Avi Goldstein would love to bottle the magic he sees when teenagers discover the impact effective negotiation could have on their lives. As founder of the Brussels-based Pathways Institute for Negotiation Education, Goldstein and his team organise workshops with Belgian schools on navigating the myriad interactions that life brings. For students, whether it’s negotiating with a friend, their mum, a nightclub bouncer or their future bosses, the same principles apply.
Based on an integrative methodology developed at Harvard Law School, Pathways’ Game Changers workshops – which are in English – also bring together pupils from diverse backgrounds, by pairing schools with different languages and cultures. With the US Embassy in Belgium, Flemish schools network Scholengroep Brussel and the King Baudouin Foundation US among its partners, Pathways involved 240 pupils from 12 schools last year and plans to expand to more than 300. Goldstein talked to ING’s Dave Deruytter at Coworking Les Galeries in Brussels about the joy of seeing students lit up by their lightbulb moment.