APX-IV-0012
“I finally asked for what I needed without apologizing for it.”
Asking clearly for what you need is not weakness, it is self-knowledge made verbal. Hedging and apologizing around your needs teaches others to discount them. A clean ask is a sign of someone who knows their own worth.
Your Practice
Notice how it landed, did the person respond differently than when you hedged? Write down the difference. Keep a running list of clean asks and their outcomes. You're training yourself out of a pattern that has cost you real things.
The Architects
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
Frederick Douglass, 'West India Emancipation' speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857