Can Conflict Actually Make Our Relationships Stronger? with Priya Parker

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Contact us on LinkedIn, spend $250 on your first campaign, and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com/campaign, turn sick edition supply. On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride, with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media podcast network. Hi, Adam. Hey, Brunei. Are you excited to talk with Priya Parker? I can't wait. I have some fighting that I need to get better at. Oh my God, I mean, I thought about us a lot when I was reading this book, and I thought about my whole life when I was reading this book growing up. Now, what I've learned about conflict, let's tell people who Priya is in case you don't know. Priya Parker is a facilitator, strategic advisor, and a claimed author of the art of gathering, how we meet and why it matters. Her new book is The Art of Fighting, the transformative power of conflict. It's available now. She's trained in the field of conflict resolution, she's worked on race relations on American college campuses, on peace process in the Arab world, in Africa, and in India. She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Let's bring on Priya. Priya Parker, welcome to the Curiosity Shop. Are you ready to fight? I'm always ready. Thank you for having me. I know. I'm always ready to fight. I don't think you two are the 10 tended targets of this book. I don't know. You both are comfortable with healthy heat. And yet, extremely conflict diverse, I speak for myself only here. But. Really? I am not conflict diverse at all, but do you think you're conflict diverse on them? Historically. Yeah. I've worked hard to overcome it. Man, you. Guys, I'll start with an apology because it's working with me. Apology rejected. I love it. I love the fact that we can fight and get closer, which is what Priya's book is all about. And I have to say that, first of all, let me just show the book again. Love the cover. Really? All my post-it notes. Really loved this book. I summoned you to facilitate and is in rooms with teams all the time. I was like, oh my god, holy shit, where is this book been? My entire facilitating life. So congratulations on the book. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I have to say, Adam, to your point, not, I got to tell you, I don't think we've ever had a fight or a disagreement where we weren't better when it was over. I appreciate that about you and about our relationship. So I'll start there, modeling what the book is about. Same. But I also, Priya, when I was revisiting the book, because I first read it a few months ago. I couldn't help but think that, if you had just written it 10 years earlier, Brunei and I could have avoided our four years of not talking to each other. So where is your time machine is what I want to know? Okay, so let's go to your conflict history. I'm so glad I'm so glad to bring you up. Great. This is not about us. I want to jump in to a line that is right at the top of the book. How do you fight with those to whom you want to belong? And why am I in so many rooms with so many people that say, you absolutely do not want to fight with people to whom you want to belong? We have been taught in this culture myself included that fighting is immoral, dysfunctional, messed up, only for bad groups out there, quote unquote. And yet we all fight. It's a normal part of everyday life. And in part because we've been taught at some level that you only fight with the enemy, it's distorting what fighting actually is, which is to belong to any group, to any team, to any family, meaningfully, you have to sort things out. And we have actually such a flat word fight. I wish we had 600 different words to describe all of these different types of relevant tension. And I'm a conflict averse conflict resolution facilitator. So I have learned that conflict is a skill. And I've also learned that when you avoid it, there's a lot of loss. Avoiding conflict doesn't make your team or your group stronger. In fact, it increases the likelihood that it falls apart. It's so interesting because I'm thinking about growing up. And I'm thinking about my parents and the parents of my friends. And you write about this a little bit in the book. I saw two things, no fighting, which is what I really longed for as a kid, or really shitty, hurtful fighting downstairs muffled when you're a kid, you're scared. It seems terrible. It doesn't seem productive. I mean, I didn't have the word productive. It just seems like your world's getting ready to end any minute. And so the only thing I ever saw was like no fighting. And my friends saying, oh my God, my parents have never been in a fight in their lives. Or, oh my God, it's my whole world getting ready to end because I don't understand what's happening. And so when Steve and I first got married, and of course we've done a lot of counseling because neither one of us comforted something where we saw productive, we've never seen the art of fighting. And so the first couple of times when Ellen was maybe old enough to know that we were in disagreement, we were both like, oh God, I think we're supposed to do it, but I think we're supposed to do it well. I don't think we're supposed to pretend that things are wrong and I don't think we're supposed to go ape shit right now, I just think we're just supposed to be like, productively doing something. Yeah, no. Well, in a moment, in a way, you almost want to end that moment, pause as if you're watching a soccer match or a football match and like get the coach in your ear and be like, no, okay, what do I say? And what do I do? Because this is relevant and I don't want to mess up in front of my child. And I care about this person, but I'm also really mad. Yes, that's it. And we don't have those coaches. We haven't been taught, we don't have a lot of examples of healthy heat. And so many of our families, so many of our teams do exactly what it, it sounds like was also happening in your friends' families. As we oscillate between what I call unhealthy peace, which is avoidance, no one ever says the thing, really important conversations, never get had. And or we oscillate to the other side and enter into unhealthy heat or unhealthy conflict, which is dominance, insulting, manipulative, abuse, but yet conflict is actually relevance, conflict, that's why I call it heat, it's dangerous, but it's also relevant. And what we actually need are skills and tools to begin to help hold the most important conversations of our lives. We don't fight with the people we don't care about and they're not relevant to us. I mean, this book isn't up, the art of fighting isn't about yelling at strangers on the internet. The art of fighting is how do you actually build resilient, fun, thriving, meaningful, connected teams? Okay, so this, I think speaks to one of my favorite points from the book, which is, one of the things you crystallize for me is that too often we end up on the two extremes, either unhealthy peace or unhealthy heat, because we avoid the conflict until it blows up. And you actually suggest that we should fight more to practice when the stakes are low. How do we do that? I once saw this actually done in a tech company, they were having their leadership retreat and I have permission to talk about this. The vice president was responsible for hosting a three-day retreat, 5,000 leaders. They were at a huge crossroads in their company. And he realized that they were suffering from what he called toxic politeness, right? And everyone knew there was deep difference and a number of different perspectives in a really [BLANK_AUDIO] important decisions they needed to make. But their norms were such that if once it started happening everyone was sort of look away or make a joke and sort of keep it cool, temperature-wise. And so when he did, on the first day, he went up on stage and he said, "You know, welcome. I don't like doing this, but we're gonna start on kind of a heavier note today. We have some big decisions to make. I was in the room. You could see everyone sort of like tense up, pay attention." And he said, "So we're gonna actually start with four really big debates. We're just gonna rip the bandaid off." And everyone's kind of like looking around, you know, pin drop silence. Everyone was normally texting like, "Looks up." And he says, "Because we need to really make some big decisions on as a team." And then he says, "So the first debate within our, you know, historic company and he looks up and he looks on the back of the sliding." He says, "And the slide appears pineapple on pizza." Yes or no. And everyone's like, "What? He's also, he's practicing being an artful fighter. Let's go. Groups of four. Duke it out. Debate." And I turn to the four people around me and one of them scrunching up their nose and another one's like, "That's disgusting." And another one's like, "Do you not have any curiosity in your life? Pineapple on pizza is amazing." And someone else is like, "I'm Italian. I'm offended. Pineapple doesn't go on pizza." And everyone's laughing and ribbing at each other and not worrying about walking on landmines. And then he puts up a second slide. And it's like, "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" Yes or no. Third slide. And then the keep on doing this. They're practicing their reps. What is the right time for lunch? And again, I'm like, "What's the right?" And people are just go 11 a.m. What are you? 11 a.m.? That's barely breakfast. No, no, no. 2 p.m. If I eat before 2, I'm going to fall asleep. Again, but what they're actually doing is they're practicing pro-social fighting. There's warmth. Yeah. There's humor. They're practicing about strongly held opinions that don't matter. And as I was watching this room, the genius of what Lionel Mori did was he basically helped see that low stakes arguing actually helps prepare us for high stakes arguing. In part, because a lot of what we avoid in the fight isn't actually the intellectual or the language. It's how our bodies freak out when we're in the room. Yeah. And so what he's starting to do and what that room did, and I now host hot takes parties. For my teams, for teams, I have a newsletter called Group Life. We hosted a hot takes party a few weeks ago just to practice these skills. And the core lesson here is to approach heat, add warmth. I love that example. It's so playful. And it reminds me of times when I've warmed students up in the classroom or leaders in teams just by saying, "Hey, is cereal soup?" Yeah. It's the same exact dynamic. People are like, "Hey, we can actually disagree with each other and think it's hilarious and not mind that the other person has a completely different view." And part of doing that as a teacher, as an educator at the beginning of a class, is you are, this is now getting into art of gathering stuff. But the first 5% of a classroom, of a meeting, you're actually laying the pathways for how people behave in the norms for the rest of the time together. And so you're increasing their perception of warmth of each other. When we feel safe, one of the, I interviewed three types of people for the art of fighting. People experiencing conflict, which is everybody, but groups fighting, people who study conflict. So researchers, professors, and then people who hold conflict. Facilitators, trainers, lawyers, and Prentice Hempel, who I know Brunei knows, Prentice said, "The most powerful body we have is a relaxed body." God, that's so true. And so part of what you're also doing is you're increasing your students or your leader's ability to actually hold complexity when you're also semantically relaxing them and giving them pro-social experiences with each other. It actually changes the capacity for the rest of the meeting. God, that's so interesting. And it's also, I mean, it takes me to another point in this book that I just, when I read it, I called my husband. I called some of the facilitators we work with in organizations. And it's just a line that took my breath away. Healthy conflict is the missing link in our struggle with loneliness. Like I cannot, with very few exceptions over the last 20 years, every organization that I go into to do really deep work starts with, well, we have a nice problem. You know, and it's what you're talking about, the toxic positivity. And when I dig into it, there's always just this moment. So I say, well, when you get angry, or you're disappointed, or you're frustrated, and you're not talking to the person who's involved in this. When you're not talking to that person about how you're feeling, what are you doing? And 100% of the time the answer is we're talking about that person to someone else. And oh, my God, like the distance created when people are so afraid to be uncomfortable with each other. Can you walk us through that? I mean, so much of your work rhymes so deeply with the art of fighting. I mean, I can't tell you how many people say to me, it's like what Burnet Brown says. Clear is kind, right? It's reframing the idea that we assume that the only way to be in relationship with one another is when things are peachy. And actually, the crucible moment of all group life is a fight. You can't, like, I studied group theory for this. And there are stages of group development. And the second stage is called the storm. So part is you, it's you form as a group. This could be a trivia club. This could be a church group. This could be a volunteer group. This could be a new team. You form, then you storm, conflict increases. Who are we? How do we share power? How are we going to do this? What night of week are we going to meet? Then you norm, and then you perform. And in so many of our teams when I joke like when the group chat goes silent, it's usually because there's a smaller sidebar. Right? And so a huge part of the side text. Yeah. Exactly. The side text. Like, did you see that? Part of what often happens is when we aren't taught the skills or given the social permission to to address whatever the issue is between us or this can also be about a product. Like the number of companies or teams that avoid a product fails that avoids literally a debrief. What went wrong? Right? Yeah. Of course, opposed to Mortem because there's so much assumed shame. So part of this is the way to kind of actually come back together is reframing it. But then saying, hey, I want to talk with you about this because I want to work with you. Right? I want to invest in you. One of the teams I looked at that I think is so interesting. It's a family-owned business. They're a generation fine dining restaurant in the Pacific Northwest called Cannes. And I'd heard about them from other restaurant tours. And they were saying you should talk to them. The brothers there are doing something very interesting about how they actually hold heat. And they have two spaces in their restaurants. One's called the Keshe and one's called the Hooch, where if people, if like staff members are basically starting to bicker or get into it on the floor, someone rings a bell and says, take it to the Hooch. And they've created special, separate, private, not in front of everyone, one-on-one spaces. Or they don't just say, give each other feedback directly. They actually have normalized. It's in their employee handbook. I wish I could read it in front of you. Do not take the person aside. Do not do in front of other people. We are going to have many moments of conflict every night of service. Oh God, that's true. This is not a disaster. This is actually how we team. And so starting by a leader or a manager normalizing and having people actually practice what I call molehill clearing. Like small kerfuffles to just again passing the ball back and forth. This is a massive part of communication. If we don't actually know how to communicate, we're not giving scripts, we're not giving tools. And the other thing I'd say is I see a lot of in workplaces, something will happen. And not only do they talk behind others back, I've seen people post oblique stories on Instagram about what's going on in their team. Well, Priya, one of the things that you just spoke to that I think very powerfully is you were referencing the Bruce Talkman work on stages of group development, right? On forming, storming, norming and performing. And I think one of the things that a lot of groups get wrong is they think those are linear stages. And once you pass through stage two, you're done with it, right? We have stormed. Now we can norm and perform. And I think what glad that's over. Yeah, I think what you're underscoring here is that we actually need to normalize storming as part of our ongoing communication process. And the canless example is such a fun one. And the idea of having a place where people can playfully shout at each other to go, it really takes the pressure off. As opposed to say, okay, you two, you need to fight. You need to have a conflict. You know, we think that a storm only happens once. And then it's like, okay, great. So now we can perform forever. But actually storms happen all the time. And so often in group life, we have rituals, we have application processes, explain or articulate why we want in, right? College application, a job interview, you get to hear the other side who they are, you get to sell yourself, and then we just kind of help like, okay, great, now we're in. But actually, once you get into a long-term group, fights are the moment of articulation as to why we stay, right? There's no midway interview. It's like, well, why are we doing it that way? Or I look at a ticodrumming circle group, I look at all types of groups in the artifighting, in part to normalize heat, all groups fight. It's not only super complex groups, the groups you think have no difference within them. They too fight. And one of the, in group life, often a moment will happen that's called, I call, a forcing mechanism, where everybody has to see the same moment at the same time. So in families, those are weddings, right? Oh, do they say the word God or not? What kind of ritual? Why isn't Indian families, she's not wearing red, right? All of these sort of like implicit norms are visibilized. But in companies, it's like, oh, 30th anniversary, why is everyone fighting? Because it's a forcing mechanism to debate, who are we? Which product do we want to say is who we've been and what we want to celebrate? Who gets stage time? What is our vision? These are high stakes moments that actually forces to articulate who we think we are. And if you block that conversation, it's not good for the body of the group. God, these are fraught times. These are the times that you just named our times over the course of my personal and professional life, where when heat is avoided, I have seen permanent fissures that people never come back from. Talk to me about this, this idea that I have in my head and you write it and you and I have talked about it before, offline and I think probably publicly, the scourge of comfort. Like this belief that a joyful, meaningful good life is one that is free from discomfort. Yeah, free from friction. Where does this come from? I don't know. I don't know. And I think it's a dangerous trope. I think it's when we celebrate like not my baggage, not my labor, not my circus. Now, there is some conflict that is wise to avoid. I'm not saying have every fight. I actually spent the first three chapters of the art of fighting saying, make sure you want to have the fight because there's a lot of fight to worth avoiding. But within connected, meaningful community, one has to engage across difference and be uncomfortable at all. I'll give a simple example. And this, you know, often it's actually in happy moments that I'm called in and people will say like, why is this happening? This is supposed to be a happy moment, right? Or this is our wedding. Why is there so much fighting? This is our championship game. We can't fight now, right? And I call these moments sort of jokingly jackpot moments because studies show that when people win the lottery, they think it's going to be this amazing moment in their life. And often it's full of massive conflict because all of a sudden, first of all, all of these people come around and say like, oh, great, like you're going to share this in different ways, your values basically get brought up. And you have to actually ask, how am I going to spend this? What is money? How do I actually feel about this? And similarly, but jackpot is also a forestry term, which means a building up of excess tension that can is likely to explode. And so often these jackpot moments in our life, our moments in which, in part, Brunei, because they're also symbolic, the fishers you're talking about last for so long, because the entire community sees, oh, I wasn't asked to give a toast at their wedding. Oh, I wasn't asked to be on stage to discuss the product that I helped design, right? And everyone else also witnessed it. And I'll give a simple example, but there are also opportunities to repair. When I had my first child, someone very sweetly offered to host a baby shower for me. And actually in the art of gathering, I talk about whether or not I wanted the baby shower and how we re-imagined it so that people brought meaningful advice to me instead of like pin the diaper on the donkey or whatever it is. But in the art of fighting, there's a part of that baby shower that I did not talk about in the art of gathering, which is a fight that happened. And I invited, I thought about who was going to invite my friends to send out the invitation, and I got a really upset call from my father. And he said, "I can't believe I'm going to change the name, but I can't believe you didn't invite Marsha." And I was like, "What?" So I can't believe you didn't invite Marsha. And I thought, "My stepbrothers' wife?" And she lives in a different state. We don't talk. Like, there's nothing negative between us, but she's sort of not my community of psychological safety. And I'm not her. It's like, we're cool. And I had to think about it. Should I invite her? If I invite her, who else from that rung of people do I need to invite? Uh-oh, because you're in a different, you've pushed out the concentric circles. Yes, you've pushed out the concentric circles. This is a door opener. Yeah. How am I going to behave if I'm in front of somebody where I feel like I need to perform instead of just be? How am I going to behave? Am I going to say what I would normally say if I'm in front of my intimits? It actually makes it a different thing. But it forced me, as gatherings often do, right? Why wasn't I invited? Why wasn't? And you can imagine whatever type of gathering. And it forced me to go through my own line of questions, which is, what do I want this thing to be? Do I want to be closer to this person? And am I willing to sort of hold the line? I end up not inviting her. And afterwards, I had some repair to do, but not with her, with my father, dad. Yeah. And so part of what, and it was a few months later, we were in a coffee shop in Philadelphia and I brought it up and I said, Dad, I just want to talk to you about this a bit. And he said, he was still upset. It really hurt him. And he said, you know, I think of my life and I have a circle of 11. You, and this a joint family, you hit, you know, his stepchildren, you and on and my husband. And I don't know why you wouldn't invite all 11. And I said, Dad, your circle is not my circle, right? And that's like, it's a moment I have children now. He's a grandparent. This is to your point. I'm like, these conversations don't stop. They take new forms because we take new forms. Yes. And so part of what I'm doing there is I'm actually finding the right amount of space and distance and community and overlap between me and my father. It doesn't end when I leave the house for college. And so whether it's your family or whether it's your team or whether it's a neighbors, like there are going to be triggering events in moments of transition. And even if you, I don't feel like I messed up, but there was some difference and hurt there. And so I took the time and it was scary for me to do some repair with my father, which didn't mean apologizing. It actually means sort of coming to the river together and looking at the water. Support for this show comes from Quince, whether it's that versatile sweater that works with everything or that pair of jeans that just fits right. We all have pieces in our closet that have stood the test of time and earned a permanent place in our wardrobe. And Quince is here to help you find your next one. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and washable silk. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. 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Offer valid September 24th, 2026 through October 4th, 2026, Exclusions Apply for Licenses, and the Home Depot. I'm just wondering what do you do in those situations? That's the first question. Maybe we can start there. So the art of fighting and the art of gathering is my attempt on biracial, unbi-cultural, I grew up in multiple countries, I grew up in multiple households. We are confused as a culture. We don't fully know how to fight, we don't know how to gather, and at some level it's not our fault. This is the result of living in a culture and a country and teams of difference. One of the art of fighting, I studied traditional communities where people were born in the same place, died in the same place, prayed in the same God, eat the same food. They actually had internal conflict rituals to deal with the airing of grievances, and what we have in common life is court, and court is a very blunt tool. Not everything should be taken to court, or we have union negotiations in companies. Not everything is meant for a union negotiation. And so part of the call here is we need to, in diverse society, create temporary common hymnals. And so the art of fighting is my attempt to actually say, I mean, honestly, if you're listening to this conversation, share the conversation, this conversation creates a temporary shared hymnal that introduces just the beginning of an idea that, oh, there's something called healthy heat. And so I recently did another interview, and I've been having people slide into my DM saying, I sent our team, our entire team listened to your interview, on the interview, we listened to it together, and it gave us an in-road to say, huh, where are we in healthy heat? And how do we get better at it? And so much of the work, I mean, you both do this in your work, it's almost like we're giving each other conversational door knobs to enter, having just the minimum bear idea that like, oh, I'm investing in this, I'm scared, but because I care about you. And here, listen to this podcast, this is what, like, I'm in the business of culture change, so are you both. And we need a little bit of a common context to help people, like, reframe what they think is actually happening when heat rises. I'm so glad you said door knobs and not an aluminum pole, because when you said airing of grievances, I thought, oh, no, are you going to suggest we need festivists? Like George Costanza's parents sit on Seinfeld? No, no, let's not go there. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly, I mean, also in popular culture, we have these examples of people storming together. I looked at reality TV shows, because I actually think hiding in plain sight, one of the healthiest, with a masterist, one of the healthiest conflict rituals we have are the Real Housewives reunions. They come together, they're contractually obligated to come to this reunion, they've been dunking each other all season, yes is for entertainment, yes is for ratings, right? Yes, they're paid to have heat, but I was looking at these reunions and they basically match traditional conflict rituals, there is a different space, it's not the normal set, they dress up in boas and tiaras and ballgowns, they get preparation, there's a pre-configuration, there's an elder, Andy Cohen, Andy Cohen thinks about what questions are going to ask, and I ended up interviewing two of the executive producers of these reunions, and I was like, am I crazy to think, like, this is what you're doing? And they kind of chuckled and they said, this is what we're doing. The entire purpose of this is a clearing. You are helping me with my case to Brunei that she needs to watch Survivor, Brunei Survivor does the same thing. Yeah. I mean, a lot of these reality TV shows, there are elements that are deeply dysfunctional and there are parts that go into deep unhealthy heat. And because these are group shows, many of the executive producers are doing what the rest of us should be doing, which is what they're thinking about the life and the dynamic of a group, and part of what I'm trying to do with the art of gathering and with the art of fighting is create a new bookshelf. So we, yes, we have lots of self-help books, but we also need group help books and to grow our group intelligence about what is a group need? What is a clearing? What should a reunion look like? What is a cast that has been through this entirely intense experience need to get something off their chest? And yes, it's for ratings, but it's also for them. I think to your point about Survivor Adam and just thinking about this, the thing that makes me the most worried about this sometimes is when I'm working with the team over an extended period of time, one of the things that I have noticed, I mean, I'm going back to Prentice and their work around the most powerful body is a relaxed body. And I'm going back to, in my mind, because we don't have the door knobs and the bookshelf, we don't have ways to regulate our nervous systems during conflict that are helpful. Yes. The thing that flags me a lot about reality television and those conflicts is I can see teams who cognitively understand the need for heat, but again, don't understand what it can look like and what it can deliver, performing conflict, and I think sometimes reality television because of the variables of ratings can get very performed conflict. Absolutely. Yeah. And so I do think one thing I see is when you have scared people who don't have a lot of emotional vocabulary and not a lot of practice managing their nervous systems, they reach desperately for performance conflict. And I think it just goes back sometimes to how we do a lot of kind of from conscious leadership above the line and below the line work. And so how do I in conflict stay above the line, so I'm in a mindset of co creation, productive challenge, coaching, co coaching as opposed to going below the line when I'm in conflict and all I know how to be is villain victim or hero. And so I think it goes to this idea that actually I had to read and read and mark up and think about and walk away from in the book, can you talk to us about this idea of not letting the most offended person in the room run the room? This is hard because I do want to I want you to if you can address this for me specifically because I'm thinking about something where I'm really struggling right now in a group facilitation. Very difficult when the offended person gets either overly villain or overly victim to not let that person suck every I don't know how you measure measure oxygen, but all the oxygen out of the room. So give me a facilitation lesson about how it happens, what the danger is and how lay people, how we can talk about this. First of all, this is why I sort of keep saying this is really group, help, not self help. Yeah. And one of the most effective roles of an outside facilitator is to first help a group including the villain victim, practice, low stake skills before they attempt the high stakes conversation. And this is why teaching conflict skills is a leadership practice, normalizing conflict skills is a leadership practice. These are skills we don't have. We have a massive education problem starting even from our schools. And so the symptom is this villain victim freaking out, right? And then everyone else is punished for it. But actually underneath what is happening is we haven't been taught. We're just sort of like, oh my gosh, there's been a disaster. But actually we haven't prepared any of the soil. We haven't prepared, we don't think about normalizing heat in the book. I'll couple of things. The first I have an interlude called preparing your body for a fight and facilitators. [BLANK_AUDIO] you do this facilitators, I myself included. I am still conflict of earth. So when the heat rises and I'm paid to hold heat, my heart starts palpitating, my tongue gets dry, my palms get sweaty, like it doesn't go away. And so the first thing is I practice and I have an entire chapter in interview with Prentice. Both of us share what our rituals are in our own bodies before we go in and facilitate. I mean, one of the things that Prentice says, they say, "The body has all sorts of reactions. Get ready for them." There's no such thing as non-physical conflict. When we are in conflict, our body knows. And it reacts. This is very normal and annoying. And then Prentice says, "Our bodies feel that something we care about is threatened. We may want to leave the body out of it, but sometimes conflict is one of the first ways people even feel their bodies at all. It becomes a bit more uncontrollable." And so in the book, I talked practice being in a regular body. Relax, take a breath, give a shake, and much more. But what I'm saying is leaders should actually teach this as skills. And actually, when you frame conflict as learnable, as an important skill as a leader, it becomes slightly less scary. And then the second thing is in terms of the offense in the room. If someone, particularly if they have power, is flipping out, the people who they have power over are rational, to not want to go there. I mean, I've worked, I've talked about this in the book. I've worked with organizations and teams. I think of myself as a facilitator with group conflict almost as an acupuncturist rather than a physical doctor. So the work with me or the metaphor, I and my peers were kind of like looking at this body and we're trying to figure out where can we intervene and what size needle. And will the intervention hold? And sometimes it gets spit out. I was during the summer of 2020. I was facilitating as many of us, many Zoom recordings, virtual digital. And I was going into one such organization and everything my colleague and I presented, they would reject. They were, they had like too much PTSD of all of these other experiences they'd had. And finally, I realized, okay, this group is not willing to do anything together as a group. It's too high risk. So we offered, we tried to find out what I call in the book, a hypoallergenic solution, something they're not going to just reject. And we came up with, with teaching poetry, poetry workshops. And the invitation was we brought in an award-winning poet in and she was going to teach everyone how to name an ache. I was like, okay, this is brilliant. This is totally brilliant. They're just going to approach it. It's a skill. No one signed up. Right? And that's not to dissuade you. It's to say when somebody with power is villain and victim. The people around them are particularly if they power of them, if they're, if that's the paycheck, this is a cultural problem. It's not the problem of the individuals to solve. That needs to go at some level to a higher authority. I'm so glad you asked about that because I see this dynamic all the time in teams where it's the loudest voice that kids heard when conflict is brought up as opposed to the person who's actually trying to solve the problem in many cases. And it makes me wonder, it's really common to get on the wrong path. And you know, you start to get, you start to see people, you know, get sort of into a space of unhealthy heat. And you can't just say to them at that point, hey, you're getting defensive. Or hey, you're taking too much offense. How do you think about deescalation? Okay, question. Deescalation starts with preparation. And if you're only thinking about deescalation, you're starting way too late in the fight plan. So in the art of gathering, I say 90% of the success of every gathering serves before anyone enters the room. It is even more true with conflict. And in the art of fighting, one of the things I looked at was where are modern associations, churches, institutions teaching their people how to hold a fight together. And one of my favorite examples, and I'll, if this gets to deescalation, is a minister in a Martin Copenhaver. He, like many ministers in the 90s in the US, had their church was sort of coming apart over a gay marriage. And he had to lead the church through a process to decide whether or not they would become what they called open and affirming. And he realized, again, he practiced group intelligence, that if they used their normal processes, which were literally Robert's rules of order. Of course, of course. Right. Right. Parliamentary procedure. Do we allow gay marriage? It wasn't going to work. And so what he did, and this is such a beautiful leadership example, first, he didn't bring in some external process that was going to have the body freak out, right? The body of the church freak out. First, he looked back into their own archives to see, do we have practices, rituals, skills from our DNA that we could bring forward to today? He found that they used to, two and a 50 years ago, have a process called congregating. He then told his church, "Oh, we're not doing this strange new thing and bringing out this outside process. We're going to go back to our roots. This is a precious conversation and we're going to practice being together in a different way." He then hosted four meetings, not about gay marriage, but practicing this new way of being together. And one of the major structures was after everybody's spoke. After each person spoke, the entire congregation had to say, "May the Holy Spirit speak through us." And part of what that was doing was it was actually creating verbal structure and spacing. And he said, "If not saying we assume the Holy Spirit is speaking through us, it's just giving a pause. We don't, it's almost inviting curiosity and humility." So he's looking, he's watching, he's like, "Okay, I think we can now handle it." And so then he takes that practiced body and brings in open and affirming and they start hosting debates. But through this process, after anyone speaks, they have to say, "May the Holy Spirit speak through us." On one of such sessions, a man stood. He hadn't listened to any of the rules. He was loud. He was elder in the church. He had three page notes against the rules and starts reading why they shouldn't allow gay marriage in the church. And someone else screams, "This is unconscionable!" And the whole church freezes, right? Escalation, escalation, escalation. And he looks around and the entire church tells to me, Reverend Martin Koveneva says, "The regretted teeth says, "May the Holy Spirit speak through us." And the guy looks around. That is the holiest moment of all. It's also de-escalation. But it's practiced. Yeah, totally. We're asking ourselves to be Olympic athletes when we have a train to walk. And so part of de-escalation was, and by the way, that church, he had a lot of intelligence. It would come to a vote. But though in their rules, you could have an absentee ballot. He banned absentee ballots because he said, "You have to be in the room." Because you have to be altered or be open to the opportunity to be altered by what you hear. And then the final thing they did is the day that they had the vote, yes. And he didn't say the vote will be on this day. He said, "When we are ready, when I use his authority as a leader, when I perceive we are ready to have the vote, we will have it." And then in the fourth session, he said, "We are ready." And he made another rule. Whatever the verdict is, no celebrating. No celebrating. Because churches were being ripped apart at the time. Oh, our church was ripped apart. Yeah. And they went and they ended up passing, opening and affirming. And no one left the church. Wow. And the final thing he said was, "Before you leave today, please go over to someone who had a different opinion than you and say hello and shake their hand." Because I don't want you debriefing in the parking lot. I want you debriefing here. What great leadership, great leadership. Yeah, I'm struck by the de-escalation strategy, which was basically in a light way to call back to one of their core principles. Which they knew, right? The common criminal. I did advising work for the Zoran Mamdani mayoral campaign. And they were, they used gathering as a strategic framework to help build the movement to win that campaign. They're using gathering as a strategic framework to also lead. And one of the ways, these rallies, we get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And like all rallies, once you're getting attention, whatever political party you have, there's going to be hecklers. There's going to be protesters. And so part of the training that I do with teams in it, this works in all types of cases, is instead of de-escalation. One of the questions I often ask is, how do we insert joy? How do we interrupt based on the values we have? How do you send in the opera singers? How do you blast salsa music? And teach everyone to dance, right? They literally did this at one of their largest rallies in Washington Heights. And this is but public. You can see it on videos. The MC who's a comedian came up and said, now we may have some, we may have some disruptions. Everyone's like, boo, it's normal, relevance. There's going to be some interruptions. And if you hear something, if for some reason we can't continue, you're going to hear this song. And everyone's listening. And it's Danza Codoro. You know, it's like, na, na, na, na, na, na. And what we're going to ask you to do is stand up and dance. We know you can do it, right? We were in Washington Heights, like a large Latina, Latino neighborhood. And everyone starts laughing and they stand up and they start saucing in the first opening moments of the rally, right? They're increasing warmth. They're having people embody their values. They know where they are. But they're also de-escalating, right? We have where our imagination is so limited because we think conflict is only antagonistic. We think we actually can't find ways to be in relationship with each other and expand the juiciness, right, of how we actually be together when we care about each other and we care about the shared thing. Our tools are keeping us from each other and they need to help us actually bring us to each other. But it's also about power. It's not only just about connection. Yeah, and I just have to say this idea of collective humanity as a de-escalation tool is just, I was just thinking about a debate that broke out just a couple of weeks ago in my MBA intensive that I teach. And I said, "Let's just stop." Well, it's everybody feeling right now because I bet we'll find a lot of things in common and people like, "I want to run worse class ever," and then we just started laughing. And I don't think you're supposed to be talking about these things. Yes. I was like, "Beautiful." Yeah, fuck it. Who cares? Let's keep going. And I'm like, so we have a lot in common. They're like, "Is it okay that what we have in common is we all want to run for our lives?" I'm like, 100%. Wonderful. And they're like, "It's wonderful. It's like the moment when you're at church and you're like, "Peace be with you," because I really dislike you so much. That I'm throwing up in my mouth a little bit, but peace be with you. May the lords peace be with you. Okay, lightning round. Can I just also say the poetry of the art of gathering and the art of fighting? I'm just chef's kiss to you, Priya Parker. Thank you. That was not what I sold it as, by the way. What did you sell it as? Rift. Oh, that's good too. Again, we all think it's like, "Oh, well, it's so obvious." It's like, "You got it fine." It wasn't originally the art of fighting. Yeah, but there's poetry. I mean, I would have sold on the art of fighting, the poetry of fighting, the grace of fighting. They're all just, yeah, and I love the conflict. I love how beautiful the conflict is on the cover of the book. That's River Head. My publisher deeply understands that visual language is also our assumption. Again, warmth, beauty, relevance. Like, what are we doing? Well, welcome to the mess. Like, welcome to the mess. You know, I love it. I love the mess. Okay. Lighting round. What's one thing you're deeply curious about right now? I am deeply curious about how children connect with technology and without technology. All right. I got to ask this one because I saw a version of it on the internet. I thought it was, we had to go to the expert. It was something like the reason we have so many bad fights in America is that the left has purity tests and the right has loyalty tests. Agree or disagree? Disagree. Oh, you're not getting off the hook there, girl. I just said. Good luck. I think we have so many fights in America because we are trying something that a nation has never done before, which is to have a multiracial democracy, where people are relatively equal, but also are free to chase their dreams. And it's a really, really hard project. And I do think that the left has purity tests, which many groups on the left are starting to really question and unwind. On in Gerda Das's book, The Persuaders, talked a lot about the unwinding these purity tests. He gave this example. He's also my husband. He gave this example about how mega churches in parking lots leave their first three rows of parking spots for people who've never been church before. It's not a shame that you've never been before. How do you lower the drawbridge? I don't know about loyalty. I don't know. I don't know what they mean by loyalty tests, but I think that we fight because we fight about the things we care about. And I think the danger is we fight with people we don't know. And what I'm inviting you to is to fight better with the people you know, including across political lines, but with the people you love, because where there is longing, there's a possibility for a way through. Well, but so well said. Beautiful. You get to design the weirdest and wildest curiosity shop item, anything you want. What's one thing you're going to leave on our shelves of the curiosity shop? Oh my gosh. Well, this isn't designed, but I feel you would love this, which is my mentor is a guy named Hal Saunders. And he was a senior diplomat. He wrote the Camp David Accords, helped write the Camp David Accords. And then he retired and spent 20 years working with young people teaching these skills, dialogue skills. And he always told us, listen deeply enough to be changed by what you hear. And at his funeral, we were each given a stone that on one side said, listen deeply enough. And then you turn it over to be changed by what you hear, Hal Saunders, and then his birth years. And this book, the art of fighting is dedicated to Hal Saunders. And so if I could, I would give the curiosity shop that stone. We would accept gratefully. Definitely. Just beautiful. Yeah. Last question, what's one thing you're deeply grateful for right now? I am deeply grateful for my children and my husband. We both, but crazily enough, have books coming out in September. His is called Man in the Mirror. It is a wild thing to not have one, but two book launches in a month. And so I am grateful for our collective within our little for some humor, and joy, and kind of sense of fun. Because if you don't have that, when things are also stressful, what do you have? So I'm really grateful for their sense of humor, and joy, and always finding the fun in when we can in each moment. Thank you for joining us. What a treat. Just so good. Thank you, Priya. Thank you so much for having me. I, Renee, your books with post-it notes in them is like the highest honor as an author. I remember you did that with the art of gathering. And I'm like, I've died and gone haven't. So it's really, I love how you read. It's so physical. Oh, no, it's very physical. And I can tell you that your book got some airtime, meaning I threw it across my bedroom while I was reading it while wishing you and your husband, but not your children, curses. But then I picked it back up and read it again because it just hit in some really hard places, but critically important ones. So airtime, post-it notes, all the ways I love a book. Thank you. Well, it stayed firmly on the ground for me, but immediately on my recommended fall reads list. Thank you so much. I just think, Priya, this is, it's a book that no matter what kind of relationship you're in or what kind of group you're in, it's impossible to read it without thinking, oh, I have some work to do. And this is going to help me get closer to the people around me. I thought I was going to read a book about conflict. No, it is a book about relationships. That's totally right. And I thank you so much for your blurb. It's sort of like when someone reflects you back to you. I'm like, that is what this book is. And I think you said this isn't a book about having better arguments. It's a it's a manual for having better relationships. And I was like, yeah, that's right. Thank you for seeing it. But that was my deepest hope. It's like these aren't like have a better conversation with one person. It's like, let's zoom all the way out and kind of, I don't know, have it like add another color to this painting. I did think you crushed the blur about him. It was so yeah, it was really spot on. All right. Thank you, Priya. And we, I can't I can't wait to know what the next art is. So call us when you're ready. It can't be the art of art. That's my only ask. I don't know art so won't be. Plus with installation, starting at just 49 cents per square foot, upgrading your space is more affordable than ever at the Home Depot. Offer valid September 24th, 2026 through October 4th, 2026. Exclusions apply for licenses. See Home Depot dot com slash license numbers. That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results. So I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn dot com slash campaign turns the edition supply. Renee, I'm so glad you suggested that. It was so good. It was so fun. Yeah, I just, we did a couple of gigs together like a tour, and I've done some stuff with her and her husband, and the, I don't know, this is like circular, but the thoughtfulness behind the contribution, you know, and her experiences, and yeah, I just thought it was a really, if I could have people eat this book before I can visit them, that would be so helpful. I don't trust them to read it. If they could literally consume it, I'd be better off. I mean, this is, this is for me the big takeaway on de-escalation strategy. It's just pause. You need to read the heart of fighting. Yeah, I mean, pause and just humanity and joyfulness, and we're so much more the same, especially when it gets all the way down to our bodies and our fear and what we need and what from each other to be able to leverage that as de-escalation. Like, here's what we have in common right now. We all want this to end immediately. Here's what we have in common right now. We wish it was lunchtime, you know, it's like, because we're human. So I think it's, and I thought about us a lot, and when I was reading this too, our four year, our four years of not talking to each other, the rounds of hard conversations we've had, the friendship that we're building, I am grateful that we never walked away from heat. Me too. And I think most of the time my impulse has been to walk away from it, and every time I think you are so good at this, like you're so good at rumbling, and it's always helped us understand each other better and get on the same page faster. Why do I still have this instinct to run in the other direction, because I'm afraid that it's going to hurt the relationship and I care about the relationship. It's interesting because you must process that internally because every time I've reached out to you to say, "Hey, there's this thing going on. I want to talk about it." All I see is can't wait. How does tomorrow look for you? Like, I don't see that impulse to be like, "Oh, I just see." And then sometimes when we get on a Zoom or a call, you might start with, "I was kind of anxious about this, but it's weird because I know we're going to end up better in 30 minutes than we were right now. I just always saw willingness." That's so interesting. Interesting. That's because the uncertainty is worse than if the relationship was in jeopardy, right? Not knowing. It's like getting called to the principal's office, and then the meeting is next week. No, no, no. If I'm getting called to the principal's office, I need to see the principal now so that we can work out whatever the issue is, and I can resolve it. Am I the principal or the story? Maybe. Maybe. I think you are. But once I know there's a problem, right? It activates the solver in me, which you initiate with often. But it also just, I don't know. It's interesting. I think you texted me a few weeks ago and described me as sensitive. I think you're the only person in my life who would describe me that way. It actually led to some really interesting reflection about what is it about our dynamic that brings out that part of me. I think some of it is you are more forthcoming about issues than most people. Some of it is, I think there's just a vestige of because we got off on the wrong foot initially. I'm always a little bit more worried that I could screw it up. Yeah, and when, because I think you are trying to, I think you are trying to convince me that I'm a more sensitive person, and I know I'm a sensitive person, but I'm like, you're so sensitive to, we're both sensitive people. You're like, I deny that claim. I totally rejected it. Yeah, but I think we're both sensitive. I think we can both be anxious. I think that we both are afraid we're doing something or going to do something that's going to cause another riff that feels insurmountable. But I think not only have all of our hard rumbles been so productive, I think they've deepened our friendship, and I also think I've learned more about myself talking to you. Me too. Me too. I think that's part of what gives me confidence. It's not just that the previous ones have gone so well. It's also the aha moments and revelations that come out of them. It allows me to walk in and say, okay, worst case scenario. Brunei is going to be mad at me or offended by something that I did or said. And I'm going to grow through that. And I think that's good for me and long run. It should be good for us to do. Yeah, my thinking is the worst case scenario is he is going to be mad at me. And I'm going to be wrong about something, but I don't mind being wrong about something. And if he's mad at me, then I want to know. Yeah. And so, and one thing I will say that in her in Prius book, one of the calls to courage to me that's so strong that I want to really compliment you on is this idea is be alterable, be someone who can be altered by information or someone's experiences or whatever. And I think maybe, and if you're listening, I don't, we're not fawning over each other. We're, we have had, yeah, no, we have had some very fricking tough conversations, very hard conversations since the podcast started. I think we're both willing to be altered. And where we have really strong convictions, we're willing to learn and understand from each other about why they're strong come, you know, and so I think that's a big, because even if I told Steve, like, I don't have a hard conversation with Adam tomorrow and it's scheduled and I'm nervous. He'll be like, can't you just skip to the part where you know it's going to be okay, because you know it's going to be okay somewhere, right? And I'm like, yeah, but I'm not in that part yet, Allison, I mean, Allison and Steve should just resolve our conflicts for us because going, going into these Allison often says, you just, you just need to talk to Renee. Every time you talk, these things that you're worried about turn out to be either resolvable or you actually were, we're saying different things than either of you understood and there wasn't a conflict to begin with. Yeah. So I think, I don't know, it's been a good, it's been a great exercise in the art of fighting. It has, it has. And I think one of the things that Priya also helped me really feel good about is I think I've hesitated too often. I don't want to create conflict or I don't want to bring this up. And that does then trap a relationship in the, okay, we only fight when it's intense or when the stakes are high. And that doesn't exercise the muscle. And so I think her, for me, that's a really good push to say, you know what? There is no fight this too small because if we can, if we can argue about the fact that a hot dog is definitely not a sandwich hell no. And I can't imagine being altered on that. But, but also I can and we can have some fun with it. That really prepares us for the important conversations, doesn't it? God, 100% and I think if we, I think the moment we say we're not going to bring up these hard things, whether it's conscious or not, we've put a cap on what the relationship can be. And I think if you're okay with that cap, I mean, I'm okay with that cap with certain people in my life where I'm not going to invest, I'm not going to invest the body work, the repair work, the time. I'm just not going to, I'm okay with that cap, but I am very aware of when there's a cap on conflict in a relationship, there's a cap on potential growth and deepening, I think. I think so too. You know, it's, it's interesting because in those, in the relationships where it matters enough to you to not put the cap on it, I almost think that refusing to raise an issue is disrespectful to the other person. I think what you're, you're kind of implicitly saying to the other person is, I don't think you can do this. I don't think our relationship can withstand this. And what a sad, what a sad free determined conclusion to arrive at. Why are you investing in this relationship at all? If you don't think it's capable of evolving and handling tension. Yeah, and we, I think that's exactly right. I just think, I think that is the messaging. I don't think it can bear the weight of conflict, which is maybe selling yourself, the other person, the team, short. And also, it's a, what do you call that, a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess. Yes, yes, that's it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have now just confined the relationship to the existing space. It is, it's operating in and it's going to be contained to that moving forward. That's it. I think Priya would say, no heat, don't expect a ton of warmth. I love it. All right, this was fun. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Burnay Brown, Education and Research Group and Granted production. You can subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. Just tell it to your driver and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what'd you pin? Mm-hmm. Two, five, three, eight. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride with pin verification from Uber. When you shop, Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. 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