Love Your Job

CHAPTER 8 How to Have the “What’s Next?” Talk with Your Boss ■ ■ ■

Sooner or later you’ll have to suck it up and have the “talk” with your boss. Don’t roll your eyes. You can do this. Stop dawdling.

It’s unlikely that you will simply be handed a new opportunity, or a bump in salary, on a silver platter without asking. “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” as my father used to say to me when it was time to make a choice or decision. This chapter will show you how to speak now, and how to have that critical conversation you’ve been having in your own head for so long.

The time has come to channel your inner salesperson. “Like it or not, we are all in sales,” Daniel Pink, bestselling author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others, told me. He explained to me, as he does in his book, that in his mind, “every person in the world is now engaged in sales. It’s not about going door-to-door selling products, but about moving people, convincing them to go along with your idea, your project.”

To find a solution to your job blues, you either have to tough it out and pretend all is well until you can make those internal changes we discussed earlier, or find a way to persuade your boss to make some changes in your situation. Think Sales 101. One of the best ways to get your mental game ready for this conversation is to step into your boss’s shoes, metaphorically speaking.

“To be great at sales, you need to be able to get out of your own mind to see from another’s ...