Satisfying Craving for Balance and Parity is Ground Zero for Women

Lisa Gates is a negotiation consultant, trainer and coach whose passion for building things provided the inspiration for The Daily Thrive, as well as She Negotiates Consulting and Training.

While working with entrepreneurs and high achieving careerists, Gates began to notice a pattern among her clients. These talented, professional women were making quick work of setting goals and designing strategic plans for implementing those goals. But when it came to negotiating–whether it was with a family member, a senior partner, a vendor, a neighbor or a used car salesperson, Gates says, “they dug in their heels. They resisted.”

So she called her attorney friend Victoria Pynchon to ask for help training her clients in negotiation. That request grew into a new and successful partnership venture called She Negotiates.

After several iterations of their online course, a retreat, and a passel of presentations and corporate trainings, women consistently revealed they were desperate to negotiate far more than money and salary.

“Women are craving an end to the paper chase,” says Gates. “They are off and on with their self care, overwhelmed by technology and pesky things like email and file management, and they desperately want a way to earn more and spend less.”

It became clear to Gates that “ground zero for women was a pervasive craving not just for wage and leadership parity, but for balance in all areas of their lives.” And for Gates, negotiation was the entry point for making it all stick.

“What we learned and continue to learn from the women we train is that to be truly effective, sticky learning, women need to become wide-eyed and conscious about the cultural context in which they negotiate.”

For Gates, that meant “helping women understand unconscious and conscious bias, our default ways of navigating conflict, and all the ways we’ve internalized how society expects women to behave.”

The Daily Thrive, explains Gates, “is learning that moves from the inside out, nested in a community of professional women all taking the same journey. And the online learning model assures that the learning will be efficient and available when it fits into their busy lives.”