Negotiating From Potential to Powerhouse

Do you ever feel like there is a powerhouse inside you just waiting to come out? If so, you’re right! We all have a powerhouse ready to be released. The key is to nurture the powerhouse mindset to realize your full potential and unleash her to the world. Speaking of powerhouse women, I interviewed Tracy Holland recently for our Art of Feminine Negotiation podcast and wanted to share her insights on this important issue. Tracy built Hatch Beauty from a startup to an award-winning recognized global leader and now spotlights innovation and helps women entrepreneurs amplify their voice and impact.

Here are some hot tips on how to negotiate from your potential to your inner powerhouse.

Negotiate With Yourself

You’ve no doubt heard me say that all of life is a negotiation and the most important initial negotiation is the one with yourself. Tracy agrees. She advocates first negotiating with yourself to up-level. Make sure you’re setting a high enough bar for yourself. Don’t think small. Ask yourself if your ambitions are bold and audacious enough, if you’re thinking big enough, if your perspective is broad enough. Invite yourself to question if perhaps you’re settling. Are you limiting yourself based on what you think you can safely accomplish or are you willing to go for what you believe might be possible? Dare to ask “how big a vision can I have”?

Once you’ve honestly explored the possibilities, then it’s a good idea to determine if it’s what you really want. So often in life – especially as women – we do what we believe is expected of us rather than pursuing our true passions or purpose. The key is to find that balance between ensuring that what you want feels like an aspirational stretch for you and that it’s something that gets you fired up. You want to feel a little tingly at the prospect. You want to ignite your passion and keep that wick lit.

Doing this exercise at the outset of any new venture is critical. And it’s also important to check in with yourself every few months to recalibrate your vision. Take it out (so to speak), hold it up to the light (metaphorically) and really assess, with an open mind and heart, whether or not it still fits and feels right for you.

Avoid Split Energy

Once you’ve set your intentions and gotten clarity around what you want, consider doing a further check-in with yourself to ensure there’s no internal conflict. You’ll want to ensure you’re not undermining your own progress and momentum because of underlying split energies. If you have limiting beliefs or blocks around the vision you’ve set for yourself, it creates an inner tension and conflict that results in split energy and will hold you back from achieving your full potential. If you have split energy around what you want and what you think is possible, your internal negotiation for space around what’s possible will take time and energy away from where you’re heading. It’s impossible to step forward as your best self when you’ve got that split energy happening.

Get Clear About Your Core Beliefs

I invite you next to get clear about what your core values are. These values are the lens through which you see the world. These fundamental beliefs you carry around will impact on how you speak, how you show up, how you connect with others, how you feel about yourself, how you perform and ultimately on your level of success.

Many people go through life not even aware of the limiting beliefs and values they’ve been carrying around. It’s tough to take control of your life if you’re unaware of the values that drive you. The projection of those beliefs onto other people or situations powerfully impacts on how you interpret what you see, how you interpret others’ reactions to you and also inevitably on the meaning you attach and accordingly your own reactions.

Exploring your values and belief systems allows you to consider, with intention, whether they support what you’re trying to achieve or hinder your progress. The powerful mindset shift around choosing your values and beliefs can lead to delicious new experiences and ways of being as you get more purposeful about how you live your life. It’s food for thought and food for your soul.

Tap Into Your Feminine

All the world is energy. And we all have both masculine and feminine energy. But for too long, our society has bought into the myth that it’s a ‘man’s world’. Our definition of success seemed to be crafted almost exclusively based on a masculine model. And so, many women developed and stepped into their masculine, believing that was the only way to succeed, to be heard, to be respected.

We come to believe that our masculine is what gives us confidence. We buy into the idea that to hold power we need to walk into a room forgetting our feminine. It can feel like wearing that masculine energy is an antidote to marginalization. That it somehow allows us to stand out and speak up and disagree in a roomful of men. To state our opinion even if it isn’t popular.

If this resonates with you at any level, I invite you to get reacquainted with the power of your feminine. Reconnect with the secret weapon of the art of feminine negotiation. Rediscover the power of persuasion that comes from rapport-building, empathy, flexibility, intuition and trust. Explore the edges of where both your feminine and masculine energies stop and start. Embrace the best parts of your feminine. Recognize the power and strength there. Find your authentic centre and let that fuel you.

Let Go of Your Shoulds

Beware of falling prey to your ‘shoulds’. Should is a powerful word that can lead you down a dark and difficult path if misused. When you find yourself self-recriminating that you ‘should’ have done this or ‘shouldn’t’ have done that, it’s time to take a step back to regroup. When you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do because of others’ expectations (or perceived expectations) of you, it’s time to do the recalibration exercise noted above.

If you let your calendar become full of ‘shoulds’ you run the risk of losing your passion and purpose … of feeling trapped and unfulfilled. Ask yourself how much of your day is really coming from a place of impassioned focus where the creative energy and juices are flowing freely versus coming from a place of obligation and expectation. When your should overtake your desires your motivation will dry up and your passion with it.

As women in particular, we tend to be driven by a desire to please and serve as caregiver. With that typically comes a ‘to do’ mentality where we focus on all the things we need to get done.  And we keep putting our own dreams and passions and aspirations on hold in what I’ve come to call the ‘ one day’ mindset. When I finish school, when I have kids, when the kids are gone, when this happens, when that happens. There’s always something else we think needs to happen, and we keep pushing down our own desires, passions and purpose.

This was actually the impetus for my daughter and I to create the Purpose Planner. Instead of being a ‘to do’ driven planner, it’s designed specifically for women to refocus on living your life more fully on purpose and with purpose.

What makes this Purpose Planner different and in a league of its own is that we focus on those things that get you closer to your life-vision, inspire your passion, improve your quality of life, and make you the best version of yourself.

Living into your best life involves living with intention.

This planner will help you:

• Design your life.

• Create clarity about who you want to be and how you want to show up.

• Focus on what really matters.

• Breathe into each moment.

• Live powerfully present with rekindled purpose and passion.

• Live into your dreams and vision.

• Live into your limitless life!

At Women On Purpose we’re passionate about helping you live into your passion and focus on those things that get you closer to living your life-vision.

Hope you got some insights that you can incorporate into your life to step into your inner powerhouse. Here’s to a new way of being.