It’s become a common story: Divided by politics, my father and I grew more and more distant, and after a while we could not talk about much without tension rising between us.

He passed before that distance was ever repaired. I did not have the tools in time. I kept wondering why this happened so easily, to families and friendships and people who had once known how to be in the same room together.

Then I went to graduate school at Colorado State University. I became a graduate teaching assistant and facilitator for the Center for Public Deliberation (CPD), which became the most fulfilling part of my time in graduate school.

Part of what drew me to this work was my experience with my father, though our story is one many people will recognize. In recent years, political division has worked its way into kitchens and living rooms across the country, coming between people and making once-ordinary conversations hard to have. You may have felt it at your own table.

When I found the CPD, I found the tools I had needed so desperately and had not known existed. These were not techniques for winning an argument or even holding your ground. They were ways of reaching the “why” underneath another person’s perspective, the experiences and stories and information that had built it.

The goal, I discovered, should never have been agreement. It was understanding, the point where someone’s view makes sense to you as something a person could reasonably arrive at, even when reaching that point is hard. That was exactly what my father and I had never had a way to give each other. It showed me the path I wanted to take in life.

Even beliefs that look irrational on the surface usually trace back to a real concern or value underneath. Understanding that root does not mean every belief holds up equally against facts. Some do not. What it means is that curiosity about the person’s underlying concern is what makes deep value-based conversation possible. You can respect where someone is coming from and still hold the line on what is true.

The CPD is hired by cities and local organizations across Northern Colorado to bring community members together around shared challenges. Rather than holding traditional town halls, where people often talk past one another, the CPD designs events that foster collective wisdom: the recognition that the knowledge of a group is far more powerful than any single person’s alone.

What I loved most was who filled the room. A retiree and a college student, a small business owner and a recent arrival, people from across the political spectrum and from neighborhoods that may rarely interact. The issues were as varied as the people: housing, how communities care for their aging members, student Mental health, and, with the local newspaper, misinformation and political polarization. Whatever the topic, the aim was the same: to give a group what it needs to work through a shared problem, together.

As a facilitator, my role was to help people, using techniques like uncovering the value tensions underneath their disagreements. This is more delicate than it sounds.

When people argue, they tend to argue about conclusions, but conclusions are not always where the real disagreement lives. More often we hold many of the same values and simply weigh, rank, and apply them differently, shaped by what our own lives have taught us.

Take accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small additional homes built on existing properties. One neighbor might prioritize privacy, worried that an ADU next door changes the quiet street or brings people they don’t know closer to their daily life. Another might prioritize freedom, believing homeowners should have the right to build on their own land as they see fit. Both values can be held by reasonable people. Neither is wrong. The disagreement isn’t really about ADUs. Instead, disagreement lives in which value, privacy or freedom, someone weighs more heavily when the two come into tension.

Naming the value underneath a position does two things at once: It shows the group where the actual tension sits, and it makes the other person’s view legible as something a reasonable person could hold. Once you can see that, movement becomes possible. We were not necessarily searching for common ground that already existed. But, rather, we were building it together.

At some point, tools stopped being something I reached for and became something I embodied in everyday life. I noticed it less as a single moment and more as a pattern showing up everywhere. I found myself curious in interactions that used to pass by unnoticed, wanting to know more about people for no reason other than wanting to know them. When someone said something I disagreed with, my first instinct stopped being to argue. It became asking what shaped that belief, what experience or value sits underneath it, digging past the kind of surface-level exchange most conversations settle for.

Curiosity tends to be contagious. When I show someone true interest, they often show it back. What started as one person asking questions turns into two people learning from one another. That only works, though, if it stays voluntary. Some people are private, and that is their right. I am not asking anyone to disclose more than they want to. If someone wants to share, I listen. I ask. I learn. It stopped being a skill I used and became a way I move through the world.

Long after the events ended, I would catch myself in a heated debate at a dinner or with friends, reaching for the why underneath what someone had said instead of what I deemed to be disagreeable or flawed. I stopped needing to win. I started assuming the person across from me knew something I did not, and that searching to discover their reasoning was the most respectful thing to do.

The harder lesson was patience, and most of it was with myself. Some conversations made me frustrated. Some I simply got wrong. The discipline was never to pretend otherwise but to notice the mistake and repair it, and then to extend that same grace outward. Other people arrive carrying their own frustration and stumble in their own ways, and they need the room to learn that I needed, too.

Sometimes the best thing I had to offer was curiosity. It was a single conversation across difference that left someone feeling heard, which can feel rarer than it should.

That curiosity follows me well beyond any event, into encounters that have nothing to do with policy. In an old mining community in Wyoming that had largely emptied out, I stopped to talk with a man who made pottery. The town was the kind of place where the buildings tell the story before any person has to, where you can read the initial boom and the migration in the empty storefronts and homes.

We sat together while he told me what it had been like to watch his town change, the prosperity that came and went, the quiet the exodus left behind. He spoke about staying when others left, about his craft, about what it means to keep making something with your hands in a place that feels as though some had forgotten.

I was not there as a researcher and I had no agenda. I simply wanted to know, and so I asked, and he told me. I think about that conversation more than he would ever guess, and it gave me something no book could impart. This is what curiosity does. It lets you hear about other people’s lifetimes rather than just their opinions, and it asks something of you in return: the willingness to admit that your own understanding is incomplete, and that other people’s stories and experiences are part of what fills in the gaps. This requires us to choose curiosity over certainty, again and again, even when certainty would be easier.

I do similar work now at Unify America, helping design and support civic assemblies that bring everyday people together to address shared problems. The timeline is slightly longer than those evening events in graduate school, but the ethic is the same.

What moves me most still happens in the small moments of connection: people who would never have crossed paths in ordinary life, of different ages and neighborhoods and political realities, sitting down together over weeks and slowly getting to know one another. They share meals. They learn the names of each other’s kids. They discover, often to their own surprise, that a person they assumed was their opposite carries many of the same worries and hopes they do. I have been in the room while it happens, and you can feel the shift when it comes. The distance that seemed permanent reveals itself as circumstantial.

I don’t say this to suggest that dinner-table tension is the whole story. Many people are living through a period of real precarity right now, for reasons that differ sharply depending on who you ask and what news you consume. Some people are afraid for their safety. Some are afraid for their livelihoods. Some are afraid of being unheard or unseen in a country that no longer feels familiar to them. Whatever the reason, whether it belongs to you, your neighbor, or a stranger you pass on the street, it comes from the same place. We are all moved by our hopes, our dreams, our values, our experiences, our fears.

That’s part of what makes this work harder than it looks from the outside. You cannot ask someone to be curious about a neighbor’s perspective while pretending the stakes are small. The fear is real, even when two people in the same room are concerned about two completely different things. Deliberation does not erase that concern or resolve it. But it does something else that matters as much. It reminds people that they are not just living alongside one another, they are co-creating the communities they share. That means everyone has a seat at the table, not to win an argument, but to build something together that helps all of us navigate life the best way we know how and become a little more of the people we hope to become. Belonging grows out of that kind of collaboration. It is hard to build when we default to blaming our neighbors for our differences, and it gets easier when we choose curiosity instead, again and again, until it becomes a way of being with each other rather than a technique we reach for.

The same attitudes carry weight beyond any single conversation. When people practice curiosity and patience with each other, they build the capacity to do something bigger together: to take part in shaping the decisions that govern their shared life. Civic processes work best when the people inside them can actually hear one another, weigh trade-offs, and hold a disagreement without needing to end it in conquest. That capacity does not appear on its own. It is built the same way any skill is built, through patience, in rooms like the ones I have described, and in the ordinary conversations that happen everywhere else. The more of us who carry these attitudes in public life, the more capable we become, together, of building a collective vision of what it means to participate in a shared civic life.

This is why I do this work. Not because I am trying to solve polarization as an abstract problem, but because I know what it feels like when understanding breaks down between people you care about, and what it feels like when it can be repaired. Every assembly, every conversation, every moment of curiosity is a chance to help others experience what I am still learning myself: that we do not have to choose between our perspectives and our relationships. We can seek to understand one another not out of self-interest, but because human experience is rich beyond measure, and we are all a little incomplete without each other’s stories.