It’s no secret that women are often left out of conversations about negotiation and debate. There are complex societal factors conditioning women to avoid speaking up and advocating for what they deserve. It’s time to unlearn those beliefs—negotiation is for everyone. Lucia Kanter St. Amour is a VP for UN Women, an attorney, author and international negotiation expert. In Forces of Good: The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation, she tackles how to negotiate effectively through narration and interviews.
What is the podcast about?
Negotiation is everywhere, everyday. It’s not solely for business; it’s everybody’s business. This podcast dispels the all-too-common myth that negotiation is an elite skill best left to the “experts.” It’s not just in board rooms or complex business mergers. The good news is that anyone can do it. You don’t need to be an attorney like me, or a CEO, MBA or a retired hostage negotiator. A true superpower for those who are practiced in the skill, it’s a superpower accessible to anyone willing to hone the skills in small ways everyday. It means listening, being curious and understanding human behavior (including your own). Negotiating isn’t just useful and inevitable in everyday life—it’s fulfilling and confidence-building.
This podcast travels wide territory including nuts and bolts building blocks and exercises to strengthen your everyday negotiation muscles. It also includes broader perspectives on human psychology, behavioral economics, social trends and historical retrospectives. We’ll talk about listening, planning, questioning, power and leverage, cognitive traps, perspective-shifting, storytelling, imagination, choice theory, brain science, art, music—we’ll even talk about chocolate. Well, now we’ve got your attention. Happy to have you here!
Why should people listen to it? Who is the podcast for?
For those who have been left out of negotiation as non-experts—and especially women. Negotiation is very white-male-dominated. It’s well past time that women internalize the confidence that they are competent everyday negotiators. The podcast uses an engaging social/cultural story-telling approach and is best to start listening to it from episode one. It’s like an audible negotiation course.
Featured Episode – Negotiation Is Danceable!
This may be my favorite episode and only one of two episodes that features a guest. Both guests are NON-expert people who don’t think of themselves as negotiators at all. But they did something extraordinary that required negotiation skills. In this episode, it’s a 17-year-old high school student at San Francisco School of the Arts, who started an inclusive dance program for students with disabilities.
Biography
Lucia Kanter St. Amour is a VP for UN Women USA (San Francisco), practicing attorney and law professor turned everyday negotiation superhero. She teaches how to harness your everyday negotiation superpowers so you can land your dream job, get your kids to eat their peas and be the most powerful person in the room.
As the author of the most inclusive and comprehensive 21st-century negotiation guide you’ll ever need, “For the Forces of Good: The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation,” Lucia knows that negotiation isn’t just for business. It’s everybody’s business.
If you want to be on top of your communication game, don’t miss out on the Communication TwentyFourSeven podcast by Jennifer Furlong!
As the author of this podcast (and best-selling book), I did not compose the introductory paragraph of this summary because I never use the phrase “Imposter Syndrome.” It is purely a social media framing and buzz phrase. The 2 women psychologists who studied it 50 years ago (Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes) were very conscious to call it Imposter Phenomenon (an experience) and not Syndrome (a pathology) because the latter makes it all something in the mind of the individual (mostly women, though some men), and ignores the very real constructs in the world and workplaces, etc. that act as obstacles. Even recently in an interview, Clance commented on how irksome the pervasive social media “Imposter Syndrome” construct was to her. It’s no different for everyday negotiation, which has structurally left women out. It’s NOT just in your mind that you think you can’t negotiate. You’ve been conditioned to think that way. Chances are, it’s time to unlearn what you think you believe about negotiation – especially if you are a woman.
Hi Lucia – thanks for the feedback! We’ve updated the post to better reflect the topic.
Splendid! Thank you, Laura!