[music] [applause] Growing up, we are told conflict is bad. Avoid it. Be nice to each other.
However, avoiding conflict does not keep us together. It pulls us apart. Silence, resentment, lost connections.
Every conversation you don't have is a connection you have already lost. My choice is different. I love conflict.
Not violence, not war, not aggression. Rather, the conflict in hard conversations, the tensions, you know those moments that we all run away from. I used to run too until I didn't until I engaged in the conflict then practiced then improved and finally got so comfortable with it that I learned to love it.
And what I learned is that the conflicts I was running away from were exactly where my deepest connections were waiting. My introduction to conflict started when I was 11 years old in Soviet Ukraine. In our class, there was a boy named Sasha.
Small, shy, brilliant Sasha. He was bullied almost every day by this group of boys. And I, like everybody else in school, did nothing.
I just stood there silent, afraid to become the next target. One day, they beat him up so badly he bled on a schoolyard floor. That day, watching him bleed, I decided I was done being afraid.
I committed to help Sasha. To do that, I needed to understand the boys who hurt him. I was curious, why did they hurt this small, shy, brilliant boy who did nothing to them.
I didn't have enough courage to jump between them and Sasha. So instead, I asked them, "Do you want help with some homework? I went to their homes.
I met their families. I watched them play soccer for hours. I listened to their music.
They stopped being the bullies in my mind. Instead, they became boys with stories. Boys who were hungry, scared, often hit at home, and like the rest of us, desperate to belone.
As we became friends, they also met Sasha differently. Instead of seeing him as someone to mock, they saw him as someone they knew. The bullying stopped.
The boys also stopped being isolated by others in school. They stayed in school until graduation and we're still very close. This is when I learned curiosity does not dissolve our fear.
It softens its grip. And sometimes that's enough to make all the difference. This was 38 years ago.
Look around us now. Families do not speak to each other. Teams walk on eggshells.
Communities are fractured along every line. We are afraid. Afraid of being misunderstood.
Of losing the people that we love. Of the pain that comes when facing the hard truth. So we choose the easy route.
We avoid conflict. We stay silent. We mistake comfort for connection.
And it's killing our relationships. We're making the world more divided, one avoided conversation at a time. My experience is different.
Over the last 25 years, I am proud to say that I've built businesses across four countries and three continents. I went through three immigrations from Ukraine to China, then to the United States, then to France. I speak five languages.
When I lived in China, I mastered Mandarin fluently by listening, really listening. out there. This listening helped me belong in all these countries, helped me feel at home, grow businesses, build friendships.
It also allowed me to see that people who do not avoid conflict, but instead see it as a catalyst, those are the ones who thrive. Their families stay close, their communities build together, and their teams collaborate and innovate. My mentor wisely said, "Mediocrity is a result of a tough conversation that never happened.
" In my experience, another result of that is lost intimacy. By intimacy, I don't mean romance or although it hurts romance as well. By intimacy, I mean the courage to share the hard truth despite your fear.
The courage to be truly seen, to see the other, to stay connected despite our differences. And yes, conflict is still painful. Our stomach t is tied.
Our chest is in pain and and uh uh every instant in us yells run. However, when we move through conflict, when we really move through conflict, the results are powerful. We build real trust.
And it's not just about managing or tolerating conflict. Like me, you can learn to love it. When you tolerate conflict, you are tied and defensive.
When you love conflict, you come alive excited to see what you are going to learn. That's a very meaningful difference. Then February 24th, 2022 happened.
Russia [snorts] attacked Ukraine. My homeland, my people. Russian is my mother tone.
It's the language I learned to love. It's poetry. It's songs.
[snorts] of the aggressor. I couldn't speak to my Russian neighbors, to my running partner, to my children's piano teacher. I wanted clear lines, us and them.
[snorts] Instead, I chose the hard conversations. I reached out to my Russian friends at a time when it would have been much easier to cut them off. I asked them questions about their fears, and I listened.
really listened as many of them cried, grappling with guilt and grief. We shared meals together and they listened as I showed them my anger and my heartbreak. It was not unlike theirs.
Many of my Ukrainian friends said, "Anna, you're betraying us. " To me, those heartfelt conversations felt vital. Eventually, trust grew back and collaboration replaced division.
Many of my Russian friends joined our efforts to help f to help Ukrainian refugees in France. Jobs, accommodations, financial support. Many are still helping today.
To be honest with you, this was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And it showed to me that curiosity and listening work. even when your country is at war.
[snorts and sighs] Then October 7th, 2023 happened again. The world fractured again. Friends stopped talking to each other and colleagues avoided tough conversations.
As you may expect, I couldn't just stand by with my fellow entrepreneurs, Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians. We formed a small group. We called it hope.
Eight people, eight perspectives. The rule was simple. No debating, no convincing, no walking away.
Only presence, respect, listening, and vulnerability. The first sessions felt brutal. We cried.
We shared hard truths. We asked difficult questions. To me, every time it felt like an open heart surgery.
We could have destroyed our friendships and for many of us it was dangerous to be part of this group to be seen as talking to the other side. Then something wonderful started happening. We started seeing what was beneath the anger and conflict.
our love, our fears, our values. And we understood something simple yet profound that all of us here understand. We all care about love, family, security, meaning, justice, belonging.
I'm sure you've noticed that what's what's deeply personal is universal. Even when we disagreed, we stayed because our the respect of our bond was much more important to us than our individual comforts. One evening, a Palestinian woman said, "Every time I join this call, I wonder if I can bear this again.
" I told her, "Every time I see families walking through the rubble carrying their children, I see my own generations ago running away from pograms in Ukraine. I see myself in all of this. " [sighs] We both cried.
And uh here we were, a Jewish woman, a Palestinian woman, truly seeing each other. I've this is what I've learned when I was 11 when I was learning to protect Sasha. When we embrace conflict, we might not create agreement.
However, we build a bond strong enough to survive what divides us. So, how do we get there? In my work, I teach five principles.
presence, curiosity, listening, questioning, and intimacy. We engage with presence. We move from discomfort to courage.
We replace judgment with curiosity. We listen to understand, not to answer. We question with genuine interest, not defensiveness.
And we practice intimacy, sharing our truth despite fear. Think of these five as a dance. The more you practice, the more natural it becomes.
My father taught me, Anna, question everybody in everything. Do not just follow the status quo. Well, in Soviet Union, this was a dangerous advice and it shaped me.
So, talking about dance, in 2019, I went to Buenosaris to learn tango. As you may know in Argentina, tango is uh not just a dance, it's a way of life. As I sat there in the milonga, a tango gathering, I could see men scanning the rows of women like we were items on the menu.
And my thought was, h why do I have to sit here and wait to be chosen? So I'm going to go and learn how to lead tango. Well, many milongas asked me to leave the floor because it's inappropriate for a woman to lead.
Many women or some women refused my invitations. And my inner critics said, "Who are you to question the tradition? " Yet I kept dancing.
And eventually I found a community that dances both roles that switches between leading and following sometimes even within the same dance. Tango became my laboratory. You cannot fake presence when somebody is so close in your arms.
You have to listen with your whole body. A small shift, a slight hesitation tells you everything. We negotiate every step.
When to lead, [snorts] when to follow, when to hold, when to let go. done well. Tango is a stream of tiny conflicts, a hesitation, a misunderstanding, a pause, a choice.
We readjust, we continue just like a real conversation. And just like a real conversation, conflict does not interrupt intimacy. It deepens it.
every hesitation, every misunderstanding, that's intimacy in motion. And when you can lead and follow, when you can f hold your position while staying curious about theirs, this is when we start building something that's bigger than each of us individually ever could. That's art.
That's collaboration through conflict. Look at me now. Today I stand in the middle of most major geopolitical conflicts.
I'm a Ukrainian. Russia is at war with my country. I build businesses between China and the United States and now they're in trade war.
I'm Jewish. I have family in Israel and dear friends in the Palestinian community. I practice these principles daily in situations that truly test everything I know, believe, and feel.
And this is the why I do this work to be able to connect with people that we love and to take this courage to the conversations that truly matter. Perhaps you have heard this phrase. If you think you are enlightened, go spend the week with your parents.
I live with my Ukrainian parents, with my French husband, with my three multilingual multicultural kids. So I practice daily and as my children will tell you I mess up all the time. So whenever so start small whenever you want to change the subject because it's uncomfortable.
Pause. Get curious. Stay present.
Pause. Get curious. Stay present.
Repeat these movements until it becomes your second nature. Until you stop avoiding conflict and start working towards loving it because the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships and the quality of those relationships that's intimacy. So build intimacy at home, at work and in the world.
Create collaboration where others only see division. Stay close, fight kindly, and love deeply.
