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LinkedIn News.

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel and this is Hello Monday.

Before we begin today, I just want to remind you that we only have a couple more weeks before

my memoir comes out. On October 4th, it's called The Family Outing. It's the story of how

everyone in my family, my dad, my mom, my sister, my brother, and myself came out.

And what happened next? Now, if you're thinking she talks about this every week, I already pre-ordered

mine, thank you. I so appreciate it. It really does help me so much when you pre-order.

And if you haven't gotten yours yet, there's still time. You can find The Family Outing

out by Harper Collins, anywhere you buy your books. Thanks. Now to the show.

Today, we're talking to Kwame Christian. Kwame founded and runs the American Negotiation

Institute. And I've talked about negotiating with him before. Kwame's greatest gift is that he

understands how to have difficult conversations. And with this new book, he's putting that gift to

particularly good use. The book is called How to Have Difficult Conversations About Race.

Now race is a tender topic for a lot of people. For me, maybe for you, for Kwame certainly.

He describes himself as a reluctant leader in this area. He practiced civil rights law early in

his career. It burned him out. And he avoided it after that pretty much entirely. Even after the

murder of George Floyd in 2020, he didn't want to lean into it. And then his wife Whitney called

him in a bit. She pointed out that Kwame asked people to lean into the hardest conversations

regularly, but he wasn't doing it himself. Kwame remembers exactly when she told him.

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