Why Your Smallest Requests Are Sabotaging Your Biggest Dreams AKA THE ASK

Selena Tatum: Welcome and hello to the Empathy Lab podcast. We are at episode 13. It's almost the first week of April. It's actually Sunday, March 29th, which means two things are happening simultaneously. Spring is doing what spring does, insisting. The ground that froze all winter is we're hoping to be soft again. You know, we keep getting hit with various different climate climate climate type of things, it's kind of funny. And also things that went underground in October are pushing back through. You probably can feel it in your body, whether you live somewhere with four seasons, two seasons, or real season right now or not. Something in us in the organism knows the dormant period is over, Aries season has begun, it is time. to move. And like most things that happen, Q2 has just opened, which means someone, your manager, your board, your own internal performance review, the blank page of New Quarter, if you are into that type of work, or maybe you work for yourself, or maybe you volunteer, or maybe you do something that truly lights you up. And as I was saying before, If you're in areas where questions are asked, internal reviews happen, they start talking about cues, blank pages, and somewhere along the line, someone has asked you, or maybe you've asked yourself, what do you want to accomplish? And I want to ask you something, if it happened to you this week that just passed, or you've been thinking about this weekend, when that question arrived, what do you want to accomplish? What do you want to do? In whatever form it took, did you answer it with your number? Your real ask, as we say, the full version of what you want? Or did you do what we all do? or most of us do, what we in the lab like to call and what we were talking about this week, because we were having this conversation. And we asked if we run the edit on ourselves first. And what that is, is it's the pre-negotiation. It's the internal auction where you start at your actual want, so what you want, and then you immediately start discounting it. So before anyone has even spoken, What you put on the table is often smaller, safer, and a more, as they say, palpable version of truth. And this is the Empathy Lab today, episode 13. Everyone knows me, I'm Selena Tatum. ⁓ Folks call me Tatum. And we spent the last four episodes, so even kind of the last one, clearing the blockers. So we started with the words you aim at others. We went to the words that you aim at yourself. We looked at scripts that we've all inherited, the rooms we thought we deserved. We were excavating and then we burned the shit down. We burned what needed burning. And now that the ground is available, the first thing we get to do with available ground now, us, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. is plant something. And today we're planting what we call in the lab and what I like to call the ask. Specifically, why you shrink before it even leaves your mouth and what it costs us, you, dear listener, what it costs you and what it looks like to want something out loud, in full, without apologizing for wanting it. And so episode 13. We're going to delve into the ecclesia. And this is what we're going to call the raga arc. This is where the raga arc begins. And so the yantra, get into the structure of the thing. Raga and the grip around the wand. Let me, as I was saying, get to introduce you to the next clay shout, or for those of you that are like, I don't like that word, or however you're feeling about it, that's what it's called. We can also call it the kinetic energy tax, or the CATS. You know this feeling, you have something you want, be it a raise, a boundary, an hour alone, a creative project that scares you with how much you want it, because you can taste it. a relationship that asks you to be fully seen. And before the ask even forms into language, before you've decided what words to use, something grips maybe inside of you, maybe outside of you. A tightening, I like to say, around the wanting of the thing itself. A managing, a preemptive shrink of the desire before it can even be witnessed. That, that I've just explained. That grip is raga. In tantric philosophy, yogic philosophy, raga is the kleshas of clinging and attachment. And right here is what most people misunderstand about raga. It's very subtle, like the rest. To get more subtle as we go along. Raga is not about wanting too much. It is about the relationship with the wanting. Clinging is not to the thing that you want itself. It is to the outcome, to the yes, the approval, to not be too much for the room. Ragaz turns a clean desire into a performance of need. Because if you want something too visibly and the answer becomes no, the rejection doesn't mean you didn't get the thing. It means wanting the thing itself was wrong. And that, fear that the wanting is wrong is where we start this whole pre-negotiation that we do to ourselves and with ourselves. And we right here need to talk about the importance of knowing what you actually want before you walk into the room, not the managed version. Not the version of you or the thing or the want that's been run through the approval filter. You all the filters we have, you guys know what I'm talking about. The real ask. Adrienne Marie Brown's fractal principle really holds truth here too. The way you ask in the small moment is the way you ask across your entire life. If you negotiate against yourself in the salary conversation, you negotiate against yourself in the marriage, in the creative pitch, in the question you almost ask the doctor. but soften it to something smaller, because you don't want to seem difficult. You don't want to seem like you actually really needed to go to the doctor that day because the rash got out of hand. As we've been saying throughout the episodes, and it's one of the sutras, the thread that runs through everything, small is all. Which means that if the ask is always smaller than the truth, the life that gets built from those asks is always smaller than the one you wanted. Raga here, it's not the villain. I wanna be clear about this. As I keep saying, clashes, these grooves that we inhabit are not villains. Raga, at the time, if we go back to inherited rooms, inherited scripts, was the reasonable response to rooms where wanting too much again had consequences. Where being too visible with your desire made you a target. Where the safest strategy for anything was to want it quietly, ask minimally, and be grateful for whatever arrived. and we're not in those rooms anymore. And the grip around the wanting is still running the same old security protocol. Same thing, SuperTar. We're going to get into the tantra. The field guide to the shrunk ask. Three rooms, three scales. Ragga runs the edit, a smaller version exits. Let me take you to the rooms. Let me pull you into the fractal. Because Ragga's edit on the ask doesn't only apply in our salary negotiations. It's so subtle. It happens at the kitchen table. It happens in your creative work. And in the conversation you're having with yourself about what you want your life to look like. The pattern here is identical at every scale. You start with the real ask, you run it through an approval filter, and something smaller exits. Let's go through the three rooms, because I'm going to take you there. Let's look at the ask at work. We call it the pre-negotiated proposal. So here's the move. always give it to you guys. You've done the work. You have the data, track record, the years of pattern recognition. You deserve the promotion, the raise, the expanded scope. You know it. Your body knows it. and you walk into the conversation already decided or what we like to say, having already decided somewhere that morning, the night before, you've decided what you think they can give you. You've made the decision already. So you ask for that. The number that you think will be received, the safe number, not the number that's accurate to your worth. Now the build, the architecture around this is this is Raga running the auction before the bidding even opens. Raga has started running down the taxes before the bidding room even opened. I said running down the taxes, I should have said running down the prices. And what this is is that you have, and we've all done this. When I say you, I'm not directing you, all of us, I've done this. a bajillion times, I probably did it this week, We've, you've, all of us have become so attached to the outcome, so completely, to the yes. And what the outcome is, is the yes. To not be seen as greedy, to not be disrupting the relationship. that we have pre-collapsed the ask to protect ourselves from a no that hasn't even happened yet. Your boss hasn't spoken, the AVP, the VP, the director hasn't said anything, the room hasn't responded, and yet still, you've already taken the loss. Wow. Here's the rag attacks, or the cats. You receive what you ask for, which is less than what you are worth. And what happens is you leave the room having negotiated with yourself and lost, while the other persons or people didn't have to do anything at all. I want to be super specific about something here. This pattern isn't random. For women, for Black and Brown professionals, for anyone who has been taught directly or by the cold temperatures of rooms that didn't want them full-sized, that asking too clearly for too much is dangerous. Ragga's grip on the ask is not a personal failing. is a structural response to structural conditions. Even my conditioning has been conditioned. It's a quote from a hip hop album. The edit was irrational at one time. What we're doing today is deciding whether it is still rational in the room you're actually standing in. This is the thought. Let's look at the ask at home. Second room. This is what we call, I call, the lab calls, the minimum viable request. Then VR, Minimum Viable Request. This is how it plays out. You need something, real, legitimate need. And I'm not saying all your needs are not legitimate. This is scenario. or persona playing. a night off? A conversation about the division of labor. Help with the invisible architecture of a household that lives in your body and not on any shared calendar. And what exits your mouth is the minimum viable version. Not the full ask. It becomes the ask you think won't cost you the peace of the room. Not I need a week. Instead it's, I just need an hour. Not, I need this entire system redesigned. Instead, could you maybe just help with the dishes tonight? Sound familiar? Mm-hmm. Here's the architecture. And I'm gonna slow it down, because it's deep and it's heavy. And to hold it requires us to open to patterns and behaviors and grooves that we may or may not realize are there. The home is where Ragga's grip is one of the tightest, because the stakes at home are the highest. The want is more exposed here at home. You can't present it as a business case. You can't hide behind a data or spreadsheet or a tool or whatever. The ask at home requires you to be seen wanting something from someone whose opinion of you matters more than any VP, your bosses, maybe, I don't know. And that visibility is where Abhivanasha, we talked the survival fear we mapped in the blocker art, the fear of survival, okay? Identity survival. This is where Abhivanasha hands the baton directly to Ragha, like, yo, here. Fear of annihilation, you not need anymore, becomes clinging to approval as the grip tightens, but you ask for shrinks. and the rag attacks, or the KET, kinetic energy attacks. The minimum viable request, the minimum viable ask gets a minimum viable response. The underlying want that you have goes unmet. You absorb the difference here silently. somewhere between the dishes and the invisible checklist and the third minimum request you made, because you scale it down, the resentment that was never a part of anything starts building in the architecture. heavy pause here. You can all carry that. Third room. The ask inside. The dream you negotiated down before anyone even heard it. Here's the move. And we do this to ourselves now, all right? gotta, y'all, if you're screaming at me right now, you can fight me in the comments. I really appreciate those of you that decide to leave me a message, fight me, not fight me in the comments, send me messages, texts for those of you that know how to actually reach me in the world about how you feel. your response to what I'm saying. It is so important for the work and for us collectively as a community of folks who are here in the empathy lab tuning in to see where our gurus might be together, non-judgment, because no one can say anything, but you guys can all say stuff to me. We're going to go into the heaviest room. I saved it for the third room because it's something that we all do and I want us to be very crystal clear. about this that we do, the dreams that we negotiate down before anybody has ever heard them. And the move is like this, picture it. It's not gonna be Sicily. Quote the Golden Girls. There is something you wanna build. There's something you wanna write, start, become. Something that lives inside of you full size. The real version of you, or the real version. The version that scares you with its specificity and its scale, the magnitude of what you see yourself being. And somewhere between the moment of wanting and the moment of telling anyone, including yourself, in your journal, in the quiet, in the shower, you run the edit. No, yes, you. You make it smaller. Make it more realistic, more palpable. In essence, you pre-approve the reduced version. So the grief of the real want doesn't have to be witnessed. It's hard, huh? It's like, whoa, hate your poor. You know, she really came at us today. And I'll just, do this to myself. I do it all the time. All the time. That's why I'm out here doing this work. I do this all the time. I tell you what. The architecture, the build of this is, this is Raga operating at a scale without an audience. That's the fucking crazy part. There's no audience. There's no one we're telling. This is us with us and us. And this cliche operates without an audience. There's no one in the room. There's no VP to impress, no partner to manage, no committee to approve, no kid looking at you. And we're still negotiating against ourselves. This is the most expensive version of the ket of the rag attacks because it happens entirely inside of us. Before the want ever gets the chance to be tested against reality, we have already edited it and audited it down. We have already decided what the world will allow us to want. It's fucked up. and at the same time we make ourselves so small inside our own minds to match what we think the world will allow us to want. Yo, let me tell you how that, even writing that y'all, even writing that, just put my pen down and be like, ugh, what? Okay, right on. What you pay attention to grows, what we pay attention to naturally grows. Your intention flows where your attention grows. The want you pay attention to, even in the smallest amount of internal negotiation, is the want that sets the pattern for the whole life. The dream you negotiate down in your journal is the life you're gonna build, y'all. And what I love is that we all out here journaling, or I like to think that we're all out here journaling. And we don't even realize that the versions that we're writing in our journals, we've edited those down. Because if we write it on a piece of paper, and it's so big and so fantastic and so amazing, it cannot possibly be us. Fear or annihilation? You do not need the world's permission to want the full version of yourself. We do not need the world's permission to want the full version of ourselves. Raga has convinced us, me, you, your friends that we do. And thus this, this, that translates two words at once, is the misperception we are redesigning today. I'm gonna erase some lines and draw in some new lines. Let's look at the whole Ask protocol or the WAP. started to Meg Thee stallion and Cardi B. I think they both did well together or one of them did it. However, two 21st century street philosophers, poets, business women, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. WAP here's what it is. I had to just get that out. Cause it was fun and it's me y'all. Every episode in the arc that you've been journeying with me on has given you a protocol that operates at a different scale. So we've been operating at different scales at different times. If you've decided you wanted to participate. And replace butt. So we were looking at removing the butt from our words that we weaponize against other people and ourselves and put and in there. Drop the tail and the descent is without a buffer. So the right. So like all those little inflections, the void hold or the hold held the silence after you said the thing. We're not following up on anything. We're saying it and we're like, keep it moving. The room inventory ran the binary before the wave could even intercept it. So we were running that last week. Is it life-affirming, life-enhancing? Today's protocol operates even earlier than all of these. And I feel like I said that every episode, like this one comes before everything else. And maybe I've been taking you backwards on a journey. Well, we'll find out. Before the ask, before the words, in the moment when Raga runs the edit, when the full want is present in the body and when the grip starts gripping in and that first pre-negotiation begins, That moment, that is where we intervene. It's what I call the whole ask protocol or the WAP. Three moves. Move one. State the full want first. Before you edit, before you filter, before you run it through the approval architecture or structure in writing, in your body or out loud in a room by yourself. State the full version of the ask. The real number, the actual need, the whole dream. not to perform it, not because you are necessarily going to say it exactly that way. Because if you don't know what the full ask is, you cannot make a deliberate decision about what to bring into the room. You will constantly default to the minimum. State the full want first, move to, then we run the binary. Is this ask life affirming? Is it life enhancing? You know this one now. You've been running it on full throttle, I'm hoping, last week. Run it now on the full want before you run it on the reduced version. Because often what happens is we run the binary on the edited ask, the safe version. And it always comes back as a yes because it doesn't threaten anything. The full ask is the one that needs the binary. If the full want is life-affirming and life-enhancing, and it usually is, then the edit is raga, not wisdom. You can name it. I have a name for it now. Move three. Wah, no tail. Say the full version. Clean. No preamble that apologizes for the state of the want or the size of the want. No postamble that softens it after it lands. The whole ask sounds like this. I want the senior role, the salary of X to Y. and a clear pathway to the extended scope of this. How do I get there? The journey I need to take within the next six months. I need the entire weekend, not an afternoon, the weekend. I am writing the book, the full version, not the practical one, the one I want to write. Feel what happens in the body when the sentence ends and there's no tail. Know if that's okay. None of this, I know it's a lot. Know it's totally fine if it's not okay. The ask, simple and plain, standing on its own, sovereign, asking to be answered. I need the weekend. That discomfort that you feel in those moments when you start sweating and you feel hot all of a sudden or cold or you start shaking is Raga meeting the boundary of its own grip. The wanting has been seen fully without an apology. The nervous system is going to want to send the radioactive softener, the text, the follow-up, the I hope it wasn't too much. Don't fucking. Send it. That is episode 50. For now, we just wanna practice letting the ask land. This week, one room, one whole ask. You're in one room. Please, the experiment, we're still running a two week experiment, but this one is gonna start next week. I would really want you to pick one room. If you're a super keener, like some of you are out there, and you wanna do all three rooms all week, go with Joy. Write me in the comments. Send me a message. What I am asking y'all to do here is one room. State the full want first. You run the binary. Say the full version without the tail. Notice then what happens in your body when the sentence lands and you do not rush to make the room comfortable again. What about your comfort? Notice if the ground holds. I guarantee you all it's gonna hold. I guarantee you this. Like my name is Selena Tatum. I guarantee you. This spring, that's also a quarter. The blocker arc that we went through taught you to stop subtracting yourself. Drop the tail, hold the void, release the inherited room. The raga arc is gonna teach you what to plant in the ground that you've now cleared. And I want to say this with an asterisk in bold captions. You cannot plant a want that you've already negotiated down to nothing. You cannot build a life from the minimum viable version of your own desire. The ground now is available. The season's right and our quarter is open. The ask or the full ask is the seed. And you don't get to decide in advance whether the ground will receive it. You only get to decide whether you put the whole seed in or whether you split it in half first to make it less threatening because you want half of a flower. Well, I don't know how that works. We're going to put the whole seed in. What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to the full want this week, not the managed version, not the pre-approved one, the real one, the one that lives in your chest. ⁓ full-size and wants to be spoken out loud say which full chest as they say State it fully without apology. That is the whole ask. That is where the Raga arc begins. As usual, this has been the Empathy Lab podcast. I want you to take care of yourself. I'd like you to take care of each other. I'd like you to run the WAP in one room. And if you wanna go through all three, please let me know how that works out for you. Because I'm curious, I go through all three all the time. But I'm just asking for one. Stay hydrated, take very good care of yourself and each other as I said before. And I'll see you next week for episode 14. This been Tatum at Peace Lab. Peace.