Hello, my friends, and welcome to our practice session.

In our practice sessions, we invite our featured guests to show off their negotiation and conflict resolution skills in a realistic scenario.

In this session, I want you to pay attention to what our guest does and not to what I do, because while they are trying to show off their skills and teach you, I'm trying to frustrate their efforts in

different ways through things like aggression, annoyance, emotionality, or awkwardness. And then after

the practice session, we debrief and talk about what worked, what didn't work, and what you can

use in your next difficult conversation.

I have some incredible news.

My second book, How to Have Difficult Conversations About Race, is now the number one new release in its category on Amazon.

I'm so excited, so excited for this, because we've put a lot of work into it.

And this was risky.

Because as a lawyer who's focusing on negotiation and conflict resolution, talking about race

seems for many to be outside of the scope of what I usually do. But again, how are we defining

negotiation? We define negotiation as any time you're having a conversation and somebody in the conversation

wants something. And as the podcast is titled, Negotiate Anything, we can negotiate anything.

And in my years of doing all of this work in the professional world, difficult conversations

about race is something that comes up over and over and over again

in the workplace.

And there isn't really a solid resource out there that blends the fundamentals of negotiation

and conflict resolution and effective communication with this particular topic.

So it's risky.

It is risky to venture in this way, but I'm really excited and encouraged by this early

result.

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