The Art of Asking for What You Want

One of the best purchases of my life

I had taken a course with Marcia a few years ago titled Asking for What You Want.

I forgot how much it cost, but it was under $300, and it was one of the best uses of the money that I have had in my life.

It is hard to express the intensity of my excitement when I found Marcia. It was at a big festival and she was leading a few different presentations. I was impressed right away because I could tell she is very smart from how she was explaining everything. Each of her presentations was on a different topic, and for each one, she met the audience where they were while introducing really useful knowledge, while having very nice pacing while being warm and casual.

She is one of those rare people who is able to point to and name very intangible concepts. “Asking for what you want” is not something I even knew that a person could develop skills in, before meeting her. “Sales” and “negotiation” were skills in my head that somebody could get better at, but I never considered “asking for what you want” to be a skill that a person could get better at.

I took the first online workshop that was available after the festival, along with about ten other people because she kept those specific workshop groups intentionally small. I had seen her recently, years later at another event and she remembered me from the digital workshop I took with her years ago.

I can find it challenging to know how to write about other people, but I have delayed writing this post for a very long time because I was not sure how to talk about how Marcia’s presentations, her books, and her workshops have helped me with the level of granularity I wanted to. But being thrilled with somebody’s work is a good reason to write about them, not delay it!

Her material has the highest praise from me: I believe that her material should be taught in every college in the country, instead of the current boundaries and consent workshops that are taught.

She had written extensively about consent culture, and some of her ideas made into this consent one-pager I have made:

How Not to Get Me-Too-ed (And Get What You Want)

What I found so interesting were both her theoretical breakdowns of the concepts, and then how she uses exercises to help her participants try on the concepts for themselves. I generally am a big fan of acting and improv classes, and any artistic classes, as a way to go outside of yourself and explore your own capacities for reaction to your environment, and your own capacities for generating actions.

She would guide us through coming up with things we *could* want to do with another person from the group, making a list of 100 things, and then going ahead and asking these things, knowing we would get rejected for most of them because that is par for the course. She teaches that part of learning to ask for what you want is growing comfortable with hearing “no” and it not feeling like something cripplingly humiliating.

That was just the start, and it was already so powerful.