knowing your worth & asking for it are two completely different skills

women are told to know their worth as though the knowing is the hard part

We all need be as audacious as Elle Woods, an absolute icon.

Most women know exactly what they are worth.

They know it in the moment they prepare someone else’s work and watch that person present it.

They know it in the salary negotiation they rehearsed for 2 weeks and then accepted the first offer anyway.

They know it in the meeting where they said the thing quietly and it was ignored and a man said the same thing 10 minutes later and the room responded.

They know. The knowing is not the gap.

The gap is between the knowledge and the ask.

The ask is a different skill entirely, one that nobody teaches women because for a very long time nobody needed them to have it.

The ask requires you to name a number and not fill the silence after it. To say what you want without the paragraph of justification that makes it more comfortable for everyone else and significantly less effective for you.

To make a request without softening it into a suggestion, without appending the apology, without leaving the other person a graceful exit from the obligation of taking you seriously.

The knowing lives inside you. The ask has to travel across a room. And the journey between those two things is where most of the negotiating power disappears.

This kind of writing is slow, unoptimized, and made with care. If this resonated, you’re welcome to support it.

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Here is what happens in that journey.

You know what you are worth.

You open your mouth to say it.

And everything you have ever learned about being a woman in a room, about not being too much, not being demanding, not making people uncomfortable, not taking up more space than has been offered to you, arrives simultaneously and starts editing the ask before it leaves your body.

The number becomes a range. The range becomes a question. The question becomes an apology for asking. And by the time it reaches the room it is so qualified and so softened that the room does not have to take it seriously, and does not, and you leave having confirmed the very belief you were trying to overcome.

This is not a confidence problem. It is a conditioning problem.

And the distinction matters because confidence is something you are supposed to already have, which means not having it is a personal failing.

Conditioning is something that was done to you, which means undoing it is a learnable skill. One puts the problem inside you. The other puts it where it actually belongs.

The ask is learnable. It is practised in the body before it is comfortable in the room. It is said out loud before it feels natural. It involves sitting in the discomfort of the silence after the number, the silence that feels hostile and is almost always just silence, without rushing to fill it with reassurance.

It involves separating the ask from the relationship, which is the hardest part, because women have been taught that the two are inseparable. That asking for more is a risk to the connection. That the request and the rejection of the person making it are the same thing.

They are not. The ask is not your worth. It is just a number in a room.

You know your worth. Now practise saying it out loud, in full, without the apology at the end.

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The thinking work

Think of the last time you asked for something, a raise, a favour, recognition, your own needs met, and notice exactly where the edit happened between what you knew you deserved and what you actually said.

xo,

musingsofacitygirl — still spiraling, still observing, still surviving beautifully

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