Welcome back to the Articharm podcast, a show designed to help you communicate with power and become unstoppable on your path from hidden genius to influential leader.

We know you have what it takes to reach your full potential in each and every week we share with you interviews and strategies to help you transform your life by helping you unlock your ex-factor, whether you're in sales, leadership, medicine, building client relationships, or looking for love.

We've got what you need. You shouldn't have to settle for anything less than extraordinary. I'm AJ and I'm Johnny. Now thank you everyone for tuning in. Let's kick off today's show today. We're speaking with Dr. Vicki Medvek. Dr. Medvek is the author of negotiate without fear strategies and tools to maximize your outcomes, which came out a few weeks ago. She's a master negotiator, Kellogg professor and the CEO of Medvek and Associates, a consulting firm focused on

high stakes negotiations and strategic decisions. We're going to talk with her today about eliminating the fear that impedes success in negotiations and the negotiation strategies that she has honed over decades advising Fortune 500 clients. And don't worry, we're even going to break down how you can negotiate your next salary raise. Welcome to the show, Vicki. So happy you're here, joining us talking about how to be less fearful when it comes to negotiating.

Thank you so much for having me, AJ. I'm very excited to be with you today. Now Johnny and I would love to know a little bit of your origin story and what drew you to negotiation.

You know, it's funny when I first graduated from college, I had a position at United Way of America. I was selected as one of 10 people, 10 graduating seniors who would work with the national, the international United Way for one year and then work in a local United Way chapter. And when I was doing that, I found that my passion was for the fundraising side of the United Way.

And I recognized I was really enjoying negotiation. So after fulfilling my duty of working for a full year for a local United Way after my year with the international, I was recruited by a president of the university to lead fundraising for one of his colleges.

And I started there doing a lot of fundraising, a lot of negotiation. And that's what really sparked my interest in going back and studying that as I got my PhD doing research in it. And then ultimately teaching it and advising many companies and organizations on very high stakes deals.

Are there anything that you can point to in negotiation that stick out to you that you really enjoy because when most people think about negotiation, we'll get to this. All of a sudden they get a pit in their stomach, they start to get nauseous, they don't want to deal with it. And we always hear much like cells.

You know, there's always these people like I don't like cells people. They're always too pushy. That's why I'm not a cells guy. And then there's the same thing with negotiation. I don't like negotiation. Everyone on the other side's a big jerk. And then it's always comes down to the same thing, which is cells and negotiation is going to be an integral part of your life.

If you have a mission, if you have reach in your life, because you're looking to acquire things, you're looking to achieve things. And so you have to get out there and make things happen. And in order to make things happen, you have to deal with other people. So either you're selling your ideas or you're negotiating to enable and to get your ideas in the play.

I couldn't agree more, Johnny. And in fact, I would argue that that pit in your stomach that you feel that is the fear that I tackle in my new book, Negotiate Without Fear. I want to take the fear out of negotiations and allow people to negotiate in more confident and comfortable ways.

Because I would absolutely agree with you that negotiation is critical to so many parts of our life. And I actually believe that when you can embolden yourself and empower yourself to be able to negotiate, you actually create a much more satisfied life.

Because I think a lot of times we're dissatisfied with situations. We don't like what's happening. We don't like how we retreat. We don't like what someone is doing.

And if we recognize that we can change that through our negotiation capabilities, we feel more empowered and more satisfied. So I agree with you that getting the fear out of negotiation is critical to leading to satisfaction.

And I believe there's no worse feeling than being taken advantage of because you don't know how to negotiate.

We've all kicked ourselves for paying too much for something, for not negotiating our salary and then finding out a coworker or a peer who's less talented than us is making more money simply because they asked for it.

So we love looking at fear and overcoming fear and changing our attitude, gaining knowledge. And of course the last piece is gaining experience.

I want to tackle the first one that mindset and the attitude going into negotiation because that lays the groundwork for how it is going to go in that room.

And I think one of the biggest fears is being taken advantage of. I think another fear is I'm afraid the other side will walk away. I'm afraid all damage the relationship.

I'm afraid that I will get a bad deal. I think there are so many fears that impede our ability to negotiate in confident ways. And that's where we want to give you strategy to help you to be able to take that fear out of negotiation and be able to appropriately go into that situation in a really confident way.

And when it comes to attitude and we talk a lot about this when it comes to socializing, what you think about before you enter that room comes into play when you're actually in communication with someone.

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