January 23, 2019 • 32 mins
Shifting our attention to the way we gather, Priya Parker says, will lead us to collective transformation.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Three speeches, and I realized I need to be more
vulnerable than I was planning to be, because if I'm
asking them to be vulnerable, I need to be vulnerab
by myself. Hey, welcome to You Turns. This is the
(00:23):
podcast where we talk about change, where we want to
make our you Turns smooth Turns. I'm Lisa Oz, and
I'm Jill Herzig and Lisa. You and I were recently
talking about something in a comment you made really struck me.
You said that we have made junk food of our relationships. Well,
it's part of my life philosophy, or at least an
(00:45):
observation on modern life philosophy. Um, where I see that
we kind of disassociate all of the meaning from the pleasure.
So with food, we take out the sweet and the
salty and the fat and we extracted from natural source.
And with sex rather than having it in a long term,
committed relationship where you dig deep each all about the
(01:07):
orgasm in the connection with very superficial with like one
night stands and friends with beneficesent hooking up, and UM,
I think we do that everywhere we extract pleasure or
the most superficial level from those aspects of the thing
that given meaning. I think we do that like social media.
(01:28):
It's all about likes and and painting people and a
quick text rather than a real connected conversation. So that's
what I was talking about. That So in the same
way that junk food artificially pulls pulse flavors and artificially
injects them into things that have actually no nutritional value. Right,
we're our relationships are devoid of real nourishing qualities, and
(01:54):
yet we feel like we're interacting. We just wonder why
we're not satisfied. Yeah, you're always at this same time,
like if you eat junk food, you're always empty and
full at the same time. Really scary, which is why
we have run in our next guest, because she talks
about putting substance back into our interactions. We're speaking with
(02:16):
Pria Parker. She's the author of the Art of Gathering,
How We Meet and Why It Matters, and the founder
of Thrive Labs. Pria, thanks so much for being here today.
Thank you for having me so. Pria, can you talk
to us about what it means now to gather and
how we make those connections in today's environment. I think
of gathering as any time three more people come together
(02:37):
for a purpose, um. And that can be a wedding
or a funeral, or a pot luck or a neighborhood
birthday party. Um. And I think that one of the
reasons we don't gather as well as we could, or
to use your earlier analogy, we kind of junk food
gather is because most of our gatherings have gone on
to autopilot. We think that there's a specific form that
(03:01):
something has to look like. A birthday party looks like
candles and a you know cake, um. A wedding looks
like a white dress walking down an aisle. And in
part because for decades, for generations, we've been told that
if you get the things right of gathering, if you
get the fish knives right, if you get the wine right,
if you get the you know, the lighting right, which
is which is important, but it's not a precondition for
(03:23):
meaningful human connection. And you can see this from the
expertise from which we draw. We think gatherings and we
ask people who are experts on things. UM. So you know,
Martha Stewart, for example, sort of the symbol of if
you get the recipes right, you know, if you look
at her party planning guide on on her website, and
I don't mean to pick on Martha. I'm using her
as like an archetype. It's, you know, twenty seven steps,
(03:46):
three of which are about guests, which are logistical questions,
you know, get the r SUPs and the invitations out,
But then there's three steps about how to get the
crew did tase right. And I think, regardless of what
the advice is, we've basically been told that if you
get the things to a level of perfection, the rest
will take care of itself. And I think that's epically
bad advice. So I would say it's really more from Instagram,
(04:07):
and Martha's there too, But I mean Instagram is said
such a such a takeover of our imagination of how
things should look and how any party or event should feel. Um,
I mean, is social media a part of this junk
foodization of our gatherings? Absolutely, And I love that insight.
(04:30):
I think that we tend to design things for an audience,
and we're designing for the wrong audience. So there was
a piece and then Your Times maybe three or four
weeks ago that talked about events that have become literally
for the purpose to be instagram able and you go
and it's kind of this candy flossy type of you know,
(04:50):
that's a perfect um. You know, step and turns to
like take a photo in front of and the like.
The chandeliers are gorgeous, and you walk in and people
are very excited, and you leave feel and kind of empty,
and you realize that at some deep level you're kind
of being used for this future moment that somebody else
will see online that looked perfect. It's it's it's marketing.
(05:11):
You're a marketing engine. And the second thing is I
think part of what I'm so curious about and I
love what you all explore, is what are our sources
of meaning? And meaning is really hard to capture visually
unless you're an artist, and let's ask your medium. And
so partly these visual images of our of our gatherings,
the dinner table or the presentation, um, there are proxies
(05:33):
from meeting meaning, but in the room they are very,
very very indirect forms of meaning. We create meaning through conversation,
and it's very hard to capture conversation on Instagram, and
so we tend to put it on to the side
and we think that our meaning will be created only
through visual beauty. It's also very destructive. I think living
(05:53):
with someone who's public figure and needs to have Instagram
morble moments, it's incredibly disrupting when you're having a moment
and it's interrupted by the need to take a picture
and document that. And that's actually a big source of
conflict for me and my husband because he's always saying, oh,
let we need to get a picture of this. I
(06:14):
was like, no, we don't. It's your granddaughter's birthday. That
is not a public event. Beautiful um needs to be
here for them. And I think it takes us out
of our the intimacy of a moment to be thinking
of documenting it does. And and I'll say, and I
love the example of your husband because he's a more
extreme version of all of us, right, And sometimes it's
easier to see these things in the extreme. And what
(06:36):
I mean by that is, well, every gathering I believe
as a social contract, right, You're you're basically saying, I
want to do this, are you in? I want to
have a birthday party, do you want to come? I
want to have a conference? Do you are you know?
Are you for this? And part of what's happened with
social media is we've developed unconsciously to social contracts, our
contract with our present people in your you know, in
(06:58):
the room with your god daughters, birthday or whatever it is,
and this kind of invisible social contract with our quote
unquote audience or quote unquote followers. Whether you're a public
figure or not, everybody has an audience. Everybody has an
audience and um, and they're competing. But right now we're
not conscious of them competing, and so we are. Our
conflicts you're conflict with your husband are proxy wars for
basically this deeper question, which is who is this audience?
(07:21):
What is the purpose of this gathering? And who is
this for? First? And if there is another audience, are
they fulfilling your first purpose or are they distracting from it?
But we rarely have those conversations explicitly, you know, just
kind of connecting this to you turns a little bit um.
Often these gatherings, weddings, funerals, birthdays, these are significant moments
(07:43):
where we're trying to move from one phase in our
life to another. And I'm I'm wondering if what you've
identified as a problem is something that's really hindering us
from doing that. Do you think it's that big a problem? Deeply?
And I think part of our gatherings is that because
we think something has to look in a certain way
or take a certain form, we've we've lost the meaning
(08:05):
in them. And I'll give an example. I recently got
a story from somebody who had read the Art of
Gathering and um, she's a self described stocker. Mom Um,
she lived in Chicago and she and her family moved
to the suburbs, so a transition, right, She's picked up
the house for a lot of different reasons. They've moved
to another type of neighborhood, another context. And they went
(08:27):
from a neighborhood that had a lot of chili cookoffs
and people were gathering all the time. And she came
in and kind of no, no one welcomed her in
an obvious way, right, there wasn't a gathering to welcome her.
People don't show up with banana bread, No, not anymore
that anymore. Kind of like cast role exactly. And she had,
you know, read the book. I don't mean be promoting,
but like she thought, Okay, here's an opportunity where I
would like to create a meaningful ritual where I get
(08:49):
to meet my neighbors. How do I do this in
a way that's meaningful, not just like, hey, guys, let's
come together and have cocktails and kind of say hi
and you know, and kind of have a form. What
would a meaningful, you know, simple gathering look like. So
she had her kids, she went out to Kinko's. She
said to her husbands, this is worth dollars for the invitation,
because the invitation primes, and this is our first opportunity
(09:09):
to really get to know our neighbors. She had her
two kids go on scooters around the neighborhood and hang
coffee cups on ten neighbors that she had met to
get their emails, and on the coffee cups, She's left
an invitation that said something like your email and then
three facts about you and how many years have you
lived on this block. They brought them back and she
sent an email out because she had their emails and
primed them with a like a gift from Cheers, and
(09:31):
said we'd love to have you over at Jackson Avenue.
And then the neighbors came and she had two sets
of name tags. One that was the name of the
other was three things that were true about them, but
put on someone else. So these neighbors had to come
in and then find like, oh that's me right, you're
you're wearing my name tag And they had never necessarily
met it must have thought some fun ladies. She changed
(09:54):
the norms and then she brought a cake out and
on the cake and said two fifteen, Like what was
that and she said, it's the number of years we
collectively have all lived on this block, and like that
is meaningful. She made it up. She's sure her purpose
is to get to know her neighbors, but also to
change the norms of gathering, and she was able to
do it in a way that was um, not junk food,
(10:17):
but still simple m m. And I'm sure they all
got to know each other a lot better to trying
to figure out which two had the sticker that was
yeah yeah. And when she had the cakes, she said,
we're so happy to be in our forever home. And
afterwards one of the neighbors said, well, we'll also progressive.
Let's let's do this. Is so gatherings are powerful in
part because when you gather in a way that's authentic,
(10:38):
it's contagious. When we come back, we're going to dig
deeper into that how to create meaningful groups. We've been
talking about gathering and we are with PREA. Parker. She
(11:00):
is the author of the Art of Gathering. You are
also the CEO and founder of Thrive Labs. So I
want to talk about that a little bit. You consult
with large corporations the World Economic Forum. So impressed. Um,
these groups that have challenges getting together. Can you tell
us a little bit about that. My background is in
(11:21):
group conflict resolution, So my craft and and kind of
my my day job is as a group facilitator. UM.
I'm by racial. I I was born in Zimbabwe. I
have an Indian mother and a white American father, um,
and they both remarried after some time, and I grew
up with them having joined custody. So back and forth
between these two extreme homes uh Indian kind of vegetarian, Buddhist, atheist,
(11:43):
incense dwelling and fuse liberal Democrat. You kind of get
the point home and then this white American evangelical Christian
conservative Republican, you know, me eating church, going home and
every two weeks I go back and forth and my
husband often jokes as no wonder and ended up in
the field of confict resolution, And I work now with
with companies, with political groups, with organizations that at some
(12:06):
level are going through a transition and trying to figure
out who they want to be, who they want to
be individually and collectively. And to me, so much of conflict,
and I use that not as a bad word, comes
down to a disagreement over identity or identities. And so
I work with groups that, um, that are trying to
(12:27):
have meaningful, complicated conversations together and need somebody to help
create that container in space and figure out how do
you actually have meaningful conversation when there's some heat in
the room. Is there some general tips for lack of
a better word that you can give us that we
can use because we've all been in rooms that felt
pretty hot. I think the first is, no, your purpose,
(12:51):
So heat for heat sake is not necessarily a good
and I could only be very dangerous. UM, but no,
the specific purpose as to why you're gathering people and
won't assume you know what it is. So for example,
often I'll be approached by a group of people who
are saying, UM, a company that say, is where we
have this team off site, and UM, we really want
to talk about our vision for the next year, and
(13:12):
I start poking around and as you say, what is
meeting in person worth coming together forth? You can't do
on email, you can't do on a conference call. So
part of this is making more sacred our time together
UM and then to make sure that the whatever that
question is it, particularly if you're going to be talking
about UM some elements of heat, that you're priming people
(13:33):
for it. So one of my favorite characters that I
met when I interviewed over a hundred gatherers to figure
out like how do they create UM transformative experiences as
a woman named Ida Benedito, and she's an underground experience
designer who helps groups deal with risk and taking risks.
And I asked her, what can we law learn from you?
And she said, every time I create an experience for
(13:54):
people that's going to be uncomfortable, I ask four questions.
One what is this group avoiding? Two what is the
gift in facing it? Three? What is the risk in
facing it? And four is the gift worth the risk? Mhm.
I can see that that's super effective for a group
that is electively together. You can create a common goal.
(14:18):
But what I'm thinking is your parents divorced, so they
chose not to be a group. What do you do
where when the differences are such that, let's just take
for example, the United States Congress, where they are of
such disparate goals that, given given their druthers, they probably
(14:38):
would separate and not work together. What what do you
do where you have a forced collective where the goal
isn't the same, and yet they still have to work together.
How much time do you have but just well, and
if anyone who's in Congress is listening, exactly help them.
So I think Congress and and frankly most public or
(15:01):
kind of private corporate gatherings. This is true, which you
have to look at the underlying systems that these people
are part of and representing. And we've created a political
system where the majority of what happens in the room
has broadly been decided before anyone enters the room. Right,
they're funded by a certain group, they have made promises
(15:23):
to certain um political donors. They need a strong n R,
a score, they whatever it is. But to these metaphors,
we're worshiping other gods and they're beholden to the people,
And so partly in a gathering, I think some of
the best gatherings that are created for congressmen and women
are the ones that are off the record, behind closed doors,
(15:43):
without an audience, that are um that our relationship building.
So you know, when you think about um Jimmy Carter
in the Middle East peace process, one of the moments
that created a breakthrough between kind of all of the
sides was when they pulled out there are pictures of
their grandchildren. Right. They saw each other as humans, They
saw each of themselves as grandfathers who had grandchildren of
(16:06):
whom they all cared about, and it was a disarming
moment in which they could actually begin to at least
pause some of their other beholden interests and remember, we
have a sense of common purpose. And often one of
the reasons I think gatherings tend to get stuck, and
this is very true in Congress, is that they go
on autopilot and we go into scripts. So you already
have a sense of what you know. Nancy Pelosi is
(16:27):
going to say, you already have a sense of what
you know. Chucking was gonna say, I'm using the Democratic leadership.
And I think part of the opportunity in Congress is
anytime anybody has an opportunity to throw people off their
scripts and get even a moment where they come back
to the reason they entered politics and connect to that.
I think you saw a little bit of that in
the Kavanaugh hearings with Jeff Lake and the elevator. He
(16:47):
was thrown off his script for a second. Um. And
so I think it's very hard and embedded systems to
do that. And I think that that's the opportunity. Do
we script ourselves all the time? All of us? I
think we were bond to the cultural context that we
are in. And scripts aren't necessarily a bad thing if
you're if you're reading the script you want to be reading.
(17:07):
And what I mean by script is basically a set
of uh in a way first a character and a
set of language of vocabulary UM, that we are following
because we think we are trying to achieve a certain purpose.
So for example, at a board meeting, UM, to structure
a board meeting in a way where you have mahogany
tables and UM, you know, everybody's sitting around the table
in a very specific way, wearing specific jackets and specific roles. UM.
(17:31):
There's a sense of what a board meeting should feel
like or look like. But often those board means get
very stuck because people are playing the same roles over
and over again and perpetuating a hierarchy that is more
about the relationships in the room than the problem at hand.
And so often, as a facilitator, one of the things
that kind of my profession does is come in and
figure out how can you knock people off their scripts
for a purpose. And so if, for example, what that
(17:53):
board room needs is intimacy or silliness, and again you
can have strategic silliness. Silliness leads to a lot of breakthroughs.
The first, you know tip that to to give your
listeners is deeply and courageously choose the location um of
your gathering. And one of the people I interviewed, Patrick Frick,
is a great facilitator. He said the room does percent
(18:14):
of the job. Jerry Seinfeld has said the same thing
in an interview um where he says, you know, I'll
be Vaudeville houses are my favorite places to perform around
the country and some this is a quote from a
radio show he did. Some rich guy sees you in
the theater, brings you to his birthday party and you
go down the toilet and everybody thinks Jerry Seinfel is
awful in real person, And it's because the room is
doing eight of the job. And so part of this
(18:36):
is if you're having a board meeting any of a
very specific goal, don't take the default set up of
the board meeting or the board location. And often we
choose these very important decisions based on logistics. We outsource
it to whatever is either easiest or whoever is in
charge of logistics. And and the first thing I would
say is make sure that your context works for the
goals that you have. So let's take it out of
the corporate context for a second. Here on a personal level,
(19:00):
what would be a brave choice for a setting for
a more personal I don't know, rite of passage or
or gathering, you know, for the purpose of a really
meaningful connection. Yeah, so take a birthday party. I'm making
this up. One of the things about birthday parties is
I think we often forget to ask like, rather than
(19:21):
saying what do I want my birthday party to look like,
to ask the reverse question, which is what does a
need in my life right now that a group of
specific people by gathering might help me fulfill and say,
for example, you know, in my twenties and my thirties,
I used to always interrupt my patterns I do these adventures.
I'd go to hikes on the weekend, or I'd go
to underground whatever clubs. And I never do that anymore.
(19:44):
And what if this year, I really want to get
my sense of adventure back. Okay, so what could that
look like in my city? What if my quote unquote
birthday party was a five am trip to the fishing
docks and watching the fishermen pull their nets in, and
I invited four people from my life who to me
represent adventure even as they take on the trappings of
less adventurous lives. You know, that is an interesting birthday party.
(20:05):
And you know, I know imman Kai was on your
show recently. I think he's genius at this which is
not being seduced or entrapped by the forms that we
think something has to take. To start with the need
hold onto that thought because when we come back, we're
going to take the ideas that you've put forth for
a corporate or a group gathering and apply it to
(20:27):
our personal shifts. We are back, and we are speaking
with crea Parker Arthur of the art of gathering, how
we meet and why it matters. Listening to you talk
(20:48):
about productive effective gathering sounds a lot like expanded conflict resolution.
And I'm thinking you say gatherings anytime there's more than
two or three people together, right, A family is a
gathering the rules or the techniques that you use in
um corporate settings like if you had been hired by
(21:10):
your parents, could could you take those big ideas and
help with the conflicts inherent in a family gathering? Absolutely?
And I will say families are their own unique systems
that are much more complicated, I think, than than corporate systems. Um.
I'll give a couple of examples that I love. So
one is I interviewed George DAWs Green, who founded the Moth. Um.
(21:33):
Are you familiar with the moth of course? And Um,
he had a family reunion. So moms are these you know,
storytelling nights? Um? And he had a family reunion a
few years ago. Um, and uh, I don't know. Eighty
people are so from his extended family were all coming together.
And I think it was a sister who said to him,
you know, rather than doing just like yard games, what
(21:54):
if we do one evening whereas we have this meaningful
coming together. Um, and what if we make it a
moth night? What if we make it a store retelling
moth night? And they called it it's not easy being
green because it's the last name. They rented out a
local hall, and um, anybody had five minutes I remember
the exact timeage, but five minutes or so, UM to
tell a story in their life about what it to
(22:14):
them it means to be a green. And as he
told her, he said, you know, I have a nephew
that I've barely spent any time with, who's a teenager,
you know, on the West coast. And he tells a
story about, you know, being in the locker room with
some guys and you know something and the other. And
I smiled to myself and and I realized, yeah, that
is what it means to be a green. Um. And
or I, you know, my great uncle talks about a
(22:35):
specific story, and I think that is not what it
means to be a green. Right. It's this. It's not
so directly on the nose, but it's this beautiful way
to begin to invite people to have some structure and
tell story that creates meaning about who are we? Who
is us? And particularly in an intergenerational context, who were we?
And what do we want to let go of? Mm hmm,
(22:56):
well that's an interesting one. I mean I I read
your question a little bit to be about what do
we do when family rooms have a lot of heat
in them? So it would certainly have helped if we
had established that that lineage and that long line of storytelling.
And but what do you do when you have established
none of that? Do you have advice for a family
(23:19):
system like that? I mean, you and I are both
children of divorce. We can't fix that. We we may choose, um,
we may choose conflict resolution as a way to sort
of address the pain of it, you know, shooting from
the hip here. But um, but is there advice for
that kind of family conflict? Um? I mean, I am
(23:40):
choosing my work to work out my pain, and I
think that most of many of us do. I think
It's one of the reasons I care so deeply about
this is because I come from a place where it
didn't work and um, and still doesn't in a lot
of ways. And I think for me, I think it's
very difficult in a moment in a family con text
(24:00):
to change the dynamic because we are so stuck not
only stuck in our roles, but everybody else has an
investment in our us playing those roles, and in my experience,
UM the heat in the family context, it's it's always
easier the next time around to think about what do
I want this to look like rather than let me
shift this in the moment. Um. So a couple of
(24:21):
tips for in the moment. The first is to try
to get people to share stories and experiences rather than opinions.
So this is particularly true if you're a Thanksgiving trying
to talk about politics, going down and debating politics, and
you know, with with people who are different points of
view in a family context with alcohol is rarely going
to get you to a good result. However, if you can,
(24:42):
you know, get your you know, Aunt Jude to talk
about a moment in the last forty years where she
felt invisible and why I'm making this up and why
she found hope in such and such candidate. But to
tell the story, right, that's interesting And so I think
part of what I've seen in family context is when
(25:02):
we can help um change the way we talk and
often through stories and change the questions we ask, Um,
it can be become more interesting. I'll give it another example.
So I also think it's easier to plan ahead of time.
So my husband and I, I'm happening in his His
parents are Indian uh Indian and he's an Indian American
born here. We were going back to India to visit
(25:24):
our extended family. We wanted dripping together those two families.
They had only met once at our wedding, And we thought,
how can we do this in a meaningful way where otherwise,
at least in our context, the cousins, I'll talk to
the cousins, the grandparents, all talk to everyone eats, drinks,
goes home. And we decided that we would do a
fifteen toasts, which is a format I talked about in
the book and I invented with a friend of mine,
where we chose a theme and we told him ahead
(25:45):
of time. Again, I'm a big fan of like letting
people know that this is happening and having them have
some choice in it. And I think the question we
asked was, um, what's a moment in your life that
changed your world view? And um, we were all all
like twenty people around a table. My grandmother, his grandparents
and multiple generations down cousins and they're partly behaving for
(26:07):
each other. Right, it's sometimes easier to have a context
when you're bringing together two different sides, even if their
in laws versus a nuclear family. And we asked him,
we said, at some point tonight, can you um ding
your glass and share a story and a moment in
your life that no one at this table has heard
of before? And that was the clincher and um and
the last person has to saying their toast, and it
(26:28):
was beautiful. I mean, my husband's like, you know, ninety
year old grandfather was talking about when he was like
a sprightly young leader in a film business. Um and
told this kind of Harvard Business School case study worthy
example of when he figured out, you know why the
film reels he was sending on the train down to
Bombay were weren't getting to the theaters. And all of
(26:51):
a sudden you saw this ninety two year old man
as the said, young, bright, ambitious man. And that's powerful,
particularly in a family context, because part I think gatherings
are transformative when we can remember and when we are
allowed to be many things. So what did that do
for you having that gathering be successful. It allowed me
(27:11):
to show my family that there are many ways to
gather and we don't have to do the same thing
over and over again. Um. It also let me see
many of my aunts and uncles and new lights right
and so and not um not as playing the role
of whether it's like always the one to cook, all
(27:31):
was the one to oppose the idea at the table,
or always the one to like leave early, always the
one who fall asleep. And you know, Stephanie Koonts, the sociologist,
talks a lot about what allows for marriages to last
over time, and one of the phrases to use is
to look at each other with fresh eyes. And I
think it allowed us to look at each other with
fresh eyes for an evening. To get people to share
at that level, um, either in a family or in
(27:54):
a corporate environment, there has to be a level of trust, right,
and you have to assume that when you share, you're
not going to be judged. How do you personally encourage
people not to be judgmental in a group, and how
do you do that individually? I think it starts with
(28:17):
the host and people in the room who have some
amount of influence and and and every system, someone has
some amount of influence whatever this because they've been there
around the longest, or because they're the newest, because they're
the oldest, because of the youngest. That doesn't matter. They
from You have to get from a leader type. Yeah,
at least from other people. Like in Conflict with Solution.
One of the things we do is we map what's
(28:37):
called social capital, like who in a community before you
go in. If they are on board, they will have
their constituents who say maybe we could do this, or well,
if Jared's doing it, maybe maybe there's a there there. Um.
But the first thing as a host is to be
vulnerable yourself. And so you mentioned the World Economic Form earlier.
I was. I'm a member of their Values Counsel, and
(28:59):
I um with a colleague wanted to host a dinner
the night before. That showed people a different way of
being together because I think at these meetings we tend
to perform rather than to kind of be and connect meaningfully.
We kind of give our our stump speeches rather than
our sprout speeches. We you know, we're trying to sell,
even if it's just a selling ourselves, and um, we
hosted a fifteen toast diner as the first is the
(29:20):
invention of the dinner, and we chose a theme a
good life? What is a good life to And we
invited fifteen members from different councils to come together in
a closed room like a closed door dinner context, and
asked them at some point in the night to give
a toast to that. And I kind of thought what
I was going to say and and three speeches, and
I realized I need to be more vulnerable than I
was planning to be, because if I I'm asking them
(29:42):
to be vulnerable, I need to be vulnerable myself. And
the story that came to mind was literally my mother
throwing me a period party. Oh my god, And I
thought the world and I thought, okay, here, I am
like younger than most people in the room, browner than
most people in the room, you know, like, oh, woman
of color, Like I don't want to play the type.
(30:03):
I want to talk about having gone to m I
t or I want to talk about, you know, I
want to talk about the chute unquote masculine parts of me.
And I thought, Priya, if I'm asking beautiful to be vulnerable,
and I'm asking them to trust each other. I need
to put some skin in the game. And so I
shared my period party with them, you know, and half
the room was men and I was shaking, you know,
and I was small, and I were telling them that
(30:23):
this party was meaningful for you, that it was part
of a good life. I told the example that, like
I think meaningful rituals, my mother hosted me this period party.
I explained what it was. I explained that in that moment,
because I came home. I'll tell it now. I came home.
I got my period at a friend's house out a sleepover,
and I wasn't sure what meaning to make of it.
I wasn't sure if it was awful or not. I
came home, my mother found out, picked me up in
(30:45):
the air, swung me around and like hooted and hollered
joyously through the house. And then she threw me this
period party where she invited from other women friends and
um like played Paul Simon and you know, like it
was made up, um, but to invite you and of
the sorority invite me, but more importantly to have a
memory when I did face a lot of contexts where
(31:08):
either a period was quote unquote not gross or that
it was, you know, problematic to be a woman in society.
I had this meaningful ritual and this memory that will
always remind me of the value and the power of
being a woman. Great job, mom, She's pretty great. Good mom, Pria,
(31:29):
thank you so much for teaching us how to gather.
Thank you for having me so useful. Thank you. If
you want to connect with Pria Parker, she's at Pria
Parker on Twitter and Instagram, and you can connect with us.
Tell us your period party stories, Your Turns Podcast seven
Three speeches, and I realized I need to be more
vulnerable than I was planning to be, because if I'm
asking them to be vulnerable, I need to be vulnerab
by myself. Hey, welcome to You Turns. This is the
(00:23):
podcast where we talk about change, where we want to
make our you Turns smooth Turns. I'm Lisa Oz, and
I'm Jill Herzig and Lisa. You and I were recently
talking about something in a comment you made really struck me.
You said that we have made junk food of our relationships. Well,
it's part of my life philosophy, or at least an
(00:45):
observation on modern life philosophy. Um, where I see that
we kind of disassociate all of the meaning from the pleasure.
So with food, we take out the sweet and the
salty and the fat and we extracted from natural source.
And with sex rather than having it in a long term,
committed relationship where you dig deep each all about the
(01:07):
orgasm in the connection with very superficial with like one
night stands and friends with beneficesent hooking up, and UM,
I think we do that everywhere we extract pleasure or
the most superficial level from those aspects of the thing
that given meaning. I think we do that like social media.
(01:28):
It's all about likes and and painting people and a
quick text rather than a real connected conversation. So that's
what I was talking about. That So in the same
way that junk food artificially pulls pulse flavors and artificially
injects them into things that have actually no nutritional value. Right,
we're our relationships are devoid of real nourishing qualities, and
(01:54):
yet we feel like we're interacting. We just wonder why
we're not satisfied. Yeah, you're always at this same time,
like if you eat junk food, you're always empty and
full at the same time. Really scary, which is why
we have run in our next guest, because she talks
about putting substance back into our interactions. We're speaking with
(02:16):
Pria Parker. She's the author of the Art of Gathering,
How We Meet and Why It Matters, and the founder
of Thrive Labs. Pria, thanks so much for being here today.
Thank you for having me so. Pria, can you talk
to us about what it means now to gather and
how we make those connections in today's environment. I think
of gathering as any time three more people come together
(02:37):
for a purpose, um. And that can be a wedding
or a funeral, or a pot luck or a neighborhood
birthday party. Um. And I think that one of the
reasons we don't gather as well as we could, or
to use your earlier analogy, we kind of junk food
gather is because most of our gatherings have gone on
to autopilot. We think that there's a specific form that
(03:01):
something has to look like. A birthday party looks like
candles and a you know cake, um. A wedding looks
like a white dress walking down an aisle. And in
part because for decades, for generations, we've been told that
if you get the things right of gathering, if you
get the fish knives right, if you get the wine right,
if you get the you know, the lighting right, which
is which is important, but it's not a precondition for
(03:23):
meaningful human connection. And you can see this from the
expertise from which we draw. We think gatherings and we
ask people who are experts on things. UM. So you know,
Martha Stewart, for example, sort of the symbol of if
you get the recipes right, you know, if you look
at her party planning guide on on her website, and
I don't mean to pick on Martha. I'm using her
as like an archetype. It's, you know, twenty seven steps,
(03:46):
three of which are about guests, which are logistical questions,
you know, get the r SUPs and the invitations out,
But then there's three steps about how to get the
crew did tase right. And I think, regardless of what
the advice is, we've basically been told that if you
get the things to a level of perfection, the rest
will take care of itself. And I think that's epically
bad advice. So I would say it's really more from Instagram,
(04:07):
and Martha's there too, But I mean Instagram is said
such a such a takeover of our imagination of how
things should look and how any party or event should feel. Um,
I mean, is social media a part of this junk
foodization of our gatherings? Absolutely, And I love that insight.
(04:30):
I think that we tend to design things for an audience,
and we're designing for the wrong audience. So there was
a piece and then Your Times maybe three or four
weeks ago that talked about events that have become literally
for the purpose to be instagram able and you go
and it's kind of this candy flossy type of you know,
(04:50):
that's a perfect um. You know, step and turns to
like take a photo in front of and the like.
The chandeliers are gorgeous, and you walk in and people
are very excited, and you leave feel and kind of empty,
and you realize that at some deep level you're kind
of being used for this future moment that somebody else
will see online that looked perfect. It's it's it's marketing.
(05:11):
You're a marketing engine. And the second thing is I
think part of what I'm so curious about and I
love what you all explore, is what are our sources
of meaning? And meaning is really hard to capture visually
unless you're an artist, and let's ask your medium. And
so partly these visual images of our of our gatherings,
the dinner table or the presentation, um, there are proxies
(05:33):
from meeting meaning, but in the room they are very,
very very indirect forms of meaning. We create meaning through conversation,
and it's very hard to capture conversation on Instagram, and
so we tend to put it on to the side
and we think that our meaning will be created only
through visual beauty. It's also very destructive. I think living
(05:53):
with someone who's public figure and needs to have Instagram
morble moments, it's incredibly disrupting when you're having a moment
and it's interrupted by the need to take a picture
and document that. And that's actually a big source of
conflict for me and my husband because he's always saying, oh,
let we need to get a picture of this. I
(06:14):
was like, no, we don't. It's your granddaughter's birthday. That
is not a public event. Beautiful um needs to be
here for them. And I think it takes us out
of our the intimacy of a moment to be thinking
of documenting it does. And and I'll say, and I
love the example of your husband because he's a more
extreme version of all of us, right, And sometimes it's
easier to see these things in the extreme. And what
(06:36):
I mean by that is, well, every gathering I believe
as a social contract, right, You're you're basically saying, I
want to do this, are you in? I want to
have a birthday party, do you want to come? I
want to have a conference? Do you are you know?
Are you for this? And part of what's happened with
social media is we've developed unconsciously to social contracts, our
contract with our present people in your you know, in
(06:58):
the room with your god daughters, birthday or whatever it is,
and this kind of invisible social contract with our quote
unquote audience or quote unquote followers. Whether you're a public
figure or not, everybody has an audience. Everybody has an
audience and um, and they're competing. But right now we're
not conscious of them competing, and so we are. Our
conflicts you're conflict with your husband are proxy wars for
basically this deeper question, which is who is this audience?
(07:21):
What is the purpose of this gathering? And who is
this for? First? And if there is another audience, are
they fulfilling your first purpose or are they distracting from it?
But we rarely have those conversations explicitly, you know, just
kind of connecting this to you turns a little bit um.
Often these gatherings, weddings, funerals, birthdays, these are significant moments
(07:43):
where we're trying to move from one phase in our
life to another. And I'm I'm wondering if what you've
identified as a problem is something that's really hindering us
from doing that. Do you think it's that big a problem? Deeply?
And I think part of our gatherings is that because
we think something has to look in a certain way
or take a certain form, we've we've lost the meaning
(08:05):
in them. And I'll give an example. I recently got
a story from somebody who had read the Art of
Gathering and um, she's a self described stocker. Mom Um,
she lived in Chicago and she and her family moved
to the suburbs, so a transition, right, She's picked up
the house for a lot of different reasons. They've moved
to another type of neighborhood, another context. And they went
(08:27):
from a neighborhood that had a lot of chili cookoffs
and people were gathering all the time. And she came
in and kind of no, no one welcomed her in
an obvious way, right, there wasn't a gathering to welcome her.
People don't show up with banana bread, No, not anymore
that anymore. Kind of like cast role exactly. And she had,
you know, read the book. I don't mean be promoting,
but like she thought, Okay, here's an opportunity where I
would like to create a meaningful ritual where I get
(08:49):
to meet my neighbors. How do I do this in
a way that's meaningful, not just like, hey, guys, let's
come together and have cocktails and kind of say hi
and you know, and kind of have a form. What
would a meaningful, you know, simple gathering look like. So
she had her kids, she went out to Kinko's. She
said to her husbands, this is worth dollars for the invitation,
because the invitation primes, and this is our first opportunity
(09:09):
to really get to know our neighbors. She had her
two kids go on scooters around the neighborhood and hang
coffee cups on ten neighbors that she had met to
get their emails, and on the coffee cups, She's left
an invitation that said something like your email and then
three facts about you and how many years have you
lived on this block. They brought them back and she
sent an email out because she had their emails and
primed them with a like a gift from Cheers, and
(09:31):
said we'd love to have you over at Jackson Avenue.
And then the neighbors came and she had two sets
of name tags. One that was the name of the
other was three things that were true about them, but
put on someone else. So these neighbors had to come
in and then find like, oh that's me right, you're
you're wearing my name tag And they had never necessarily
met it must have thought some fun ladies. She changed
(09:54):
the norms and then she brought a cake out and
on the cake and said two fifteen, Like what was
that and she said, it's the number of years we
collectively have all lived on this block, and like that
is meaningful. She made it up. She's sure her purpose
is to get to know her neighbors, but also to
change the norms of gathering, and she was able to
do it in a way that was um, not junk food,
(10:17):
but still simple m m. And I'm sure they all
got to know each other a lot better to trying
to figure out which two had the sticker that was
yeah yeah. And when she had the cakes, she said,
we're so happy to be in our forever home. And
afterwards one of the neighbors said, well, we'll also progressive.
Let's let's do this. Is so gatherings are powerful in
part because when you gather in a way that's authentic,
(10:38):
it's contagious. When we come back, we're going to dig
deeper into that how to create meaningful groups. We've been
talking about gathering and we are with PREA. Parker. She
(11:00):
is the author of the Art of Gathering. You are
also the CEO and founder of Thrive Labs. So I
want to talk about that a little bit. You consult
with large corporations the World Economic Forum. So impressed. Um,
these groups that have challenges getting together. Can you tell
us a little bit about that. My background is in
(11:21):
group conflict resolution, So my craft and and kind of
my my day job is as a group facilitator. UM.
I'm by racial. I I was born in Zimbabwe. I
have an Indian mother and a white American father, um,
and they both remarried after some time, and I grew
up with them having joined custody. So back and forth
between these two extreme homes uh Indian kind of vegetarian, Buddhist, atheist,
(11:43):
incense dwelling and fuse liberal Democrat. You kind of get
the point home and then this white American evangelical Christian
conservative Republican, you know, me eating church, going home and
every two weeks I go back and forth and my
husband often jokes as no wonder and ended up in
the field of confict resolution, And I work now with
with companies, with political groups, with organizations that at some
(12:06):
level are going through a transition and trying to figure
out who they want to be, who they want to
be individually and collectively. And to me, so much of conflict,
and I use that not as a bad word, comes
down to a disagreement over identity or identities. And so
I work with groups that, um, that are trying to
(12:27):
have meaningful, complicated conversations together and need somebody to help
create that container in space and figure out how do
you actually have meaningful conversation when there's some heat in
the room. Is there some general tips for lack of
a better word that you can give us that we
can use because we've all been in rooms that felt
pretty hot. I think the first is, no, your purpose,
(12:51):
So heat for heat sake is not necessarily a good
and I could only be very dangerous. UM, but no,
the specific purpose as to why you're gathering people and
won't assume you know what it is. So for example,
often I'll be approached by a group of people who
are saying, UM, a company that say, is where we
have this team off site, and UM, we really want
to talk about our vision for the next year, and
(13:12):
I start poking around and as you say, what is
meeting in person worth coming together forth? You can't do
on email, you can't do on a conference call. So
part of this is making more sacred our time together
UM and then to make sure that the whatever that
question is it, particularly if you're going to be talking
about UM some elements of heat, that you're priming people
(13:33):
for it. So one of my favorite characters that I
met when I interviewed over a hundred gatherers to figure
out like how do they create UM transformative experiences as
a woman named Ida Benedito, and she's an underground experience
designer who helps groups deal with risk and taking risks.
And I asked her, what can we law learn from you?
And she said, every time I create an experience for
(13:54):
people that's going to be uncomfortable, I ask four questions.
One what is this group avoiding? Two what is the
gift in facing it? Three? What is the risk in
facing it? And four is the gift worth the risk? Mhm.
I can see that that's super effective for a group
that is electively together. You can create a common goal.
(14:18):
But what I'm thinking is your parents divorced, so they
chose not to be a group. What do you do
where when the differences are such that, let's just take
for example, the United States Congress, where they are of
such disparate goals that, given given their druthers, they probably
(14:38):
would separate and not work together. What what do you
do where you have a forced collective where the goal
isn't the same, and yet they still have to work together.
How much time do you have but just well, and
if anyone who's in Congress is listening, exactly help them.
So I think Congress and and frankly most public or
(15:01):
kind of private corporate gatherings. This is true, which you
have to look at the underlying systems that these people
are part of and representing. And we've created a political
system where the majority of what happens in the room
has broadly been decided before anyone enters the room. Right,
they're funded by a certain group, they have made promises
(15:23):
to certain um political donors. They need a strong n R,
a score, they whatever it is. But to these metaphors,
we're worshiping other gods and they're beholden to the people,
And so partly in a gathering, I think some of
the best gatherings that are created for congressmen and women
are the ones that are off the record, behind closed doors,
(15:43):
without an audience, that are um that our relationship building.
So you know, when you think about um Jimmy Carter
in the Middle East peace process, one of the moments
that created a breakthrough between kind of all of the
sides was when they pulled out there are pictures of
their grandchildren. Right. They saw each other as humans, They
saw each of themselves as grandfathers who had grandchildren of
(16:06):
whom they all cared about, and it was a disarming
moment in which they could actually begin to at least
pause some of their other beholden interests and remember, we
have a sense of common purpose. And often one of
the reasons I think gatherings tend to get stuck, and
this is very true in Congress, is that they go
on autopilot and we go into scripts. So you already
have a sense of what you know. Nancy Pelosi is
(16:27):
going to say, you already have a sense of what
you know. Chucking was gonna say, I'm using the Democratic leadership.
And I think part of the opportunity in Congress is
anytime anybody has an opportunity to throw people off their
scripts and get even a moment where they come back
to the reason they entered politics and connect to that.
I think you saw a little bit of that in
the Kavanaugh hearings with Jeff Lake and the elevator. He
(16:47):
was thrown off his script for a second. Um. And
so I think it's very hard and embedded systems to
do that. And I think that that's the opportunity. Do
we script ourselves all the time? All of us? I
think we were bond to the cultural context that we
are in. And scripts aren't necessarily a bad thing if
you're if you're reading the script you want to be reading.
(17:07):
And what I mean by script is basically a set
of uh in a way first a character and a
set of language of vocabulary UM, that we are following
because we think we are trying to achieve a certain purpose.
So for example, at a board meeting, UM, to structure
a board meeting in a way where you have mahogany
tables and UM, you know, everybody's sitting around the table
in a very specific way, wearing specific jackets and specific roles. UM.
(17:31):
There's a sense of what a board meeting should feel
like or look like. But often those board means get
very stuck because people are playing the same roles over
and over again and perpetuating a hierarchy that is more
about the relationships in the room than the problem at hand.
And so often, as a facilitator, one of the things
that kind of my profession does is come in and
figure out how can you knock people off their scripts
for a purpose. And so if, for example, what that
(17:53):
board room needs is intimacy or silliness, and again you
can have strategic silliness. Silliness leads to a lot of breakthroughs.
The first, you know tip that to to give your
listeners is deeply and courageously choose the location um of
your gathering. And one of the people I interviewed, Patrick Frick,
is a great facilitator. He said the room does percent
(18:14):
of the job. Jerry Seinfeld has said the same thing
in an interview um where he says, you know, I'll
be Vaudeville houses are my favorite places to perform around
the country and some this is a quote from a
radio show he did. Some rich guy sees you in
the theater, brings you to his birthday party and you
go down the toilet and everybody thinks Jerry Seinfel is
awful in real person, And it's because the room is
doing eight of the job. And so part of this
(18:36):
is if you're having a board meeting any of a
very specific goal, don't take the default set up of
the board meeting or the board location. And often we
choose these very important decisions based on logistics. We outsource
it to whatever is either easiest or whoever is in
charge of logistics. And and the first thing I would
say is make sure that your context works for the
goals that you have. So let's take it out of
the corporate context for a second. Here on a personal level,
(19:00):
what would be a brave choice for a setting for
a more personal I don't know, rite of passage or
or gathering, you know, for the purpose of a really
meaningful connection. Yeah, so take a birthday party. I'm making
this up. One of the things about birthday parties is
I think we often forget to ask like, rather than
(19:21):
saying what do I want my birthday party to look like,
to ask the reverse question, which is what does a
need in my life right now that a group of
specific people by gathering might help me fulfill and say,
for example, you know, in my twenties and my thirties,
I used to always interrupt my patterns I do these adventures.
I'd go to hikes on the weekend, or I'd go
to underground whatever clubs. And I never do that anymore.
(19:44):
And what if this year, I really want to get
my sense of adventure back. Okay, so what could that
look like in my city? What if my quote unquote
birthday party was a five am trip to the fishing
docks and watching the fishermen pull their nets in, and
I invited four people from my life who to me
represent adventure even as they take on the trappings of
less adventurous lives. You know, that is an interesting birthday party.
(20:05):
And you know, I know imman Kai was on your
show recently. I think he's genius at this which is
not being seduced or entrapped by the forms that we
think something has to take. To start with the need
hold onto that thought because when we come back, we're
going to take the ideas that you've put forth for
a corporate or a group gathering and apply it to
(20:27):
our personal shifts. We are back, and we are speaking
with crea Parker Arthur of the art of gathering, how
we meet and why it matters. Listening to you talk
(20:48):
about productive effective gathering sounds a lot like expanded conflict resolution.
And I'm thinking you say gatherings anytime there's more than
two or three people together, right, A family is a
gathering the rules or the techniques that you use in
um corporate settings like if you had been hired by
(21:10):
your parents, could could you take those big ideas and
help with the conflicts inherent in a family gathering? Absolutely?
And I will say families are their own unique systems
that are much more complicated, I think, than than corporate systems. Um.
I'll give a couple of examples that I love. So
one is I interviewed George DAWs Green, who founded the Moth. Um.
(21:33):
Are you familiar with the moth of course? And Um,
he had a family reunion. So moms are these you know,
storytelling nights? Um? And he had a family reunion a
few years ago. Um, and uh, I don't know. Eighty
people are so from his extended family were all coming together.
And I think it was a sister who said to him,
you know, rather than doing just like yard games, what
(21:54):
if we do one evening whereas we have this meaningful
coming together. Um, and what if we make it a
moth night? What if we make it a store retelling
moth night? And they called it it's not easy being
green because it's the last name. They rented out a
local hall, and um, anybody had five minutes I remember
the exact timeage, but five minutes or so, UM to
tell a story in their life about what it to
(22:14):
them it means to be a green. And as he
told her, he said, you know, I have a nephew
that I've barely spent any time with, who's a teenager,
you know, on the West coast. And he tells a
story about, you know, being in the locker room with
some guys and you know something and the other. And
I smiled to myself and and I realized, yeah, that
is what it means to be a green. Um. And
or I, you know, my great uncle talks about a
(22:35):
specific story, and I think that is not what it
means to be a green. Right. It's this. It's not
so directly on the nose, but it's this beautiful way
to begin to invite people to have some structure and
tell story that creates meaning about who are we? Who
is us? And particularly in an intergenerational context, who were we?
And what do we want to let go of? Mm hmm,
(22:56):
well that's an interesting one. I mean I I read
your question a little bit to be about what do
we do when family rooms have a lot of heat
in them? So it would certainly have helped if we
had established that that lineage and that long line of storytelling.
And but what do you do when you have established
none of that? Do you have advice for a family
(23:19):
system like that? I mean, you and I are both
children of divorce. We can't fix that. We we may choose, um,
we may choose conflict resolution as a way to sort
of address the pain of it, you know, shooting from
the hip here. But um, but is there advice for
that kind of family conflict? Um? I mean, I am
(23:40):
choosing my work to work out my pain, and I
think that most of many of us do. I think
It's one of the reasons I care so deeply about
this is because I come from a place where it
didn't work and um, and still doesn't in a lot
of ways. And I think for me, I think it's
very difficult in a moment in a family con text
(24:00):
to change the dynamic because we are so stuck not
only stuck in our roles, but everybody else has an
investment in our us playing those roles, and in my experience,
UM the heat in the family context, it's it's always
easier the next time around to think about what do
I want this to look like rather than let me
shift this in the moment. Um. So a couple of
(24:21):
tips for in the moment. The first is to try
to get people to share stories and experiences rather than opinions.
So this is particularly true if you're a Thanksgiving trying
to talk about politics, going down and debating politics, and
you know, with with people who are different points of
view in a family context with alcohol is rarely going
to get you to a good result. However, if you can,
(24:42):
you know, get your you know, Aunt Jude to talk
about a moment in the last forty years where she
felt invisible and why I'm making this up and why
she found hope in such and such candidate. But to
tell the story, right, that's interesting And so I think
part of what I've seen in family context is when
(25:02):
we can help um change the way we talk and
often through stories and change the questions we ask, Um,
it can be become more interesting. I'll give it another example.
So I also think it's easier to plan ahead of time.
So my husband and I, I'm happening in his His
parents are Indian uh Indian and he's an Indian American
born here. We were going back to India to visit
(25:24):
our extended family. We wanted dripping together those two families.
They had only met once at our wedding, And we thought,
how can we do this in a meaningful way where otherwise,
at least in our context, the cousins, I'll talk to
the cousins, the grandparents, all talk to everyone eats, drinks,
goes home. And we decided that we would do a
fifteen toasts, which is a format I talked about in
the book and I invented with a friend of mine,
where we chose a theme and we told him ahead
(25:45):
of time. Again, I'm a big fan of like letting
people know that this is happening and having them have
some choice in it. And I think the question we
asked was, um, what's a moment in your life that
changed your world view? And um, we were all all
like twenty people around a table. My grandmother, his grandparents
and multiple generations down cousins and they're partly behaving for
(26:07):
each other. Right, it's sometimes easier to have a context
when you're bringing together two different sides, even if their
in laws versus a nuclear family. And we asked him,
we said, at some point tonight, can you um ding
your glass and share a story and a moment in
your life that no one at this table has heard
of before? And that was the clincher and um and
the last person has to saying their toast, and it
(26:28):
was beautiful. I mean, my husband's like, you know, ninety
year old grandfather was talking about when he was like
a sprightly young leader in a film business. Um and
told this kind of Harvard Business School case study worthy
example of when he figured out, you know why the
film reels he was sending on the train down to
Bombay were weren't getting to the theaters. And all of
(26:51):
a sudden you saw this ninety two year old man
as the said, young, bright, ambitious man. And that's powerful,
particularly in a family context, because part I think gatherings
are transformative when we can remember and when we are
allowed to be many things. So what did that do
for you having that gathering be successful. It allowed me
(27:11):
to show my family that there are many ways to
gather and we don't have to do the same thing
over and over again. Um. It also let me see
many of my aunts and uncles and new lights right
and so and not um not as playing the role
of whether it's like always the one to cook, all
(27:31):
was the one to oppose the idea at the table,
or always the one to like leave early, always the
one who fall asleep. And you know, Stephanie Koonts, the sociologist,
talks a lot about what allows for marriages to last
over time, and one of the phrases to use is
to look at each other with fresh eyes. And I
think it allowed us to look at each other with
fresh eyes for an evening. To get people to share
at that level, um, either in a family or in
(27:54):
a corporate environment, there has to be a level of trust, right,
and you have to assume that when you share, you're
not going to be judged. How do you personally encourage
people not to be judgmental in a group, and how
do you do that individually? I think it starts with
(28:17):
the host and people in the room who have some
amount of influence and and and every system, someone has
some amount of influence whatever this because they've been there
around the longest, or because they're the newest, because they're
the oldest, because of the youngest. That doesn't matter. They
from You have to get from a leader type. Yeah,
at least from other people. Like in Conflict with Solution.
One of the things we do is we map what's
(28:37):
called social capital, like who in a community before you
go in. If they are on board, they will have
their constituents who say maybe we could do this, or well,
if Jared's doing it, maybe maybe there's a there there. Um.
But the first thing as a host is to be
vulnerable yourself. And so you mentioned the World Economic Form earlier.
I was. I'm a member of their Values Counsel, and
(28:59):
I um with a colleague wanted to host a dinner
the night before. That showed people a different way of
being together because I think at these meetings we tend
to perform rather than to kind of be and connect meaningfully.
We kind of give our our stump speeches rather than
our sprout speeches. We you know, we're trying to sell,
even if it's just a selling ourselves, and um, we
hosted a fifteen toast diner as the first is the
(29:20):
invention of the dinner, and we chose a theme a
good life? What is a good life to And we
invited fifteen members from different councils to come together in
a closed room like a closed door dinner context, and
asked them at some point in the night to give
a toast to that. And I kind of thought what
I was going to say and and three speeches, and
I realized I need to be more vulnerable than I
was planning to be, because if I I'm asking them
(29:42):
to be vulnerable, I need to be vulnerable myself. And
the story that came to mind was literally my mother
throwing me a period party. Oh my god, And I
thought the world and I thought, okay, here, I am
like younger than most people in the room, browner than
most people in the room, you know, like, oh, woman
of color, Like I don't want to play the type.
(30:03):
I want to talk about having gone to m I
t or I want to talk about, you know, I
want to talk about the chute unquote masculine parts of me.
And I thought, Priya, if I'm asking beautiful to be vulnerable,
and I'm asking them to trust each other. I need
to put some skin in the game. And so I
shared my period party with them, you know, and half
the room was men and I was shaking, you know,
and I was small, and I were telling them that
(30:23):
this party was meaningful for you, that it was part
of a good life. I told the example that, like
I think meaningful rituals, my mother hosted me this period party.
I explained what it was. I explained that in that moment,
because I came home. I'll tell it now. I came home.
I got my period at a friend's house out a sleepover,
and I wasn't sure what meaning to make of it.
I wasn't sure if it was awful or not. I
came home, my mother found out, picked me up in
(30:45):
the air, swung me around and like hooted and hollered
joyously through the house. And then she threw me this
period party where she invited from other women friends and
um like played Paul Simon and you know, like it
was made up, um, but to invite you and of
the sorority invite me, but more importantly to have a
memory when I did face a lot of contexts where
(31:08):
either a period was quote unquote not gross or that
it was, you know, problematic to be a woman in society.
I had this meaningful ritual and this memory that will
always remind me of the value and the power of
being a woman. Great job, mom, She's pretty great. Good mom, Pria,
(31:29):
thank you so much for teaching us how to gather.
Thank you for having me so useful. Thank you. If
you want to connect with Pria Parker, she's at Pria
Parker on Twitter and Instagram, and you can connect with us.
Tell us your period party stories, Your Turns Podcast seven
Road to Somewhere News
Hosts And Creators
Lisa Oz
Jill Herzig
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