Professor Alison Wood Brooks
Appearances
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And or take the you've now instructed her to make this like log of things that she's done. She could bring the log to her boss and say, which of these things is most valuable to you? What do you think is what am I doing here that you love so that I can do more of that? Which of these do you think I should do less of? How can I grow in this role? What should I be doing differently, better, great?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Which of these are most valuable to you that make you want to hold on to me?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And this is true of any conversation where you're trying to be, the mindset of trying to be persuasive is a very dangerous mindset. What do you mean? There are so many conversations where we go in and we are often at work and we want to persuade someone to agree with us. I want to persuade my boss that I am deserving of a race.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
But the way to do that, ultimately, the way to be persuasive is to go in with a learning mindset. When you go in and you try and learn as much as you can about what's valuable to them, what's valuable to the organization, what do they love about what you're doing? What do they hate about what you're doing? Learn, learn, learn.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Ultimately, that conversation is going to feel like the two of you are solving a problem together rather than arguing and pushing and pulling and you trying to persuade them to agree with you. And ultimately, you will ironically end up being more persuasive.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And it's not a trick. It's not like you're going to this conversation and you're going to try and trick them. It's so authentic and rooted in reality. You need to figure out what's valuable to them and then deliver it. And then you become invaluable to them. Of course. That's how relationships work. That's how work works.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Or if you're actually feeling sort of the social comparison thing of this high performer, you could go in and say, what are they doing that's awesome that I could do more of? Make it practical. We all do social comparison, but it's often useless, a sort of waste of your emotional energy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Turn that waste into something productive, which is like so much of what we observe in other people is this sort of myth of naturalness or they're not doing that much more than me. They're not doing anything special or that just comes naturally to them. When you dig under the hood and you actually ask people, what do they do that's good? How do they make people around them feel?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
What work are they getting done? You realize, oh, I'm not doing that, but I could. I could try. So there's a lot more to learn there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, it's undeniable proof that they're doing something right. Even if it feels like those behaviors are sort of detestable, if you track back and you say, but yeah, he was the one who said that he was great at this. And now you're all just listening to him. Well, he nailed it. They're listening to him. He's succeeding. Maybe you have something to learn from that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, they go in and do what you're saying, which is they go in sort of righteous and resolute, thinking this is what an influential person looks like. This is what they sound like. They're decisive. They're convincing. They're compelling and strong. Aren't they? But when you talk about dialogue, when you talk about, oh, there's a human being on the receiving end of this,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And you realize that every encounter, whether it's a salary negotiation or a first date or whatever, that's another human mind sitting on the other end, and they need to receive what you're saying. So going in with your hands on your hips and making your argument, this is not a public speech.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
This is a co-created dialogue with another person who has needs and wants and desires and opinions and beliefs that differ from yours. And you need to figure out what they are in order to be the best position to actually deliver what they need.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Oh my goodness. It's the most direct pathway. And the thing is, Mel, we're not good at guessing what other people need. Even with people you know well, like your husband.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You got to ask questions. Endlessly ask questions. You can ask them, what do you need? What are you excited about? What is this other employee doing that's so great? How can I do better? What do you What am I doing on my list of tasks that I'm totally nailing? What could I do better, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You need to be a sort of glutton for learning, a glutton for feedback, and then it will actually make you invaluable to them and put you in that powerful position to say, look, I know I'm invaluable to you. You've told me, and now I think I deserve more.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You yourself want to succeed. And at the same time, you're signaling, I want us to succeed. I want this organization. I want this restaurant. I want this investment bank. I want whatever, this school. I want us as a group to succeed. Let's figure out how I can help us do that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I really love more casual feedback.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
It's so stressful to go into like a 360 review or your annual feedback meeting and everybody's nervous and it feels very high stakes. You have the opportunity to ask questions anytime. That's true. Anytime you see somebody, hey, I tried this thing. Here's, let me give you, like show you a video. Let me show you what, what do you think about this? Was this a good idea that I did this?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
What could I have done better? You were in that presentation I gave the other day. What did you think of my slides? What could I have done better? Should I have not even used slides? The opportunity to ask for lower stakes, more casual feedback is always there, but it requires that you ask those questions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Exactly. And they're more invested. It's causing people around you to actually think about you, right? It's saying like, hey, I care about your opinion. And now we have a meaningful enough relationship where I feel comfortable asking you. That's so valuable. Like you're embedded, you're enmeshed in this sort of social net.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Organizations are just a group of people who care about what they're working on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
how do I get the good shift? Totally. I spent many years of my life waitressing too. I know this feeling. So I think there's a couple answers. The first question is, who are you talking to? Who are you targeting?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Because you could talk to your fellow servers first and say, are you also unhappy with your shifts? Are there any opportunities for us to trade? that would be win-win, right? So we call that trading on differences. People have different preferences. There might be win-wins in there to trade with the fellow servers.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You could then, if not, if that's not an option, you can go and talk to your boss and say like, when you're making the schedule, what are you thinking about? Is there something about this shift that you think I'm uniquely positioned to do? Am I doing a good job here? What value am I bringing?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Or what this, I would really love to be on this earlier shift, but I see that, you know, this other server is there. Do you think they're uniquely positioned to be there? What are they doing that's great? Or what could I do to put myself in a position to be considered?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Their job is hard. The job that they're doing to decide who's doing what shift is a complicated puzzle to solve. And so you're saying, I see that this is a complicated puzzle. How can I help you solve this puzzle? And how can I become a more valued part of the puzzle? This is a really great mindset shift.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Whenever you confront even a tiny disagreement, instead of thinking of it as confrontational, instead of setting it aside and saying like, I'm with you. I care about you. I see what you're doing is hard. Let's try and solve this together. That's a really important mindset shift. And it's almost always true, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Whether it's with your spouse or your kid or your boss, these are people you really care about and admire. You don't need to be getting in a fight with them about really anything. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Humans need a lot of affirmation. And you can give it to them in these tiny little moments in your conversations with them, just reminding them relentlessly, hey, I'm with you. I got your back. It makes sense that you feel upset about where you are in the schedule. Let's talk about how it could get better in the future. We're in this together. I'm affirming you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And also, I can't move you in this right now.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. If you've had these conversations and you feel like you really understand how you're adding value, you've really put in the effort to become this sort of invaluable, irreplaceable contributor, and you really have assessed and been honest with yourself, do I deserve more? And you get to this place where you're like, yes, I think I do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
After all of that, which is important, that's an important first step, then it gets to this point where you need to work up the courage to say, is there a world where you could even afford, could you give me a raise? Can the organization afford it? Can you afford it? Do you agree with me? Because I'm feeling like I really need it and it would really help me. Well, hold on a second.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Thank you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
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The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
There are a lot of young people feel unqualified. You know, parents who have taken time off from the workforce and are going back feel unqualified, like they've lost pace with technology or their skills are no longer relevant. There's so many people out there that feel like they're not qualified or like, what should I even say? Or am I even can I be helpful to them? Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Here's my advice, and I really mean this. It is so much more rewarding to connect with people in person or on the phone than it is through a networking website or through LinkedIn, which is valuable, very valuable. But a real human connection makes you so much more memorable to somebody. And when you go and have a coffee chat with someone, don't go trying to impress them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Go because you're truly curious to learn from them. What do they work on? What are their pain points right now? What are they struggling with? What do they love about the job?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
know if I would start with that, Mel.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I would start with, I am so curious about what you're doing. What you're doing is so amazing. I'm so intrigued by it. Can I have a five minutes of your time to just pick your brain? What are you struggling with? What do you love about this? What do you hate? Who do you love working with? What are you missing in your organization?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Asking these questions with like true, sincere curiosity, you're going to learn so much. You're going to feel very validated of like, oh, I am still relevant. You know why? Because I'm good at asking these questions. I'm good at figuring out what people need.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. Maybe they don't even need to know that you're looking for a job, right? Just connect with people in an authentic way where you're curious and interested in what they're doing and figuring out what are they missing? What do they need? Do I know someone that could do that? Am I the right person to do that? Could I learn how to do that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Could I develop a new skill that makes me exactly what they're looking for? Probably.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Just now I just said take five minutes of their time. I really mean it. You don't need any more than five minutes to make a meaningful connection and to learn a lot about someone. But what's key about even very short interactions to make them feel meaningful is the importance of follow-up. There have been amazing research on this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, I'm a behavioral scientist. I got my PhD at Wharton at the business school in Philadelphia where I studied emotions. and how people feel, how they talk about their feelings, and specifically in the context of negotiations. How do we feel when we're negotiating? How we feel before we negotiate? And I was hired at the Harvard Business School to teach this course on negotiation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Actually, there's a study of entrepreneurs in Africa where part of what they taught them to do is just be more thorough about follow-up. What does thorough mean? Like anytime you have a meaningful conversation, afterwards, like shoot him a text. Say, that was really amazing. I feel really inspired. You're so incredible. Thank you. And I'll be in touch later.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Just a quick affirmation to the other person of like, that was valuable to me. Thank you so much. I'll follow up. That's amazing, right? You're giving them the affirmation they need. They took time out of their life. You're showing them gratitude. You could drop a little callback to something you talked about during the conversation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Hey, you mentioned that your daughter is in the tech industry, right? Let me call back to that. I hope your daughter's loving her tech job, right? A quick callback can be so, it shows that you were listening to them, that you're interested, that you have interpersonal skills that you might be valuable to have in their organization.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Okay, so first to interviewers, that's not a great question. Stop asking that question. More concrete questions are much more interesting.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
But if you are going to stick with these sort of very abstract, open-ended, broad questions, like tell me about yourself, which we are all going to confront, I like to make it more concrete in ways like, for example, if someone said tell me about yourself, I'll say I'm going to share two things with you about my professional experience and then two things about my personal life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. And they're going to get a much more thorough view of who you are. And they don't need to be, you don't need to tell them, you know, that you've had STDs or whatever, but it's like... You can tell them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Exactly. But if you, again, this is also topic prep. When you, you can anticipate that when you go into a job interview, they're going to ask you about yourself, about your work experience. What about your life makes you a valuable person here? So topic prep that. What are things that you've experienced professionally that will make you good in this role?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
What are things that are unique about you personally? When I wrote this book about talk, something that I realized is I'm uniquely positioned to write this because I'm an identical twin. Of course, I'm like obsessed with humans. I'm obsessed with helping other people find this tight-knit shared reality that I have with my twin sister. Hmm. So I should say that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I need to say that in an interview, on a podcast, so that people understand who I am and why I'm a valuable person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And it's an incredible course. It's so valuable. We all need to learn how to negotiate more effectively. I taught that for about four years. And then I started to get a little itchy. I was like, I think the business school might need something else in addition to this negotiation course.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I mean, so much to me to hear that, really. I use it too, but to hear it from people, I mean, Mel, that's incredible. Thank you. No, thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. So first of all, if you're feeling anxious, it's so good. It's so good. It is such a clear signal that you care about something. What's better than that about human existence? You care about something, and that's precious. So just keep that in mind. Feeling anxious means you care. The recipe for anxiety is uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen in the future.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You don't know how this job interview is going to go. You don't know how your work on the job is going to go. Even in any conversation, I don't know what my partner is going to say next. And they could say something... tough. They could say something confusing. They could say something very unexpected. And I'm going to have to respond to that. Yep. So uncertainty is the first part of the recipe.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
The second part is lack of control. Lack of control and uncertainty create these feelings of anxiety. And that's what conversation is. You don't know what's coming next. And you don't have perfect control over what the other person is going to say and do. So whether it's a job interview or networking or salary negotiation, whatever, of course you're going to feel anxious. It's hard.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And it's uncertain and you don't have perfect control. So... In my research, this was from more than a decade ago. It was my dissertation research, actually. When you're feeling anxious, I really wanted to help people figure out how to cope with it. It's not a problem. It's just a sign that you care about something and that you don't know how it's gonna go.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And naturally, when people feel anxious, we're focusing on all the ways that things could go badly. Yes. I start to stutter. I forget to say things. I say something embarrassing. I seem incompetent. I don't get the math problems right. My voice cracks. Whatever you're freaked out about, you're thinking about how things can go badly. Correct. The threats.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
So I created a course called Talk that focuses very broadly on how to become a better conversationalist in all areas of your life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
So in this research, what we found is a very simple reframe. When people feel anxious, their instinct is to try to calm down, all right? Does that work? No, of course not. Anxiety is a high arousal emotion, which means you have increased cortisol, your palms are sweaty, your heart is racing. These are all physiological signals of high arousal, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Trying to make that go away and go down is so hard. Impossible. It's trying to control your body's natural reactions.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And we do all these crazy things. We do rituals and we take a shot and we drink the tea or whatever to try and calm down. It's like this desperate instinct of like this. I know this isn't good. I need to calm down. Fruitless attempts to try and reduce those physiological symptoms. Instead, let's try and take advantage of that energy, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
This is high energy because you know this is important and you care about it. So instead of trying to reduce your arousal and move to the positive zone, let's just move to the positive zone. Move from anxiety to excitement and say, you know what? I'm aroused because I'm excited about this. And instead of thinking about the 100 ways that it could go wrong...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I'm going to focus on how it could go well. We could have such a rewarding conversation. They could uncover the fact that I'm the perfect person for this job. We could have this conversation and they say, you know what? You do deserve a great raise. We really value you here. We love having you. Things could go great.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And so thinking about those good scenarios makes them more likely to actually happen.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. When you say, I'm excited, especially out loud to someone else, imagine you said, hey, Allison, how are you feeling about this interview? If I say, you know what? I'm really excited about it. I think it's an amazing opportunity, and I just can't wait to make them fall in love with me. Wow. That changes how you will actually behave once you're in there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Even though you feel like having stress diarrhea and you want to run away? You know what's so funny, Mel?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
When I teach, I've done this reframe for almost 15 years in my mind. My body still has these physiological reactions. And a lot of people who teach at Harvard have it too. You can't sleep the night before. You have the racing heart. You get the sweaty palms. You get the indigestion. It's just that in your mind, you're flipping from negative to positive.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I know all those things are happening in my body because I care about this. And it's an uncertain environment. I don't know how my students are going to react. I don't have perfect control over what they say and do. But what I do have control over is how I think about it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
You're wasting that very valuable prep time on trying to calm down instead of using that prep time to think about the other person and say, what does success look like here? What are we aiming for? What are my goals? What are their goals? How can I make this go well? That's how you should be using that preparation time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
It's mentally healthy and it's so common. Like we all feel that way. We're human beings. That's how our bodies were built to react to any situation where there's uncertainty and a lack of control. So interesting.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
There's great power in expressing gratitude to people. So if you've gone through a process where you've networked and you've met lots of people and you've had all these conversational interviews and you've clearly taken a lot of people's time, right? Any conversation is co-constructed. It's co-created. It means that other people are devoting their time and attention to you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Including a job interview. These are people that have jobs to do and they're spending some of their time getting to know you and evaluating you. And even though that feels daunting from your perspective, it's also quite generous from them. And so saying thank you so much, no matter what happens, I've really loved getting to know you and learning from you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
that's a very appropriate thing, very kind thing to say to them that will land very well.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Don't aim for perfection. Don't aim to be trying to prove how great you are to other people. Aim for connection. Think about what other people need and then deliver it to them to the best of your ability.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
If the more people that you can give what they need, the more people there are in the world who are poised and ready and excited to give you what you need back.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
My parting words in the course that I teach called Talk, we use a metaphor. If you think of every relationship in your life as a sort of string that starts at hello and goes all the way until the end of your relationship or even the end of your life, we like to think of every conversation along that string as like a light bulb, like a cafe light. those beautiful strings of lights.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, when you imagine a good negotiator, I think this really tough, rigid, persuasive person comes to mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
The goal is to make each one of those conversations glow just a little bit brighter and imagine how much we could light up the world one conversation at a time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And some of them will brown out. Some of them will explode. Some of them will never light up at all. But just know that in the future, there are more light bulbs to come and just keep aiming, just keep trying, try, try, try to get them to glow a little bit brighter. Wow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
When we actually study people negotiating in practice in the real world, often the best negotiators are people who are just great communicators, people who have and are good at developing meaningful relationships, who figure out what other people need and then figure out how to actually deliver what other people need.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Professor Brooks.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
It's not about getting in there and saying like, give me more money or give me more power. It's literally giving people, actually adding value and bringing what people need to them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Very few negotiations are about just one issue. It's not like you're going to be doing this tug of war, push and pull on the price of a car. there are other issues that matter. For example, starting with nobody wants to talk to somebody who's blustery and decisive and harsh. Like no one goes into an interaction wanting it to be miserable and confrontational.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And so even that itself is a thing that you can deliver to them to make it more pleasant, more enjoyable. That is value that you can bring to them. That's going to make them more likely to make a concession on price.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
It's so funny. When we think about people who get promoted, we think of these powerful people who are sort of like masters of the universe or maybe tycoons or whatever. In practice, the people who thrive at work, who do well, who perform well, are good at conversation. They're doing a good job talking to their coworkers.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
They're doing a good job talking to their investors, to their clients, to their customers, to their boss. They're people that everyone likes working with because they're enjoyable to be around and they're bringing value. They're working hard and bringing value to the people around them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah. Sometimes your contributions are observable without talking. Sometimes other people will notice and will say something and sort of promote you. about you, talk good about you, something that they've observed. But very often, if you think about a high performer at work and you track back, well, how did they become known as a high performer? You track the chain of information back.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And very often, it comes back to a point where it's like, well, actually, he told me himself that he just won this award or that he just figured out this new problem or he figured out this new thing. Right. So very often it comes back around to this idea of like you, if something great is happening and no one's noticing, it's up to you to share it with someone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I was gonna say, now that you've said it, anyone who hears this episode can then go and they can share that information. I can leave our conversation here and I'm gonna say, guess whose podcast I got to go on? And it's so amazing because guess who's the number one podcast right now? It's Mel's podcast. I wouldn't have known that except if you told me. Even someone who's coming to visit.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
So there are so many examples of this where it wouldn't be known unless you shared it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, I think this is part of why my course has been such a hit and why it sort of hit such a nerve. Even when our students are in business school, they focus on hard skills like, oh, I'm going to learn as much as I can about finance. I'm going to learn as much as I can about accounting. I'm going to learn as much as I can about private equity. Mm-hmm. I'm good at connecting with people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
I'm good at figuring out what people need and helping them get it. Conversation is this incredible superpower that not enough of us are taking advantage of.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
And it is a skill, yeah. And nowadays, because of this new science of conversation, it's a more quantifiable skill than ever before. And we've learned so much about how to build this skill.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
Yeah, we'd like to. I think it's easy to think about that someone walks in and they're confident and they say, I deserve a raise because of X, Y, and Z. And you lay out the data and you say, because I'm great and you owe this to me. Right. Right. before you actually figure out what's in their mind. What do you value in an employee? Am I doing a good job? How can I add more value?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
What could make this organization better? How could I be more pleasant to be around? How could I be more helpful to my colleagues? And this is not the mindset that people usually go in with. They go in with this, I'm strong and I'm going to convince you that I'm right and deserving. There are questions like, how many other people do you have available to you that you could replace me with?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Most Important Career Advice You’ll Ever Hear With Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor
That's an important question. If your boss has a queue of 200 other resumes sitting on their desk, you're probably not in a very powerful position to walk in and say, hey, give me a raise. But if you are bringing a lot of value and you're hard to replace, then maybe you are in a better position to talk about that.