This month is different.

Religion, politics, money. Three things you are not supposed to bring up in polite company. On September 17, we are going to spend an hour on one of them.

My guest is open about where he stands politically, and he is not going to pretend otherwise. He will say things some of you disagree with. I am not going to sand those down.

That is not a warning. That is the point. Because the skill we are actually after has nothing to do with politics.

Come If You Are Carrying One of These

• There is something everyone on my team knows, and nobody will say, and I do not want to be the one who blows up the meeting.
• I have a high performer whose behavior is costing me good people, and I have been working around it for a year.
• I need to disagree with my board chair, or my CEO, and I cannot afford for it to go sideways.
• My meetings are quiet, and the real conversation happens ten minutes later in the parking lot.
• I have put something off so long that raising it now would be its own event.
• Someone in my family and I stopped talking about anything that matters, and I miss them.

If you recognized even one of those, that is the hour.

Here Is Something He Gave Me for Free

Chris knocked on more than 9,000 doors running for office in a district that was never going to elect him. Nine thousand strangers, most of whom disagreed with him, standing on their own porches.

He came out of it with one question. When you are mid-conversation with someone whose position you cannot fathom, ask:

"What would you have to see in order to change your mind?"

If the answer is nothing, there is nothing. Let it go. You just saved yourself an hour and possibly a relationship.

If they pause, if they actually think about it, if they come back with any answer at all, there is a conversation to be had.

That is one question. We are spending an hour on the rest.

What You'll Walk Out With

• A way to open the one you have been avoiding. What 9,000 doors taught him about the first thirty seconds, and why they matter more than the argument.
• A way to tell a conversation from a dead end, so you stop spending your energy on the ones that were never available.
• A way to stay in it without going numb or going to war. Wealth, power and belonging is the frame of Chris's book, and belonging is the one we skip. It is also the one that decides whether a team, a family, or a country can disagree and stay intact.

What we will not do is debate policy. Neither of us is going to tell you who to vote for. Politics is here because it is the loudest version of the problem, not because it is the problem.

Why Chris

He enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 to get out of a working-class dead end in Naugatuck, Connecticut. He served in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, and led a route clearance platoon in Helmand Province. Somewhere in Iraq, another West Point grad told him he should apply. The Army flew him to Kuwait to sit for his SATs. He got in.

A bachelor's in Physics with a focus on Nuclear Engineering from West Point. Dual master's degrees in Public Policy and Foreign Service from Georgetown. Policy advisor at the US Department of State, then the private sector, then two runs for state office and a seat won on his local Board of Education. Few people have stood on as many sides of the American divide, and fewer are still willing to have the conversation in good faith.

This one is live, and that is the reason to be in the room. Send your question when you register and I will put it to someone who has had this conversation nine thousand times. If there is one you have been avoiding, I would rather ask yours than mine.

Chris's book, You Shouldn't Have to Kill to Get Ahead: Reimagining Wealth, Power and Belonging in America, is available now. My recommendation, not a sponsorship.

Lead well. Feel well.

~traci