Hi Reader, This week on Gentle Power, we reacted to a short video from Alex Hormozi on negotiations. It's about a line you can use when a buyer asks you for a discount, and it's been shared a lot. We watched it live on the episode and then picked it apart. To be fair, there’s a real negotiation principle buried in it, but there’s also a few assumptions that subtly undermine it. Alex also shared a story about his most embarrassing moment, which illustrates why using this line is risky. Listen...
5 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, Something exciting happened last week: Gerta was featured in Business Insider! link to article This article covers the negotiation myths in comp negotiations that we see most often, including ones that most career coaches still repeat. The reason Gerta's take is different is that she spent years on the other side of the table at Salary.com, advising hundreds of companies on how to pay their employees. She's seen what the data actually says, and more importantly, she's seen how...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, This week on the Gentle Power podcast (GentlePowerPodcast.com), we hosted Tallulah Le Merle. Tallulah spent seven years as a management consultant at Kearney, has done fractional COO and advisory work with AI scale-ups, and is now a partner at a conscious-tech investment firm called Fifth Era. She also has a book coming out called The Case for Hope in the Age of AI. The thread running through all of it is a deep, practical fluency in human dynamics. This turned out to make for one...
12 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, Today we're diving into one of the most common points people give ground before they even realize it: early compensation questions. The tactics here aren't complicated. But we’ve seen in our client work that when the pressure's on, even the most experienced and senior professionals start second-guessing the basics. Be careful with early compensation questions Sharing your preferred salary number will never help you, except in very rare edge cases. Imagine that negotiations are like...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, This week on Gentle Power (GentlePowerPodcast.com), we had Surina Diddi on the podcast. Surina and Gerta are Wellesley classmates, and it turns out they also took a graduate class on negotiations together at MIT, which we learned a few minutes into recording. Surina spent nearly a decade in finance: equity research, investment banking, then private equity in the renewable energy space. She understands long sales cycles, institutional bureaucracy, and the art of building...
20 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader, We recently had one of Gerta’s favorite podcasters, Julia Martin, and her cofounder, Melanie Bettis, on the Gentle Power Podcast (YouTube | Spotify | Apple). This conversation ended up landing in one of our favorite topic overlaps: that messy intersection between mindset and tactics. Julia comes from the world of mindset, manifestation, and intentionality. Melanie comes from the world of job search strategy, interview prep, and salary negotiation. Together, they built something...
26 days ago • 7 min read
Hi Reader, This week, we wanted to highlight a benefit of negotiating well that many people don't realize: signaling that you have strong business acumen and professional competence. We explain why below. Quick PSA: Negotiations Q&A on Thursday, March 26th We're hosting a free negotiations Q&A next week! Join us next Thursday, March 26th at 12pm PT / 3pm ET to get live input and real-time feedback from us on all your negotiation questions. We'll also send everyone who RSVPs a free template...
30 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, We love PhD dropouts and we love decision making science, so, naturally, we had to have Sam Liu on the podcast (Episode: YouTube | Spotify | Apple). Sam is the founder of an AI company called Fergana Labs. Before that, he was doing a PhD at Stanford studying decision making. We were curious what someone who studied decision making at that level actually learned, how they apply it to their negotiations, and how they apply it to their personal lives. The surprising part was that...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader, We get the following questions a lot: “Have you trained an AI on your negotiation framework?” “Can I just follow a template?” This week on the Gentle Power Podcast (YouTube | Spotify | Apple), Gerta and I recorded a solo episode where we dove deep into why negotiations is not as straightforward as memorizing scripts on how to push back or ask for more. We get the appeal. Clean template language would be easier for everyone involved, more scalable for us, and probably more...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read