When I was a child,every other Friday, I would leave my mother and stepfather's home -- an Indian and British,atheist,Buddhist,agnostic,vegetarian,new age-y 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-churchgoing,meat-eating family.

It doesn't take a shrink to explain how I ended up in the field of conflict resolution.

(Laughter) Whether I was facilitating dialogues in Charlottesville or Istanbul or Ahmedabad, 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 -- and leave the interaction between people largely to chance.

So I began to wonder how we might change our everyday gatherings to focus on making meaning by human connection,not obsessing with the canapés.

And I set out and interviewed dozens of brave and unusual hosts -- an Olympic hockey coach,a Cirque du Soleil choreographer,a rabbi, a camp counselor-- to better understand what creates meaningful and even transformative gatherings.