Why Aren't you Negotiating yet? - The Power of Expectations

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So today I'll be continuing from where I stopped yesterday. If this is your first time of reading my blog, please do well to check out the previous and all other posts on my blog. Also don't forget to follow and leave a comment when you're done reading.

Expectations are powerful because they are the goals you set for yourself. If you set your expectations too low, you will not do as well as you could. If your expectations are extreme, you may not meet them—and you will likely feel disappointed. What is important here is performance. The goal of setting a goal is not to achieve the goal but to improve performance.

Setting expectations sets the standard to which you aspire. One of the biggest changes that you could make to get more of what you want is to set higher expectations, even if you don’t achieve them. Setting higher expectations will change your behavior—and can lead to better performance.

Expectations are so powerful, in fact, that the expectations of others—even if we are ignorant of them—can affect how we perform.

Expectations, whether they are set by ourselves or by others, can drive behavior. Think about this: before making pay decisions a manager learned that he might have to explain why he gave the raises he did. He assigned lower raises to women than to equally performing men. This manager seemed to change his allocations based on what he expected: men would ask for more—but not all men. Some were satisfied with the raises they received. So to keep as many men out of his office asking for more, he may have given them higher initial raises.

In contrast, the manager expected that women would simply accept the raises without question. So he preemptively gave the men more. It is little wonder, then, with this cycle of diminished expectations both from employers and their female employees that women make substantially less than men in equivalent positions with equivalent qualifications.

Changing this cycle requires a starting point—namely, changing your expectations about what is possible in a negotiation. After all, if you don’t expect to achieve much if you do ask, it is not surprising that you don’t ask or you ask for substantially less. The more uncertain you are about the correctness of negotiating, the more likely you are to accept less than you might have received if you had made the attempt.

If you want to change the way you negotiate, determine an acceptable compensation package for a position, or perform on math tests, it is critical that you set appropriate expectations for each scenario. Doing so will give you a decided advantage in getting more of what you want—be it a higher salary, a more satisfying glass of wine, or a better test score.

Every day, you have opportunities to negotiate. Most people miss these chances to get more of what they want because they have a narrow understanding of when it is appropriate to negotiate. To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to broaden your horizon of what is and is not negotiable.
Situations of resource scarcity and social conflict are especially good opportunities for negotiation. When confronting such scenarios, assess whether you could negotiate to get more of what you want.