The Year I Stopped
Apologizing for
My Salary.

I said “sorry” before I said my number. Every time. For nearly a decade, I prefaced every salary conversation I ever had with some version of an apology — “Sorry, I know this is awkward, but…” — as if asking to be paid fairly for my work was an imposition I needed to soften before anyone could hear it. I didn’t notice I was doing it until a colleague pointed it out after sitting in on a negotiation call with me. “You apologized four times before you even said a number,” she said. I went back through my old emails. She was right. I’d been apologizing in writing too.

This is the story of the year I stopped. Not because I woke up one day with sudden, fully-formed confidence — that’s not how it happened, and I’m suspicious of any essay that claims it did — but because I got tired enough, and informed enough, and finally angry enough to do something different. This is what that actually looked like, mess included.

“I had spent ten years negotiating like I was asking for a favour, when I was actually negotiating the price of my labour.”

— Naomi Okafor

What I know now — what it took a brutal performance review, one humiliating pay gap discovery, a negotiation coach, and roughly eighteen months of deliberate practice to learn — is that the guilt women feel around money is not a personality flaw. It is a trained response. And trained responses can be untrained, slowly, with the right tools and enough repetition.

The Number I Found by Accident

I found out what my male colleague earned the way most women find these things out: by accident, through a spreadsheet that was shared with the wrong permissions during a reorg. He had joined the company eight months after me, at a more junior title, and was earning eleven percent more than I was.

I want to be honest about my first reaction, because I think it’s more common than we admit: I didn’t feel angry. I felt embarrassed. My first instinct was to wonder what I had done wrong — had I underperformed somewhere, missed some signal, failed to advocate for myself in a way that would have prevented this. It took me nearly a week to arrive at the more accurate conclusion, which was that I hadn’t failed at anything. I had simply never asked.

That distinction matters enormously. The pay gap wasn’t a verdict on my competence. It was the predictable result of two different behavioural patterns — his and mine — meeting the same employer, which will, with very rare exception, pay exactly what it is asked to pay and not a penny more.

Why “Just Ask” Was Never the Whole Story

I’d read the articles. “Just ask for more.” “Know your worth.” I found this advice both true and almost useless, because it skipped the part where I actually had to do it — sit across from someone, or on a call with someone, and say a number out loud while every cell in my body screamed that I was being difficult, ungrateful, and unlikeable.

That fear has a name, and it isn’t imaginary. Research on negotiation consistently shows that women who advocate assertively for themselves face a social penalty that men largely don’t — we are simultaneously expected to negotiate and punished for negotiating in the same way men do. I wasn’t being paranoid. I was responding, accurately, to a real asymmetry. Understanding that didn’t make the fear disappear, but it did make it easier to separate from the question of whether I deserved more money. I did. The fear was about consequence, not about merit.

The First Attempt: A Disaster, Briefly

My first real negotiation attempt, about three months after the spreadsheet incident, went badly. I had prepared a number — a fair one, backed by market data I’d pulled together over a weekend — and then, in the actual conversation, I undercut myself before my manager even had the chance to push back. I asked for less than my prepared number “to be reasonable.” I added qualifiers. I said “I know things are tight right now” before he had said anything about budget at all.

I left that meeting with a 4% raise I had, essentially, negotiated downward myself. I sat in my car afterward — there is apparently a pattern, for me, of having important realisations in parked cars — and felt something close to fury, mostly at myself.

• I had done the research. I had the number. I still talked myself out of it in real time.
• Knowing what you’re worth and being able to say it under social pressure are two completely different skills.
• Preparation alone doesn’t fix a trained instinct to soften, qualify, and pre-apologize. Practice does.
• A bad negotiation is data, not a verdict. I used mine.

What Actually Changed Things: Rehearsal, Not Willpower

The shift wasn’t an attitude adjustment. It was structural. I hired a negotiation coach — a one-off, three-session arrangement, not a luxury I’d recommend everyone needs, but something that worked for me — and what she taught me had almost nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with scripting and rehearsal.

We role-played the actual conversation, multiple times, including the uncomfortable silences. We practiced saying a number and then stopping talking — no qualifier, no immediate justification, just the number and silence, which turned out to be the single hardest thing for me to do. We rehearsed responses to pushback that didn’t include apologizing or immediately conceding. I wrote scripts. I read them out loud in my kitchen, alone, until the sentences stopped feeling foreign in my mouth.

“You don’t need to feel confident to say the number. You need to have said it enough times that your mouth knows what to do without your nervous system’s permission.”

— Naomi’s negotiation coach, paraphrased

The Conversation That Actually Worked

Six months after the disaster in the car, I asked for a meeting with my manager and walked in with a number 18% higher than my current salary, backed by a one-page summary of my contributions over the previous year and current market rates for my role. I said the number. I did not apologize. I did not soften it with “if that’s possible” or “I understand if not.”

He pushed back — not aggressively, just with the standard “let me see what I can do” — and instead of immediately offering to come down, I said: “I’d like to understand what’s driving that, because based on my research, this number reflects market rate for this role at my level.” Then I waited. It was, genuinely, one of the longest silences of my professional life. It lasted maybe four seconds.

I got 14% of the 18% I’d asked for, along with a commitment to revisit the remainder at the mid-year review, which we put in writing. It wasn’t everything I’d asked for. It was, however, more than I had ever received from a single conversation in my career, and I had achieved it without once saying sorry.

The Guilt Didn’t Disappear — I Just Stopped Listening to It

I want to be honest about something the productivity-and-confidence genre of career advice tends to skip: the guilt didn’t go away. I still feel a flicker of it, even now, before every negotiation. What changed is that I stopped treating the flicker as information. It is not a signal that I’m being unreasonable. It is a trained reflex, inherited from years of cultural messaging that tells women asking for money is somehow less dignified than asking for almost anything else.

I think about my mother, who worked for thirty-one years and never once asked for a raise, because in her mind, raises were things that were given to you when you’d earned them, not things you requested. I understand exactly where that belief came from, and I understand why it cost her, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of pounds over a career. I am not interested in inheriting it.

What I Want You to Take From This

If you are sitting on a number you haven’t said out loud yet, or rehearsing apologies before a conversation you haven’t had: the guilt you feel is not a verdict on whether you deserve the money. It is a pattern, trained into most of us long before we ever sat in a salary negotiation, and patterns respond to practice far more reliably than they respond to willpower.

Do the research. Write the script. Say it out loud in your kitchen until it stops sounding foreign. And when the moment comes, say your number, and then do the hardest, most unnatural thing available to you: stop talking, and let the silence do some of the work for you.

You are not asking for a favour. You are naming the price of your labour. Those are two very different sentences, and the year I finally understood the difference between them is the year everything else started to change.