You may be one of the smartest people in the room. You work harder than anyone else, you have done everything right, and yet it still feels like it is not translating. The deals are not closing the way they should. And then you start coming down on your price before anyone even asks, out of fear you asked for too much.

Yes. The system was not built for you to win and it has done a number on how we see ourselves and what we believe we are allowed to ask for. But sometimes we are also the barrier. We are the ones folding before anyone called our bluff.

My guest today has spent 20 years at the intersection of both truths.

Ellen Leikind spent 15 years at Pfizer and L'Oréal launching over a billion dollars in products before she founded PokerDivas in 2005. She is the creator of the BOLD Negotiation System, the author of PokerWoman: How to Win at Love, Life and Business Using the Principles of Poker, and one of the most practical voices on negotiation, access, and strategic confidence working today. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, spoken at Chief, and spent two decades teaching women the rules of a game nobody wrote down for us.

What We Break Down:

• Playing to win vs. playing not to lose: What fear-based play actually looks like in a negotiation, a pitch, or a room where you are the only woman and how to catch yourself doing it.
• The BOLD System: Ellen's four-part negotiation framework built specifically for the moment the ask is for you, not for your client or your company.
• Reading the room: How to walk into any high-stakes environment and understand who holds power before you say a word.
• The rooms we were never in: Why poker became the new golf and what it has cost women that we were not at either table.

• When folding is the move: How to know the difference between playing it wrong and just getting unlucky and why that question changes everything.

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