This is the title of the conclusion of Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They 
Really Want, by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever.
Many women, myself included, experience hearing “no” as negative. It resonated deeply with me that they flipped that upside down and made me look at “no” in a whole new way. In essence, the lack of “no” is now the negative experience, a signal of how women limit themselves by not even asking for the things they want. But they don’t just give you this information and expect it to change your life; no, in the section they call “Negotiation Gym” they set out exercises to stretch your negotiation muscles, including a whole week of getting yourself accustomed to hearing no—without charging it with a negative emotional weight.
The book is filled with information that incites these light bulb moments and has already inspired me to think bigger about asking, negotiating and imagining what I want. There’s also many persuasive statistics and illustrative anecdotes that got my mad up.
Stay tuned for further conversation about this book with the bloggers on LYJ.
One of the greatest pearls I extracted from my coach training is that selling begins the moment someone says no. It creates the opportunity for us to tap into our creativity and construct an argument that the person on the other side can hear. And there’s the rub. I’ve always suspected that the reason men are branded better negotiators is because their conversations focus on results they have achieved. Because women often focus on their strengths, values, effort expended, and relationships cultivated rather than results, we set ourselves up not to walk away with what they seek. While having a good process is important and may lead to achieving and sustaining greater results, until we learn to speak the language of the latter, the language the person with power is usually listening for, we set ourselves up to fail when we do harness the chutzpah to ask for what we deserve. Thanks for sharing this great resource, Nicole. I’m interested in the exercises suggested!
Alexia, thanks for sharing your insights on negotiation. I agree, talking about results and success is still hard for women, because we tend to focus and value (for whatever reason or reasons) on the areas you mentioned. Interestingly, Ask For It suggests that this focus can make women good negotiators, once we add in talking about our successes and what we want, because relationships, strengths and values are all crucial to the negotiation process.
You’ll be hearing more about the exercises; I’m going to try them myself and blog about it here for six weeks, starting soon.