Yahoo Finance Want a raise? Follow these three easy tips
If you had grand plans for your career this year, don’t injure your chances by broaching the topic of a raise or a promotion with your boss in a cold, clinical meeting room.
Instead, you’d likely be giving yourself a better shot at persuading your manager or boss if you took them to chat in a more relaxed environment, such as a café.
It sounds fairly intuitive already, doesn’t it?
Here are three tips to create an environment conducive to make your pitch.
1. Give them a hot drink
Researchers from Yale and the University of Colorado conducted experiments simulating a job interview scenario that ultimately showed touching objects of different temperatures could influence a person’s feelings of interpersonal warmth.
“Participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring),” the paper said.
Why do we associate physical warmth with a warm person? The reason goes back to when we were infants.
“Because of these frequent early life experiences with the trustworthy caregiver, a close mental association should develop between the concepts of physical warmth and psychological warmth.”
2. Give your boss the comfy chair
A similar study also found that the chair your boss ultimately sits in can affect how he or she receives you. Participants in a study were asked to simulate a car purchase and place two offers on the car (assuming the first offer was rejected).
“Participants who sat in hard chairs judged the employee to be both more stable, and less emotional, but not more positive overall than did participants who sat in soft chairs,” the findings revealed.
“Thus, hardness produces perceptions of strictness, rigidity, and stability, reducing change from one’s initial decisions, even when the touch experience is passive in nature.”
3. Talk about the weather
It’s more than understandable if you’ve been avoiding this admittedly cliche’d topic for its inanity and unoriginality. However, Tel Aviv University psychologist and author Thalma Lobel points out that talking about the weather can affect of you.
“‘How about this weather?’ is actually polite code for ‘What’s going on with you?’” Thalma wrote.
“The answer to this seemingly innocent question may sometimes influence your judgements and decisions.”
But if it’s a dreary day, don’t point that out; you’d be better off sticking to talking about the coziness of where you are instead.
There are a million visual and physical cues in our world all the time – understanding them better could have a hand in turning our luck.
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