36:16Z

Someone right now, perhaps you, is hearing the Board Finance Chair say, "It's regrettable but please understand, it's not personal. It's financial” to which you raise your eyebrows. "This is the culture of nonprofits." You blink twice at the corporate speak, feeling the familiar twinge of disdain crawl up your back. You are unemployed.

You imagine the spreadsheets and gear-grinding discussion about what to cut. You find little will to divine the faces of individual board members for their leanings. You can only visualize small, frail-boned imps counting lima beans into equal piles. You can only picture Steinbeck hurling his first draft of The Grapes of Wrath into a funeral pyre. You just weren’t finished, and you are uneasy about lack of completion. Three years of diligent toil scatter like sepia photographs loosed to the wind, experience fading into history. You feel as if you were never here, an imposter finally discovered. Add to that the likelihood that you were being paid far less than you were worth in the first place, you wonder if cutting your position will really alter your employer’s bottom line.

“We must focus on essential functions," he finishes. In silence, you show yourself the door and wonder if the bathroom will have toilet paper.

Just what is your essential function now, you wonder. Twenty six weeks, baby. You better bust a move and find out.

But wait a minute. Being unemployed in a still sluggish labor market is painful stuff, and even moreso now that the Senate failed to pass the Unemployment Extension bill. And living on 30 percent of your usual income doesn’t exactly create an environment of inspiration or generate the creative juice necessary for landing a new job, let alone reinventing yourself.

Or does it? Career reinvention stories abound in the media, and not everyone is angling for a more of the same—certainly not a ladder move. We’ve grown distrustful. These are stories of loss and reclamation, of people dusting off old passions and letting go of the afflictions of consumption that deliver us every weekend to strip malls with pink-tiled roofs to shop for cake mixes and power tools.

Clearly the soulless plunder of the Lehman Brothers and AIG and Countrywide (leaving out a few bears and bulls) have driven many of women to seek a new humanity, to discover and rediscover our personal value, our non-negotiables, and our worthiness in livelihoods of our choosing.

What I've noticed in my practice parallels what we read in the news: in addition to using our extended unemployment to retrain for new careers, many are also choosing to ditch the cubicle in droves, opting to start businesses and write books, or wait tables and brew lattés in order to underwrite selling our artwork from our garages. So now more than ever we’re realizing we have an urgent need to know our intrinsic, personal value as much as we need to recalibrate our economic value.

And, big and, in our new forays as entrepreneurs or into entirely different fields we desperately need to develop our capacity to negotiate to capture our value--and to honor our values.

And perhaps the next time we’re faced with a cut or a reduction or a layoff, we’ll have the tools to refuse our demise, and instead help our businesses and workplaces find an alternate win-win.

Last 3 days to register for our signature course, She Negotiates. Leave a comment and get the early bird rate!Here.

All she had to do was ask...

2010-07-13T12:00:48Z

In the next ten minutes we will not be able to level the wage gap between men and women. But in the next ten minutes, if one woman somewhere, anywhere, wakes up and realizes that all she had to do was ask, we will be two feet closer.

And if we have a string of those 10-minute wake up moments, we just might make an immediate impact on the quality of our lives and make legislating pay equity unnecessary.

One of the primary reasons the pay gap persists is something we can be personally responsible for changing: We have to ask. Not just once, but persistently, relentlessly, until we get what we want, not only at work, but in every area of our lives.

Here’s a good example of a highly typical workplace conversation. I invite you to find the obvious holes and plug them.

A: I’m not really liking the new director.

B: Why’s that?

A: Haven’t you noticed? She came in talking all about creating new leadership positions, but not a peep since. Seems like she’s really close to the vest. Secretive.

B: Really? What evidence do you have to support that?

A: Evidence? As far as I know she hasn’t asked anyone into the corner office. She hasn’t met with any of the team.

B: Are you making assumptions, or do you know this for a fact?

A: Look, it’s been seven weeks since she’s been director and all we’ve done is have brainstorming sessions. Someone has a great idea, and she says, “It’s all yours. Give me some details by the end of the week.” That kind of stuff. I haven’t seen any follow up on those great ideas. And I was really hoping she’d consider me for leadership slot.

B: What have you done to make that known?

A: I would think she’d come to me. We met when she first came on board, and that was that. I mean, what have you noticed?

B: I met with her, told her what I’d like to offer the company, dished about my preferences and strengths and accomplishments.

A: I hate selling myself like that. Feels so car salesmanny.

B: I didn’t wear seersucker, I promise. We had a couple more meetings, and we’re supposed to meet again next week about me taking the communications team lead.

A: You’re kidding? That’s wonderful for you, but I’m a bit incensed. She just totally put me on the back burner.

B: Um, do you even hear what you’re saying? Why don’t you ask? She's good, but she's not a mind reader.

You would think that with all we now know and all the workplace leadership learning we’ve done that we’d be beyond this kind of conversation, but we’re not. Why do you think that is? Unlearning our upbringing and cultural inheritances? Implicit bias? What if we sit still for a moment and stop pointing fingers “out there” and take responsibility for what we want?

What are you ready to ask for?

She Negotiates starts July 19. Learn the strategies and tactics and support your learning with journaling, coaching and peer connection. Go!

The Power of Balance and the Balance of Power

2010-07-07T21:34:05Z

In my work I've noticed a pattern. The women who come in the door with a "work+life balance" challenge, shortly uncover that their primary focus is to reclaim the power they've given away.

Women tend to start by saying, "my life is unmanageable at the current speed and current workload, but I can't see what I can let go of." In our sleepy mindsets, we overwork our natural tendency to be of service and feed the Knee Jerk Yes Syndrome. And yet it's still not the heart of the matter.

We will also complain about who and what is in our way. Often we say it’s the men in our lives who throw up roadblocks, or a power structure that we perceive to be hindering us. In other words, we point at everything external to ourselves as the reason we're in such a dither—why we didn't get the raise or promotion, or why nobody lifts a finger to pitch in with housework. Hell, we all do that before we wake up.

Here, we're getting warmer...

We say we want things like:

Flextime
Help with housework.
A raise or promotion.
Quality time with children and family.
Friends who aren't energy sucks.
Good sex.
Money in the bank.
Organized closets.
Help with the children to find a few hours to focus on work.
Better team work.
Time for creative projects.

The two—admittedly stereotypical—ways we go about getting what we want are by 1) complaining, and 2) hoping someone will notice and do everything in their power to put us out of our misery.

Have you noticed how repeatedly ineffective those two choices are?

How many of you are in positions of relative power in your workplaces working at a fevered pitch and hoping, just craving that somebody notices how great you are and gives you a promotion?
How many of you have repeatedly asked your beloved to put the cap on the toothpaste to no avail?
How many of you can't believe you're being interrupted on the phone yet again, when you've asked your children repeatedly to wait until you're finished?
How many of you have quit a perfectly good job because the guy in the next cubicle was being paid more than you?

That's what I thought.

You know by now that you're the one who needs to do the asking. Right? The world is not looking out for you. It's not a malicious thing, it's just the way it is. But it's the quality of our asking that needs the most work. In the coaching profession this is called asking powerful questions, or open-ended questions. Mediators and negotiators call it asking "Diagnostic Questions."

Here's an example of turning our whining and complaining and closed-ended YES-NO questions into Diagnostic Questions:

Is there any chance of getting a promotion? | When are you free to discuss my promotion?

Will you take the trash out every night? | When would a good time for taking out the trash every night?
Do you like vanilla ice cream? | What are your favorite flavors of ice cream?
Are you happy? | What would it take to make you happy?
Is this a price you're willing to pay? | What price are you willing to pay?

Diagnostic questions help uncover the needs, wants and desires of the other person (and it's a good idea to know your own answers to the questions you're asking). They also help to frame the subject of your conversation in a way that will influence the outcome and help find a collaborated resolution. Here's a few more:

Why is it so difficult to remember to put the cap on the toothpaste?
If we were partners in this, how could we use our strengths to support each other?
If we were partners in this, how could your strengths improve my weaknesses and my strengths improve your weaknesses?
What's getting in the way of showing up on time?
What's difficult about following the rules as they are now?
If we created new rules, would that help resolve some of the problems you're having with X now?
What's upsetting you?
What do you think is fair?
Why do you think that's fair?
What about that resolution seems fair?
What else?
What might be left unsaid or undone?

But we can’t really achieve balance, and navigate our daily lives and everything on our plates by pointing fingers. We have to know ourselves, our values, and our purpose. When we know who we are and what we want, and we have the strategic tools to ask for what we want and make it happen, we will have true personal power, and economic wellbeing.

And that, my friend, is real balance.

P.S. This is PRECISELY what we'll be teaching women to do (and a lot more) in our upcoming virtual course, SHE NEGOTIATES starting July 19. We challenge you to negotiate your way into this course.

Remember When Your Job Was Like a Love Affair?

2010-07-05T15:13:55Z

Remember when your livelihood was sexy? It was so alluring you thought about it every waking, dreaming minute. You were having an affair with your work. And then, well, it turned into an affair. The lurid steam was just shower fog on a bathroom mirror. You hit a bump in the road, yes, a patch of bumps, and there you were, climbing in bed with the statistics and making the livelihood you love all wrong. One day you woke up and said something like, “This job is just not giving me what I want; it’s not fun or challenging or collaborative anymore.” And now you cultivate an internal sneer when you think of your workspace, or your boss, or your co-workers. It just doesn’t measure up. People you work with just don’t get it. In fact, you don’t even like them at all. Your job has become an it, and your team has become a they.

From there you start calling your livelihood a career. Or maybe you’ve so fallen out of love you’ve started calling your career a J-O-B. Whatever the case, before you ditch your current source of sustenance, the one you once said was “a perfect fit, my ideal life,” consider these questions:

What if you are in charge of your experience?
What if you are responsible for bringing the fun and challenge and collaboration?
Can you give up being right in favor of creating fun, challenge and collaboration?
What might happen if you quit blaming others and refuse to play the victim?

Don’t get me wrong, there are jobs that will suck the marrow from your bones. We’ve all had them. And job security has become as laughable a phrase as job loyalty. But in terms of your own personal development, what if you turn your attention back toward yourself as if you were 100 percent capable and responsible for providing the juice and inspiration you crave. How might your experience be different?

To test your readiness to leave your current digs, and to illuminate a potential pattern you might not want to bring to your next adventure, try this out:

For one week, test your thinking with this “mirroring” exercise. Notice every criticism and judgment you have about your work or other people, and turn it around. Try it on and see how it fits.

If that doesn't help you rekindle the flame, perhaps it time to learn how to negotiate a raise or a new position, or an exit strategy.

She Negotiates! Next virtual training starts July 19! Get the Early Bird Discount and Save $75. Ends July 10.

We're just, you know, negotiating, and then whammo, something totally transformative happens...

2010-06-25T02:41:56Z

I have a confession.

I like using that phrase because confessions usually cause people to perk up their ears and hang in for the dark chocolate...

Victoria Pynchon and I have know each other since 2006. She's my partner in the Balance University course She Negotiates. Our friendship started as a love affair with words and writing, and has moved into one of the most important relationships in my life. Not just because of her brilliance as a lawyer, mediator and negotiation trainer, but because we transform each other and call each other out and laugh—a great deal. We're like kids dunking Oreos in milk and forgetting to cover our mouths when we guffaw and make a beautiful mess in the kitchen.

We started designing She Negotiates back in March. Between that time and now, winding our way through conversations spanning all of human history, something transformational happened. And unexpected. I am at peace with my husband.

I am at peace with my husband.

What the heck does that have to do with negotiating, you might ask. Well, lemme say this: it would never have happened if I hadn't declared that peace on the planet will be possible when women know their value. I called Victoria to ask her to teach the course, I knew nothing about framing and concessions and counter offers and log rolling or expanding the pie. As a co-actively trained and certified coach, I thought I knew everything about diagnostic questions and Socratic inquiry--the stock in trade of mediators, negotiators and coaches. But it was my friendship with Victoria and the daily conversations that made room for a big deal change in my daily real life.

I remember making a "note to self." The note said, "Watch what happens when you shift your entire way of being. Go ahead. Ask him a few questions. Get curious." Look, I'm a coach, I'm supposed to have this nailed or I would have to call myself a fraud...so the story goes.

A few days ago, my nearly 14-year-old said, "Wow. You two are completely different. You're happy. You're so gentle and accommodating. I mean, you even went to Home Depot together. I feel so happy. Thank you mommy, thank you daddy. It feels really good." Break my heart beautiful, isn't it?

So. By all means take the She Negotiates course to get a pragmatic handle on your value, your potential in the market. Take it to learn how to ask for and get a promotion or a raise. Take it to turn the table on the wage and income gap. But the real takeaway for humanity is to master this one little negotiator's tool: diagnostic questions. Master the art of being curious and "getting over there" in every single conversation...the cashier in the grocery store, your boss, your team, your neighbor, your banker, your mechanic, the person next to you as you fall asleep at night.

And prepare to be awakened.

Get the Early Bird Discount for She Negotiates starting July 19 and Save $75!