This TED Talk features conflict mediator and author Priya Parker, recorded live at TED 2019.

When I was a child, every other Friday, I would leave my mother and stepfather's home.

An Indian and British, atheist, agnostic, vegetarian, new-agey sometimes,

democratic household.

And I would go 1.4 miles to my father and stepmother's home

and enter a white, evangelical Christian, conservative, Republican, twice a week church going,

meat eating, family. It doesn't take a shrink to explain how I ended up in the field of

conflict resolution. Whether I was facilitating dialogues in Charlottesville or Istanbul or Amdabad,

the challenge was always the same.

Despite all odds, and with integrity,

how do you get people to connect meaningfully,

to take risks, to be changed by their experience?

And I would witness extraordinarily beautiful electricity in those rooms.

And then I would leave those rooms and attend my everyday gatherings,

like all of you, a wedding or a conference or a back-to-school picnic,

and many would fall flat.

There was a meaning gap between these high-intensity conflict groups and my everyday gatherings.

Now, you could say, sure, somebody's birthday party isn't going to live up to a race dialogue,

but that's not what I was responding to.

As a facilitator, you're taught to strip everything away and focus on the interaction between people,

whereas everyday hosts focus on getting the things right,

the food, the flowers, the fish knives,

...