Why I Stopped Using the Word Negotiate

I serve on the board of ReCity, a Durham coworking and event space for nonprofits. ReCity provides affordable space for organizations to execute their missions and grow in a supportive community. I'm also an advisor and financial backer of Coram Houses, which is working on housing affordability in a city that desperately needs it. Between the two organizations, the conflicts are constant and consequential. Landlords and tenants. Funders and nonprofits. Developers and neighbors. Employees, partners, and the communities they serve. These are hard, slow, important problems. The gap between the urgency of the need and the pace of change is something I think about a lot. They also give me no shortage of opportunities to practice what I preach.

And this week I've been wrestling with a single word in an acronym.

The Win-Win AGENT™ Framework doesn't care about the scale of the conflict. The work of untangling Durham's housing affordability and nonprofit capacity problems and the work of admitting that a word I chose years ago isn't quite right both benefit from the same AGENT approach. The courage to stop avoiding conflict looks remarkably similar whether the stakes are large or small. That scalability is actually the point.

The word was "Negotiate."

It never quite sat right. In my workshops, it always created a small bump in the room. People would get through Aware, Ground and Empathize and then something would shift when we hit Negotiate. The word carried baggage I couldn't get rid of. I knew it, and I kept moving anyway.

When I first introduced the Win-Win AGENT™ Framework at my TEDx talk, I needed an N. Negotiate was close enough. It fit the acronym, it pointed in the right direction, and I had a website to build, a course to deliver, and an AI Coach to launch. So I moved on and let it simmer.

Then last week, an Estonia based beta reader of my forthcoming Win-Win AGENT book tripped over it.

He's not a native English speaker, which means he approaches words with a deliberate attention that fluent speakers often skip. He pushed back in a way my English-speaking readers hadn't. And once he named it, I couldn't un-see the problem. Negotiate was doing too much and not enough at the same time.

The Turn

Once I slowed down to look at it honestly, the real problem came into focus. Negotiate is a loaded word. For a lot of people, it's exactly the word that makes conflict feel scary and transactional. It conjures lawyers and boardrooms and zero-sum showdowns. Worse, I was using "negotiate" both as a step in the Win-Win AGENT™ Framework and as a description of the whole process. That's a recipe for confusion.

The surface issue was an awkward word in an acronym. The real issue was that the word was undermining the very thing the framework was trying to do. It was making conflict feel like combat at the exact moment I was trying to invite people in.

I had been avoiding it because I didn't have a better answer yet, and momentum matters. I told myself I'd come back to it. I always come back to things eventually. Becoming AWARE of a conflict doesn't mean you have to resolve it immediately. Sometimes you ground yourself in what's truly important, note the tension, and let it wait for the right moment.

There's another reality I've learned about conflicts we put off. The longer you wait, the more tangled they become. And the more tangled they become, the easier it is to find reasons to wait a little longer. I had built an entire ecosystem around a word I wasn't sure about.

The right moment finally arrived when I hired a publisher to help me bring the manuscript to life. Suddenly, the word I'd been quietly tolerating for years was going to be printed on paper, permanently, in people's hands. That changes things.

The Shift

I sat with the question again: What is the N step actually asking people to do?

The Win-Win AGENT™ Framework gives you a tool to slow down and approach problems methodically. After years of practice, hearing the word AWARE triggers something almost automatic for me now. I quickly assess how important the problem is and how important the relationship is, and from there I give myself permission to follow my instincts — avoid it, accommodate it, fight it — or to become intentional and try to collaborate. All of that happens at the speed of thought.

I had cycled through that A step many times over the past months with this very problem. Each time, my instincts took over because the stakes never felt high enough to push further. The conflict was real, but it wasn't urgent. So I let it simmer and moved on to other battles.

The publisher changed that. Suddenly the word was going to be permanent. The stakes cleared a threshold I hadn't crossed before, and this time I kept going.

It's not a transaction and it's not a debate. It's a journey. Once you've become AWARE of the conflict, GROUNDED yourself in what matters to you, and EMPATHIZED with what might matter to the other person, you set off together into terrain you've never crossed in quite this way before.

And that's when it landed. Navigate.

You don't negotiate a mountain trail. You navigate it. You read the terrain, adjust your footing, check your map, and keep moving. Some stretches are harder than you expected. Some open up into something beautiful. The destination matters, but so does how you travel.

Win-Win AGENT™ in Action

This one was personal, so let me map it that way.

AWARE. The discomfort with "Negotiate" had been there for years. Naming it honestly, rather than dismissing it as a minor quibble, was the first real step.

GROUND. My interests were clarity and effectiveness, not just a memorable acronym. My BATNA was to leave the word as-is if nothing better emerged. Knowing that gave me permission to stop forcing a solution and let the right answer arrive.

EMPATHIZE. When I put myself in the reader's position, someone busy and carrying real conflicts, I asked what they actually needed. They need a word that invites them in, not one that signals combat. Navigate does that.

NAVIGATE. A beta reader from Estonia sparked the breakthrough. Staying open to feedback, even when I thought I'd already settled the question, is what made the insight possible.

TIE. Every piece of material going forward, the book, the newsletter, the AI Coach, will say Navigate. The Win-Win AGENT™ Framework is now whole in a way it wasn't before.

The takeaway: the conflicts we've been quietly tolerating are often the ones most worth returning to.

Try This Before Your Next Conflict

Think of a low grade conflict you've been carrying. Nothing dramatic. Maybe it's a conversation you've been putting off, a situation at work that quietly irritates you, or a relationship where something small has gone unaddressed for longer than it should. Not worth the effort, you've told yourself.

Try it anyway. Name the conflict out loud. Then walk it through the Win-Win AGENT™ Framework. Not to solve the world, but to exercise the muscle. The more you practice on the small stuff, the more natural it feels when the stakes actually matter.

Closing Reflection

The Win-Win AGENT™ Framework didn't resolve this conflict for me instantly. It gave me a place to put the discomfort while I waited for the right moment. That's often enough. Staying aware of something without forcing it is its own kind of forward motion.

My challenge to you: find a small conflict you've been carrying and name it. Then use the Win-Win AGENT™ Framework to slow yourself down long enough to get past your instincts and choose how you want to show up. The more you work that muscle on the small stuff, the stronger it gets when the stakes are higher.

I'm convinced the word "negotiate" has been getting in the way. What we're really doing, every time we work through a conflict with intention and curiosity, is navigating. And sometimes the hardest terrain is inside our own thinking.

Navigate on.

See you in the win-win moments this week.
— Sam