People like me who teach negotiation like to tell our audiences that everything is negotiable. But I suspect that most of us still understand negotiation as an activity conducted at workplaces, in board rooms, in law offices, in union halls. We imagine negotiations over salary, over working conditions and benefits, over contracts, over stock options, over cash.

In doing so, we overlook the daily transactions that quietly make up life’s most important negotiations. And there’s one kind of negotiation in particular that holds serious consequences for those who lack the skill to succeed in it.

It takes place in private. It proceeds behind closed doors, when the shades are drawn, in halting steps or in haste.

It’s a kind of negotiation that demands self-agency, the ability to advocate zealously for oneself and also to walk away if you can’t get to yes:

Condom negotiations.

These are negotiation skills every sexual active teenager and adult should possess: the ability to negotiate safe sexual practices with a partner. The web, that confidential, sometimes dependable refuge for the embarrassed or the self-conscious, offers advice and links to resources. These include:

• Condom Use Negotiating Tips for counselors working with patients (in PDF)
• From the Cambridge University Students’ Union, ideas for how to respond to different scenarios that might arise in negotiating condom use
• “Negotiating Condom Use” by the American Social Health Association
• A quiz from Yale Medical School on “Harm Reduction Negotiation Skills” (PDF), together with role play scenarios for “latex negotiation”

These are negotiation skills on which life and death can depend. It’s time at last to throw open the shades, let in the light, and talk about them openly.

Idiosyncratic deals, or i-deals as they are also known, are agreements negotiated between individual employees and employers that benefit both sides. Although such deals give an individual employee a benefit that other, similarly situated employees may not have, these deals are not the products of favoritism, nor are they one-sided, since by definition the organization as well as the individual benefits. I-deals in fact can be an effective way for organizations to motivate individuals and reward job performance.

Denise Rousseau, H. J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy at the H. J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Tepper School of Business, and a nationally recognized expert on the i-deal, gives a series of short video interviews explaining how they work and why they foster innovation, and has some advice to employees on negotiating i-deals for themselves.