How to stay together when shit gets real

Why the Art of Gathering led to the Art of Fighting

It was the summer of 2020, and everything was falling apart.

As the COVID-19 pandemic and a racial reckoning waged on, institutions of all kinds were imploding. We all saw this play out in the news, of course, but it was also happening in my private DMs, email inbox, and within the context of my consulting work.

I’ll be honest: as a trained conflict facilitator, 2020 was a boom time. I was being brought into organizations of all kinds to help C-suites, teams, religious leadership, inter-generational families, and others work through these group reckonings — and to understand what needed to happen for the group to come through stronger.

Interestingly, two years earlier, thanks to the success of my first book, The Art of Gathering, I had become known as the gathering lady. Outside of my work with clients, my public-facing work was providing inspiration and guidance for how to bring people together to create the kinds of meaningful moments that build sturdy communities. Then, bizarrely, the pandemic’s lockdowns catapulted gathering (and yes, The Art of Gathering) into the center of people’s longings.

And yet here I was, spending my days elbow-deep in conflict, speaking to people who would, probably by their own admission, prefer to be doing anything else. All of us, sitting tensely in our little Zoom rectangles, were not exactly an advertisement for joyful gatherings.

I was also noticing something else in the broader culture, both online and off. Alongside our uptick in loneliness was a simultaneous rise in ghosting, excuses, canceling, abruptly ending friendships, and exiting groups. Thanks to the reception of my first book, I knew how much we deeply craved gathering and belonging — but we were all acting in a way that was bringing about the opposite reality.

Sometime in late summer 2020, a thread started to emerge for me. If my first book was about how to come together, I realized that perhaps my next book needed to be about how to stay together when shit gets real.

The Art of Gathering was about how to live well with others. The Art of Fighting, I was realizing, needed to be about what to do when you inevitably don’t.

The shift from the gathering lady to the conflict lady is not so big a jump as it might seem. First, gatherings are full of conflict. Ask anyone who’s planned a big wedding or a 35th anniversary for a firm — a seating chart is not just a seating chart. It’s a schematic of intimacy, power, belonging, trust, and relational priorities. Which is precisely why it brings up so much.

And second, gathering and conflict are both tools central to group life. To build healthy, connected groups and communities, some people need to know how to hold great gatherings — places where people can talk, eat, dance, share, and commune. Simultaneously, some people need to be skilled in conflict. Conflict is part of every thriving group that lasts, and if no one knows or has the skills or rituals to hold it, your group is going to suffer.

There are many extraordinary books on conflict resolution. Many of them inform my work and career. But, much of the existing advice takes a one-on-one lens — not a group lens. They help us navigate conflict between pairs: spouses, bosses, business partners. We have far fewer tools to help with our group needs. What do you do when a group needs to have a complex conversation? What happens when the group chat implodes? How do you handle a raging town hall with real differences? What are rituals that help in times of group tension?

It is a massive hindrance when the primary formal tools we have to hold collective conflict are limited to courtrooms and union negotiations. In absence of a wider range of options to hold and face conflict— which traditional cultures have — we oscillate between two extremes: pretending everything is fine one day, and slapping each other with a lawsuit the next.

There is so much space between those two extremes, and that is precisely where The Art of Fighting comes in. It’s about how to notice the early signs of conflict and feel confident in what to do next. It’s full of the kind of gathering design and group infrastructure that informed The Art of Gathering, but it’s geared towards a deepening and strengthening of our bonds, rather than the initial formation of them.

When writing my first book, I remember grappling with what it was I was putting out in the world. While it was instructional and practical, it wasn’t exactly “self-help.” It was advice on how to help the group.

The Art of Fighting is my next offering to the growing genre I’ve come to think of not as self-help, but group help. It’s a section I hope gets a much larger display in every bookstore and library. And it’s what all of my work — my books, this newsletter, and my private client work — is ultimately about: elevating and popularizing the skills needed to tackle the questions of our shared life. I want to make group help as aspirational and accessible as self-help.

But group life isn’t just a me thing — it’s an all-hands-on-deck thing. The joy of building this newsletter over the last year has been finding a community of readers who also want to strengthen the skills, habits, and rituals that help groups thrive. To find the kind of people who want to turn towards each other — including (especially!) in the hard moments — as an act of resistance against the loneliness and individualism that pervades so much of modern life.

I wrote this book for you — for us — in the hope that it will help us keep building deeper, thicker, more resilient, and frankly more fun group life. So let’s dig in.

Warmest,

Priya

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A special pre-order event with Lupita Nyong’o

Join me and my friend, Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, for a virtual conversation celebrating the launch of The Art of Fighting. I could not be more excited about this! We’ll be talking about all things conflict and tackling real-life dilemmas submitted by you, live on Zoom, on Friday, September 4 at 12 pm ET. This conversation is a THANK YOU from me to you for anyone who has pre-ordered the book by September 4th.

Here’s how it works:

Preorder the book from any U.S. retailer, then fill out the form below to register. Already ordered? Just grab your transaction or purchase order number from your confirmation email and use it to register, no need to buy again.

You can also submit a conflict you’re navigating within a group, friendship, or community for a chance to have Lupita and me talk it through live. Submit by Thursday, August 27th to be considered. This is an optional step and is not required to receive your official invite.

I can’t wait to see you there!