Come on over to the ForbesWoman She Negotiates Blog to learn how to improve your negotiation performance by writing about it in advance. Excerpt below. Full article at the link.

In a recent effort to remedy the persistent problem of women performing poorly on math tests, researchers at the University of Chicago asked women to write about their test-anxiety or about their personal values. It didn’t matter whether the women wrote about their values or about their fears, having journaled in preparation for their math tests, their scores improved one full grade. See The Write Way to Reduce Test Anxiety at U.S. World and News Report.

[Researcher] Sian Beilock [said] that “[o]ne small snippet of writing can be enough to boost performance. Writing for eight or 10 minutes before the test put anxious students on a par with students who didn’t worry.”

Here’s the most important finding for women who continue to resist negotiating on their own behalves.

“Women who tended to believe that men were better than women at physics showed the greatest improvement” in test scores when they wrote about their values or fears in preparation for their examinations.

Journal your values and journal your fear

I’m particularly pleased to learn of this research because the She Negotiates training is conducted on an online journaling-learning platform. My business partner and I have long wondered why the women who take this course nearly always report a transformative result that impacts all areas of their lives.

“It’s because of the word journal,” I’ve said to my partner. “It allows women to go deep.”

We cannot simply give women negotiation strategies and tactics, expecting them to go out into the commercial world and use them.

We need to provide women with a community learning experience in which they’re able to connect their fear of negotiation to the culture in which that fear developed like the old consciousness raising sessions of the Second Wave Women’s Movement. We need not only negotiation skills, but the confidence and sense of entitlement to use them.