NEGOTIATRESS

Women the Workshop is now Negotiatress!

When I first founded “Women the Workshop” just over a year ago, it was really just a loose hunch. More like an urge to shout out to women around me that we were losing a battle we didn’t even know we were fighting. I wanted to tell them I knew we had so much awesome potential because I’d seen it. That we were missing out on what we could reap out of that potential because we were hesitant or threatened from stepping fully into who we were and engaging more actively in getting what we deserved from the world.

Two factors played a role in this from my point of view. First, we were deterred from taking any role really, as we are so often told off for daring to sound our opinions or for asking for what we want. And second, if we were to take on any role, there is so much pressure to emulate the roles of men, because we are told that being a woman is not enough. So stepping into our identities as women is not desirable if we want to be considered successful (or in fact considered at all).

A Call to Arms (or Tools)

I wanted to get women to engage, so I started giving workshops to whoever I could, under the working title “Women the Workshop”. As in a workshop to help us step into being whole, engaged, and proud women. I also liked the idea of us “womaning” the workshop rather than “manning” the workshop- workshops with sawmills and heavy tools being considered something that is more manly in activity, and something that women shy away from for no real reason.

This has been the working title for a year now. Under this title, I’m so pleased to have reached so many women, and hopefully to have changed the role they see for themselves in society. Negotiatress? What’s a Negotiatress?

Now it’s time for a new name, that fully reflects what I’m trying to do! The meaning of “Negotiatress” is quite clear, I think. The importance of using it? Let me say that I could not find a single use of this word in a sentence online, not in all of Google’s mighty resources! It is a proper word in English, I’ve checked (at least on Mariam Webster, the jury is still out on Oxford English, and as late as October 2019 I couldn’t find it in any online dictionary).

But going by Google’s insistence on correcting my search word to “negotiator”, and Microsoft Spell-Check’s insistence that Negotiatress is not a word, it seems negotiation is still not something we would readily associate with women. And that’s what I’m out to change!

So here we are, starting a new journey with a new name. I invite you to join this journey by coming to one of my workshops (the next one is July 10th-11th! Just a few spaces left), or browsing through this very blog– there are lots of tips and discussions on what being a Negotiatress is about.

You can also join me on July 24th-26th where I will be co-hosting the “Navigating the New Normal” weekend retreat on how we can re-calibrate ourselves mind, heart, and body to choose the paths that suit us most in a world that is reshaping itself before our eyes these very days. Checkout the details here, or get tickets on Eventbrite here!

. See you next post!

Yasmine Guerin Founder of Negotiatress

Originally posted July 5, 2020 by Negotiatress