2021-05-20
52 分钟So in this sort of time of emergence, how do we turn a gathering, whether it's two people, a handful of people, over a meal, to a larger gathering or event, into an experience of collective elevation?
Well, my guest, Priya Parker, is on a mission to help us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time.
She's a facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of the Art of Gathering, how we meet and why it matters, a book that I absolutely love, and the host of the New York Times podcast together apart, pre has spent some 15 years helping leaders and communities have these complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition.
Trained in the field of conflict resolution, she has worked on race relations on american college campuses and on peace processes, processes in the arab world, southern Africa and India.
And Priya is the founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic forum, global Agenda, Council on New Models of Leadership, and a senior expert at Mobius executive leadership.
She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia.
And her work, well, it's been featured everywhere from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Ted, to real simple Oprah, Glamour, Today show, and tons of others.
And in today's best of conversation, we dive into what exactly is the art of gathering?
How do we bring together people and create those shared moments of understanding and transformation, which is something that we could all use more of right now.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
So my mother comes from kind of originally banaras, which is sort of, you know, one of the oldest cities in India.
And her father, who actually would have turned 100 today, oh, wow.
He passed away about a few months ago.
Her father worked for the indian government, and so she and her four siblings traveled around India a lot.
And when it was time for her to kind of get married, she decided she didn't want to, or at least not didn't want to have an arranged marriage.
And she kind of secretly applied to graduate school in the US and got into a few places, and at least in that generation, Virginia versus Iowa versus Minnesota, you're sort of just happy.
You have no idea what is what, and you just say yes.
And she ended up at Iowa State University, begged her parents to let her go, and they allowed her to.
Was that unusual for sort of that moment in time?