Three Dinners Launch

On Monday September 20, 2021 Care Lab kicked off our inaugural Three Dinners series.

Over an intimate dinner at a private location, a bipartisan group of 12 senior congressional staff took a much-needed break from policy and politics to re-connect, share personal stories related to stress and resilience, and learn a few new tools.

Presenter Alexander Caillet opened with a short discussion on the science of stress; how it manifests in the body, and what it does to both long-term health and in-the-moment brain function and effectiveness. In a live biofeedback demonstration, he showed how quickly the mere thought of stressful subjects sends the body into “incoherence” – and how powerful simple breathing and appreciation exercises can be for regulating the body and re-establishing coherence.  

In the next two dinners, the group will continue to explore how and why this matters for the leadership challenges they face.

At dinner two, john a. powell of the Othering + Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, will pick up on this theme to discuss how stress, anxiety, and fear can activate the parts of the human brain disposed to “othering,” and offer some strategies to counter this tendency by bridging across difference.

At the third dinner, author Amanda Ripley will discuss what she learned while researching the material for her book High Conflict: Why we get trapped and how we get out and share strategies for moving from toxic (lose-lose) conflict, to more generative “good conflict.”

As a dinner participant said, these are not partisan topics, but common challenges.

Just like care, itself.