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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Well, the end of October has arrived and with it begins the start of the holiday season. Now, whether or not you love everything the holidays bring, I could live with our Christmas music in November. Something we all value is quality time with our loved ones and maybe we value it now even more than we did in the past, year three into COVID. We've likely lost a lot of meaningful time with those we hold close to us.

Remember last year we thought we'd be able to gather with more freedom, thanks to the vaccines but right before the holidays, Omicron hit and caused a lot of people to cancel plans once again, and with people we're less comfortable with than our families. Maybe you're feeling anxious that your social skills have gotten a bit rusty. After all, our social lives have changed a lot in recent years.

Many of us are working from home and no longer making small talk with people we run into the way we used to, so what to do when we value our gatherings more but we're feeling less confident in how we gather? We've invited Priya Parker, conflict facilitator and author of the popular book, The Art of Gathering, to close out the show for the next few days. Her book and newsletter are about both personal and business gatherings with advice that's both pre-pandemic, perennial, and particular to these times. We'll focus today on a recent newsletter from Priya Parker called The Art of Guesting. Priya, thanks so much for the time this week. Welcome to WNYC.

Priya Parker: Thank you so much, Brian. It's such a treat to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: I'll mention that, for people who don't know, your background is partly in the field of conflict resolution. How did that bring you to think deeply about how we gather?

Priya Parker: Gathering is culture shaping, it's line drawing, it's at the most basic element. It's somebody saying, I think this group of people should meet at the same place at the same time and focus on the same thing and who's up for it. If you're part of a family or a workplace or a set of siblings, you know that that inherently can be caused for conflict. My training is in group dialogue and group facilitation and so much of what I was trained as a young person and then growing up in this field is that what creates meaningful connection between people has very little to do with the stuff that's in the room.

The lighting, the food, the food is delightful but in terms of what actually connects people is so much around the meaning we make together, the conversations we have. I wrote a book on The Art of Gathering before gathering was banned and taken from us about what the most beloved gatherers in their communities do every single time to create meaningful, powerful, memorable occasions for their people without people all having to be the same.

Brian Lehrer: We wanted to start this mini-series with you by focusing on what you call guesting in your newsletter on the topic you write, "This work is called The Art of Guesting, not art of hosting in part because guests have extraordinary power in shaping a gathering." Maybe we don't think about that when we're going to be guests when we're not the ones throwing the gathering as the host. By the way, why do you use guesting as a verb?

Priya Parker: Because it is a verb, the same way citizening is a verb. Most of us are guests much more often than we're hosts. Even people who like hosting, even managers who are running meetings all day or all week long, most of us are at someone else's gathering as much as we are at our own. Guests have an extraordinary amount of power in shaping the gathering. If you're at dinner with a group of people or if you're at a conference or if you're in an online training session and a few people are checked out, someone's texting under the table or someone else is rolling their eyes, everybody feels it.

Groups are organisms that people are reading each other's codes. Do I want to be here? Do I not want to be here? What do other people think about being here and so much of being and attending a gathering is really about how you show up, whether you decide to show up. I'll give a simple example. Guests have an extraordinary amount of power to meaning make to help themselves, to help other people, to help the hosts decide what happened at this place. You're all running a pledge drive and I was just listening to some of what the callers were saying coming in. I think I heard Carrie say I listen to WNYC because it provides me with a moral center.

That's a guest meaning-making, what is this thing? Why do I listen to this thing? Then you have thousands of other listeners saying, oh, this is what it means to have a moral center.

When my husband and I years ago got married, we had a wedding and there's an old adage that you leave a newlywed couple alone when they go on their honeymoon, don't call, don't write. We went on our honeymoon and an email came in from one of his oldest friends, and the subject line was 20 things. We opened it up and we were amazed.

It was a note from her of the 20 things, the 20 moments she loved about our wedding. Many of those moments were moments that happened between guests that we weren't a part of that we didn't see. In that moment and actually, sending us, even more than a thank you note, a list of these moments that happened in our wedding, she took on the role as a guest of meaning-making.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. That's great. I see that's one of your premises is your behavior alters the behavior of other guests. In our last minute or so for it today and you'll be back and continue this on some related angles tomorrow in the next couple of days. I want to put a pandemic over on this a little bit because we've heard so much about people losing some of their social skills during the more intense isolation parts of the pandemic, children not behaving in school the way they used to once they go back, drivers feeling more licensed to be selfish and express road rage, lots of things. How do you see it affecting the art of guesting?

Priya Parker: For years have talked about nutritional diets. What do we put into our bodies? How do we choose to put what type of food in our body? We then, as the internet came along, started thinking about informational diets. What do I want to read? What kind of channels am I taking in? How long do I do them scroll? [chuckles] I want to introduce an idea called the gathering diet, which is, as a guest, you get invited to all sorts of things.

How do I actually want to spend my time? What do I actually want to say yes to? How many type of X occasions do I want to attend in a week or in a month, and so much of our social muscles have atrophied during the pandemic, but also, a lot of the obligation many of us felt was swiped away for a few years. Now as we're, in some communities, coming back to engaging again, the first thing that one can do is to start intentionally thinking just as what do I put in my body?

What do I actually read? To begin to ask how do I actually want to spend my time and to practice a meaningful note what you don't want to attend, and a gracious and full yes to what you want to attend. Because when we choose how to spend our time, we show up completely differently.

Brian Lehrer: That's the last word for today. We'll get more from Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering in the next couple of days to end the show as well. Priya, thanks a lot.

Priya Parker: Thanks so much for having me.

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