Ask For What You Want. Out Loud.

Career · Mindset

By Feras Asakrieh · 5 min read · Issue #37

Sandra had dinner on the table. I was still holding my phone.

The VP role had posted that afternoon. I read it four times on the drive home. I read it again at the table.

I told her about it. I told her it was a big jump. I told her I had been a leader for three years and nobody at Citi made VP in three years. I said it like a fact.

Because it was one.

She was cutting something on her plate. She did not look up.

"Apply. What do you have to lose?"

That was it. That was the whole answer.

Sandra has never worked in corporate America. Not one day. She stayed home with our kids, which is the best investment the two of us ever made together. She has never sat in a talent review. She does not know what a job band is. She has no idea how the ladder works.

And that is exactly why she said it.

I said something like "that's not really how it works." We moved on to something else. I did not apply that night.

She Did Not Know the Rule

Here is what I understood at that table and she did not.

I knew the timeline. I knew who had made VP and how long it took them. I knew the quiet math of who gets considered and who gets told to be patient. Seven years inside a place teaches you things.

I called that knowledge. I called it being realistic.

It was fear wearing a nicer suit.

Sandra was not smarter than me about Citi. She was just not carrying anything. No history. No pattern. No list of names of people who tried and got passed over. She looked at it and saw one question. Do you want it or not.

The people closest to a system are the ones most trapped by it. You learn every reason a thing will not happen. Then you start calling those reasons wisdom.

The Week I Did Nothing

I want to be honest about the middle part, because most stories skip it.

I did not walk in the next morning and ask. I carried it around instead.

I thought about her line in the shower. In the car. Between meetings. In that dead hour at night when you should be sleeping. Every single day, that same sentence came back. What do you have to lose.

And every single day, I found a new reason to wait.

That gap between hearing good advice and acting on it is where most people live. Not for a week. For years. Some people live there their whole career.

Why the Ask Feels So Expensive

It is not that people don't know what they want. Most people know exactly what they want. They just will not say it out loud.

Because saying it out loud costs something.

Here is what is actually running through your head:

"They'll think I'm arrogant." You've watched someone reach too early and you saw how people talked about them after.

"Now my name is on a list." Right now nobody has an opinion about your readiness. The second you ask, somebody forms one.

"If they say no, I have to run my team meeting Monday." Everyone will act normal. You'll know. That is the part that stings.

"I'd rather be a maybe in my head than a no in real life." As long as you never ask, you get to keep believing you were close. That story is comfortable. It costs you everything.

"There's a rule about this." And you'd be the guy who did not know the rule.

Read those again. Not one of them is about whether you could do the job.

Here Is How I Finally Asked

I went to my boss. Here is roughly what I said.

"I'd love to apply for the VP role. I know I'm not qualified. But I want to share my interest, and I want to learn what it takes to interview for a role like this."

That sentence did more work than anything else I did that year. Here is why, broken into what you can actually copy.

1. Ask the person who can move it, not the person next to you.

Most people workshop the ask with a peer. A work friend. Somebody at their level who will agree with them and change nothing. That feels like progress. It is not.

I did not vent to a colleague about how I probably was not ready. I went to the one person who could put my name into the room I was not in. Find the person with the actual power and go to them directly. Every step between you and that person is a step where your ask goes to die.

2. Say what you want in plain words.

Not hints. Not "if anything ever opens up, keep me in mind." That is not an ask. That is a wish with better manners.

I said the words "I'd love to apply for the VP role." Six words. Nobody had to interpret me. Your manager is not a detective. If they have to guess what you want, they will guess wrong, or they will guess nothing at all.

3. Say the disqualifier out loud before they do.

I told her I was not qualified. On purpose.

That sounds like it weakens the ask. It does the opposite. The gap was going to be in her head either way. By naming it first, I took away the awkward part, and I showed her I was seeing the situation clearly instead of overestimating myself. Now we are two people looking at the same gap together instead of one person selling and one person doubting.

4. Make the yes cheap.

This is the piece almost everyone gets wrong.

I did not ask her to give me the job. I did not ask her to promise anything. I asked to learn what it takes to interview for it.

Look at what that does to the cost of saying yes. She was not signing off on my promotion. She was agreeing to teach somebody who wanted to grow. That is nearly free. And once someone says yes to the small version, they are standing next to you when the big version comes up.

Ask for the door. Not the room.

5. Hand them the evidence they don't have.

Then I sent her everything Citi could not see on my record.

I was running a business on the side. I was deep in my community. I had been building and leading in places that never showed up in a performance review, because performance reviews only measure the box you are already in.

That is the point. Your file says what you have done at your current level. It says nothing about what you can do at the next one. So you have to hand them that yourself. Nobody is going to go looking for it.

What the Managing Director Told Me Later

They put my name in. I went through the process. Seven rounds.

I got the job.

On the day they told me, the managing director said something I have never forgotten. He said the first interview was a courtesy. That is the word he used. A courtesy. They were doing my boss a favor by talking to me.

Then he said what I did in that process was something they could not overlook. Seven rounds. Seven years of performance behind it. It got hard to say no.

Sit with that.

The rule was real. I was right about it. Sandra was wrong about how Citi worked.

And she was still right about what to do.

The rule was real. It just was not final. But nobody ever finds that out from the outside of the room. You only find out by putting your name in and then giving them something they cannot walk away from.

No rule breaks until somebody tests it.

Final Thoughts

There is something you want right now. You know exactly what it is. And there is one person who could hand it to you.

You have already decided how that conversation ends. You have run it in your head so many times it feels like a memory.

But it never happened. You made it up.

Sandra did not have a better read on Citi than I did. She just was not carrying twenty reasons to stay quiet. If you have been in your industry long enough, you are carrying those reasons too. And you have been calling them experience.

Ask for what you want.

You never know until you ask.

See you next Saturday.
Feras

Ask For What You Want. Out Loud.

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