We long for connection and deeper authentic relationships. Circling practice offers a training ground for creating trusting connections that go beyond mindfulness. As one participant expressed it: "It's magical that I now experience myself spiritually connected to people I've just met."
We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, caught up in our era's individualistic performance and self-optimisation culture. I experience that there is a longing for greater connectedness and deeper authentic relationships. It exists both in myself and in most others I encounter, both privately and professionally as an executive coach and leadership developer. This longing is the first answer to why Circling may be the practice you didn't know you needed!
Often this longing for connection is not particularly conscious. Most of our attention at work is usually directed towards long to-do lists, efficiently getting through the numerous meetings and emails, supplemented by a good dose of dopamine-inducing scrolling through various feeds in the breaks of work and home life. But it doesn't take much to get in touch with the longing for deeper connection and the meaning of experiencing it. I experience this again and again when I run team development workshops or give talks. Here I've begun to include a small simple Circling exercise which, in just 10 minutes, creates precisely this experience with remarkable accuracy.
Imagine you are sitting or standing facing another person. In the first 2 minutes you close your eyes and turn your attention inward to notice your inner state: physical sensations in the body, moods, feelings, mental state. Then you make eye contact with your partner, who asks you: 'How is it to be you together with me right now and here?' The exercise is now to try to notice what arises physically, emotionally and mentally in you when you focus on what it's like to be in contact with the person facing you. You try to put it into words and share it. Does it sound flaky and a bit risky? In a way it is. Because it's something we very rarely do – and we mostly know it from intimate relationships.
Of course there is quite a lot more instruction and guidance into this exercise, which equips the participants and which I simply skip over here. But the exercise is simple and its effect is unmistakable. The vast majority report that they now feel far more connected and with greater trust in each other. It is clear that the exercise also predominantly provides safety, energy and joy – although all manner of other feelings and effects can also emerge. After such an exercise, a not insignificant side effect is that the greater psychological safety and relational trust are heightened, so that all the challenges and potentials in the form of tasks, obstacles, collaboration patterns etc. that a team faces can now be handled and resolved far better.
At the beginning of the 2000s, I conducted PhD research into how, among other things, mindfulness practice could contribute to more meaningful leadership development. I had experienced in my own body how meditation could be the path to discovering my inner landscape of body and mind, give me more calm and capacity, enable me to see the world in new ways and discover patterns and assumptions I was caught in.
I believe that part of my own and Western culture's attraction to mindfulness was and is that it fits like a glove with the dominant cultural demand for the individual's self-development. Unfortunately, in my view, this has also meant that 'mindfulness' practice has been widely incorporated into the dominant culture as a tool for self-perfection and stress reduction. In its original context, mindfulness meditation in Eastern wisdom traditions is, on the other hand, a practice whose ultimate purpose is to 'dissolve or transcend the self' to give access to wisdom-giving experiences of unity and insights into the interconnectedness and transience of all things.
There is much good to be said about mindfulness and meditation as personal development practices. At the same time, it is my experience and conviction that this does not in itself mean that you become better at creating authentic and nourishing relationships, let alone develop the ability to navigate tense team dynamics. The ability to feel, regulate and understand yourself, as it is developed through meditation (or individual therapy), gives you really good cards in your hand, but doesn't necessarily teach you how to play them to create good relationships and team dynamics. The potential in a practice that directly trains you to create trusting authentic relationships is the second answer to why Circling is the practice you didn't know you needed.
Circling offers rich opportunity to discover and experiment with the patterns and assumptions – both facilitating and limiting – that each of us brings into relationships. Circling is a training space where we can practise and become more aware of, for example, noticing our own boundaries, saying yes and no, or daring to share vulnerable sides that we otherwise keep to ourselves. Because we bring different things out in each other in relationships, it provides a space where we can explore and become better friends with feelings across the entire spectrum from grief, anger and shame, to joy, love and gratitude, which we otherwise typically shut down or judge as too much, inappropriate or wrong. In Circling, instead, we can discover what these feelings hide in terms of insights and doorways to being able to create connected relationships that we can be nourished and grow from – together. In Circling, we also quickly become aware of the whole range of norms and unconscious conventions that daily govern the way we relate – and that awareness is a crucial step towards greater capacity and freedom to discover and re:construct relationship dynamics in new and more appropriate ways.
Circling is not therapy, but can have a profound therapeutic effect. There is not, as in, for example, Gestalt therapy's encounter structure, a therapist who facilitates an 'I-Thou' exchange between participants by constantly monitoring and intervening with questions such as: 'What does it do to you when you hear that?' 'What do you need to say, or what do you need to hear now?' etc. Such questions can be relevant, but in Circling practice the starting point is that all participants are at all times, to the best of their ability, self-responsible and simultaneously dedicated to exploring connection with others – including whatever may stand in the way of it.
In the 20 years I have worked professionally with leadership development, I have seen many terms that point to the paradigm shift in leadership understanding and practice that many seek to advance and which the world's many crises call for. Currently, the concept of 'regenerative leadership' is gaining traction – with its worldview and inspiration drawn from nature's circular cycles and evolutionary dynamics. On the largest scale, the paradigm shift, whatever we call it, consists of a movement away from modernism, the mechanistic worldview, the leadership ideal as 'the charismatic individual hero' and the self as a self-authoring autonomous entity. The emerging paradigm can be termed meta-modern, sees the world as complex interwoven systems/networks, where the leadership ideal is self-organising co-creation, and the self in its mature form is 'self-transforming' and socially-constructed.
The above summary was presumably not exactly a flowing and easily understandable reading experience. There certainly exist plenty of fine academic words, insights, understandings and instructions – but it's difficult to make it comprehensible when we can't quite connect it with concrete experiences and learnings. We've lacked a distinct practice that gives a sense and training ground to experience what this new paradigm offers, how we can act within it, what we need to learn and unlearn – and how a new sense of identity, which is more connected, more relationally constructed and more in continuous movement feels. That is the third answer to why Circling is the practice our time has been waiting for.