How to Get What You Want: Podcast Review
What if the difference between being overlooked and moving forward is not working harder, but learning how to make your value visible? How to Get What You Want, created and hosted by negotiation expert and executive coach Susie Tomenchok, explores the everyday conversations, choices, and moments of influence that can quietly shape the direction of your career.
What is the Podcast About?
How to Get What You Want is a career and professional development podcast built around a simple but often overlooked idea: negotiation is happening far more often than we realize. It is not limited to salary discussions, major deals, or tense conversations across a conference table. Negotiation happens when you speak up in a meeting, ask for an opportunity, present an idea, respond to difficult feedback, manage workplace conflict, or advocate for the value you bring. Susie Tomenchok helps listeners recognize these moments and approach them with greater clarity, confidence, and intention rather than waiting for their work to speak for itself.
Through practical workplace scenarios, communication strategies, mindset shifts, and conversations about leadership, the podcast examines how professionals can become more deliberate about the way they position themselves and pursue what matters to them. Episodes explore subjects such as executive communication, workplace politics, imposter syndrome, difficult decisions, influence, emotional intelligence, career visibility, asking for a raise, dealing with rejection, and knowing when to push or step back. Rather than teaching people to become aggressive negotiators, the show presents negotiation as a thoughtful process of understanding interests, communicating clearly, listening carefully, and creating opportunities without manipulating others.
Podcast Details
Category: Careers
Frequency: Updated weekly
Starting Year: 2022
Language: English
Podcast Creator
Core Theme
At the heart of How to Get What You Want is the belief that negotiation is not primarily about winning. It is about navigating human interests with awareness. Tomenchok challenges the familiar image of negotiation as an adversarial contest in which one person must overpower another. Instead, she presents it as a form of communication that begins with understanding what you want, recognizing what the other person needs, and discovering where influence, leverage, and mutual value can meet. This makes negotiation relevant not only to compensation or contracts, but also to leadership, collaboration, conflict, visibility, and everyday career decisions.
A second recurring theme is personal agency. The podcast repeatedly explores what happens when capable professionals stop assuming that recognition, advancement, or opportunity will automatically arrive because they have done good work. Preparation matters, but so does positioning. Competence matters, but so does communication. Listeners are encouraged to notice where they are holding back, making assumptions, avoiding necessary conversations, or allowing other people to define their value. In this sense, getting what you want is not about controlling outcomes. It is about becoming more intentional about the conversations and decisions you can influence.
Podcast Takeaways
Some key lessons from the Podcast:
- Negotiation happens every day: Asking for support, presenting an idea, setting a boundary, resolving disagreement, or requesting an opportunity can all involve negotiation, even when no one formally describes it that way.
- Know what you want before asking: Clear outcomes create stronger conversations. When you understand what matters to you, you can communicate your interests more effectively and recognize alternative paths toward a satisfying result.
- Preparation creates confidence: Confidence does not have to come from personality or natural assertiveness. Understanding the situation, the people involved, your value, and the possible outcomes can make difficult conversations considerably easier to navigate.
- Understand the other person’s interests: Effective influence is not simply about presenting a stronger argument. Curiosity and careful listening can reveal what the other person values, making it easier to identify solutions that serve both sides.
- Silence can strengthen communication: There is power in saying what needs to be said and then allowing space for the other person to respond. Filling every silence can weaken a position, while patient listening can reveal information that would otherwise remain hidden.
- Your value needs to be communicated: Doing excellent work is important, but expecting others to automatically notice its significance can limit professional growth. Career advancement often requires learning to articulate your contributions and advocate for opportunities.
- Getting a no is not always the end: Rejection can provide useful information. Understanding why an answer is no, what conditions might change it, or what alternative opportunities exist can turn an apparent dead end into the beginning of a more productive conversation.
Podcast Strengths
One of the strongest qualities of How to Get What You Want is its ability to make negotiation feel relevant to ordinary professional life. Instead of concentrating only on dramatic boardroom deals or salary negotiations, Tomenchok brings the subject into meetings, feedback conversations, workplace relationships, leadership decisions, career opportunities, and moments when someone must decide whether to speak up. The episodes are practical without becoming formulaic, and the broader emphasis on mindset helps listeners understand why they may hesitate even when they already know what they should say. The result is a useful combination of communication strategy, self awareness, leadership development, and immediately applicable career advice.
Who This Podcast Is For
How to Get What You Want is especially valuable for professionals, emerging leaders, managers, executives, and ambitious individuals who want to become more effective at advocating for themselves while remaining authentic and collaborative. It will particularly resonate with people who work hard and perform well but sometimes struggle to make their accomplishments visible, ask directly for opportunities, handle workplace politics, or navigate uncomfortable conversations. Listeners interested in negotiation, leadership, communication, confidence, career advancement, and emotional intelligence will find many of the situations immediately recognizable.
Why Should You Listen To This Podcast?
You should listen to How to Get What You Want if you want practical tools for handling the small professional moments that can produce surprisingly large consequences. A career is shaped not only by major decisions, but also by what you say when someone challenges your idea, how you respond when an opportunity appears, whether you ask a difficult question, and how clearly you communicate what you bring to the table. Tomenchok makes these moments easier to recognize and navigate. More importantly, she offers an approach to influence that does not require becoming louder, tougher, or less like yourself. The podcast can help you become more deliberate about how you communicate, advocate, decide, and lead.
Questions This Podcast Helps Us Explore
- How much of our professional potential remains unrealized simply because we never clearly ask for what we want?
- What changes when we stop seeing negotiation as conflict and begin seeing it as communication?
- How can we advocate for our own interests without losing curiosity about the needs of others?
- When does patience become passivity, and when does speaking up become an essential part of leadership?
- What opportunities become possible when we learn to communicate our value instead of waiting for others to recognize it?
Concluding Thoughts
How to Get What You Want offers a useful shift in perspective: negotiation is not an occasional professional event reserved for raises, contracts, or major deals. It is woven into everyday working life. The way you present an idea, respond to resistance, ask for support, communicate your contribution, and handle an unexpected no can all influence where your career goes next. By making these moments visible, Susie Tomenchok gives listeners a practical framework for participating in their professional lives with greater intention.
What makes the podcast particularly worthwhile is that its message extends beyond simply getting better at asking. It is ultimately about becoming more aware of your own agency. You cannot control every decision, response, or outcome, but you can become clearer about what you want, better prepared for important conversations, more attentive to what others need, and more willing to advocate for what matters. That combination of confidence and awareness makes How to Get What You Want a thoughtful resource for anyone ready to play a more active role in shaping their career and life.
→ You can listen to How to Get What You Want on Apple Podcasts and other leading platforms, or explore more at their website.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an impact-driven creator at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 life goals around the globe. Tal's journey and recent book, The Art of Fully Living, inspired him to found Elevate Society.
