Hey everyone and welcome to our throwback episode. In our throwback episodes, we are reintroducing you to some of our most popular episodes.

This is great for new listeners who want to learn more about the work we've done in the past. And it's a great refresher if you've been a listener for a long time.

Enjoy. So my name is Melissa Harreford, and I started my love affair with

negotiation about 23 years ago. Now, I was fortunate enough early in my career to start working

for a company that taught negotiation skills in corporate settings. So I taught people, salespeople,

how to negotiate more effectively with their clients, procurement, purchasing professionals,

how to negotiate more effectively with their vendors, and internal teams, how to negotiate

with one another. So within Fortune 1,000 companies, we were teaching people how to negotiate with one another. So within Fortune 1000 companies, we were teaching

people how to do negotiating skills, how to use negotiating skills in those business situations. Now, I say

a love affair, my love affair with negotiation skills, because my experience teaching those people how to negotiate more effectively

touched me at a very personal and professional level because for 20 years I was fortunate enough

to work in this company and I know you're probably thinking 20 years that's crazy who says

they work for one company for that amount of time but I think you can relate to this and your listeners can probably relate to this. When I say that negotiation skills are endlessly fascinating.

Yep.

It really never stops being interesting. So every class I taught, every salesperson, procurement, internal team member that I taught over that 20 years, came out of a skills training class and said to me, Melissa, this class changed my life.

Not only did it change the way I'm going to negotiate with my customers or vendors, fill in the blank, it changed the way I'm going to talk to my spouse,

my peers, my boss, my kids. These skills are about everyday agreements that we're able to either

use to bring us together or to drive us apart. I love it. I agree 100%. That's phenomenal. We kind of touched

on this, but I want to pull it out a little bit more. So how would you define negotiation?

Negotiations are everyday conversations. In fact, now the courses that I teach, my company is called

Connector Conversations because not only are you negotiating once a year for a raise, once every five years for a new car, they're not only the milestone agreements that you have to come up with.

They're getting alignment on my team when I have no direct authority over these people.

...