Behind Her Empire: Alexandra Carter On How to Negotiate Anything

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: Alexandra Carter On How to Negotiate Anything

This week, Behind Her Empire sat down with Alexandra Carter, J.D. Carter is a professor at Columbia Law School teaching mediation.


Since 2016, Carter has partnered with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. Her career is focused on alternative dispute resolution. Before she enrolled at Columbia herself, she was a private equity analyst at Goldman Sachs and a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan.

As a child, Carter said she was shy and nervous. She felt she struggled socially to make friends, but discovered if she was very passionate about something, she "kind of came alive in front of this group."

Early on, she "realized that one of the main ways I can connect with people is on issues that I really care about." She said her ability to share and connect with people taught her that "I didn't always know what to do socially. But I could teach and I could lead."

While enrolled at Columbia School of Law, she realized that mediation was her path to success.

"I swear, the first time I did that, I thought, this is it. I've found what I should be doing for the rest of my life," she said. "I loved helping other people negotiate."

Carter has run with her passion for negotiation. She said that she has to consider "what would my life look like, as a woman, as a professional, if I treated every conversation I had with someone — not just the money conversations — but every conversation as an opportunity to steer that relationship, to teach that person how to value me."

She said she found that not only did she have to negotiate, but she felt she had to do it for other women, so that they also know that negotiation and recognizing your own value is a good thing for every party involved.

Carter shared invaluable tips on how to negotiate, especially navigating pitfalls that disproportionately affect women. She spoke about how to see and protect your worth, the power of silence and how to ask the right questions.

Carter said that asking the right questions is key to successful negotiation.

"Questions are the secret weapon in negotiation," she said. "Negotiation starts with how you talk to yourself."

If you feel unprepared for a negotiation or have trouble making choices in the moment, she said it's likely "you didn't know the right questions to ask yourself first."

Once she started looking for ways to steer conversations and prioritize getting what she wanted, Carter said, "everywhere in my life, I saw opportunities to negotiate."

Carter shared advice on taking yourself seriously, the unique challenges women overcome as negotiators, how she deals with imposter syndrome and how to negotiate pay, promotions and project management.

Alexandra Carter is a Columbia Law School professor, public speaker and author of "Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything."

"Studies show that only 7% of people know the right questions to ask to make the most money at the table… They're open questions, you want to get that other person talking about their needs, their goals, what are the problems that they want to solve. And that is when as an entrepreneur or a person in corporate, you are going to start to crack incredible ceilings in your career, generate more business, do more business with your current clients, and also have them come back over and over again." —Alexandra Carter

dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.

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The Influencer-to-Podcaster Pipeline Is Ready to Explode

Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a freelance reporter with dot.LA. They previously worked at Protocol writing the Source Code newsletter and at the L.A. Business Journal covering tech and aerospace. They can be reached at nat@dot.la.
The Influencer-to-Podcaster Pipeline Is Ready to Explode
Evan Xie

It’s no secret that men dominate the podcasting industry. Even as women continue to grow their foothold, men still make up many of the highest-earning podcasts, raking in massive paychecks from ad revenue and striking deals with streaming platforms worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a new demographic is changing that narrative: Gen-Z female influencers and content creators.

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nat@dot.la

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System
Evan Xie

NASA’s footprint in California is growing as the agency prepares for Congress to approve its proposed 2024 budget.

The overall NASA budget swelled 6% from the prior year, JPL deputy director Larry James told dot.LA. He added he sees that as a continuation of the last two presidential administrations’ focus on modernizing and bolstering the nation’s space program.

The money goes largely to existing NASA centers in California, including the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory run with Caltech, Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

California remains a hotspot for NASA space activity and investment. In 2021, the agency estimated its economic output impact on the region to be around $15.2 billion. That was far more than its closest competing states, including Texas ($9.3 billion) and Maryland (roughly $8 billion). That same year, NASA reported it employed over 66,000 people in California.

“In general, Congress has been very supportive” of the JPL and NASA’s missions, James said. “It’s generally bipartisan [and] supported by both sides of the aisle. In the last few years in general NASA has been able to have increased budgets.”

There are 41 current missions run by JPL and CalTech, and another 16 scheduled for the future. James added the new budget is “an incredible support for all the missions we want to do.”

The public-private partnership between NASA and local space companies continues to evolve, and the increased budget could be a boon for LA-based developers. Numerous contractors for NASA (including CalTech, which runs the JPL), Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman all stand to gain new contracts once the budget is finalized, partly because NASA simply needs the private industry’s help to achieve all its goals.

James said that there was only one JPL mission that wasn’t funded – a mission to send an orbital satellite to survey the surface and interior of Venus, called VERITAS.

NASA Employment and Output ImpactEvan Xie

The Moon and Mars

Much of the money earmarked in the proposed 2024 budget is for crewed missions. Overall, NASA’s asking for $8 billion from Congress to fund lunar exploration missions. As part of this, the majority is earmarked for the upcoming Artemis mission, which aims to land a woman and person of color on the Moon’s south pole.

While there’s a number of high-profile missions the JPL is working on that are focused on Mars, including Mars Sample Return project (which received $949 million in this proposed budget) and Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover, JPL also received significant funding to study the Earth’s climate and behavior.

JPL also got funding for several projects to map our universe. One is the SphereX Near Earth Objects surveyor mission, the goal of which is to use telescopes to “map the entire universe,” James said, adding that the mission was fully funded.

International Space Station

NASA’s also asking for more money to maintain the International Space Station (ISS), which houses a number of projects dedicated to better understanding the Earth’s climate and behavior.

The agency requested roughly $1.3 billion to maintain the ISS. It also is increasing its investment in space flight support, in-space transportation and commercial development of low-earth orbit (LEO). “The ISS is an incredible platform for us,” James said.

James added there are multiple missions outside or on board the ISS now taking data, including EMIT, which launched in July 2022. The EMIT mission studies arid dust sources on the planet using spectroscopy. It uses that data to remodel how mineral dust movement in North and South America might affect the Earth’s temperature changes.

Another ISS mission JPL launched is called ECOSTRESS. The mission sent a thermal radiometer onto the space station in June 2018 to monitor how plants lose water through their leaves, with the goal of figuring out how the terrestrial biosphere reacts to changes in water availability. James said the plan is to “tell you the kind of foliage health around the globe” from space.

One other ISS project is called Cold Atom Lab. It is “an incredible fundamental physics machine,” James said, that’s run by “three Nobel Prize winners as principal investigators on the Space Station.” Cold Atom Lab is a physics experiment geared toward figuring out how quantum phenomena behave in space by cooling atoms with lasers to just below absolute zero degrees.

In the long term, James was optimistic NASA’s imaging projects could lead to more dramatic discoveries. Surveying the makeup of planets’ atmospheres is a project “in the astrophysics domain we’re very excited about,” James said. He added that this imaging could lead to information about life on other planets, or, at the very least, an understanding of why they’re no longer habitable.

https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

Three Wishes Cereal Co-Founder Margaret Wishingrad on ‘The Power of No’

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Three Wishes Cereal Co-Founder Margaret Wishingrad on ‘The Power of No’
Provided by BHE

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Three Wishes founder and CEO Margaret Wishingrad talks about creating brand awareness and shares the key component to running a successful business.

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