Hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for spending time with us today.

It's listeners like you in 181 different countries that have made Negotiate Anything the most popular negotiation and conflict resolution podcast in the world.

I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator,

professor, and the director of the American Negotiation Institute. Before we get started,

I have two quick questions for you. Is negotiation a critical part of what you do? Do you need to

resolve conflict and persuade at work? If you answered yes to both of those questions,

visit our website to learn more

about our negotiation workshops. We've traveled the country working with professionals just like

you, and we'd love to have the opportunity to work with you too. Check out the link in the

description to learn more. Lisa, thanks for joining us today. Thrill to be back. Yes, it's good to have you back. We are well overdue for this interview. I feel like we've been talking about it since you came on, so I'm glad we've finally made it happen. That's cool. It's probably been two years, and it feels like it's been a few months. Right. Well, good deal. So how about you get us started by

telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do? Well, I'm Lisa Cummings, founder of

Lead Through Strengths, and we specialize in virtual trainings where we help teams figure out how to get

results by using their natural talents, by leaning into their strengths

rather than spending a lot of wasted energy on fixing what's broken about them.

I love it. Yeah. And I think this is incredibly powerful, too, when it comes to negotiation and

conflict resolution, because if you have a better

understanding of your strengths, then you can create strategies around those strengths to maximize

your persuasive endeavors. So we're excited to have you. And the three things that we're going to talk about today are, first of all, we're going to answer the question, are strengths even useful in difficult times?

So it is currently March 27th, and it seems like the world is on fire.

So I think it's first important to talk about whether or not this is timely with regard to the value of strengths at this time.

The second thing we're going to talk about is reframing your default response to difficult conversations.

And then lastly, we're going to talk about how all of this applies in remote working environments.

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