Have you ever gotten that pit inside your stomach when your spouse or a good friend walks into the room and says to you, “Hey, sit down a second, we need to talk?”

We’ve all been there. The uncomfortable conversation that we all try to avoid and hope that it will take care of itself with no effort from us.

Well America, that’s where we are today. As a society, we need to talk, and what we need to talk about is systemic racism in America. We’ve all tried our best to ignore it and hope that it would go away on it’s own, but it hasn’t, so we need to talk about it.

More importantly, we need to listen. We need to put ourselves into rooms with people who don’t look like us and have that difficult conversation about race. We need to talk about the black race and the white race and every other race, but most importantly, the human race.

In this episode of “The Journey of My Mother’s Son,” I sit down with Monica Livingston, who is one of the many absolutely incredible human beings that I’ve been blessed to meet through the Positive Coaching Alliance. She is a former women’s professional football player, entrepreneur, consultant and speaker. Her company, 36 Nation, located in Washington, DC provides individual representation to meet her clients needs.

We both had to overcome our fear and had that uncomfortable conversation about race. We recognize our differences, but more importantly chose to focus on our similarities. We’re all on the same team, we can only move forward together.

We know that we’re only two little people, but we’re going to start the conversation and hope that it inspires others to have the tough conversation with those who don’t look like them as well.

Both the video and audio versions are available below: