Celebrate the Fourth of July with Conversation

In honor of the upcoming holiday here in the U.S. when we celebrate the birth of our nation and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I've been thinking a lot about how conversations shaped our nation.

The Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution are all living and breathing documents that illustrate where our nation's conversations have taken us in our two hundred and thirty five years of being a country.

We continue to shape how our country looks, to not only each other but the world, and I continue to think of how we as a society are influencing these documents by not only what we are talking about, but how we are talking about it.

Case in point, this morning on the drive into work my husband and I had a fifteen minute conversation around a National Public Radio (NPR) story we heard about President Obama's budget address yesterday. He and I disagree on the state of American politics, and I decided this morning that instead of putting my dukes up and having  the "I'm right, you're wrong" fight, I would instead listen to my husband's point of view and ride the wave of his train of thought.

The outcome? I learned that while my husband and I both viewed the President's address the same way ideologically, we were really having a conversation about the climate these conversations were being discussed in. I realized in those quick 15 minutes that I was out of integrity with myself. I was being incredibly cynical and rooted in that position  just to prove the point that I thought the system was broken. Did this conversation move mountains? No. Did it make me realize that I do, in fact, want to continue these conversations so that someday mountains can move? Yes.

As we gear up for another election year, as our country continues to shape and define what equality for all means, and as we celebrate our nation's history, I'm going to refer back to a key belief we hold here at Fierce: "While no single conversations is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a company, a relationship or a life - any single conversation can". I would add that this is true for a country too.

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