This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The 3 N’s - Negotiation, Networking & No with Kathryn Valentine | 327

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Let’s talk about the three things women are told not to do: negotiate, network unapologetically, and say no like we mean it.  Most of us have been programmed to default to yes—to the point that we feel guilty saying no, even when it’s the most obvious answer. And when we do say no? We often soften it, explain it away, and sugarcoat it so much that it barely sounds like a no at all. Kathryn Valentine—CEO of Worthmore Strategies and corporate badass helping companies retain and promote female talent—is here to flip that script. With experience advising Fortune 100s and dropping knowledge in places like HBR and Fast Company, Kathryn knows exactly how women can claim their worth, own their voice, and not feel bad about it. From salary talks to schedule shifts, from asking for more to turning down what doesn’t serve you, this episode is your reminder: your power doesn't come from being liked. It comes from knowing what matters and having the guts to go after it. Kathryn even drops her epic list of 76 things you can negotiate (yes, SEVENTY-SIX). So if you've ever softened your no or stayed silent in a meeting, this one’s for you. Connect with Kathryn:  Website: www.worthmorestrategies.com 76 Things You Can Negotiate:www.76things.com Related Podcast Episodes: The Hard Truths Of Entrepreneurship with Dr. Darnyelle Jervey Harmon | 313 Toxic Productivity with Israa Nasir | 254 Be A Likeable Badass with Alison Fragale | 230 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your game time tastes like Miller time. Learn more at MillerLite.ca. Must be legal drinking age. I am Nicole Kahlil and I could probably fill an entire episode with the things women have been taught not to do. Don't be too aggressive. Don't take up too much space. Don't be too aggressive. Don't take up too much space. Don't ask for more. Don't say no. And if you do ask for more or do say no, please, for the love of all things holy, do it in a way that makes everyone else comfortable. And friend, all of

that makes it really hard for women to negotiate. So on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're talking about three words that all start with N. Words that increase our personal power and not surprisingly are some of the biggest game changers in a woman's career and life. And those three Ns are negotiation, networking, and the word no. Because too many of us walk into negotiations with hesitation and apologies, or worse, we don't walk in at all. We underestimate what's possible. We leave opportunities on the table

and play by outdated rules that were never designed for us in the first place. And too many of us feel like we don't have time for networking or avoid it like the plague because we picture a room full of strangers with name tags where the game is to see who can ask, what do you do while shoving a business card in your hand, the absolute fastest?

And using the word no, I mean, most of us have been programmed to default to yes, to the point that we feel guilty saying no, even when it's the most obvious answer. And when we do say no, we often soften it, explain it away, and sugarcoat it so much that it barely sounds like a no at all. Which is why we're talking to Catherine Valentine, CEO of Worth More Strategies, who helps organizations advance female talent and sees firsthand how these three ends, or lack of of them influence a woman's ability to get what they want.

Catherine has worked with companies like JPMorgan, KPMG, and Bain and her experience has been featured in places like the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. She also has a list of 76 things that you can negotiate besides your salary, helping to remind us that there are many ways to claim our worth, expand our opportunities, and secure what truly matters in our careers and our lives. Catherine, welcome to the show. And I'm gonna dive us right into the topic of negotiation. Why is it important for women to learn this skill? And are we really all that bad at it?

Nicole, thank you so much for inviting me to join the show. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. The thing that I always try to convey whenever I'm doing a training on negotiation or speaking or even coaching is we have more influence than we think we do. And so because of societal concepts of gender, we can talk about toy coding studies and all of that stuff. I can go very deep on the nerd if we want to go there.

But because of those things, we have been taught from a young age that our job is to be focused on others, to respond when others need us, to make sure that others are comfortable. And one of the things that I love the most about giving women a gender-specific negotiation skill is that there's more that we can influence and change about how we experience our daily lives

than most of us were raised to believe. Okay, so this question was triggered as you were talking and I swear I'm going to connect it back to what you were saying, but what is the purpose of a negotiation? At least in my mind, I've always thought about it like the goal is to create a win-win. But if we as women are undervaluing ourselves or putting the needs of everyone else at the forefront, is part of the problem that we go into negotiation without even having that result or that outcome in mind. Is my question making any sense?

I'm kind of thinking out loud. It does. And so I don't get to do as much one-on-one coaching anymore. Now I do mostly large groups. But when I did one-on-one coaching, it was really interesting to me. When I started, I assumed we would spend most of the time in the brass tacks of how we do this.

Instead, we actually ended up spending the majority of the time removing that concept of we are undervaluing ourselves and really getting clear on what is it that would make my day better? What would allow me to deliver more impact? What would lower my stress? What would bring me joy? And when you can remove all of the sort of handcuffs and you think very broadly about what it is that you can negotiate, it really starts to light people up. I had one woman negotiate a $2 million inventory system, one woman negotiate fertility benefits, and one woman negotiate a new

chair. Granted, I did not know chairs could be this fancy. It was worth more than her monthly salary, but that new chair changed a lot of how she experienced her day. And so I think working us through kind of removing those societal things and saying, okay, if you're in the driver's seat, if I gave you my magic wand, what would your life look like in a year? And once you dive into that brainstorm, okay, now what are the pieces we can pull apart

that we can actually negotiate? And I have to imagine when we think about the things that would make our day better or would make us better though other parts So that's a win for us the win for the organization is that we are more productive more engaged and we show up Better right like I have to imagine and all three of those examples that you gave That at least an element of the negotiation is how it was going to make a difference to the person they were negotiating with, yes?

Huge, and so my personal view is that we have unrealized value sitting all over our organizations because we haven't equipped women to have these conversations. And so let's run through those three examples, right? The woman who negotiated the inventory management system ended up enabling her team to get the same amount of work done

in 40% less time. So all of a sudden they added in a layer of strategy. And if you can think about inventory management at a retailer, that had a huge impact on the company's cash position. That's monumental for a business, right? We're going into Q4 thinking we're going to have no money and now we have an extra couple of million.

Okay. Huge for them, huge for her. The one with the fertility benefits ended up taking that job and she's the chief marketing officer. That company has taken all, I mean, they're in my fridge right now, they're probably in yours. And then the last one was actually, that was somebody who ended up negotiating with me. I was president of an organization at that point in time. This woman

was responsible for collecting our accounts receivable. She was a fairly average player to that point in time, but I noticed that she couldn't sit for longer than maybe half an hour. And so we had a discussion and it turns out she had scoliosis, which she hadn't disclosed to the company, and she didn't really want to talk about it. But the company issued chairs meant that she was in so much pain she couldn't get anything done. And so as soon as we had that negotiation and she got the chair she needed, she was a star player, star player for us. And those are the types of things that, to your point, most of the employee employer negotiations you'll do actually are a win-win because what's better for the employee is usually better for the employer.

Okay, now you mentioned a couple of things already, but I'm curious based on your research, what is actually holding women back from negotiating? Because I'm guessing it's a little bit more complex than just one thing. And are we actually bad at it? Or have we not been taught the skill? Or do we do it differently? Or is the way we do it not commiserate with what people are used to?

I mean, I'm thoroughly curious about what's happening when women attempt to negotiate. This is a great question because there's a lot of either misconceptions here or things that have were true but have since been updated. So let me pull apart three that you just said. The first one which you hinted at is that women are bad negotiators. We're not. We're very, very good negotiators. The problem is that we've been given tools for other people and then been told they should work for us. And I'll peel that apart in a second. The second misconception is when you said

what's holding women back. So 20 years ago, women were negotiating far less than men. At this point in time, research shows that women are negotiating as often as men are, but we're only successful half as often as they are. Okay, so now it's not an awareness gap, which is what it was, but now it's a skill gap. And the reason why there's a skill gap

is because if you were to Google, how do I negotiate? You're gonna come up with all these articles. Those articles are all going to recommend tools that were built for men and just assume that they should work for you, which I mean, I've been doing this for 10 years and frankly, it still ticks me off because you, I live a couple hours away from Augusta. Like you could never imagine going to the masters and all of these men being handed golf clubs for the average five foot two woman and being told go have a good day, like

the uproar that would ensue. Yet that's what we're doing to women every day is especially in negotiation, although I would argue in a lot of sort of business skill areas, we're telling women, oh, this worked for all those people over there, so of course it should work for you. That's not how this works. And we can talk about what gender specific

negotiation skills are, but that's the problem is we haven't given women the right tools to be successful in this. And I do wanna go into what they actually are, the right tools and a kind of follow-up question is, is the problem when we do it the way it's being told or being done by men, is it because it feels inauthentic for us?

Is it because when we do it that way, we get perceived differently than a man would when they do it that way? Is it something that I'm not thinking of? Like, why can't we just follow the same script as our male counterparts have been? Two reasons. So the one that's usually highlighted in the research

is because of the risk of backlash. So the world expects you to be others focused. If you come in with a certain stance that's all about you, we have been, I mean, we've been cultivated since we were, 18 months is the first time that you see this in children, but we have been cultivated for that to cause fear and that fear causes backlash. So the first reason is because of societal concepts of gender cause backlash. The second reason though, and the one that's not as popular in the research, but I saw this in coaching, and so it's so interesting with you as a coach that

you've probably also seen this, which is that when we tell a room of 100 women to go in and say, honestly, what was recommended in the Wall Street Journal article on negotiating, I deserve to be paid more of those 100 women, probably 90 or more are not going to want to say that. What we've seen in our research is A, we can eliminate the risk of backlash, but B, we can also just make it feel more authentic, which means you're more likely to do it

and more likely to be successful. And that's what we want. Yeah, it's anecdotal, but that speaks to my experience where somebody has told me, typically a guy, this is the way you do it or this is the way you say it. And my brain goes, yeah, I could say it that way, but I would want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. You know, if I did say it that way, it wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't feel good. And I have to

imagine that the inauthenticity or whatever icky feelings I'm having about it would show up in some way. Those icky feelings are telling you something important. And what those icky feelings are telling you is that he could go in and say it that way. But if you did, you're facing a risk that he doesn't face. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so how should women negotiate? What do we need to know that's different?

So at this point in time, I've reviewed about 13,000 pages of academic research. Plus, we've done our own. And what the research really boils down to is, we think of it as a three-part strategy. So part one is think holistically, part two is ask relationally, and then part three is discuss collaboratively.

Would it be helpful if I kind of dive into each of those? Please. So on the think holistically, this is a little bit of what we were talking about at the beginning, where a lot of people go in. So I started a lot of my talks with this one picture. And I say, what do you think she's asking for? And 82% of our audiences say salary. And the response to that is, salary

is just the tip of the iceberg when you think about what you can negotiate. In fact, we actually, at this point in time, have a list of 76 things we've seen people negotiate, which I'll offer to your listeners at the end. But when you're thinking about a negotiation, when we say think holistically, it's, I would recommend that you ask yourself, you know, what could I ask for that would help me deliver more impact? Because a lot of times we can monetize that. What would reduce my stress? What would bring me joy?

And then I would just honestly cross-reference with this list and see if there's anything else on there that you might be missing. So we don't want to just go in and ask for simply a raise. We want to go in and ask for a package of things that overall are going to increase our happiness among a variety of different areas. So that's tip one.

Tip two is ask relationally. So the research on this, which is this is my favorite research, the research on this shows that when women negotiate in a way that is seen as both legitimate and beneficial, and this is a direct quote from the research, this one's Georgetown, virtually eliminate the risk of backlash. The problem with that is that you tell a really busy woman that she needs to figure out how to demonstrate this and like her eyes glaze over, we're too busy to do this. And so we've created a formula

that allows you to check those boxes, which is that when you're negotiating, share what your past performance is, talk about that future goal that everyone's on board with. Usually it's the reason that your job exists, like it's in the job description. Then make your ask, and then finally stop talking. What we've seen is that women are so wonderful that in an attempt to make their negotiation partner feel more comfortable,

they'll actually start negotiating against themselves. Instead, we wanna end that with something like, what do you think? Which makes it clear it's the other person's time to talk. A cabana? That's a no. But a banana? That's a yes. A nice tan? Sorry, nope. But a box fan? Happily, yes. A day of sunshine? No.

A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. That speaks completely to my personal experience in negotiation and in sales.

I talk way too much. I'm trying to over explain and address any potential questions that could possibly come in. I can remember vividly when we were selling our house, Jay, at one point, my husband looked at me and he was like, stop talking. Anyway, okay, anyway. Okay, so what's the third step? And then the third one is to discuss collaboratively.

And it's a little bit of what you hinted at before, which is that there is a perspective that you can, or sometimes even should negotiate aggressively. And what we find is that's an unfair playing field where women are set up to lose. What actually women tend to do better at is a collaborative negotiation or to your point, a win-win. And so the easiest way I think of to talk about this

is when you're going into negotiation, it's not you versus me, but it's us versus the problem. And the problem is anything really that prevents you from doing your best work. So it's a problem if you're exhausted. It's a problem if you don't have the resources you need. It's a problem if there's some political or team dynamics. The company is paying you x to deliver y.

And if you are delivering Y minus 20%, but could deliver Y plus 40%, like the company would be better off to help you get to that point. Okay, so I love these three steps. They make sense to my brain. Can you maybe walk us through an example of how we would think through or deliver these three steps?

Because as you said, we're so busy, it's like crazy, but we might not have the time to figure out how to negotiate on our own behalf. I love this. Let's almost kind of do a script. What scenario do you want to toy with? So let's say I am in a job where I am feeling overworked, exhausted, and it's not necessarily that I want to get paid more

and keep doing, it's like, I want to scale back, but I don't want to lose income, right? So like, I think of meshing a few people that I coach in my mind, but it's like the people who are still working in the evening or After their kids go to bed on the weekends. They're always on call via email and They're just freaking burnt out and exhausted but they're Doers and they get things done and they have a strong reputation and the company so

Compensation isn't even the thing that they're the most So compensation isn't even the thing that they're the most upset about or bothered by. It's the, I don't have a life outside of my job type thing. This is one that's very familiar. So yes, let's do this one. I'm gonna take a leap here just for time sake. So if we were coaching, what I would do is coach you through,

okay, what does that life look like? What are the things that are most important? I will say having done a number of workshops now, most of the time what I hear people say is it's the evening work. Like it's the evening work that is eliminating my life and eliminating my rest time. So I'm gonna go ahead and just make an assumption

that that's the thing that would be most helpful in this scenario. I'm also just gonna make an assumption that you're in sales, cause you mentioned it earlier and because I need kind of a job to do this. So you're in sales, you're exhausted because you're working a lot of nights. So the way that this first of all, what you would do is you would take some time to really brainstorm and I think a lot of times I like to do it with a friend because they have a new perspective, but to brainstorm what it is you can ask for.

Then you're going to make your relational ask. In this case, it's going to sound something like this. Hey, manager, as you know, last quarter I was able to exceed the sales target by 10%. This quarter, I think we can do that again, or I think I can do that again. In order to do that, though, I wanted to talk to you about working the hours when I'm most productive. Let's talk about some of this evening work. Do we need that all the time? Or what if I just stop work at six every day?

What do you think? And so now we're going to have a discussion. And one of the women that I worked with had that discussion and what she learned back was that her manager was really concerned because her team was in charge of getting out a full company report first thing Friday morning and they worked on it into the night Thursday night and he was like well what about the report and she was like that's a great point we actually don't get the data for that until Thursday at noon so what if I can guarantee you that I will do

whatever is needed in whatever hours to make sure that that's still what the company needs it to be and her manager manager was like, okay. The other thing that might happen is your manager's like, I don't know. I'm still really nervous. At that point in time, you can just propose an experiment. I understand you're really nervous. It's really important to me to do great at this job. And I'm concerned that my exhaustion level is starting to mess with that. So what if we just run this experiment? What if we do it for a month and see how it goes? What we've learned with experiments is it's a lot easier for people to say yes to,

and then frankly, a lot harder for them to go back and say no to, because most of the time, there is no fire that would make them concerned about that decision. So Nicole, what do you think about all that? Yeah, phenomenal. And I love the positioning it as an experiment, because it gives anybody on the other side

who might be concerned or worried sort of this feature out if it doesn't work out and it gives you the freedom to test out what it is that you want. And most of us, because we're so good at getting things done and making things we want to work, we'll figure out how to make it work. Which I think is another thing that I always

like to bring into kind of the workshops and discussions is we know that superstars matter a lot to companies. And so the other thing that sometimes I like to think about is, especially for the women that come in that are a little bit tired, is sure, we can negotiate less on your plate, or we could negotiate more resources. What could you do if you had three people on your team?

What could you do if you had access to 50% of this assistance time? What could you do if you, I like to negotiate for those things. We also know from the research that women tend to be given fewer resources than men. So this is Laura Cray out of Berkeley. But anywhere between 25% to 40% fewer team members

and things like that. And so bringing that into the negotiation allows us to deliver the impact we're capable of without giving away our market value. I wonder, and this is a little bit of a offshoot of what we're talking about. I don't know if there's any research that backs this up, but I do find a good chunk of women feel undervalued

or underappreciated in their jobs. And you just said, and I agree, being a rock star puts you in a really good position to negotiate. What if you're in a position where you are a rock star, but you might not be being perceived or people might not be aware of all of the value that you add when you go into a negotiation? So I love this question

because one of the things that we see, and it's not just women, but one of the things we see, and I think women struggle with it a little bit more, is not wanting to brag, which is fine. Unfortunately, you're not the star of your manager's life. Your manager is the star of your manager's life. And so it's really easy for them not to know what you did, or they knew what you did, but now they've forgotten it, or they didn't see it, or they didn't understand how important it was. And so part of it is communicating how much value you're delivering. And I think

communicating how much value you're delivering. And I think it lands best. People rate you higher on leadership skills if you can deliver it when you explain what the impact is on somebody else, the client, the team, the department. So, as you know, I exceeded my revenue target by 10 percent last quarter, which allowed the department to head our department level goals. Those types of things are really powerful and you can say them in that way while also being others focused, which I think I would argue for plenty of people is very authentic. It doesn't feel ick, but it allows you to share those wins.

It's also why we start the relational ask with sharing wins. Yeah. Great language. I wish I would have had that way earlier in my life, because I was one of those people who just thought if I put my head down and did the work that everybody would notice. We were trained that way in school. Of course we all thought that. A decade later, I was like, shit, nobody noticed. Anyway, so I teed up this episode that we were gonna cover three ends.

Where does networking play a part in our ability to negotiate? This is one of my favorite overlaps because the thing that's tough in negotiation that no matter how many times I lay in my bed at night thinking about it, I cannot solve is the information asymmetry. The company is always gonna know more than you know

about what your peers are making, what other people in the industry are making, all of that. And we can do a lot of things and we have a benchmarking 101 resource I can share with you. We can do a lot of things to help you get some of that information, but you're almost never gonna know as much as they do.

One of those hacks though is your network. And so if you can imagine going into negotiation, if you can ask somebody at your company who's left your company, what they were making, what they saw at their new role, or if you can ask, and it gets a little tricky depending on your company culture, but peers or your alma mater or something like that, those are all really important. The mistake I see people making is they build a same gender network. We don't want to ask only women what they're making. We want to ask some ideally cisgender white men.

And so building your network to be very diverse allows you access to a lot more information. Again, anecdotal, but I had an experience recently where I connected with a cisgender white man who had spoke in an event that I was being offered to speak at. And so I was able to connect with him and find out a little bit about what he got and what he got paid and all of that.

And I can't even begin to tell you how helpful that was going into that conversation and then that negotiation because inevitably they asked whether or not I was willing to negotiate, which most people do when you're booking speaking engagements. And I have the tendency to be too willing or too flexible. And so just a comment on having that network

and having that information is super helpful. I also think that flexibility and just, you know, also for women who aren't, but that flexibility evolves based on where you are, right? So when you're just starting out and speaking, you have a lot more flexibility, right? And I'll negotiate for video footage and I'll negotiate for blah, blah, blah.

I'll negotiate to do a breakout session because I want to meet more people. And then as you get more established, you're less willing to negotiate on those things. And I think we see it with women in the workforce where for some people, if your caregiving responsibilities have really spiked, the pay might not be the thing that drives your happiness

for the next 12 months. It might actually be something else and that's okay. Your goal doesn't have to be my goal doesn't have to be someone else and you don't have to carry the burden of the gender wage gap on your back by yourself. It also might be that you're really excited about learning more about this project and that's what you want to negotiate. I mean, our goals don't have to be the same as each other's, they're the same. Can change over time, too. So when we are maybe getting tactical about networking,

it's, you know, not just other women, you said that. Is there any other advice about the types of people we want in our network? There's two things. I do a workshop on networking specifically as a woman. And a lot of it is what you would expect is gender neutral. But there's two things that have really popped in the research that I think

are helpful for women to know. The first one is that, and this is based on work by Brian Udsey at Northwestern, he analyzed over a million emails to look at, to map all of these networks. And what he found is that women who had networks that resembled the most successful men, which was very broad, a lot of connections, were 80% less successful than women who had that network

plus a network of close professional women. And so the sort of first point on networking for women is having a network of close professional women. And so the sort of first point on networking for women is having a network of close professional women allows you to be 2.5 times more successful because of the information exchange available there. So that's one thing that you don't wanna ignore. The second thing is that, and I'm sure you know this probably even better than I do,

but women are over mentored and under sponsored. And so finding sponsors is critical. And I think sometimes when I meet with women, they say, OK, I'm going to go talk to all these people about being sponsors. And it's like, no, no, no. When your sponsor calls, you have to drop everything and do what they need you to do.

So we don't want 10 sponsors. We want like two, maybe three very strategically placed ones. And there's some research out of Stanford that we could talk about about how to find those people. But those are the two top lines I would give on networking specifically as a woman. Okay. And then what about the word no? Where does no play a part in negotiation

and when do we use it? Like I think sometimes there's the tendency to empty threat. And obviously that doesn't work. You'd want to say no, unless you're willing to stand behind your no. Where do we leverage no in our negotiations is my question. So one of the common tendencies I see

is that people see reaching an agreement as the goal. That is not the goal. The goal is for you to be satisfied with the agreement that was reached, even if the answer to that is, hey, you know what, there's not overlap right now, so let's come back to this in six months, or something like that. The other thing that I would say to your no is,

and if I see this sort of Pinterest thing again, no is a complete sentence, that was written by a man. No is not a complete sentence if you are a woman. No with a period is an invitation for backlash. And so I tend to want to do say things like, doesn't seem like this is the right fit right now, or let's revisit this later, or, hey, can you tell me more about that? And once I learn more, either we see some overlap or we don't,

and it's an agreement to disagree on this thing right now, and that's okay. So what about when you're in a negotiation with somebody where you feel like there is no potential that you're gonna get anywhere that you're going to feel happy about? Yeah, so I actually worked with a woman who was in a situation like that about six months ago. And for her, it was a real, a lot of it was the mindset work

on not reaching an agreement is okay. She was in a job that she was okay with and somebody had approached her and they couldn't come to an end. She was like, well, should I just take this job that I'm not sure about and make less? And it's like, well, why would we do that? And so what I would say there is for most of us,

we're in an industry, we're gonna work in that industry, we live in a city, we're gonna live in that city. Like the overlapping networks are pretty impressive. And so I don't think we ever want a no walk away because it's a long game. I think we always want a, I've really enjoyed meeting you. I'm so excited about what you're doing. I'm not sure that this is the right fit at this time. And I want to make sure that you get somebody in this role that's going to help you achieve those goals immediately.

So here are a few people I can recommend, or if I can be helpful to you, please let me know. So Katherine, you just said it. I was going to ask, where does recommending other people or other solutions help in either just your credibility or even for future opportunities i find i do that a lot like i say to people seventy percent of the people who reach out to me for coaching i refer to other coaches because we're not the right fit for each other in. Some way or timing or what have you and i feel great about being able to do that. you. And I feel great about being able to do that. And I just wonder if it's a value add or to our benefit in negotiating to do something like that. It is. And I think once you flip the perspective, it becomes pretty clear, which is that when you go to someone and ask them for something, it doesn't matter to you that it's that person at that time. It matters to you that you have a solution to your problem. And so if someone

says no to you, but gives you a solution to your problem, you're good. That's all you need it. The other thing we see from the research is if you use the word because, people are much more likely to accept your no. Even if, and I love this part, even if the reason has nothing to do with the ask, no, I can't do that because it's raining outside. Something happens in people's brains where they hear the word because and they're like, oh, check, they thought about it.

I would recommend, think about throwing out a because if you can, and then if you have a solution, even better because then you actually get credit for helping that person solve their problem. Katherine, I have 1 million more questions And unfortunately, we are out of time, but I want to give people the best ways to find and follow you. So first, 76things.com is the place where you can go to get that list of all the things that you can negotiate besides just your salary. And then Catherine's website is worth more strategiesategies.com. Either way, great way to get in contact with Katherine and get more resources about her work.

Katherine, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and your expertise today. And did I miss anything? No, Nicole, thank you so much for inviting me on. This was really fun. My absolute pleasure. Okay, friend, if there's one thing I hope you take away from this conversation, it's

that asking for more, building powerful connections, and standing firm in your no are not just skills, they're necessities. Because for too long, we've been told that wanting more is greedy, that taking up space is unbecoming, and that negotiating is something that we're bad at. But the truth? Women are uniquely suited to think holistically, ask relationally, and discuss collaboratively as Catherine taught us. So whether it's asking for that flexible schedule,

pushing for the title you deserve, or negotiating your way into making more money, do it without apology. As Becca Lee so beautifully put it, the ocean does not apologize for its depth and the mountains do not seek forgiveness for the space they take. And so neither shall I.

And I don't know about you, but that sounds like woman's work to me.