Priya Parker Wants You To Fight Better

Doree Shafrir (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.

Elise Hu (0:17)

And I'm Elise Hu, and we're just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums. And I'm super excited for y'all to hear today's conversation because it is with one of the world's leading experts on groups and gathering, Priya Parker, who something like eight years ago came out with THE ART OF GATHERING, which really helped us reframe the importance of coming together, how to better come together, why we need to come together for community purposes. And now she's out with a new book, which sounds like it's not about connection and community, but really is. It's called THE ART OF FIGHTING. How about that for a tease?

We'll get into it.

Doree Shafrir (1:00)

Elise, what's going on with you?

Elise Hu (1:03)

I'm glad we're talking about fighting because I had this great weekend in Mexico City with a group that I had never traveled with before. And I was actually curious. I asked my friend Steve, who was the one who put up the bat signal and said, hey, I'm going to have this Airbnb with four bedrooms down in Mexico City for three weeks. Anybody who can come down, just come on down. Just come on down. And I was like, well, Steve, you didn't know who was going to take you up on this. What if it was a group that didn't jive? Because he leads group trips all over the world. Oh, wow. One of those companies. I mean, it's like his side job. He's mainly a photographer, but he also leads groups of high school aged boys whose parents pay for them to go to Alaska. He'll take the boys to Alaska or go to Fiji or wherever, Tokyo.

So I'm like, you know that if there's one squeaky wheel or something gets off in the dynamic, things could go awry.

It was like, I feel like now that I'm 44 years old, I've gotten to a point in my life where I curated my friend circle enough or it curated itself naturally such that if I'm going to ask friends of mine to show up randomly in Mexico City and they say yes, the ones who say yes, it's going to be pretty easy going. It's not going to be a problem. And he was right. It was a very cool group that came together. It was the four of us plus some friends and then each of us had some friends who were locals who lived in CDMX. And so we had different combinations of groups of six to eight over the course of the weekend and it was really awesome except at one point the Airbnb didn't have running water, which was a bit of a panic you know because I was like well if anybody gets sick and we don't have flushing toilets that's going to be a problem but it didn't last for too long so that got solved plus we got a credit. Thank you so much.

Doree Shafrir (3:00)

Got a credit out of that.

Elise Hu (3:01)

Yeah, yeah. It made it worth it to not have running water for about eight hours but I bring this up in connection to Priya Parker because Steve was talking about how he wanted to have like a relationship conversation in which he just stayed up all night and talked for six hours straight about nothing. You know, he's like, I feel like you really get to know somebody when you just get drunk or whatever and you're just, you're out really late or you just stay up really late and you just talk and talk and talk and it can be, you're just covering, you're running the gamut and by the end of it, you're spent but also energized and just you're more bonded to each other.

I was like, what I like to do in order to get to that same end, is have a really good fight. I feel like if I go two or three weeks even, by burying some of the things that are annoying me, my little peccadilloes in the relationship, or there's been fissures and it's the same fissure all along, having it out, really having the big fight where we're really vulnerable and we take our armor down and we say kind of mean things to each other that we would normally say unless it was kind of heated or we were in the middle of a conflict or the exposure of the conflict. I actually, and if done right, if you practice the art of fighting and actually repair from that and metabolize it and deal with the vulnerability hangover that Priya Parker calls it, the vulnerability hangover afterwards, I find those to be very bonding and get us the same place. So yeah, I think y'all are in for a treat when we talk to her.