Priya Parker on Fighting Well, and Why Conflict Is Not Sin

Description:

Think about the last real fight you had with someone you love, then think about what you did with it. Most of us swallowed it and called it peace. Priya Parker has spent twenty years walking into rooms where groups are coming apart, churches mid-split, companies that lost their founder, families with one topic nobody will name at the table. She is back on the show with a new book, The Art of Fighting, and her argument is that the peace we keep by avoiding conflict costs us the very thing we say we want most.

Jen and Priya open with a hot takes round on pineapple pizza and whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which turns out to be one of Priya's actual tools: low stakes arguing is practice for the high stakes kind. From there, what unhealthy peace looks like inside a family, a team, or a church. Priya tells the story of her grandfather's funeral, where the minister's highest praise for a fifty year marriage was that the couple never fought. Jen names the four years she let a business partnership die rather than have one hard conversation. They get into how to diagnose the fight you are actually in, why “we’re not a ___” is the sentence to listen for, and what happened when Priya went looking for the best literature on group conflict and kept landing in the Christian tradition.

Conflict is not sin. It is a skill, and every one of us can get better at it.

Part of September's Sacred Work series.

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Thought-provoking Quotes:

• Low stakes arguing helps us approach high stakes arguing. – Priya Parker
• When the going gets tough, add warmth to heat. – Priya Parker
• Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict. – Priya Parker
• I learned from an early age that there is loss in avoidance. – Priya Parker
• I invite you to think about conflict as a skill. And you can get better at it. – Priya Parker
• Conflict is not sin. Conflict is actually highly functional. – Priya Parker
• Fighting is about power. Avoidance is also about power. – Priya Parker
• Whose mess do you want to be in? – Priya Parker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker (Riverhead, out 9/8) - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fighting-Transformative-Power-Conflict/dp/0593420225
• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649
• If You Met My Family, You'd Understand: A Family Systems Primer by Jack Shitama - https://www.amazon.com/You-Met-Family-Youd-Understand/dp/1732009368