Mónica Guzmán

Don't go for the long bridges right off the bat.

Do the short bridges.

Someone who agrees with you on everything except this one thing.

Someone who doesn't seem to threaten your identity.

Go into a house that's not on fire, it's just warm.

And he says, and after crossing a lot of short bridges, you may ask yourself who you're calling the devil.

And that's the really radical idea.

It's possible that, as I say in my talk, whoever is underrepresented in your life is overrepresented in your imagination.

And if you're not checking that imagination with reality every now and then, you run the risk of living in a higher state of anxiety and with more fear than might actually be justified by the actual hearts and minds of people who disagree with you.

So what if beginning to have those exchanges, doing the small bridges actually reduces your daily emotional labor and turns the volume down on all of this madness so that we could all get more creative because one of the first casualties of fear is creativity and seeing how we can work together and actually solve problems.

So yeah, that's the reframe I'd offer.

We assume people oppose what we support because they hate what we love.

That doesn't just keep us from seeing what we're missing.

It keeps us from staying informed about the one thing that scares us most, each other.

In one CBS YouGov poll this year, most Americans said that the biggest threat to the American way of life is other Americans.

Now, it's true, there are people at our political extremes who are so consumed by hate that they are worth fearing.

But researchers at the University of Pennsylvania looked into the hostility each side sends the other, and they found something fascinating.

They found that people on either side of America's political divide assume the other side despises them twice as much as they actually do.

This fear?

It's a problem, because you can't wonder about something you think is out to get you.