Lynn Price: How to Negotiate With a Toxic Ex

Lynn Price once walked away from a negotiation and left real money on the table on purpose. After twenty-five years and more than eleven thousand negotiations as a corporate attorney, she did it because the conflict was making her sick and she valued peace more, and she calls that a strategic decision, not a defeat.

Lynn Price is a negotiation speaker, trainer, and author, and an attorney who spent over two decades as in-house corporate counsel. Across roughly eleven thousand negotiations she started noticing patterns and turned them into a simple, memorable formula she calls the three Rs. Her book, Negotiate It!, breaks the whole skill down.

In this episode, Lynn and Lisa adapt that formula for a toxic ex you feel powerless against. They work through being Ready, Relatable, and Reasonable, and Lynn's system of sorting every want into three buckets: your have-to-haves, your helpful-haves, and your hopeful-haves, the ones you can trade away. She explains why you make the ask even when the other side holds the leverage, why you make it and then stop talking, and a line she learned early: if it feels good to say it, don't.

They trade the moves Been There Got Out teaches too, anchoring to a shared goal, never asking or answering why, and never letting your ex see how much you want something. Lynn is practical about how to build the skill: practicing out loud in front of a mirror or a camera so your words and your face do not give you away, and even rehearsing with AI. Her core message is that negotiation is learnable, not a personality trait, and preparation is what turns fear into confidence.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The three Rs of negotiation: being Ready, Relatable, and Reasonable
• How to sort every want into have-to-haves, helpful-haves, and hopeful-haves
• Why you make the ask even when the other person holds the leverage
• Why you should make your ask and then stop talking
• The rule "if it feels good to say it, don't," and how to use a pause
• Why you never ask or answer "why" with a difficult ex
• How to prepare by practicing out loud, recording yourself, even rehearsing with AI

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Negotiation vs. mediation, and Lynn's 11,000 deals
3:00 The three Rs, and confidence from small wins
5:00 Leverage is perception: you still get to make the ask
9:00 Prioritizing your ask: the three buckets
13:00 Being relatable, and anchoring to common ground
15:00 Make the ask, then go silent
17:00 "If it feels good to say it, don't"
19:00 Being reasonable, and never asking or answering "why"
27:00 The price of peace, and cost-benefit
29:00 Preparing: practice out loud, record yourself, even AI

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Lynn Price at Lynn Price Consulting: https://lynnpriceconsulting.com/
🔗 Negotiate It! by Lynn Price (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Negotiate-Develop-Negotiation-Muscle-Workplace/dp/0692152539

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.