The Art of Gathering How We Meet and Why It Matters With Priya Parker

Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Priya Parker about the difference between a gathering and a community, and the importance of vulnerability.   Episode Highlights:  Priya was born in Zimbabwe to scientist parents and her family moved every 6 months. Being biracial with an Indian mother and white father, Priya sees her entire life as creating “temporary alternative worlds” to belong to at any given time as she had to float between communities. We assume that in community building you lose the “I” to the “we,” but in reality the strongest groups maintain both the I and the we. Priya sees a major key and a minor key in gatherings, with the major key being the majority position, and the minor key being dissenting voices and paradoxical identities and difficult conversations. Gatherings and community are distinct things, with communities being built at gatherings. Don’t pursue vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake, it should still be true to the purpose of your gathering and community. Priya is trained in a practice called sustained dialogue, which is a group practice that says you can transform a conflict by transforming the relationships involved in the conflict. A failure at training a university in this practice taught her that an exercise that worked in one context won’t necessarily work in another, and that you should always know your audience. Her husband wrote a book that examines how the idea of changing the world has been co-opted by philanthropy so that no big structural change actually happens at a societal level.   3 Key Points: Every strong community needs both an “I” and a “we.” It’s important to find and sit in the heat of hard conversations or other challenges within a gathering or community. Know the context of the situation you’re entering into and know your audience.   Tweetable Quotes: “Communities become interesting when they become disputable.” –Priya Parker “Whenever you have an opportunity where people are willing to take risks for you because they love you, it’s a beautiful thing.” –Priya Parker   Resources Mentioned: Priya Parker: http://www.priyaparker.com/ (Website), https://twitter.com/priyaparker (Twitter), https://www.instagram.com/priyaparker/ (Instagram) http://www.thrivelabs.co/ (http://www.thrivelabs.co/) Travis King: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisking1 (Linkedin) http://communitybuildershow.com (communitybuildershow.com) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.