In your meetings, I think one very simple transformative question is at the very beginning to just begin by asking, what is the purpose of this meeting today? And see what people say. Just literally start with that. My name's Katrina. And I'm Steve. And we are curious about how changing conversations can change organizations. Yeah. And together with our community of transformation nerds, we're exploring how to leverage conversations to make our workplaces more fit for humans, but also more fit for the future. We'll use our podcast series to do just that while being in conversation with business and thought leaders who have interesting perspectives on the topic. So without further ado, let's start the conversation. Today's guest is master facilitator, strategic advisor and acclaimed author of the book, The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters. Priya has spent 15 years helping leaders and communities to have complicated conversations about community and identity and vision at moments of transition. She invites us to take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. And Steve, in the context of today, we might add one conversation at a time. Welcome Priya. Thank you for having me. And I've got to say I'm quite excited. And, and I was, this came to me yesterday when I, when I was thinking about your past experience in conflict resolution. So you've been changing conversations in that context for a long time. And I'm really excited to hear, you know, what should we know about you going into this conversation, maybe your life or your work? Thank you for that question. I, you know, I come into this work very much based on, I think, like many of us, how I was raised. I'm really excited about the worlds in which I got plopped into as we, as we each are. My mother is Indian. My father is white American. And I was born in Zimbabwe. And I was born in Zimbabwe because it was the closest good hospital at the time from where my parents were living in Botswana that would accept an interracial couple. And so from the very beginning, boundaries and borders and identity was a very deep part of even my birth. As it is, I think, for so many people consciously or not consciously. And I was raised, my parents were married for almost a decade and eventually moved to the United States, back to the United States where they originally met. And they separated and eventually divorced. And they each remarried other people. And I often share the story because it does so deeply influence my work and my life and my lens. And, um, but they, they had joint custody. And so for about a decade, I would toggle back and forth between these two households. Um, and I would leave my mother and stepfather's house. And it was, and still is a Indian, British, Buddhist, vegetarian, progressive, global, um, incense filled household. And, uh, you know, we'd read thick nut Han and David White and that kind of ilk. And then we would travel 1.4 miles to my, um, my father and stepmother's home and walk in. And there are, you know, dogs running around and it's a white American evangelical Christian, uh, crosses in multiple rooms, twice a week church going conservative Republican. Uh, climate skeptic family. And I was a part of both. Um, and I was also apart from each, um, in that somewhat even just temporally every two weeks, I was not part of one of those systems. And then I would reenter. And so I have always been interested in how we come together. Um, and I was a part of, um, in a way three families, my original family of origin, if you will. And then that broke and then, or at least shifted forms. And then two new families were also created. Um, I became perhaps not surprisingly a conflict resolution facilitator. And so, so much of my work is very much informed by, um, by the experience of being part of multiple formations. Hmm. The Irish have a saying, they say, the thing about the past is it's not really the past. And I think it's a good example of your background and your past brings you into a conversation differently. And you bring that into your conversations. Very deeply. And, and, you know, my, my context is American. Um, and one of our Southern writers, William Faulkner has a sentence that's very similar, which is the past is not past. It's not, it's, it's not even, it's not even over. Um, and I went to the university of Virginia, which is, uh, full of, full of the past. Um, and so much of, it's funny, actually, the, um, you're reminding me the, you know, in the U S and you apply to college, uh, often you have to write essays and they ask you, you know, what do you want to be? And you make something up. And, and one of the questions in the, at least when I was in, when I was applying to these schools, one of them was literally that Faulkner quote. Um, and, and we had to write an essay about how that was true or not true. Um, and I remember the essay that I wrote, I've actually never shared this. The essay that I wrote was about, um, uh, that summer, you know, I'm half Indian and every, every summer, my mother in part to have me spend time with my cousins and in India, she would, she would kind of drop me off in Delhi and I would spend time with my cousins. And sometimes we would spend time in other parts of India. And that summer before applying to college, I had, uh, spent three months in Northern India. And, um, I, uh, my cousin was doing research in a village near Nenithal and we would go and, and, um, interview people who lived in villages. And I remember I would, I went in and in one of those homes, um, sort of a hut. I, um, I, um, I, we would sit for hours and, and, uh, interview people about their health and their experiences living there. But basically this woman had a bowl of apples, a basket of apples underneath her bed. And, um, and she could tell that we were getting hungry. And we also knew that this was like her prized, kind of her, her prized, um, hard, hard one food. And, um, we were in a, and she offered us, you know, an apple and we were in a, in a privileged position to both know that we couldn't say no, but that we shouldn't say yes. And I, uh, I went back to the U S you know, and went back to high school. And I remember walking into the grocery store and just seeing piles and piles of apples. And all I could think of was my, you know, was, was that woman. Um, and that's what I wrote my college essay about was that in so much of the experiences that we, um, that we have and that shape us, um, when you allow yourself to be altered by an experience or that it alters you, you can't unsee, it changes your lens on everything else. Thank you for sharing. It's so true. And, and, and I think that's a really big part of why, why we're so excited to have this conversation with you as well in the way that you've formulated your perspective on gathering and how it can change you, or it could also not change you. Um, and, and maybe that's also pointing to Steve when we, we're, we're laying out the case for change for this. It's, it's, it's those meetings that you, you reference where they, it's just not doing any, anything for anyone. And we'd love to go away from that. We, we actually, I mean, the more we think about it, the more we think about maybe gatherings or conversations or meetings, whatever word you like, maybe the most potent and put the, the thing that holds the most potential in, in, in changing organizations. And therefore, I'm curious to hear what is a successful gathering in your perspective? You know, I think that first, just to kind of table set, I, um, I define a gathering as anytime three or more people. So it's really about a group. It's not one, one on one, though. Many of the principles apply. Um, I think like conversation, you can have a conversation between two people or within a group, but for gatherings, three or more, anytime three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle and end. And so it's, it's an event. It's a, it's a container, but it's a container that ends. Um, I think of gatherings as different than community. Communities have gatherings and gatherings build a sense of community. But I'm really thinking about this sort of this unit of time and I'm thinking about it as a unit of time because it's something that can be shaped. It's literally something we invent, right? Some person at some point in an organization says we should actually get together because we don't know what each other's doing, right? And so then you have a, something that we call, we use the language called a meeting to then begin to exchange information. And then perhaps three years later or someone else takes over that meeting and everybody's scratching their heads and saying, why are we doing this again? And in the beginning, it was a transformational or successful gathering because it hit a specific felt need, right? And so, and then over time, because the need changes, the people change, we get stuck to the form, the ritual of, well, we always meet on Tuesday mornings at 8 a.m. Or we always meet at Wednesdays in this certain way in this corner of the office and we become attached to the ritual in the form well after it serves its purpose. And so transformational or at least successful, to use your language gatherings, are ones, very simply, are ones where there is a need that is being uniquely addressed because of the specific people that have been invited to it and how they were brought together. And so, very simply, that could be a wedding, right? I'm agnostic about the form of the gathering. That could be a wedding where people leave and, yes, there's a union between two men or two women or a man and a woman. But because of the way they gathered, because of the ways they structured their vows, because of how they included their community, everybody leaves remembering and feeling differently about how they might love, right? Having spent those four hours together versus a wedding where you go and you kind of watch and it's interesting, but it hasn't necessarily changed you. And so part of what I'm really interested in is there are gatherings and it's not rocket science and you don't need a fancy house and you don't need high, you know, a lot of education to be able to do it. But when we ask, what is the need here and how might we uniquely gather people so that the way we leave is different than the way we entered because of how we spent our time together, that's interesting to me. And when I'm holding space for a meeting in my organization and say that it's a repetitive one, so I have my operations meeting monthly. So what would be the questions that I would and I should be asking myself for that meeting to be not repetitive in its energy and transformational? What are the questions you would take me through kind of to make me repurpose it? First is what is the need of this meeting this week? What is our need today? And like any organization, like any individuals, things have changed since the last week. So the first is just very specifically, what is the need today? Why might we meet? The second is to ask the people in your meeting, right? So part of the power of, like this work is called the art of gathering. It's not the art of hosting, in part because guests have a lot of power and a lot of information. So also asking them, do you think this is useful? If not, how might we make this useful? What is the deepest need in this moment around which we should gather? Other ways to ask the question is what is our desired outcome, right? We're spending 60 minutes together, 30 minutes together. What do we want to have been different because of how we spent this time? But also some of it is like repetitive meetings aren't bad if they're hitting a specific need. And sometimes to have a transformational meeting, the content itself might even be irrelevant. Like I'll give an example. There's a woman I know who runs a weekly meeting. She's in the publishing industry. And she started, she began to think very deeply about not just the purpose of the meeting, but also the purpose of gathering her team regularly. And she started an experiment where at the beginning of every meeting, she would spend just five minutes, sometimes 10, but just five minutes connecting the team by having everybody answer one question, which was, what is your rose and thorn of this week? And it could be about anything. It could be family. It could be work. It could be, but basically what's the best part of this week and what was the worst or what was the painful or an annoying part? And what she noticed was when she regularly asked this question again and again and again and again, regardless of what the content of the meeting was, people began to take different risks of what they shared each week, what the level of content or context of what they'd share with each other. But something else began to happen, which she didn't realize, was she describes herself as kind of a cheerleader, a champion, someone who's always looking at the bright side of things. And she didn't realize that part of the dynamic that was happening on the team was that people didn't think they could bring her bad news. And by also including thorn in there, it began to shift the culture just ever so slightly for the team that became transformational because it normalized talking about both. Interesting. And I read some research a while ago where somebody shared that when you, by the time you do something for the second or the third time, your own engagement goes down, sometimes without us knowing it. But just the fact that you're repeating yourself means that you bring a little less energy and a little less, yeah, of yourself into that meeting really. So maybe there's an invitation to, if you have these repetitive meetings, to actually have the guts to revisit why are we doing this and maybe jinx them every now and then because just by the fact that you do them over and over again, they wear out. And I think that data is interesting to me in part because once a form has been found and seems to work, the good part of that is each of us can actually be a little bit less on high alert, right? There's actually, there's a comfort in repetition. There's an ability to say, oh, I can actually unwind here a little bit. And part of, I think, the dialing of, I think of this as a conflict resolution facilitator, which is how, what is the right amount of surprise and helping people kind of get off of their scripts and what is the right amount of safety and familiarity to allow people to also feel that they're not just on constant high adrenaline alert. And I think in an organization and the needs of any type of system, you kind of want textures of both. You know, in one of my colleagues and friend is the relationship expert, Esther Perel, and she's Belgian, lives in the U.S. And she often talks about these kind of these two twin polarities within a relationship of both safety and the word that she uses and desire, right? And so I think in similarly, even in gatherings, you want an element of both safety and excitement, right? It's some amount of risk, but what's the right amount of risk? And I think that looks different for different cultures. It looks different for different times of day. It looks different. And so part of it is an attunement to also knowing, how do I both stay present to this moment without feeling like I have to, you know, pound on the drums to wake everyone up? So one of the things I'm trying to do is put myself in the shoes of other leader who might be listening and who would like to maybe change one of the meetings, the reoccurring meetings. And I could just imagine them being like, oh, but when do I have time for it? I'm so busy. And now I have to revamp everything. And I could just imagine that feeling quite heavy. So if we were to offer something, a lightness or one thing that you could do, what could that be? Well, first I would say most of us are gathering too much. And so I agree with feeling like, you know, meetings often, there was a beautiful piece recently called, it's about the psychology of why we keep meeting overload. It was in the Harvard Business Review maybe two weeks ago. And one of the, and they list out kind of five reasons why we keep overmeeting. And one of them was something like meeting as like commitment checking, right? It's the way to actually, to make sure you're doing what you said you're going to do, we're going to meet. And so I think the first is to add some lightness, is to actually look and create some space, whatever that is. It could be, particularly if you have authority in your organization saying, you know, there's going to be days where there's no meetings, right? Or we're going to have three hour chunks where we have no meetings. We have to figure out another way around this. We need to clear more, we need to create more spaciousness. But in your meetings, I think one very simple transformative question is at the very beginning to just begin by asking, what is the purpose of this meeting today? And see what people say. Just literally start with that. It's not, and then it becomes revamped when you actually begin to listen to people's needs. And if they say, we don't actually know, versus you have four different answers, like it's just asking a question that can be transformational. It says, why are we meeting? What is the purpose of this meeting? But you, and the challenging thing in that, because I like that, is that you're also toiling with my control gene. Because if I'm holding space for the meeting, I would normally have a pretty good idea as to what I want to happen. So by opening up the way you inspire me to do here, I'm also letting go of control. I'm allowing myself to look into the unknown somehow, because there might be other needs. And I had something in my mind. And it's a little bit frustrating, actually. You know, I might even have prepared a deck about where we should go. So it's not easy. Part of leadership is the discernment to know when and how do you actually have a very strong sense of direction and you just need to lead and not open up the questions. And when do you actually need to begin to loosen the reins a bit? And to me, leadership and gathering is what I call legitimate need assessment. And so that deck, it actually, your team may be completely annoyed if you were to say, what are we doing here today? They may all say, we know why we're here. Get on with the deck. And to me, that's feedback saying, you have a mandate to lead this meeting and you're actually completely on the right course versus opening up that power, that ability to kind of own the next minute and be open to see what they say. And I think, you know, I think of every gathering has power dynamics. Often people will come to me and say like, oh, we just, we only want connection. We don't want to focus on, you know, power. And I start laughing. I say, well, then you're in the wrong business. I mean, anytime two or my people come together, if you think about power just simply as decision making, right? Just in a simple group, let's go out for a meal. Where should we go? How do we decide? Should we go to a Mexican restaurant? Should we go to a Danish restaurant? Should we go to an American restaurant? In a family, is it always the youngest kid who gets their way? Is it always the parent who always decides? How do they begin to make that decision? That's what, that is the simplest way I think about power in a group. And so in any gathering, first of all, like give your gathering a name so people understand what's a social contract here. Is this a, is this a workshop? Is this a brainstorming? Is this a whiteboarding? That's all information to help people understand what the purpose is. But then also know how much you need to actually open the reins to get information versus how much you know that this is actually appreciated, that you've done work ahead of time to run meetings so that they don't have to think about it. Actually, I think it was something you said in the TED talk that you've done. And you said something about the beautiful electricity that you see in the room. And, oh, I love that so much because I can feel it. Say it again, say it again. Beautiful. No, you say it. The beautiful electricity that you can feel in certain places, right? And you can feel it. Again, I'm agnostic about the gap. You can feel it at a, at a, you know, a retreat of a company when people are walking in and excited to see their colleagues and feel and are reminded why they joined this place in the first place. You can feel it when you walk into certain restaurants and you can feel like everybody here wants to be here. Wow. Right? It's that attunement to noticing that when people come together and they want to be there, anything can happen. And there's some amount of design and order. And there's also some amount of frisson that's like, what's going to, you know, what's going to happen tonight? What might actually happen because we've come together? And to me, like, why are we here if we aren't creating more spaces like that? And that can be completely nerdy. It can be about, you know, wow, we get to figure out how to help our client think about their next 20 years. What a privilege, right? Be humble about the context. But electricity is this honing of people coming together as simply put when they all want to be there. I love that. It's easy for me to, with my sensory system, to connect to meetings where that's in place. And I can also recognize situations where they're not. Yeah. And I like to think about it as I have a role in that. I'm not just victimized into meetings. I can do something. So my question, how do you create beautiful electricity? I hope you dance very well. No, I'm just kidding. I'm an okay dancer, actually. To me, gathering is one of the most sacred acts one can do, right? You're asking people for their time at the same time, at the same place, to all focus on one thing. I think it becomes very dangerous when we start designing for electricity or designing for grief or designing for an emotion, in part because any emotion can be used for anything. And so, again, I think when we are clear about what a community needs and with the pandemic and with such a complicated and grief-strucken year, sometimes what that community needs is to come together and just pause, right? And so electricity isn't the only, isn't a goal. It can be an outcome. And letting go of feeling like, I want everyone to feel alive in this room. It's like, it's almost like if you're, if we're asking that, it's too late. In the context of our workplaces, what could be one or two easy things that you can do to prime for a gathering? The first is, and I alluded to it a little bit earlier, is we are incredibly unimaginative about how we name our gatherings, right? A meeting, for example, is a very vague word. And it can cover all manner of sins, right? And so the first is to just think about, this is a super practical tip, the language we use to describe what it is we are hoping to happen. And just simply using language, and it can be as a metaphor or literally a salon, right? A living room conversation, a fireside chat, a whiteboarding, a brownstoning. I'm now making up words, right? And I think so a campfire, a, to borrow an American word, a hootenanny, right? A jam, a battle of the bands. I mean, you can see how all of a sudden these different words help, one, prime people emotionally of, what is this thing? Is this serious? But also, what is the social contract of this gathering? If it's a show or a performance, oh, I'm going to come and pay attention. Is it a dinner party? Even metaphorically, right? You're going to have a dinner party with no food, and it's actually a dinner party of ideas. Oh, okay, I need to come and be relatively interesting, right? Like, we often underprime our guests to know how to show up and assume that there's one form of guesting. There's not. I mean, going back also to our earlier conversation, each of those social contracts is a different theory of power, a different theory of participation of what you're asking the guests to play. A workshop is a different theory of power than a presentation. A workshop says roll up your sleeves and come and, one, learn something, and, two, maybe influence my ideas versus a presentation that may be more about listening and maybe some amount of input, but I'm not going to fundamentally change what it is that I'm doing. So name. The second is thinking about time of day. So, you know, we have different energy levels. And how you begin the week versus how you end the week. People need on-ramps into a week. You know, having something Monday morning is actually, I think, quite a jarring way to begin. It depends on the culture and the context. But also, like, you know, I recently did a meeting makeover for kind of a business writer, Brene Brown, and she was talking about the time of day of the meetings. And I think, if I remember correctly, it was like 3 p.m. on Mondays. And they did it for convenience sake, but she realized that they were all bringing their worst. They were tired. It was kind of like a noise. It was a lot of decisions they had to make. And so sometimes it's as simple as thinking about when is the optimal time for this meeting and how long should it be. Part of gathering is like taking the time to think about every person being in its right place, the form being in its right place. And right just means that it's meeting the need, right? The form is meeting the function. We don't need to meet more than 17 minutes, right? Or actually conversations that have an entire arc can be 40 minutes or 90 minutes. Sizes of groups, right? How many people need to be here? If we are 6 versus 12, that's a very different conversation. And so the art of gathering at some level is like need discernment, but then beginning to think about like what for this moment in this time, how do we put each piece into its right place? And so that something extraordinary could come that the sum of its parts could be greater than its parts. You mentioned different times of day for different types of meetings. I could imagine like listening to this as well. Okay, which meetings shall I have when during the week? Is there any kind of hint as to, okay, I'm going to do a more informational meeting. I'm going to do a more workshop type of meeting. What does the data say or what does the experience say on where to place those? It's a beautiful question. And one I would say like double click on and keep pursuing. I can just tell you what I do and what I've seen, how I've seen different teams structure their days based on their rhythms and needs. I first, like I know my team knows like basically Mondays and Fridays are, should be more spacious days. Basically, you need to have like some on-ramp into the week, right? Particularly if you have had a weekend, you've had experience of having other identities, you're not working through the weekend, you've been a parent or a caregiver or a hiker, or, you know, that to give some spaciousness to the change. And then Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, just in terms of the arc of the week, is time, there's like, it's energy builds. It's like an arc, energy builds. You can actually have more, people are warming up like a marathon. You know, you can have more workshops, you can have more meetings. And then Friday, it's like helpful to begin to reflect and to start sort of calming back down for the weekend. It's sort of the natural cycle of a week. And then I think similarly in mornings, I mean, it depends on people. But in mornings, it's often like it's the greatest creative space. So often when you look at rituals of writers, it's like things are a good day's writing is actually happens in two to four hours, often in the morning. And for me, I'm an extrovert. I get energy from meetings. But also, they kind of wake me up. And I get a little sleepy in the afternoon. So for me, I know that I would rather have calls and meetings in the afternoon and have creative and spacious time in the morning. And so I organize my days that way if I can. And sometimes I don't have full control like all of us over our schedules. But I think asking teams how they would like to meet in and of itself is transformative because it shows care. It shows – and it doesn't mean you listen to each person, but it's more data. And then it begins to say, and then what are the objectives of the meeting? What are the objectives? What else are we actually managing for? But I think one of the things the pandemic has done is it's made us actually see gathering. And when you see it because it was forbidden and it was illegal and it was dangerous, when you begin to see this thing, that's when we can begin to shape it. And so as offices are reentering, so many workplaces are reconsidering how and when should we meet. And there's four questions that I think are super helpful for teams to ask. I wrote an op-ed recently in the New York Times, and I said, you know, asking do you want to come back is the wrong question. It's just the wrong frame. Instead, ask these four questions. First, when you couldn't meet physically with your teams, like in your own Zoom or whatever virtual call you're on, when were the moments where you were just – what did you long for? You just wanted to push through the screen and grab those people or say, if you could only see this posted here, we could just fight better if we were in person. When were the moments you just thought, gosh, if only we could be together? See what they say. And then second, what didn't you miss at all? What are you ready to discard of? Then the third, what did we invent during the pandemic that we might want to bring forward? And then the fourth, what might we invent now? And asking those questions is transformative for the team because they learn. They get changed through hearing each other's answers. They realize, oh, what she missed is actually what I longed for. How complex. How do we do this? I think we have this inspired by what you just said that we shape this. We have this thing about you shape your conversations and then those conversations ends up shaping you. And it goes for organizations as well. And a lot of us, and I think a lot of leaders, are somehow victims of outlook, meaning it's almost like outlook. My calendar is running my life. It's not really me running outlook. And I've thought about that. And I think we're pushing the point here that there is so much power in thinking consciously about gatherings and meetings. And it is as if it's still kind of a blind spot for most of us that we just tumble into meetings. And for me, I have in between seven and ten meetings every day, week after week. And how do I get on the balcony of that victimized position somehow that I think many of the people I know are kind of in? How do you get on the other side of that? I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And it reminds me also of the Winston Churchill quote, we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us. And it's true. So I first is to look, and I think part of this is within organizations, when you begin to name that, oh, this is too much and everyone says this is too much, it allows for the taboo to emerge to say, do we really need to meet in this way? So some of this is it's a cultural conversation because it's a – we're all kind of bleeding out here. But because there's a perceived rejection or not wanting to offend one another to say, does this actually really need to be a meeting, we don't actually ask it. And then all we're doing is meeting all day long. So I think the first is doing what you're doing, which is starting to raise the cultural conversation and actually have – again, some of this is structural, which is I think in organizations to actually say, in part to ease all of our ways, meetings need to be, I don't know, run experiments, but no more than four a day. See what happens. See what happens. And then say, I'm sorry, my calendar is full. We'll have to do it next week, right? So part of this is it's too much social weight to put it on one individual to say, how do I clear out this? Because then the social norms are, oh, he's too good to meet, right? Or, oh, they're too busy. But if we begin to shift our cultural norms or just set policies, we're going to try and experiment for four weeks. That is going to be you can't – no meeting scheduled between 12 and 4. See what happens. And then the people with authority aren't having – this is important – aren't having secret meetings on the side because then they're demonstrating, oh, they don't actually mean this, so I shouldn't do this either. And so I think part of this is really beginning to have reckonings internally of like when and how should we meet? And then also how do we be disciplined? We're also addicted to meeting, right? When you actually have some clear space and you don't have to have someone in front of you, we have to begin to think. We have to begin to create. We have to begin to produce. And that can actually be incredibly daunting. So we also meet to distract. And so part of that is when we begin to actually open up some space, you have to face the terror that, oh, I have to create something here. Nice. I feel like I should hold you up on that one, Steve. Give it a shot. You're up to 10 meetings. No, but it is super inspiring yet not easy because it takes a lot of courage to rethink the way you are in the world because it works. I mean I'm here. I like what I, I love what I'm doing. I'm in great company and I work with clients that I really love working with. So a lot of things are working well. So it takes a lot of courage. And it made me, when you, when you, when you talked about it, it made me think of the book called Chasing Daylight where the former CEO of KPMG back in 2004 got diagnosed with an inoperable brain cancer with 100 days left to live in. And he committed to what he really was longing for in those last 100 days was to be in as many magic moments as he could possibly create with other people. And he ended up concluding that the last 100 days were the best days of his life. He was thankful that he was given the chance to reconfigure his conversations. And it just made me think that for him, and he was the CEO, he had to look his own death into the eyes before he actually had the courage to say, this is actually what I'm longing for. And for me, it's a tragic reminder that sometimes it's not easy for us. I don't think it's, you can hold me up on this, Katrina, but it's not easy, I'll say. And I think also, like, what we long for is, like, the magic exists in the everyday. Like, what we, I don't think necessarily reexamining our entire lives and the longing is, oh, I actually want to be doing something completely different. That may be true, and then go do that. But I think part of the bringing back of this practice is, like, gathering in this way is a practice. And it's gathering well is something you can nurture. And it's something that are, to me, is these small tweaks so that when you go into these meetings, it's a very simple shift. It's like, I want to be here. I choose to be here. How beautiful it is to get to spend time with these colleagues. Or to not. And that, I think, to me, like, gathering well and thinking, how should I spend my time? And what am I calling people to do? In the form of a meeting is, to use your word longing, it's longing discernment. What are we longing to do here? And it can also be about work, right? And so it's like, I'm longing to have a different kind of conversation here. This is a frustrating conversation, right? How do we actually have the right conversation? What's the architecture for this conversation so we have it in a different way? It can completely be about work. It doesn't have to be life moments. And part of the architecture of conversation is removing the blockages and then beginning to set up just enough structure so people can be coordinated in ways that allow for something to emerge because of the way they were convened. And for me, a practical help I've experienced is that the difference from me going into a meeting and having just connected before I go into what is my gift into this? What do I need to hold space for? Or it just, I'd almost say any meeting I can think of goes from irrelevancy to super purposeful. Absolutely. It's a subtle, subtle shift. It's like pausing before. I'm a facilitator and I still get nervous before any kind of meeting. People think, oh, no. It's like, no, no, no. The more I care, the more my heart's beating, my mouth gets dry. I have to center myself and pause and think like, why am I here? Why did I say yes to this? What is it that I can most do in this moment? What is my hope? And how might we do this in a way that we are altered because of the way we gathered? And then you go in and then it becomes interesting and curious and say, hmm, what might happen in this moment? Because of the way I showed up and because of the way the people around me are. On the balcony of this conversation that we've had, what will we each be taking into the next? And perhaps I can start by just saying that I think the idea that we meet to distract, that has hit me somehow. And I think I think I'll be stepping forward with that reflection. What about you, Priya? What sits with you? I think the idea like of pausing and the book was Searching for Chasing Daylight? Chasing Daylight. Chasing Daylight. And the sense that we are each chasing daylight and how beautiful it is to realize that we could be chasing daylight without having to have terminal cancer. And that chasing daylight may not look like changing every single thing in your life. It may. But for many of us, it's actually that subtle shift of how we 30 seconds before we enter any moment that we choose to enter it. There are many things. But maybe it's the electricity that I sensed actually in this conversation. So I'm super thankful for that, for connecting to that sensation. I'll bring that with me. Thank you, Priya. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Thank you. Priya's book is called The Art of Gathering. You can find out more about her on her website or follow her on social media at Priya Parker. If you're interested to follow up on any of the references in this episode, follow the link in the episode description. Thanks for listening. Remember, you're never not in conversation. So stay curious out there. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.