Today I failed miserably in the art of negotiating. The Hamilton exercise validated how terrible I am and how much I lack the skills to be selfish and defend my qualities when it comes to negotiating a salary. I have had many opportunities in my short life to negotiate a salary and to be bluntly honest, I failed miserably at all of them. As Paul was explaining that most people avoid this type of exchange I started thinking about why do I have such a negative opinion of negotiations. I considered if it is because I enter this ritual with the predisposition that I have to do the numbers dance…. 35…30…34….32.5… , or that I expect some sleazy tactics to trick me, or is it that I view negotiating as a type of confrontation which I want to avoid at any cost. There was no process of elimination in my head, I chose all of the above but got stuck on the confrontation part. At that moment I realized that it is the root cause for why I avoid negotiations and never invest neither time nor energy into becoming savvier. During the rest of the talk I tried to break out of that mind set, to see negotiations as something beneficial and not necessarily a situation where two initials clash their horns.
I have a lot of work ahead of myself.
