Ah, the raise. Stressful times, friend, stressful times. No one likes asking other people for more money. But if you keep these six things in mind, you can make it less excruciating and, hopefully, more productive.

1. Don’t ambush your boss – The element of surprise is good when you’re jumping out of a birthday cake, or if you’re a Navy SEAL. But when it comes to your bosses, give them the heads up. Keep it simple, upbeat and short. Something like: “If you have any time this week, I’d like to talk to you about my salary and what things look like for the future. I’d be happy to swing by anytime.” Preparing your boss works to your benefit—some people get defensive when you spring things on them.

2. Go all Spock on the situation – What you’re doing when you ask for a raise is entering into a negotiation. That means emotion takes a back seat (or, even better, stays in the trunk). You go into the discussion cool, calm and totally collected. Get hot under the collar, and the raise evaporates while the boss sees you as a jackass and wonders how you ended up with your job in the first place. Just remember the immortal words of Wesley Snipes in New Jack City: “It’s business, never personal.”

3. It’s not about why you need it – Why you want a raise is immaterial. You get a raise because, hopefully, you help your operation make money or run more efficiently and it would be expensive and difficult to replace you if you left. Just had a baby? That’s nice—no one cares. Want to buy your first home? Super—no one cares. Recidivist gambler? Fantastic, Mr Double-Down—no one cares. This is a discussion about the money you deserve, not what you’re going to do with it if and when you get it.

4. Compare and contrast – You want to come in armed with facts. Take a look at the last 12 months of your job. What’s changed since then? Have you taken on new responsibilities? Have you had some awesome ideas that made the company a boatload of cash? Did someone in your department flame out and did you have to take on half of the workload to keep things moving? You want to sit down with a pad and get all these things on paper. Every accomplishment, every endeavor should be recorded. If you think your boss would dig it, make a list and hand it over. The idea here is that the salary you’ve been earning is for the job you had—you’re simply asking for a new amount that reflects the job you have now.

5. If you don’t get what you want, make a plan – There may be a perfectly good and fair reason why you can’t get more money now. If that’s the case, ask your boss what you need to do in the next, say, six months to revisit this topic. What you want to do is create a roadmap to more responsibility and more money. Is there a new project you can take on? A change in your approach to a particular issue? Set real, concrete goals with your boss and establish a timeframe for you to achieve them.

If you want to be thorough, send a recap of the conversation to your boss in an email. It doesn’t have to be a word-for-word transcription, but maybe something along these lines: “Thanks for the talk today. I’m excited to get moving on the things we discussed. Just to make sure I understand everything, here are the goals I believe we covered…” Then end with some language saying “I know that doing these things by no means guarantees me anything, but I’m hoping we can talk about my progress and how it affects my salary in later in the year.” When your boss replies, file that email away. You hopefully won’t need it, but it’s useful if your boss is forgetful and/or a two-faced weasel.

6. One last thing you can do: Get a job offer from a competitor. In some companies, it's the only way you'll ever get a raise. Just be prepared for your boss to say "Sounds like a great offer. You should go work for them." You can't really bluff on this one, so you have to be prepared to leave.

You may not have to, however, if you make sure you don't come across as an asshole. Your approach should be less "XYZ Inc wants to hire me at $150,000--what are you going to do for me?" and more "Hey, can we talk for a second? XYZ came out of the blue and made me a job offer. It sounds pretty cool, and they're offering me $150,000. I've been really happy here and want to stay, but it's an amount of money I can't ignore. What do you think I should do?"

Is it a little disingenuous? Yeah, a little, but this approach helps smooth over what could be a rough conversation. Hopefully, your boss will come back with something like, "Well, Celeste, I certainly don't want to lose you. XYZ's offering you, what--$150,000? Let me see what I can do. Can you give me until tomorrow?" And you’ll give her until tomorrow and then she comes back and matches (or exceeds) $150K and everybody’s happy.

Or your boss may tell you to suck it. If that happens, your decision just became a whole lot easier.