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Arianna and I had been working
together for four months when a
terrific opportunity opened up:
her company was creating a
cross-functional team to develop
three new products that would
carry it into the next decade.
We both felt she deserved to be
on the team, but would the
selection committee think she
was ready for such a
high-profile role?
Arianna’s lack of visibility was
the major obstacle we were
working to overcome in her
coaching. This new opportunity
would test everything she and I
had been working on.
Raised in Eastern Europe, she
heard the phrase “The nail that
sticks up gets pounded down” a
thousand times as a child. That
constant admonition to conform
had turned her into a student
with exceptional grades whose
profile was under the radar. In
spite of her good grades, top
honors often went to lesser
students with higher profiles.
She turned her disappointments
inward, telling herself she’d
get her due if she would just
work even harder.
She became compulsive, toiling
endless hours, always with her
head down and her lips sealed.
But the same results continued
and her disappointments grew
larger. By the time I met her,
she was only 38 but had physical
ailments usually found in people
much older.
In our coaching, I kept coming
back to one message in a dozen
different ways: “It’s okay to
ask for what you want.”
To which she would find a dozen
ways to reply, “But I will sound
arrogant. People will be angry
with me.”
One day I answered her with a
lesson I’ve taught my daughters
called Ice cream for
breakfast.
“You can ask for anything you
want,” I’d say to my girls. “You
want ice cream for breakfast?
Give it a shot! You have a
perfect right to ask for
whatever you want, no matter how
outlandish. But remember, I have
a right to say ‘no’. As long as
you can handle hearing ‘no,’
then take the risk and ask. Who
knows? One day you might hear
‘yes’! But you’ll never hear
‘yes’ if you don’t ask.”
Arianna listened thoughtfully,
then said, “Yes, but you’re an
American dad with American
girls.”
“And you’re working at an
American company with American
bosses,” I answered. “They
expect you to ask for what
you want. It doesn’t mean
they’ll say yes, but even if
they say no, it doesn’t mean
they think you’re arrogant. The
point is, if you don’t ask,
you’ll never get the
opportunities you know you
deserve.”
“But they will be angry with
me,” she said.
“You don’t know that. I
understand that’s your fear. But
it’s not necessarily true.” And
then we discussed
Choosing Stories Over “Truth.”
All this work was helping
Arianna chip away at a
self-limiting belief. Everyone
has them. They get instilled in
us when we are young. The phrase
“The nail that sticks up gets
pounded down” had planted the
seeds of a self-limiting belief
that told Arianna that in order
to be good she had to be silent.
The few times she’d fought that
belief as a child she’d been
called ungrateful and made to
feel ashamed—experiences that
deepened her self-limiting
belief. Given her past, it
wasn’t surprising she became an
adult who believed that working
hard and staying invisible
wasn’t merely a way to get ahead
but was actually the only way to
stay safe.
In the workplace, self-limiting
beliefs often reveal themselves
around issues of deserving. In
some cases, people’s
self-limiting beliefs lead them
to feel they deserve more than
they’ve earned. Those people
don’t need to learn to ask for
what they want; they are already
doing it too often in
inappropriate ways. But more
typically—and these are the
people I often coach—people’s
self-limiting beliefs make them
feel they deserve less than is
rightfully theirs. They need to
learn to ask for what they want
without fear or apology.
Arianna, over time, had
tentatively begun to ask. And
she heard “yes” which was a
giddy experience for her. But
this new opportunity felt so
big, so important, she couldn’t
imagine herself asking for it.
So she rehearsed asking for her
place on the cross-functional
team until she felt she could do
it comfortably. Then she went
and made her request. A short
while later she found out that,
no, she would not be selected
for the team. When she asked for
feedback about why she hadn’t
been selected (something she
would never have done
previously!), she was told that,
because of the enormity of the
projects ahead, the selection
committee wanted people who were
entrepreneurial, dynamic
and—here was her biggest
downfall—high profile.
Was she disappointed? Of course.
But she now understood that good
work alone is only half the job;
the other half is speaking up
appropriately so you get
recognized not only for what you
do but also for who you are. And
she had learned that her natural
resistance to asking for what
she wanted was very high; she
would have to push herself hard
to ask without apology or fear.
As a way of modeling the
behavior I’m talking about in
this Tip, we here at Essential
Communications have something
we’d like to ask for and also
something we’d like to announce.
First, the announcement.
We want to announce the launch
of our Executive Coaching Tips
podcasts. This Tip has a podcast
link, as do a score of others in
the
archives on our website. You
can download the podcasts
individually or subscribe to the
series. We hope you’ll give them
a listen and give us your
feedback. We’d love to know what
you think of this new venture.
Now, the “ask.” We want to
triple the number of subscribers
receiving our Executive Coaching
Tips—either by email or podcast.
We know many of you forward our
Tips to your colleagues and
friends. We’d like to invite
those people to become
subscribers. If you’ll
share
with us the names and email
addresses of people whom you
think would appreciate these
Tips, we’ll send them an
individual invitation; we won’t
make anyone a subscriber without
their permission. We appreciate
your help hitting this goal.
In the nearly three years we’ve
been sharing these Tips, we’ve
never asked our audience for
anything before. And it wasn’t
easy to do this time. Coming up
against our own reticence to ask
for what we want was surprising.
But we do believe, as Arianna
learned, the ability to ask
appropriately for what you want
without apology or fear is
crucial to The Look & Sound
of Leadership™. |
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