So excited to bring you another special edition podcast episode!

I was recently a guest on the Negotiate Your Career Growth podcast hosted by my former client and current coaching colleague, the amazing Jamie Lee (you can visit her website here). Jamie helps smart women who hate office politics get promoted and better paid while sticking to their values. 

Jamie talked about some of her favorite concepts that she still uses from our time together, like

• How to manage your anger using The Anger Scale
• Ways The Power of One can impact your relationship AND your career, and
• Using the power of a wise inner voice to make better decisions when you feel lost or overwhelmed. 

She even shared her biggest takeaway from our coaching work together and yes, how patriarchal conditioning affects our ability to do this one thing really well. 

This is an episode that will help you with building relationships both in your marriage and your career, and I cannot wait for you to know everything we talked about. Here we go!

Relationship milestones 

So many of us want to enrich, expand, and improve our personal relationships AND our working relationships.

In my career before I was a coach, I was in human resources. And I can tell you this: there are so many overlaps between these two worlds. Especially when it comes to relationships in your career.

One of the most impactful things that happened in my HR career was when someone in a different department got promoted. 

I wanted a promotion for myself. So first, I went through feeling like their promotion was an injustice, mentally questioning why I wasn’t promoted, and essentially feeling that they should have given it to me without me asking for it.

I calmed myself down, and then I got strategic. 

I went to my boss, and asked, “What are the milestones I would need to reach in my role to be considered for a promotion?”

Now, that wasn’t a fairy tale quick fix by way of an immediate promotion. But what happened was I got on my boss’s radar for being willing to do the work for it. Then, we were able to collaborate on appropriate, achievable milestones that would make me an undeniable choice for a promotion.

And in the end, that’s exactly what happened. 

But here’s the thing… You can use this exact process in your relationship at home. 

Achieving relationship milestones can be an indicator to you that you’re making progress and moving towards the goals you want.

Whether it’s to have more fun together, to stop having that same blow up fight over and over, to get on the same page about money, or fill-in-the-blank. 

What metrics matter most to you and your partner, and how can you fulfill relationship milestones to let you know you’re on the right track? 

Manage anger using The Anger Scale

Jamie invited me to talk more about The Anger Scale because it comes up so often as a helpful tool when she’s coaching women who hate office politics.

She said, “When you’re a woman, not only are you contending with office politics, you’re contending with unconscious biases, sexism, racism, ageism. And it can be super anger-producing. Sometimes I have to coach my clients that it’s okay for them to be angry.

Instead of beating yourself up or second-guessing yourself or ruminating, it’s okay for you to be angry about it.”

Enter The Anger Scale, a tool that helps you grade your level of anger about specific circumstances. 

For example, in day-to-day life using a scale of 1-10, my partner leaving his socks on the floor is probably a 2 or 3 for me. But forgetting to pay the electricity bill is more like a 9. 

What you don’t want is to get stuck feeling a high level of anger in every situation. It’s such a waste of your precious energy to be at a 9 over a 2 situation. 

The Anger Scale is a powerful reminder that you actually have agency, because you get to choose your anger.

Applying The Power of One to building relationships at work and home

What’s unique about the power of one is the way that I teach it. It’s a hypothesis that exists in psychology based on systems theory. And the hypothesis is that when one element of a system changes, the other elements in the system will respond to that change.

You’ve probably seen this happen more often than you think.

Imagine you’re at work, it’s Friday, and you bring donuts for everybody. You’ll have an impact on all the other people in the office just by bringing that donut energy. 

Or imagine you’re in a work meeting. Everybody’s freaking out about the budget for next year. But then one person says, ‘Let’s get to it. We’re going to figure it out.’ And all of a sudden, the energy shifts.

What makes this work is that it’s never about doing things that are not genuine to you. If you’re a high-powered female surgeon, maybe you don’t want to bring donuts. Maybe it feels like playing into office politics. You’d rather be building relationships by mentoring residents and teaching them how to get what they need.

The point is that the way you lead, whatever way that is, will impact everyone else around you whether that’s at work or at home.

How your wise inner voice can save you from overwhelm

Jamie said, “Beyond our coaching relationship and years into my own coaching practice, when I have a rough day, I still ask myself: ‘What would Maggie say?’”

This is such a great tool because regardless of who you attribute that wise inner voice to (I’m personally partial to Oprah, which shouldn’t surprise you), it’s really YOURS. 

You’re asking yourself what the most loving, compassionate, powerful part of you would say in this difficult moment. Imagining it in the voice of someone you admire is just a doorway. By letting that voice represent someone else, it allows you access to a different part of yourself when you feel activated or triggered or overwhelmed.

Because as Jamie said, “We don’t know how to relate to ourselves really well. We don’t know how to talk to ourselves from the most compassionate, powerful, loving place.

Because of gender socialization, because of patriarchal conditioning, we don’t have a great relationship with ourselves.

My biggest takeaway [from our work together] was that my relationship with myself, the core relationship, impacts the working relationship with your employer, your romantic relationship, and family and friend relationships.”

Get the tools to build relationships more effectively

If you want to stop being frustrated with others’ behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.

The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school.

What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes —  to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.

You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.

If you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you. 

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Connect with Jamie Lee on her website
• Listen to Jamie’s podcast, Negotiate Your Career Growth
• TMLC Episode 14: The Anger Scale
• TMLC Episode 58: The Power of One
• The Questions for Couples Journal
• Join The Marriage MBA
• The Marriage Mindset Makeover