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Start the ask with their story
The structure has three parts. It begins with I see you: a bit of storytelling about what matters to the person, what they are working on, and what they value. The second part is here's what I'm up to, covering what you value and what you are trying to change, so the overlap shows. The third is the request itself, framed around what they gain toward their own goals by saying yes.
Inside every ask is an offer, and knowing what it is makes the ask easier to make. When Dia Bondi launched Ask Like an Auctioneer, a project aimed at helping a million women ask for more and get it, she wrote to a former client who was a chief technology officer at a large cloud storage company. She opened with what she knew of her: a woman executive in rarefied air who wants to lift women in her field as a legacy beyond money. Then she described what she was launching and how it served that, and asked for a sponsored pilot workshop. Saying yes meant building the legacy the executive wanted.
Many women find it easy to negotiate a multimillion-dollar contract for their company and freeze when the ask is about their own direction. Seeing the offer inside the ask makes it feel less like a selfish act and more like a collaboration.
Why does framing an ask around their goals work?
Roger Fisher and William Ury made this case in their 1981 book Getting to Yes, which separates what people say they want, their positions, from the interests underneath. Negotiations that stay on positions tend to become contests, while those that surface interests often find options that serve both sides. An ask that opens with the other person's interests starts the conversation at that deeper level. The Harvard Negotiation Project, where the authors worked, built its approach around the distinction.
Why is asking for yourself harder than for others?
Psychologists Emily Amanatullah and Michael Morris tested this in a 2010 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They found that women negotiated more assertively when representing someone else than when representing themselves. The researchers tied the difference to concern about social backlash when advocating for oneself. Asking on behalf of a team or a cause changed how the same negotiators behaved.
Does seeing their side really improve the deal?
Adam Galinsky and colleagues studied this in 2008 and published the results in Psychological Science. In their negotiation experiments, people who took the other party's perspective were better at both finding deals that worked for everyone and claiming a share of the value. Empathy, meaning feeling what the other person feels, did not show the same advantage. Understanding what the other person is thinking turned out to be the useful part.
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