There’s an art to hosting a social gathering. On one end of the spectrum, a gathering can feel tossed together and random. On the other end, it can feel overly-focused on aesthetic perfection: the right food, the right ambience, the right mix of people. Author Priya Parker is on a mission to change the way we think about gathering together. The author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” joins The Bright Side to talk about how to be a better host. Originally aired March 26, 2024.
Hello Sunshine. Today on the bright Side, we're celebrating Thanksgiving with the Art of Gathering author Kriya Parker. It's Thursday, November twenty eighth. I'm Danielle Robe.
And I'm Simone Voice, and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn, and brighten your day.
As we kick off this Thanksgiving episode, we really would like to take a moment to share our gratitude. We are so incredibly grateful that you have welcomed us into your lives and your earbuds, and that we've all been able to share this time together. I don't know about you, Simon, but it feels so intimate right and I'm so grateful to share this platform with you, and that we've been able to have so many powerful, funny, thoughtful, enlightening conversations with our guests.
Yes, Danielle, I totally echo that gratitude, and I hear the intimacy in dms that you send us in the interactions that we have in person. When you tell me that a particular episode really resonated with you, That's what makes all of this so worth it. I am so thankful to you, our bright Side besties, our community, and also shout out to our team who works so hard behind the scenes to bring the show to life. There are so many producers that you don't get to see, but you hear their work in every episode of this show. And today, while all of us are spending time with friends and family, we are sharing our episode with gathering experts Prea Parker. She stopped by the bright Side earlier this year to teach us how to gather meaningfully and even magically, something that feels extremely relevant today.
Oh yeah, Prea Parker is an expert, I should say, the expert in gathering and really creating community. She's the author of the book The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters. I cannot recommend that book more so, we all talked about how to make every gathering transformative, whether it's a big birthday party or even a small zoom call. So I really hope you enjoy our conversation with Prea Parker and happy happy Thanksgiving to you and whoever you celebrate with. Pria Parker. Welcome to the bright Side. We're so excited to have you here.
Thank you so much for having me.
So we want to take a page out of your book, The Art of Gathering. We're both big Prea Parker fans. Ooch, We've read the book and we want to name our intention for the conversation today. So we were thinking that our intention is to learn how to build community for a podcast in a meaningful and joyful way.
Ooh, I like the class. Kay, we got some applause, bright side bessies.
Can you please share with us why setting an intention before gathering is so important.
The biggest mistake we make when we gather is we assume that the purpose is obvious and shared. Oh, I know what a podcast is, I know what a wedding is, I know what a funeral is, I know what a staff meeting is. And when we don't actually pause to ask why are we doing this?
What is the purpose? What is the purpose of this podcast?
With all of the million of podcasts in the world, what is it that we are uniquely trying to do? We tend to then replicate forms that may not make sense for this community or for these hosts, and so setting an attention and actually thinking well ahead of the gathering, why am I doing this? What is the need? How do I want to spend this time, allows you to then make decisions and be imaginative about what that time actually looks like and feels like, and helps you make practical decisions to get you there.
So in your book, you write that the first five minutes of any gathering are critical, and there's actually a lot of research that backs that up, and I love what you wrote about it. You say, your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people, and in grabbing them, it should both all the guests and honor them. So how do we create significant openings and why are opening so important?
We are all part of different communities, and I think of a gathering as a temporary alternative world, whether that is a mosh pit or a rave or a bagel brunch or a protest. And in order to create that temporary world and invite people into it, you need to prepare them so they know what they're signing up for and they can be successful in that world. But you need to also usher them into that world. And very specifically, all of these studies show that the first five percent of an experience kind of set the pathway for everything else. And so literally, whether it's in person or virtual, of everybody's entering that space and asking.
Do I belong here? Are these my people? Did I wear the right thing?
Yeah?
And I show my tattoos, like, you know, do I need to get a tattoo? Who are these people? And the best gatherers, the best hosts, understand that you're hosting from that moment of entry, and they do a really good job of welcoming people of literally saying hello. And the way in which people choose to share what risks they take is fundamentally related to whether or not they feel like they belong there and that they're wanted there. And it is not rocket science, but it is intentional.
So that social anxiety that you mentioned is so real. We've all felt that where you walk into a party you don't know too many people. What's a practical tip that we can use in order to kind of massage some of that social anxiety that happens whenever you step into a gathering as a host.
What can we do so in the art of gathering?
I interviewed over one hundred different types of gatherers from all walks of life, choir conductors, hockey coaches, party planners, professors that students love every year and ask, you know, what is it that they're doing that is so transformative. And one of the people I interviewed is a guy named Anthony Rocco, and he is an underground party planner and he would create these secret events for new members to get to know each other. And this is one of the things he would do in order to design a welcoming space. Basically, he had people enter and he'd welcome them and he'd say, you know, make yourself at home. Drinks are on the back. There's only one rule. You can't serve yourself a drink. You can serve anyone else drink, but you can't serve yourself a drink. That's so fun and by literally just slightly shifting the norms the rules, how do you basically help people feel like this is something that they want to be a part of. And the last thing I'll say is you can help people really feel that way actually not only at the moment they enter the room with a zoom, but actually an invitation. The invitation is the first moment to create a sense of belonging, of comfort, of ease, and we tend to just think that they're carrier's logistics.
All right, we're pausing the party for just a moment to take a quick break. Stay with us, and we're back. Priya, you have completely changed the way that I host Now whenever I'm throwing a party, I try to preify it. I try to think, what would Priya do? So I tried your method recently when I hosted a dinner party and I opened it with a short speech about what my friends mean to me. We answered these table questions that facilitated a really vulnerable and candid and funny discussion, and at the end of the night, everyone was just beaming. You could just feel the energy and the magic in the room. And this is one of the texts that I got. My friend said, my soul really needed that. So all that to say, your method is truly transformative.
Thank you so much. That means so much to me.
And I think that some level, what you're learning to do is make the implicit explicit. You're turning up the meaning dial right, You're you're sort of we tend to assume like, oh, people know that I love them, right right, they know? And actually, so many of us are parched. It is so beautiful to be able to water each other's gardens and in these tiny ways to say this is what I see in you, this is how I appreciate you, and then to have that come back it's literally nourishing.
Oh I matter. Oh this is what they see me. Oh, maybe I'll take a risk if they see me that way, Maybe I will take this risk. Maybe I will actually quit this job.
Maybe I will you know, call my parents who haven't talked to it a long time. Wow, they see something in me. It's and in modern life, we have to invent these moments of tiny ritual.
Priya, I'm still a little bit unsure about how to start from scratch and invent those moments ourselves. This is just week one of our podcasts, and you're an expert, especially in creating community online.
How do we build our.
Community and have everybody feel invited and connected?
I think so often in our in person gatherings, the role of the host, there's so much physicality that's helping you. Right, people are going under doorways, they're walking through hallways, they're perhaps taking off their jacket, which is actually a moment of transition. They're getting settled and in a virtual gathering, whether that's a zoom or whether it's a podcast, people are doing all sorts of different things, and you actually have the role of the host is to create a psychological togetherness, and so what does that mean. My advice to you would be to start with an opening or beginning that feels authentic to you both. You're kind of beginning this podcast both this week but also in every single episode by gas gathering yourself, gathering your guest, gathering your producers, which your listeners may not even hear, but they're part of this gathering, and then gathering and welcoming your listeners. But the element to create a shared experience is if you invite your guests to be part of the same ritual, and it should be. It could be as simple as like three D breaths and you're all taking it together and they can do that anywhere they want.
And so having some.
Opening ritual that allows each person to kind of mark the day and say I'm here, even if I'm walking in the park with my dog or i am biking to work, I'm having a shared experience with you both.
Pria, I want to talk about your background a little bit. So you actually have a background in conflict resolution and as a facilitator around race relations conversations on college campuses. So, how did your work in conflict resolution teach you more about how to host more meaningful gatherings?
Core, I'm biracial. I grew up in two households. My mother's Indian, my father's white American. And I'll maybe just go back to the story a little bit, because it actually deeply informs my convict resolution.
I grew up in these two households.
They divorced and then they each remarried other people, and they had joint custody, and so I went back and forth between these two homes every two weeks. And that meant leaving my mother and stepfather's home, which was this Indian, British Buddhist, vegetarian, incense filled progressive household, and then travel one point four miles and enter my father and stepmother's home, which was and still is a white American, Evangelical, Christian, conservative, Republican household, meat eating, you know, softball, playing household. And my husband often jokes it doesn't take a shrink to explain how Prea got into the field of conflict resolution. And so there's part of me that has always been very interesting in many ways of being and when I went to the University of Virginia and learned about this process called sustained dialogue there, the first question I was asked as a student was always what are you? And I learned very quickly meant racially like what's my background? And long story short as a student, I started this program with other students and friends at the University of Virginia more than twenty years ago, and I learned from this guy named Houseanders a process called sustained dialogue, and as facilitators, we were taught to hold conversations and create space for conversations that we didn't fully know how to have that often happened behind closed doors that build trust. We learned how to create moments of risk and safety and connection, like how do you set up a room so that people rip up the notes in their pocket and say, you know what gonna say my prepared marks because I was really touched by what you said. And instead of giving their stump speech right like a pr PR publicist, they give a sprout speech with their voices shaking, and they say something that they're not even fully sure themselves they haven't spoken out before, and so the core of my work as a dialogue facilitator is actually helping people have the right conversations the right groups, have the right conversations, and ask the right questions. To go back to your comment on questions, but contract resolution at some level is the deep training to help people hold healthy heat and relevance and bring themselves to a conversation while still being curious to others.
I am also a biracial woman, and so everything you're saying about that need for belonging and what it feels like to straddle to worlds that so deeply resonates with me. How do you think gatherings can help us build bridges between worlds?
You know, when I researched for the art of gathering, one of the things I realized was, and maybe it's obvious, but it wasn't ah to me, which is traditional communities, ancient communities, tribal communities in which people were born on the same plot of earth, they prayed to the same god, they followed the same dietary restrictions, they had inherited ways of being. They know how to gather, they have shared ritual and in our modern life, in a diverse life where people like you and I and so many are biracial and bicultural and by religious where norms are breaking and shifting around who gets to wed and who is out in the workplace and what and we get to choose our friends and our faith in our God or are not God. Basically, we no longer have shared ways, shared assumed ways of making ritual together, and in trying to not offend one another, we end up doing nothing. And so modern gathering at the deepest level, it's not gathering around kin or belief. It's gathering around shared need and finding creative ways, innovative ways, life giving ways that help people create meaningful connection without all having to be the same, but still getting to temporarily have a shared experience. And it takes thought and it takes coordination, but it is absolutely possible.
Coming up after the break, how not to be like me the chill host with the not so chill gatherings.
And we're back, okay.
So hosting is a huge part of gathering and our title now is literally podcast host. So can you describe what the role of a host is?
I'm so glad you asked.
So a host is someone who should practice what I call generous authority, generous authority is using your power for the good of the group to help it achieve its purpose.
And a good host has three roles.
The first to connect your guests to each other in appropriate ways that are relevant to the purpose. The second is to protect your guests from each other.
Right.
And if you're at a volunteer training and all of a sudden, one person is taking over the whole thing, it's the role of the host to make sure that that person is not dominating the entire meeting.
Right.
If you're hosting a party and there's one guest that's cornering all of your friends.
It's the role of the host to protect your guests.
Right.
So we tend to think the only way to bring people together is to connect, But there's also a lot of problems that happen when people come together, and so the role of the host is how do you protect them?
Right?
And then finally to temporarily equalize your guests so that they feel like they belong here.
Mmmm.
You know, when I read your book, I realized I was the chill host.
I was the worst host you could possibly have.
For everybody who hasn't read the book yet, it's the host who doesn't put out place cards or name cards. It's the host who doesn't say you should wear this or that, just come in whatever. And I thought that I was relinquishing power because I was like, who cares? Just come as you are. But you actually say that you need rules, you need boundaries.
Why is that?
What I mean by that is we tend in many places to think by letting our guests be, we're giving them a good time. And that is certainly sometimes the case. If you're listening to this and you have a group of friends and you love the way you hang out, keep doing that. You're lucky, right if you feel like, oh, I love my people and we are good, like God bless.
This is really about for those.
Moments where you're wanting to really up the ante, up the meaning factor, up the sense of connection, and also particularly when people don't know each other, because basically gathering is about connection, but it's also about power. And if you don't give some kind of guidance as to either what is this for, or give some kind of common shared context, someone else's going to come up and do it for you. People just need a little bit of shared context to connect to banter, to have a way into each other and the really good host finds just enough structure. It doesn't need to be placed cards necessarily, but just enough structure and no more to help the group take off.
PRIA.
You have left us with so many incredible insights about gathering. We talked about some of the mistakes people commonly make, so not setting a clear intention, not having enough structure, not using generous authority. Is there one more major faux pa that we tend to do with hosting and gathering that you want to leave us with today?
I might reframe the faux pas in part because part of what this work is is it's a realization that we don't really know how to do this anymore. We're writing our own rules, and if anything, the invitation is to think deeply to ask how do I want to spend my time? And like host gatherings that you're like, oh my gosh, I want to go to that?
Yeah, right, I want to go.
If you're dreading something that's data, you know, think about, okay, so what is it that I want to do?
And so instead of thinking.
About there's like a wrong or a right way to do, this is just literally is an invitation to start paying more attention. And if this all feels totally overwhelming, my deepest advice to you is to start thinking about how to be a better guest. Guests have a lot of power and gatherings. They can shift it. You can feel and people are disengaged. You can feel, you know, like you send out an email and like the one friend right, Sanjay is like.
I'll be there. I can't wait. How can I help? And you're like, thank you, Sonjay?
Right, yes, right, be either an enthusiastic yes or a connected no. Thank you so much for the invitation. I can't make it. I love that you're doing this. I'm so grateful you thought of me.
It's like the person at the wedding who like is the first to the dance floor.
The people that are getting married are like, thank you.
Exactly. How do you practice being a generous guest? How do you help people? And then how do you be intentional about what you would attend? When we choose how we spend our time also, and when we choose, and that doesn't mean not to have any obligation, we also come in with a lot more energy.
That is the perfect note to end our conversation with you today.
Pria. Thank you so much. Pria, you add.
So much to people's lives. When we were thinking about who could sort of christen our first week, we were all hoping that you would say yes. So thank you for sharing your time with us.
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for modeling beautiful hosting.
You're already hosts that are paying attention to honoring the guests that you're bringing in and bringing yourselves to it and making it relevant to your listeners.
And it's such a pleasure and privilege to be part of the opening parts of your journey. Thank you so much for saying that.
Thank you, Pria. What a joy it was to speak with Pria. She has completely transformed how I think about bringing people together. And with that in mind, here's your spark of the day.
We're going to end on a quote from Priya, reverse engineer and outcome. Think of what you want to be different because you gathered and work backward from that outcome. So with all that, we're going to gather intentionally, meaningfully and build beautiful community. If you want to improve your gathering skills, Pria has a free workbook for all of our bright Side besties. It's called the new rules of gathering. You can find it at Priaparker dot com. Slash the bright Side.
And remember, we want to hear from you. What opening rituals do you love? Which should we try right here together on the bright Side. Send a voice memo to Hello at the brightsidepodcast dot com. Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side, and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh. And feel free to tag us at Simone Voice and at Danielle Robe.
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
See you tomorrow, folks, keep looking on the bright side.