How to Ask For What You Want with Pride
Kenneth Berger
Executive coach and author of "Ask for What You Want." I help startup leaders fend off burnout, take a stand for the life they want, and leave their unique mark on the world at large.
Welcome to part two of the core Ask for What You Want tools! Last time around I shared my tools for articulating what you want , this time I’m covering my tools to ask for what you want proudly and intentionally. Here are the steps, to recap:?
I sometimes joke with clients that 80% of resolving interpersonal conflict is asking people, “Have you talked to the person directly about that?” And often they haven’t spoken to them at all about the issue, let alone asked for what they want! But they almost always have an excuse.?
It’s amazing all the creative stories we can come up with to avoid asking for what we want! People hate hearing no, so we often go to great lengths to make sure we get a yes. We hone our arguments why we're right for weeks or months, prepare for any possible objection, have meetings before the meeting to create consensus, even shower others in favors so they’re indebted to us when the time comes.
Yet this attachment to getting a yes is exactly what makes most people such ineffective askers: consciously or not, their intention is to coerce their marks into saying yes at any cost. “I’m not just going to ask for what I want, I’m going to make sure you do what I want.” No wonder so many people chicken out of asking—I would think twice about saying that out loud too! No wonder so many asks sound aggressive when that’s the intent behind them. The drama we create with this coercive intent is so harmful. The alternative is simply respecting the response and taking no for an answer.
Not that we really have a choice! The irony is that you can’t control anyone: it’s their right to say no any time they please—and ours too. We all come fully equipped with free will and tend to use it pretty liberally. And the more you bring an intention to control or coerce, the more people are likely to resist it (or throw you out of their office). It doesn’t have to be this hard: just redefine what an ask means to you.
What is an Ask?
So if an ask isn’t coercion—if you’re not trying to force someone against their will—then what is it? To me asking is fundamentally collaborative, not coercive. Asking brings people together to do something they couldn’t do alone. Here are a few collaborative framings for your asks I’ve found useful and effective. Try them out and see which resonate most with you.
An ask is a vulnerable reveal. When you ask for what you want, the people you ask know you better than they did before. In fact, you’ve entrusted them with something rather vulnerable for an office setting: a bit of who you are and what you care about. Why is that important? Because the alternative is hiding that part of you! Often due to fear or shame. The LGBTQ community has taught us exactly how painful it is to hide in the closet, and how freeing it is to share who you are proudly. That’s why it’s so important to ask for what you want with pride! Even if your reveal of what you want for lunch is rather less dramatic than coming out of the closet. Whether or not you get what you want, now you don’t have to hide your desire.
An ask is a bid for a relationship. When you ask someone for something, you’re implicitly envisioning a relationship with the person you ask. That’s why the coercive ask is so absurd—who wants a coercive, controlling relationship? Hopefully you’re envisioning a relationship that benefits both of you—otherwise why would they say yes? Open and trusting is a better start. So what kind of relationship would you like with the person you’re asking? Polite acquaintance? Fun buddy? Respectful peer? Committed sponsor? Grateful mentee? How might you embody that in the way you ask? You can also ask explicitly of course, but often the tone of a relationship is more in its unspoken energy. Yet often we’re so wrapped up in our own stress or frustration during an ask that that’s the main energy that comes across. So rather than focus on the risks when you ask, try focusing on the opportunity: to create a stronger relationship and mutually beneficial outcome. You might end up with something really positive—even if it’s not exactly what you wanted at the start.
An ask is a vision for a better future. People say yes to asks when it benefits them, in ways that may be subtle, obvious, or both. So what mutually beneficial future are you envisioning with your ask? How will it be better than today? How will each of you feel? How will your relationships improve? What will the impact be on others? Even if you don’t know the person and their priorities well, there are certain motivations that are pretty much universal. We all want to feel good day to day. We all want strong relationships with the people around us. We all want to make a positive impact on the world in some way. Sometimes just knowing you’ll be grateful is enough reason for others to say yes. And if they say no for now, it’s still a great opportunity to ask what it would take to get to yes. So try envisioning the potential future you’re creating with each ask. Your words can make that vision real.
An ask is an experiment. One of the hard truths of asking for what you want is the response is mostly no—or something short of a “hell yes!” in any case. Because the response is mostly no, our primary goal with an ask is to learn how to ask effectively in this context, not to get an immediate yes. There’s no one right way to ask! Some people find more success with asking boldly, others with asking subtly. You’ll see wildly different results depending on who you ask and how. How should you make requests of your boss? Your friends? What about your kids or pets? There’s only one way to find out! Experiment. Over time, you'll get to know how to make different asks of different people in your own uniquely effective style. Whether or not you get what you want this time, you’ll learn something about how to ask next time around.
How to Ask
Now that you have some idea of what an ask can be, how exactly should you make your next ask? Everyone has their own style of asking, and it takes time and practice to become skillful at your style. That’s why I recommend asking for what you want every day. The most common way our asks fail is when we give up on them before we get enough practice to become skillful. Either we don’t consistently prioritize asking for what we want, we wait too long between asks to learn from our mistakes, or we keep asking the same way every time instead of varying our technique.?
Here are three techniques I teach to start asking for what you want regularly enough to begin your journey towards mastery. They’re inspired by the interpersonal effectiveness tools from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).
Say no to what you don't want (with a gut check)
I work with a broad range of humanity, from the most kind and easygoing to the most grumpy and cantankerous. Suffice to say, I am the latter. One of the more subtle side effects is being impossible to shop for—I already know exactly what I want and what I don’t.? My patient wife Meghan has mostly given up on buying me gifts, but when she does it’s obvious from my face whether she’s picked a winner or not! My face says no to what I don’t want whether I like it or not. But after 10 years of marriage, Meghan finally figured out a solution: she knows a beautiful card with a thoughtful note inside hits every time. I love them, and I still save them all.?
What lessons can we take from this adorable marital anecdote? First, that there is hope for love even for the most grumpy and cantankerous among us. But also, for the rest of humanity who tend to avoid saying it, consider the benefits of “no.” Saying no to what you don’t want is an excellent way to get practice asking for what you want—simply because you can’t avoid it! Most of us get asked to do something many times daily. If you’re on the more agreeable side of the spectrum, you probably default to saying “yes” to these requests—especially if you’re not too clear on what you want anyway. The danger when you say “yes” too often is you’re no longer steering your own ship. You’re letting it drift with the winds, and over time it can take you places you don’t want to go.?
So if you find yourself always saying “yes,” or endlessly debating what choice to make in your head, consider tuning into your gut for a reality check. When my clients truly want to say yes with their full bodies, their eyes light up. They crackle with energy and excitement to make it happen! When they’re trying to convince themselves it’s a yes, the energy tends to be “meh.” I guess that would be fine. Sure. OK. The energy difference between a full body yes and anything short of that couldn’t be more obvious, yet often we ignore it in favor of endless internal debate. So train yourself to tune into that physiological response instead, and say no to what your body tells you you don’t want.
Now, that no doesn’t have to be a flat no. It can be a “not right now,” a redirect to someone else, a counteroffer, or a lower level of certainty (“I’ll give it a shot”). But by building the habit of checking your gut and building the vocabulary to say no graciously, you’ll be well on your way to making your own skillful asks. And by saying no to what you don’t want, you’ll be preserving more time, space, and energy for what you do want.
Find the right ask for right now
Asking for what you want is scary. For some of you, this will seem obvious. For others though, the reasons you don’t always ask for what you want effectively may not immediately read as fear. Maybe you’ve been biding your time, waiting to mitigate risks, strategizing carefully to absolutely maximize your chance of success.?
But let’s be real: how likely are you to succeed on your first try, no matter how prepared you are? Often under the surface this strategy is more about fear of failure than it is about risk mitigation. Maybe you’ve been making your same ask many times over but without much success so far. Bravo for finding the courage to ask out loud, but why are you repeating the same failed experiment? Often under the surface it’s scary to accept that plan A isn’t working, especially if there’s no plan B. Maybe you’ve spent your whole life asking one particular way! Loudly, or quietly, or not at all. Of course it’s a little scary trying something new.
That’s why it’s so important to find the right ask for right now. Just because you have a big dream doesn’t mean you have to start with the biggest, edgiest ask! Baby steps, people. Start with the ask you’re willing to make today:
It’s 100% OK if you’re not ready to make the biggest, boldest version of your ask just yet. Instead of giving up, or waiting forever, or repeating the same ask needlessly, just adjust the difficulty level until you find an ask you’re willing to make today. We’re going for edgy, but not terrifying. Enough to help you learn and grow, but not so much your gut says “hell no!” The only way to be sure what works is to try out your asks in the real world.
This technique is simple, but it might be the most important one in the whole Ask for What You Want framework (AFWYW). If an ask is an experiment that teaches us what works, then we only learn as fast as we make those asks. So practice asking for what you want every day. Sure, the AFWYW tools offer some shortcuts to make great asks. But ultimately practice is the only path to mastery.
Expand your range
Imagine a range of intensity options for your asks, where 1 is not asking at all, and 10 is shouting at the top of your lungs until you get what you want. Have you used your full range lately? For most of us, the answer will be no. In fact, we tend to get preeeettty comfortable in one narrow range of that spectrum.?
If you have a subtler communication style, you might be most comfortable at levels 1-3: Gently suggesting things from time to time, but mostly accepting whatever the world throws your way with equanimity.?
We don’t always get what we want, so acceptance is a powerful tool to master! But what about when something’s really important to you? Or you find yourself resentful that others aren’t helping you or prioritizing your needs? You might want to start exploring the higher end of the intensity range.
If you have a bolder communication style, you might be most comfortable at levels 7-9: showing up with your desires clearly and strongly stated, and doing whatever it takes to make them happen.?
High-intensity asking can be very effective! But it can also be tricky when it comes to maintaining relationships. People eventually get annoyed at everything being an emergency. When your will is so strong, it can drown out other voices—and you need those other voices to feel heard if you’re going to influence them. Exploring the low-to-middle of the intensity range can help you build the relationships you need to get what you want.
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If you have a calm, steady communication style, you might be most comfortable at levels 4-6: Asking in a low-key straightforward way, while also accepting calmly that often things don’t go your way.?
This is a well-balanced style that works well for many asks! But if you always use that style—or any other style, for that matter—you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to communicate the unique meaning each individual ask has to you. At level 4-6, everything sounds medium priority. At level 1-3, everything sounds low priority. At level 7-9, everything sounds like a borderline emergency.?
Where else are you pigeonholing yourself into one narrow type of ask? What rules do you have about what asks aren’t allowed? Certain topics? Certain words? Certain tones of voice? Certain people? Intensity isn’t the only spectrum into which you can expand your range.
By expanding your range, you give yourself the tools to make yourself heard when it really matters. You improve your relationships by proving you can accept a no graciously when appropriate. And sure, we all have a comfort zone where we do most of our asking. But if that comfort zone isn’t working for one particular ask, try expanding your range. You might find the other end of the spectrum can be surprisingly effective.
How to Ask Without Offending Others
The second most common way our asks fail is by offending the person we’re asking with the way we ask. While this error is what most people worry about when they ask, it’s also the most easily avoided. The solution is simple: ask with pride in your desires, but with the humility that others have their own desires too—no one owes you a yes. So often we show up to an ask scared it won’t go our way, or frustrated we have to ask in the first place. No wonder those asks often don’t land! So even if you don’t usually worry about offending others, try checking yourself before you make your ask. I’ll get into each of these in more detail below:
There’s no shame in taking an hour or a day to process your feelings if you’re not ready yet! Often that’s time well spent to help your ask land with others.
Ask proudly: without arguing or apologizing
I often see people gearing up to make an ask like they’re going into battle. They don their armor, telling a story to themselves why their cause is righteous and their opponent’s is dangerous. They study that opponent carefully, analyzing their weaknesses and how to exploit them. They sharpen their weapons: carefully honed arguments why they are right and the opponent is wrong. They anticipate objections and prepare their counter-attacks. Then they arrive on the battlefield, armor shining, bristling with weaponry and wonder—why is my opponent so upset with me?
I see other people making an ask like they’re doing damage control on a PR crisis. They panic! Wait, I told someone what I really want? What have I done?? The public can’t know the real story, they would eat me alive! They open with an official apology statement, acknowledging the harm they’ve caused by wanting something so clearly inappropriate. They retract their ask, breathe a sigh of relief, and wonder—why do I never get what I want?
What do these stories have in common? Neither of them are really about the ask at all. They’re about how much we fear losing the approval of others when we share something vulnerable about ourselves. As I discussed above, asks are often quite vulnerable reveals! With fear guiding us, it can feel quite normal to coerce others into approving our request via fierce argument, or give up on it altogether via apology or silence. But these strategies don’t work in the long term: eventually coercive asks really do hurt our relationships, and neglecting our own desires hurts ourselves.?
These stories illustrate why it’s so important to ask for what you want with pride. Pride means letting go of the need for others to approve and simply sharing what we want so others can know us better. When we release our need for others’ approval, there’s no need for arguments or apologies. Not everyone will like what we want or agree to our request, and that’s OK. We can’t control how others respond anyway! But we can control how we respond back to them. Instead of arguing against alternate perspectives, we can look for the truth in them. Instead of apologizing for what we want if others disapprove, we can stand by it because we approve of ourselves. Asking proudly means sourcing our approval from within, asking without arguing or apologizing, hoping for the response we want but recognizing it’s out of our hands.
Stay on your side of the net
When people are worried about the response to their ask, they often start making up stories about the person they’re asking to strengthen their case. Instead of letting them make their own decision, they try to do the work for them by explaining the person’s own world to them. Suffice to say this does not tend to land well, especially when the stories are negative. You can’t know for sure what the other person believes unless you ask them! Assuming you know what’s true for others is a great way to weaken your case, not strengthen it.
“Staying on your side of the net” is a technique drawn from the long-running Interpersonal Dynamics course taught to MBA students at Stanford. It means focusing on sharing your experience instead of making up stories about the person you’re asking. Reporting what you think and feel while understanding others will have their own experience of the same events. Sharing uncontroversially observable artifacts like an email or video while understanding others will have their own interpretations of what they mean. Practically speaking, “staying on your side of the net” means using I statements, not you statements. Compare:
versus:
Using I statements in your asks accomplishes a few important tasks at once. People hate being mischaracterized, so by not characterizing others at all and only speaking to your own experience you avoid that misstep entirely. It’s also an opportunity to share your framing of the ask: vulnerable reveal, bid for relationship, vision for the future, experiment, etc. Sharing what the ask means to you—and not assuming you know what it means to others—is a perfect way to incentivize them to help without coercion.
Ask humbly: without righteousness, entitlement, or blame
It’s impossible to avoid: we all make our asks with expectations. Especially if we have an established relationship with the person we’re asking, that list of expectations can be very long. Romantic partners expect a lot of each other. Managers expect a lot of employees, and employees expect a lot of managers. We even have expectations of strangers: that the barista at the coffee shop will make what we ask for, that a person in our way will move if we say “excuse me.” Mostly these expectations are borne of these relationships working as intended! We expect future results based on past performance.
But as the saying goes, past performance does not guarantee future results. So when suddenly our expectations aren’t being met it can come as a shock! We might feel disappointed we aren’t getting what we expected, scared of what it means for our relationship, or even angry because we believe an important promise was broken. All those feelings are 100% natural and valid. The trouble comes when we start judging others as a result.
Because no matter how right you think you are, there are always an infinity of alternate perspectives you haven’t yet considered. No matter how much you believe you’re entitled to a yes, in the end no one owes you anything they don’t feel like giving. No matter how much you think it’s all their fault, you also helped create these outcomes—even if only by maintaining a relationship with them.
That’s why it’s so powerful to ask humbly: without righteousness, entitlement, or blame. Most negative reactions to asks come from people feeling judged harshly: either for their past decisions or if they don’t agree to your ask. You are welcome to your feelings about anyone and anything, but you’re unlikely to influence others if you start your asks by judging the person you’re asking. You can both ask proudly and humbly at once: with pride in the value of your desires and humility that you’re not entitled to receiving them.?
The upside of this is if you can be perfectly clear the person you’re asking is under no obligation to say yes, suddenly most of the risk is removed from the ask. They can feel free to actually consider your request on its merits, instead of out of fear of the consequences of saying no. We’ll get into this more when we discuss the next step of this framework, accepting the response graciously, but this is how you build influence over the long term. Creating relationships based on genuine respect for each person’s desires and boundaries: what they want and what they don’t.
Whew, that was a lot! Thanks for reading all the way through, that bodes well for the quality of your next ask. Let’s review how to make it great:
Frame your asks as collaboration, not coercion
Practice asking for what you want every day
Ask proudly yet humbly to avoid offending others with your asks
Got questions for me before you ask others? Or stories about what you learned from asking? Please comment below! In the meanwhile, make sure you’re following me on LinkedIn and subscribe to the AFWYW newsletter to stay in touch. Finding meaning in this work? Please share it with your network so we can build this community, I look forward to the conversations!
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1 个月Great article! It is really making me re-think the way I ask and also question how often I avoid asking. ??
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