The Liz Moody Podcast - The Secret To Finding Your People, Having More Meaningful Gatherings, & Creating A Community You Love With Priya Parker

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Priya Parker shares her practical tips for becoming a better host and guest, finding the right kind of group to gather with, and how to instantly bring energy back into not-so-fun gatherings.  why gatherings are SO important, even if you’re not a party person the one thing you need to have any kind of successful gathering  why identifying the PURPOSE of your gatherings is so important and exactly how to do it how to make the parties you throw way more memorable  the number one thing you need to do before an event begins to make it successful  how to instantly make a lame-feeling party way more fun (as a host OR a guest) what to STOP spending time on when planning parties (no one cares!) and what to invest more time in genius tips to make funerals, weddings, zoom meetings, dinner parties, and group trips more meaningful and enjoyable and so much more!  For more from Priya, head to her website www.priyaparker.com, where you can find her course, follow her on Instagram @priyaparker, and grab her book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by: LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz a to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order.   AG1: visit AG1.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to build better boundaries, uncovering herbalist secrets for more energy, or finally overcoming imposter syndrome to live the lives of our dreams. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. Today, I am so excited to welcome Priya Parker to the podcast.

Priya is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, host and producer of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, and author of the hugely popular book The Art of Gathering, How We Meet, and Why It Matters. Priya has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Glammer, and many more. She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. I have not been able to stop talking about this episode since we recorded, and it's already changed how I spend time with other people and the way that I build relationships. As we talk about in the episode, gathering is so important, not only for adding more fun to our lives and building our relationships, but also for us determining on a societal level what matters in life. This episode will change the way that you hang out with people.

Priya is the expert on putting purpose and meaning into our gatherings, and today, will be diving into all of her incredible tips. We get into why gatherings are so important, even if you're not a party person. The one thing you need to have any kind of successful gathering, why identifying the purpose of your gatherings is so important and exactly how to do it. How to make the parties you throw way more memorable. The number one thing you need to do before an event begins to make it successful. How to instantly make a lame-feeling party way more fun, whether you're the host or the guest, what to stop spending time on when planning parties because nobody cares, and what to invest way more time in. Genius tips to make funerals, weddings, Zoom meetings,

dinner parties, and group trips more meaningful and more enjoyable and so much more. We would both love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag Priya. She is at Priya Parker and me. I am at Liz Liz Moody on Instagram. I am so excited for you to hear this episode. I am so excited to discuss it. So let's get right into it with Priya Parker. Priya, welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you here today. Thank you so much for having me. I would love to just dive in. I'm such a fan of your book. I'm such a fan of your work in general. And I would love for you to kick us off by just saying, first of all, why are gatherings important? What would you say to the listener who said, yeah,

parties are fun, but they're not critical and they're certainly not life changing? I feel like if we had this conversation in 2019, I might have to make a different case as to why gatherings matter. But given that all types of gatherings banned during the global pandemic, I think one of the things that the pandemic has really helped all of us see is that the way we gather, the way we come together, whether for a party, whether for a wedding, whether for a meeting, whether for a graduation ceremony, is how we live. It's how we mark time. It's how we begin to understand what we think matters. And how we gather, how we literally come together in person or online, becomes what we think of as normal. And I define a gathering as any time

three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. So not just parties, but also parties, but really anytime we are in a social experience, a shared social experience with other people. That is actually affecting how we think about the world and what we think of as quote unquote normal. It's such an interesting perspective. Can you dive into that for a second? How is a gathering impacting what we view as normal in the world? So if you take just a simple example of a party, at some level, what do we choose to mark? What do we choose to celebrate? Why do we gather when somebody is having a child versus when somebody gets a PhD? Why do we gather, and for what, when somebody is moving versus when somebody decides to quit their job?

The what we pay attention to collectively, what rises to the occasion of literally, like, turning Netflix off, putting our pants on, and going somewhere is what we, individual, and collectively are basically deeming what is worthy to come together for. And so gathering is culture shaping. We invented. We literally make it up. Many of the gatherings that we attend, we inherit from generations prior. But how we actually come together in every culture, this is true, is what we choose collectively to come together around, to pay attention to, to mark, and to grow. What if what you want to gather and to mark and to celebrate differs from what society tells you is okay?

It's interesting that you use the example of we tend to gather for baby showers for weddings and people maybe want to gather for a PhD and they don't feel like they have societal permission to do so. Gathering is culture shaping in whatever culture that is. And so in traditional societies and in any society, we often tend to come together in ways that we've seen previously done before. We can go along on this example of a baby shower. The baby shower actually is a relatively new invention, though it may not feel like it. It's a relatively American invention in many traditional societies. People wouldn't gather to mark the life of a child until the first birthday, in part because of maternal mortality rates, in part because of the likelihood a child would survive,

goes up drastically after its first year. But there is this American sort of ritual that began over the last 20 to 40 years, there's different takes as to when it began, to kind of come together to mark before the child is born, to prepare the mother for birth, and at some level to come together and celebrate this new moment. And this has been happening for decades,

but part of what many women I know today who are choosing to have children are realizing is that the baby shower as a form, whether it's you only bring together women or you are pinning a diaper on a baby, may not actually match what you actually need in that moment. So if you are co-parenting with a man and a heterosexual couple and the two of you as a couple want to parent in different ways, then you saw each of your parents' parent, but we don't actually upgrade our ritual to include the father. How do we actually begin to normalize how parenting advice is shared? How do we begin to think about who holds a baby?

I recently read a study that said, we don't have image of men holding babies in art until the 20th century. So much of how we gather is often inherited from a previous generation realities or norms, or not consciously thinking, you're kind of going through the motions, and we have an opportunity to do is to actually pause and ask, what is my actual need? What is our actually need? What are the values we actually want to lead with? What are the values that we actually want to change from the previous generation?

And if that is what we want to do, how do we actually bring our community along? And I think that that gets to one of the core parts of your philosophy and your book, which is to know the purpose of your gathering. Can you share a few concrete tips for figuring out the real underlying purpose of your gathering? I'm a conflict resolution facilitator. That's my day job. I wrote this book, The Art of Gathering. It came out in 2018.

And I wrote it in part because I realized that many of the skills and training that my peers and were taught as facilitators to kind of make meaning and connection in the room, to get people off their scripts, to create an experience where, because of what happens in the room, people are changed by it, isn't what's actually taught in popular culture about hosting. And I wanted to write a book that demystifies how do you actually create meaningful, remarkable, memorable experiences for your people. In addition to sharing what I learned as a convict resolution facilitator, I interviewed over a hundred different people from all walks of life that other people credit with disproportionately creating meaningful

experiences. You all probably have that person in your life. Like whenever Mary or Shilpa or Raj hosts anything, I'm going to be there because you know, like, it's going to be great. And I went and I interviewed hockey coaches, rabbis, educators, underground party planners. And the thing they all had in common was that they didn't have a specific line in their head of what their gathering looked like. You can't see me, but I'm using air quotes. And instead, they started with the actual need. They first asked, not what should this look like, not what color dress do I wear, not what should the lighting be. They started by asking, what is the purpose of this thing? Why are we gathering? And I have a free guide, the new rules of gathering on my website that goes like literally beat by

beat how do you figure out the purpose of your gathering? And it starts with this very simple question, which is why, why am I having this pool party? Why am I bringing people together for my birthday? To what end? What is the need? What is a need in my life at 23 or 43 or 63? That by bringing together a specific group of people to mark this day, they might help me do. Am I looking for a sense of adventure? Am I looking to reconnect? with one of my passions? Am I feeling really lonely? Have I been feeling really judged? And I realize I actually need to have an experience and bring together people in my life who make me feel really free. So part of purpose is it's actually very practical. It helps you figure out who do you invite.

And at some level, it kind of helps you wake up to your life right now, which is like, what am I experiencing? What do I need? And who might actually be not just willing to help with that, but delighted that may actually share the same need and come together in a specific, unique way to break bread together. So once you have a purpose, let's say your purpose is, I'm lonely, because I think that's a very common purpose that a lot of us are struggling with. Where do you go from there? How do you know how to manifest that in a gathering?

One of the things that I found when looking at kind of what creates gatherings that people remember is that they're meaningful. And one of the things that I found again and again was that meaning lies in specificity. Say you want to get together with people because you're feeling lonely, but there's literally endless ways you could actually gather people. If you take this example, I'm feeling, the emotion I'm feeling, the experience I'm feeling is lonely, to pause and ask, well, what is a need in this community, in my life, around which I want to gather people, that other people might actually be interested in. And specificity allows people to have a shared experience.

I'll give an example. A friend of mine was turning 50, is what I mean by specificity, and he was feeling just sort of sad, sad about turning 50, and he realized that part of the reason he was feeling sad was because he looked at the people around him and many of the people who also turned 50,

began to contract. They took less risks. They started just living in ways that were less adventurous, and he was really afraid of doing that himself. And so he paused and he thought about in his life, who are the people in my life who continuously expand? And he invited, in metaphorically and literally, and so he invited small group of people, six or seven folks, for dinner. He didn't start with the form. And at the beginning of the evening, he said basically what I just told you, I've been feeling I realized afraid of turning this age because I'm worried that I'm going to take less risks, going less adventures. You are the people in my life who always embody risk-taking. And I've gathered you here this evening in part to share stories and for me to tell you,

like the moments you've taken a risk that really helped me. And my one birthday wish is that over the next 50 years, when I come to crossroads, when I come to decisions, that you help low courage my way. And if you wanted to take it even more, right? So then you have a need. Okay, the need is to connect with a sense of adventure. Then beginning to design the gathering around it, rather than having maybe a dinner party, you could look into your town or your city and say, like, what is one thing I've never done before? I've never jumped into the lake, right? I know of a woman recently who did her 45th birthday party, and the birthday party was literally 12 friends on a dock at 2 p.m. jumping into a crystal clear, freezing cold lake. Five a.m., go out and see the fishermen or fisherwoman, bring the fish in.

We're so unimaginative about how we can spend time together that we all kind of end up in the living room drinking proverbial beer. And so much of actually curing loneliness is meaningful conversation and shared experiences that are full of adventure. That doesn't mean they're expensive. It doesn't mean that they're fancy. It just means that they're slightly going out of your regular patterns and you're inviting other people in. If somebody wanted to have a gathering that helped them develop intimacy with their friends, would you recommend something like a shared adventure or is there a great type of gathering in your mind for that?

One of my favorite models for developing more meaningful conversation and more intimacy is called 15 Toast. 15 Toast is a dinner module that I designed with a friend of mine more than a decade ago, Tim Leverick, and he and I were at a conference and realized that at some level, like, everyone was just kind of being really fake. And using their stump speeches instead of their sprout speeches kind of coming and rattling off, you know, all of the things that they wanted each other to know about them, to impress each other. And frankly, like, we're there in part to have meaningful connection, to have more intimacy, to actually begin to solve problems.

You can't solve problems if you don't know what they are, right? You can't solve problems of you, people aren't sharing some amount of vulnerability. And so we invented this format. You're free to take it. You could do this with a group of friends. You choose a theme that you are interested in, that may be relevant at the moment of life you're in. It could be to transition. It could be to adventure. It could be to risk. It could be to conflict. It doesn't have to be positive, quote unquote. And you invite people, you tell them the theme ahead of time. And it should be a theme that's authentic to you in some way, like you are going through a transition or you are going through closing doors, right? And invite people at the beginning of the night, you kind of ding your glass,

old school style, stand up and share, you know, this is the theme for the evening. And here are a set of rules, pop-up rules, which is at some point in the evening, we're going to invite you to ding your glass, old school style, stand up if you're able, and share a story in your life that no one around the table has heard before about what you've learned about whatever the theme is. And the only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast. And that usually moves the night along. But part of what often happens, particularly in a group setting, is that in a group of six or eight or 12, first of all, conversation tends to break up into smaller pairs, right? So if a group of eight or a group of 12, it's much more likely to end up in groups of two or three, you kind of,

may go over the same kind of geography territory of conversation. And the last thing is, intimacy isn't usually built through opinion sharing. It's built through storytelling. It's built through sharing our experiences with one another. So this 15 Toast module is one of many that helps in a way a group connect, listening to one another, sharing stories that are of interest to one another, thinking about a theme. And usually at the end of these nights, we've hosted them, people have hosted them all over the world on all sorts of different themes. People leave a little fuller. They leave having listened in a slightly different way. They leave often having torn up the notes in their pocket of what they thought they were going to say about risk

or darkness or fear or vision because of what they heard someone else say before them. And then voice shaking, share a story that no one in the room has heard, that they're choosing to share, and they're kind of creating something together. They're creating this kind of temporary alternative world where a group of six or eight or 12 or 15 people are kind of like, like teasing out, exploring together some element of life that feels relevant to them in a way that allows them to actually get deeper than everyday conversation. Do you have any tips for getting buy-in from other people? I know a lot of people who feel like if you do a contrived gathering that there's something inherently wrong, like you should just be able to like meet up

and chill. And if you can't do that, then what's wrong with you? The first thing is, Don't spring it on people. I'm a conflict resolution facilitator. One of my mentors would always say 90% of the success of what happens in the room happens before anyone ever enters. So in a way, gathering is like an organizing. For those of you listening who have any background or training in organizing, it's like an organizing challenge.

And what I mean by that is you are hosting your guests not from the moment they enter the room or the Zoom, but the moment of discovery. the moment they receive this invitation. It could be a text. It could be a WhatsApp message. It could be a paperless post. It could be an email. It could be a flyer on the stump of a tree in a park. But from the moment someone, a potential guest, sees this future promise 15 toasts to fear. Interesting. What's that? A night of seven songs, right? This is another example that I love. Some people, you may be listening to this and be like, you know, I love the way I spend time with my friends, then keep doing what you're doing. Like, you're lucky. This is if you are part of either of a group of friends,

like you kind of spend time the same way again and again, and you kind of want to, you know, spice things up or move into a different category of conversation. Or are building a new community. So here's another example. A night of seven songs that you could do is a series, say your seven friends or ten friends who have been friends for years. Part of the element of friendship, particularly in community is when you meet as adults, there's so much territory you kind of just missed. I often joke with my friends like that. Sometimes don't know basic facts about their life if I met them in my 30s or my 40s. So you invite a person, each person you could do it where each person gets their own evening and they bring the seven songs that have shaped their life in some way.

And over the course of the evening, they play the song. So it's almost like a listening party. They play the song, but before they do, they share. There's a British podcast called Desert Island Discs. It's kind of like what that host does with her guests. But they share, okay, this was, I would sit in the parking lot of the giant grocery store, you know, when I was 12 years old and my father would go in and grab a gallon of milk. This was when my parents were actually divorced before they remarried. And boys to men, I swear, would come on to the radio.

And I would just weep. and kind of making this up right. But all of a sudden, you have this social infrastructure that gives people some amount of permission to share, and then to share music, to share stories, that's kind of fun. But to go back to your question, like, how do you get people on board?

You don't do it when they enter the room. You invite them. You paint this picture. And by the way, maybe the wrong picture. Like, I've done this with family members, with extended family. Sometimes it's literally calling up a cousin, who I know is also bored

with how the family's hanging out, right? and kind of getting her buy-in. And then we approach grandma, who's always up for whatever. And so then we go and talk to grandma, and she's like, yeah, I would love to do something different. And then if grandma's up for it, then her sister will be up for it. Depends on what the community is. But you first pause and when you find an authentic need, that's when people, in my experience, don't resist the structure.

Then the next step of becoming an artful gatherer is finding what I call in my digital course, the relevant math and poetry. given this group, given the need, what might actually work? What's the infrastructure? And then how do we actually get buy-in well ahead of time? So people are excited to come or they say no. And meaningfully saying no to an invitation is a totally legitimate choice. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters.

But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around

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the nicest hotels. It just feels so good. I get so excited to get into it every single night. It's time to upgrade your sleep with Bowlen Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at Bowlenbranch.com slash Liz Moody with code Liz Moody. That's Bolandbranch, B-O-L-L-B-O-L-B-Range.com slash Liz Moody. Use code Liz Moody to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. This is maybe a little convoluted, but is there a type of gathering that would help you meet other people who like fun, interesting out there gatherings? Even before the pandemic, there's so many organizations that are kind of trying to create an infrastructure to help people easily meet other people with common interests. So one of my favorite is meetup. If you don't know it, I haven't heard of it, where basically anyone can become a moderator.

I think you have to agree to a certain set of rules and host a gathering literally on anything. in your city. So maybe you host a meetup to other people who are excited about gathering in different ways and see what happens. But one of the things that they found in their research was that the more adjectives they would put in front of the name of the group, the higher the attendance. So a group on hiking might get a certain number of people, but it's sort of vague and, you know, I don't know really what it is, what kind of hiking versus LGBTQ hikers versus LGBTQ hikers with dogs, the tighter to a point that they would kind of bound the interest, the more people would show up. I was trained in political theory. Gathering is a social contract

where you have to help people understand what is this thing. One of the things that's coming out of the pandemic is more and more people are paying attention to gathering. More and more people have realized that the ways in which we gather no longer work. This is true in our office places, but this is also true with our friends. Like one of the things about, about the pandemic that was really interesting. It was this kind of massive social audit. Like, who did you long for? Who did we miss when we couldn't come together? And who did we not? Which places? Which gatherings? Were you glad you didn't have the obligation to attend? Right? It's all data. And so part of what's interesting in this moment, just going back to your question,

is finding other people in your community or kind of putting up a torch, a flashlight. to saying, hey, I want to start doing this differently. Who's in? In my experience, a lot of people are up for gathering in ways that aren't the same old, in part because we have all at least for some period of time have realized how precious life is. If you're at a gathering, whether you're hosting or guesting, and there might be different answers for both, but it just feels a little bit me. It's just not very fun.

Is there a way to add an instant injection of fun? Such a great question. Guests have a lot of power in gatherings and power to kind of detract, right? Everyone feels it when someone clearly doesn't want to be there. Someone pulls out their phone. It's kind of like a signal, even if it's not good for everyone else to pull out their phone, it's basically like, oh, if I'm not going to look up, I'm going to look down. So here's my advice.

It depends on what the gathering is and what your social agreements are. But I'll give a couple of examples of people who are at gatherings. were the rallier of the troops, if you will. One example was a housewarming party, and a couple invited a bunch of their friends to warm their new house. And it was sort of sweet, and everyone walked around, look at the new whatever window or floor, you know, what have you. And then they sat down to eat.

And again, it was like sweet, but maybe a little met. And one of the guests saw this and realized this and kind of felt like, oh, my gosh, we're all here because we love these people. clearly this is a really important part of their life. And she leaned over to the host and asked, like, subtly, would you mind if I asked the group a question to share what they most love about this home? And the host was kind of like, oh, you don't have to do that. She's like, no, no, no, I would love to.

Are you okay with it? And she was like, sure. And so the guest took it upon herself, done her glass, stood up and was like, I'm so happy. I'm so happy. What a moment for the two of you and also for all of us. You've been talking about doing this for years. I've seen how you both work together to figure out how to, whatever it is,

like fill in the blank. And one of the things I most love is how you've oriented all of your plants based on when in your life you got them. I'm making this up, right? But she basically, like, found one thing, said what it was. And then she said, I was wondering if we could go around and each of us just say, what is one thing that you notice or that you love about what they've done? to this home. And people were kind of like not totally sure. And then one person was like, I'll go. I love that there's an introverts corner. I love that there's a little window cell that when I'm

like, the group is too much, I can like go and retreat and like sit in the window cell. And someone else like, you know what I love? I love how you've chosen to make your children's art, quote unquote art, by just putting a frame around it. You know what I love? And it completely changed the evening. And it was a risk. That's like what I was saying earlier. She found like there was a need, It was legitimate. She wasn't doing it for her. She wasn't making this retuitous kind of like, hey, let's all like go outside and do something else. She found the spiritual center of what the purpose of the gathering was. And she helped the group at some level in this thoughtful way fulfill it. Do you have any examples of a host who's injected fun into a lackluster gathering?

Oh my gosh. So many. I mean, I'll say a couple of things. One is if you're at a lackluster gathering, whether as guest or host, that is data. And so the first thing I'd say before trying to change it is to just notice, just get really, really curious. First of all, they're really good guests. But second of all, they're just paying attention. Like, everything is data. If I go to gatherings, I'm always so curious. Like, why isn't this totally working? Or like, why do I feel slightly disengaged? Am I feeling disengaged? Am I feeling insecure? Here, what's happening? So the first thing is to just notice, before trying to, like, get desperate to fix it, just notice.

And part of what you might start noticing is you're saying yes to the wrong invitations. You're not being intentional about what you choose to come to. You know you always go to this specific book club and you always leave frustrated. But just like, just notice. So like increasing your level of awareness around what you're attending and how you show up based on that. I think hosts that help create forward motion in certain gatherings add the right amount of structure. And that could be literally suggesting a game. Like I know friends of mine years ago, they loved a specific game.

They loved the werewolf and it's sort of like mafia if you know what that is. And they would at the end of a conference or even at a party when things were starting to like die down, they'd literally like rally the troops. They were excited. Even if people don't know what their rules were, they'd like get everyone else excited. They'd pull 11 chairs around in a circle. One of them would moderate. And they would kind of like give new life.

Sort of like groups have cycles of energy and sometimes like the circle's done. And it's sort of either time to go home or do something else. And so a couple of the hosts I know first are usually passionate or excited about something authentic. And they're able to get other people on board. The second is there's a lot of really wonderful card games and conversational games that are coming out more and more. My husband and I have a conversation card game company. You do? Yeah. And do you like keep it around the house? Yeah, we keep it out on the table and I have it in my purse too, my car. We use it for each other when we don't have stuff to talk about and we use it with our

friends when they come over and it's really, really fun. And it just gets you beyond that like, yes, we all know how to talk to each other. And I think sometimes people shy away from conversation card games because they think it means they lack something, they lack the ability to have conversation. But what I love is it zooms you beyond that surface level. Like, how's the weather? How is your day? How's work? Into more interesting, deeper conversations.

Totally. It's such a great example. I think some really good hosts use Spotify lists really well. I read about this in a Art of Gathering newsletter a few months ago where different hosts find ways to add specificity. to a gathering, even if people don't know each other. I think their dress code was where your favorite song, I mean, you can decide if that's like totally overwhelming or the best dress code of your life.

But as people entered, people would guess like, oh, what is that? You know, is that flash dance? But then they put on the Spotify playlist, whatever their favorite song was. And it was this inherently conversational, relational, like, device. Because then over the course of the night, when people's favorite songs come on, People are, you know, they're like excited. They're sharing music. They're talking about it one

another. I actually just posted on my Instagram today. This mother and daughter couple who went on a road trip and every stop, they'd stop and speak to strangers. But it was just one specific device. What's your favorite song? We're going on a road trip. If you could add to our road trip playlist, what would you add? It's not a party, quote, unquote, but it completely changed their social permission, which is what you're talking about with your cards. It's a different form of connection. It doesn't have to be so deep or so intimate, but you also learn so much about a person, and it's like a leveling device. We are all different from one another. We live in a multiracial democracy. It's like kind of overwhelming all of the different ways one could connect.

And so having one specific way helps people just begin to explore what they have in common or are introducing each other to new worlds. I feel like a huge part of this is just overcoming this pervasive social notion that intentionality is lame and that like off the cuff is cool. Yes. Which is interesting. By the way, some of the best gatherers I know, like all of the structure is invisible. This is what experience designers do. This is what theater directors do.

It's like a duck, right? That's like kicking fast underwater. But over water, it just feels like, wow, that was such a thoughtful experience. Wow, that was so beautiful how one thing just moved to another and after the games. We were kind of tired and we just naturally went and sat in the living room. It doesn't have to be like, hey guys, let's all like hold hands and sing. It can be that, right? But there's so many different forms and manifestations of this.

I totally agree with you. I don't know if it's an American thing or it's this sort of like desire to not look like you care. Gathering is care, right? Relationships is care. I'll give another example. mine called me recently, and it's her mother's 70th birthday. And she grew up in Western Michigan, and she doesn't live there anymore. Most of the cousins are kind of scattered across Michigan and beyond. And she really wanted to gather for larger extended family for her mother's birthday. Her

father passed away years ago. And she's done all of this work to bring together like 35 family members, many of whom she hasn't seen in years, right? And she called me up and she was like, the cabin is booked. People are, you know, driving hours to come hang. We have this sort of afternoon birthday party. There'll be a cake. People can swim. But do you more than that. She's like, but I don't want it to be, everyone comes all this way. And then like, we just kind of hang out and chit chat and like mill around and the group's kind of dissipated. And some people are swimming and some people on the grass. And then we blow out the candles. She's like, I don't want it just to be that. But how do I kind of gather the group?

And part of what I told her, and again, the style can look a lot of different ways. But it's like 30 is a lot of people. Most people have some amount of social anxiety or at least social like anticipation to see people you haven't seen in a long time to see extended family. There's also often like in most extent of family is deaths that have happened like it's a lot. That gave her three points. First was don't be afraid of a little structure. And structure can be start time. and end time. It can be just saying, like, we'll get things going around two. And then, like,

for those of you who need to make the four-hour drive home, we'll be done by six. But for those of you who want to stay the night, we have extra places and we'll start the campfire at 630. That's something like, give people a map. The second was find moments of freedom and then moments of concentration. So at certain moments, like allow people to know when's a moment of focus. We'll be doing some toasts or we'll do a family photo or we'll have a sing-along, which is like her favorite songs, but it doesn't matter what it is at some level, at this time. And then the last thing I told her was, don't underestimate the power of giving people social permission to interact with each other in some fun way. In part, with a large

extended family, like we tend to go to the cousins that we know or we'll stick to our own unit. And I don't know what she's going to do yet, but she was exploring all sorts of different things like Marlene Bingo, right? And these like 12 different hints about, Marlene over 70 years and whoever gets all the clues first wins some small prize. It's just literally social permission to then honor her mother, find stories that like cousins wouldn't normally know, design a scavenger hunt that you would only know if you were part of her life. Like, it's just an invitation to build in some social permission to also tap into the meaning, the context, and the purpose of why we are all here. I love that. I think we have been,

circling around this, but you make this point very clearly in your book, and I just want to make it very clearly here as well, which is that it's actually selfish to be a chill host. Can you explain specifically what you mean by that sentiment? When I kind of talked about this in the book, I'm using chill in the way that people, again, to our earlier conversation, kind of are pretending not to care, right? I'm chill, you're chill. Like, it's all cool. Like, I don't want to look like I'm imposing on anyone, like relax. It's not for the spirit of generosity of welcome, like deeply relax here. I'm talking about the desire to not look like you care.

And most of our gatherings are under-hosted. If you're bringing people together at some level, you deeply care. And in trying to look like we don't care, we under-orient, right? We assume everybody knows each other and we'll go up to each other themselves. We assume everyone will behave, right? and that there isn't going to be a druncle cornering the friends at the wedding. We assume that people kind of feel like they belong there. And so often we're not hosting them because we're afraid about what we will look like.

Gathering is about connection, but it's also about protection. The role of the host is to practice what I call generous authority, which is using your power as a host to connect your guests to each other, to protect your guests from each other, right? This gatherings of all type. You may be a teacher in a classroom, maybe running a volunteer at a church or a mosque or synagogue. You have Saturday tour volunteer training.

One of the volunteers is chatting so much, is asking all the questions that they're taking all of the air out of the room from any of the other volunteers. That's the role of the host to protect the other guests from the dominator, right? And there's many, many ways to do that, including well before anyone arrives in which you write in the invitation and in priming people about how they answer questions in some structure. But basically, when we are hosting, we're taking on the responsibility and the pleasure and the delight of making sure that people can meaningfully connect

without all having to be the same. And that can look a thousand ways. One of my favorite examples is from the book is the Alamo Draft House. Have you been or do you know it? Yeah, it has my favorite Buffalo cauliflower in the world. Amazing. Amazing. That's a really good craft beer, which I find very funny in a movie theater. So Alamo Draft House, as you clearly know, it was found in Austin, Texas years ago. It spread around the country.

And most movie theaters, if you go, and I know movie theaters are having a crisis right now, but when we used to go, there's this rule that comes on at the beginning of a show, which is don't talk, don't text, don't be loud. In most movie theaters, if you do that, nothing. happens. If someone's really annoying behind you, it's up to you, the guest, to kind of like give them a side eye, to hush them. And like the only time a staff, right, the host of Lowe's or AMC or whatever the theater is comes out is literally if there's a physical fight, right, if it's security. The Alamo Draft House realizes that actually other people can interrupt your

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not being too chill but also not being too stressed? Because I think we've all experienced the gatherings or even hosted the gatherings where the host is like freaking out about all of these things and it's actually negatively impacting the guest's experience. When I say, chill, what I'm kind of bristling against is, again, not caring. And that is different than being so stressed out during your fill in the blank, your conference, your party, your baby shower, that you can't actually enjoy it. So I have a couple of very practical tips. I have a newsletter about this exact topic and it's called how to lessen your anxiety as a host. The biggest tip is share the responsibility, create sub-hosts. So a couple of very practical.

things, particularly if you're kind of new at this or you're kind of getting your sea legs back after the pandemic or whatever phase of the pandemic we're in, to invite someone else to co-host it with you. Very simply, like whether it's a book launch, whether it's a spring party, literally doesn't matter what it is, to have a co-host. You feel like you actually have a team. You are able to just kind of share your nerves. It's also less work. But the second thing is, even if you don't have a co-host, I try to find a subsection of guests and invite them in some small way

to become sub-hosts. In person, that can literally be inviting five people to be ministers of water, right? Hey, would you want to be a minister of water? Would you mind when you walk around today or you move around? Like, anytime you see someone with an empty cup, you know, can you just fill their water up?

Like, will you be the vice president of ICE? Will you be the distributor of big red gum? Like, I love big red gum. Would you mind just going around? Like, if people want some big red gum, like, give me... I think it's a mistake to think, like, gathering is this form of literally entertainment where, like, I am on the stage and I have to please all of these people.

And it can be fun responsibility. It can be specific. It can be tiny. You know, I went to a birthday party where there were ministers of vice. Right? And they were invited. They had a little flask of whiskey in the back, right, in the secret back room or whatever. It's just simply a way of like winking and saying at some level, we're kind of all doing this together.

And over the course of most really good gatherings, the authority and the hosting actually gets distributed and shared to everyone actually feeling like this is theirs. Are there any things that you feel like people pay way too much attention to at gatherings that actually don't make a very big difference? I think historically, like for the last 50 to 60 years, we overpay attention to the aesthetics and the logistics. And we assume that the meaning will be held through the things, right? The beautiful flower arrangements, the perfect ramps, the beautiful napkin. And it's not that those things don't matter. A beautiful table scape is breathtaking. It's so beautiful.

But somehow, it's a very specific form of gathering. And I feel like that archetype of like you have to have a perfect dinner party to be a good host is like a deeply dangerous idea. Because there's so many forms of gathering and there's so many forms of making meaning that it feels like it's closed the door to make gathering as something that's like democratic, accessible. You don't need a fancy house. You don't have to go into like cotillion school that you can put out a blanket in a park and invite. people to come in the afternoon and bring their favorite childhood soda and like enough for like one other person and tell a story about like what they were doing when they drank that thing. And that is a form of meaning through story, through context, through specificity that you don't

need a lot of money to be able to do. I think we've overfocused on the shaping of things as the only source of meaning. And we've underfocused on the shaping. of connection, of story, of specificity that is actually accessible to all of us to be able to think about how do we actually create meaning with our people. I'd love to do a little speed round where I'm just going to give you a bunch of different types of gatherings. And if you are willing, I would love just one tip for making each type of gathering better. Okay. All right, let's kick it off on a happy note with funerals. How to make them better?

Just like one way to elevate or to bring intention to or kind of to apply your principles to a funeral. Invite the guests to find a way to share a story short and sweet about the person, verbally or written, but in a way that others can share and witness it. What about weddings? Connect your guests. to each other in simple ways as they enter the room. What would that look like?

One example I have, a heterosexual couple, decided to write a letter, a little note to every guest, why they loved them or what they loved about them or why they're friends or what they admire about them, just like one sentence and one other person in the room to look out for and why they think they would like them. and then on the back of the card was a picture of the person they were supposed to meet. Oh, I love that. And so when they entered the cocktail party part of the wedding, people were kind of greeted by this. A picture is almost like one of those old school like sandwich boards.

Like they made it themselves. She said, you know, someone asked, isn't this a lot of work? And she said, well, for me, it was an intentional way we did on a road trip. We wrote the letters like over the course of many weeks. And it helped me actually explain to my husband, is this person to me and vice versa. And so it was an intentional kind of process in our wedding planning that we wanted to go through. You know, enter a room, he was like, I don't know anyone here, or like, even a plus one, like, what am I really doing here? And it gives them something to do.

It shows care without having to go around to each and every single person. It makes you feel loved and honored by that person, even if the big day, you're not going to spend a lot of time with them. And then it orientes them. Again, it gives the social permission that, like, you are all here because we love you. And you are honoring us by actually meeting each other. And you're also helping our union because our life is easier and better. And when the going gets tough, you all have now. And we are better when our communities are interstitched. Like, won't you honor us? And by the way, I think you're going to really like each other. I love that. What about a work Zoom? You use the chat. And in the first five minutes, particularly while people are milling around,

like those moments where you're kind of waiting for people, if that happens. In our in-person gatherings, that's actually often the really important time for the social fabric. Like, hey, can I get your coffee? Oh, where are you going to sit? Hey, how about that? And what's on your phone, right? And we miss that informality in Zoom. So to either play a song and, like, I know organizations where somebody's authentically excited about songs.

And then when people are waiting in that time, have everyone unmute and kind of just chat. You can chat about the song. And third tip is ask in the chat. This works particularly for larger groups, a simple work-appropriate question while people are waiting to kick things off that people can answer in the chat. Like, what's your first concert and who'd you go with? Oh, I love that. What about a dinner party?

Don't seat people right away. Get people have time to linger and to have the freedom of motion throughout the room and spend time introducing people a lot in ways that make them feel. honored and curious about the other person. Didn't you have a part in your book where you introduced people and they weren't the ways they wanted to be introduced or something? Asked us, askers, ask us. Which is why, you know, gathering is not like you're going to just throw the perfect whatever gathering once and never again. Like I still messed up. I'm still deeply curious about why things work and why things don't work. This was a dinner party where I got insecure.

I was like, oh my gosh, I don't want to look like I care too much. I don't want to look like Like I care. So I didn't introduce, it was small. It was like nine people. I didn't introduce them to each other because I kind of assumed they'd find each other until one person literally pulled me aside and was like, we don't know each other. Can you please introduce us? I hadn't planned on it. So then I kind of like start introducing people and I one person I got his hometown wrong and all of them I told them what they did for work. And then one person I forgot and then she felt wounded. Like I will also say a lot of the gatherers that I interviewed who other people credited with disproportionate. creating meaningful gatherings were introverts. They weren't people who think about themselves as like the person who stands in the front of the room. They often describe themselves as loners or experiencing social anxiety. I thought this was interesting. I asked one of them, you know, why do you think that so many people I'm interviewing identify that way? And she said, well, I know for me, I'm creating the gatherings I wish existed in the world. And sometimes that's just some very careful, like meaning full of infrastructure. And that could be just as simple. So maybe you don't

introduce everyone, but maybe there's a seating order and everyone sees their name, you know, written by your child or you. And at some level, like, they just know that there's a place for you here. Okay, last one. Let's do a group vacation. Cancel it. No. Just kidding. So a couple of things. First is think about ahead of time ideally and either have a conversation around the financial norms of the groupification. I'm a conflict resolution facilitator in one of the biggest fights

that happen either explicitly or implicitly on group vacations is around money. Both in terms of how much something is going to cost, but also particularly spontaneous decisions when people have different financial backgrounds. Really think about are we aligned or are there ways that we can have a shared experience, and different people wanting to spend in different budgets don't feel judged or controlled by each other. And then the second thing is to have some amount of norms,

so you can either choose to go on vacation with people you know they like spending time the same way, right? You go to some place and you literally want to be out all day, go into every single site and come back, you know, exhausted at home, and the other person wants to, like, sit on a chair and read all day. Again, creating meaning across differences, the core of the art of gathering. And the way to do that is to create shared norms that people are on board with. And so it could be we're going on vacation for five days. The only rule is that at 6 p.m. every night, cocktails on the porch and dinner together will cook.

Everybody is off and does whatever they want during the day. It's creating some amount of social norms ahead of time so that people kind of know what they're signing up for. I love that. Can you just leave us with one tip, one homework assignment, something we could all do as soon as we're done. listening to the podcast today to either begin to shift our thinking about gatherings or have more quality gatherings in our lives? I would invite you to take what I call a gathering audit and think about both as a host and as a guest. You could think about it for the next month or next two weeks and just pause and to ask yourself as a host like what is one way I might

want to gather my people? My always a guest? What is my guesting and hosting restaurant? Am I always a guest? And if so, if I was going to host one gathering, how could I do it in a way that, like, is a gathering I want to go to? What would delight me to go to? And I can't believe other people want to go to also. But the second is then as a guest is to actually look at your week, look at the invitations that come in. And rather than just saying either yes or no or saying yes, and then canceling 20 minutes before because you've like overcommitted to stuff, to actually pause and to ask, just like we have information diets, you know, what do we read? We have nutritional diets. What do we put into our bodies? Like, thinking about your gathering diet, and I think the

pandemic has sort of helped us in certain ways, like, how many kind of times a week or a month do I actually want to be with other people? Does that align if you live with people, you have a partner, you have a family? When and how do we actually want to spend time? What is the ways in which I spend time nourish me? And then looking at the back of the last two years, what are one or two gatherings that I felt really alive, really nourished. Interesting. What are gatherings that, like, I felt I did not want it yet and why? Just write it down. Interesting. And for the next month, to just pause as you start to become a more intentional guest and host, to just notice when you are at a gathering, before you enter, ask yourself, what's an intention that I have as I enter? Why am I

here? Why am I saying yes to this? And to just notice in a room, when are moments that take life? I also love adding to that just to bring us all the way back to the beginning. Like what are the events that we want to celebrate both on an individual and societal level? I think it is such a critical way to look at the importance of gatherings. Absolutely. I love that. What is one thing in my life that I don't feel like there's a ritual for, but I think there should be? I love that.

That's so permission-giving and so beautiful. Priya, can you just tell us a little bit about your book and you mentioned a course? and anything else that you want to draw attention to? Thank you so much for having me and for modeling, artful hosting. I could keep talking to you for a long time. I wrote the book, The Art of Gathering in 2018. And that book is full of inspiration. It's full of tips and tools.

But part of what I realized during the pandemic, particularly is people were really, really hungry for how do we actually do this? It could be a wedding. It could be a leadership conference. It could be a milestone birthday. like how do I literally do this? And so we designed the digital course. It's six weeks.

It's virtual. It's self-led. And where I literally break down, sort of like we started doing the podcast today, but how do you actually figure out your purpose? What is of this gathering? What does it mean to have a specific purpose? What does it mean to be disputable? How do I exclude with generosity?

Who should be invited? What should we actually do there? And you just work through this course step by step to create. a meaningful, artful, intentional gathering of any part. We launched recently, and one of the biggest things we're seeing is that groups are taking this course together. So teams are signing up in groups of eight or ten to change the way they actually do their weekly staff meeting or change the way they gather sort of culturally.

And so you can go to Priya Parker.com to find out more about that, sign up for a newsletter. We're on Instagram at Priya Parker and often sharing lots of examples. And send me your questions and send me your examples because the way we gather, is contagious. We literally make it up. Often what I'm doing in this newsletter on Instagram is sharing the ways people are marking moments of their life that may not have existed 50 years ago, 100 years ago, inventing new ways of coming together, having people mark moments that they think should mark to shift the culture. And when we actually see someone else to it, it gives us permission and inspiration to try it ourselves. I absolutely love that. Thank you so much for taking

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