What iswas Circling®️

Circling was a practice taught and practised by many people. According to Marc Beneteau of the Circling Guide, the practice that came to be called Circling started around the turn of the century and grew out of explorations that several different groups where doing. Eventuelly Guy Sengstock named it Circling. The field grew with some practices emerging being called Authentic Relating and three distinct Circling schools formed: The Circling Institute, Integral Circling and Circling Europe [sources: Circling Guide, Practical Relational Leadership].

After the Circling Institute decided to tradmark Circling, most people who lead a practice formerly known as Circling are now continuing to practise and develop their version of this tradition, but calling their practice something new, such as Surrendered Leadership, Transformational Connection, Relatefulness, Relational something-or-other etc.

Marc Beneteau defines this tradition like this:

un-withheld, present-moment connection to self and others, particularly when it involves an agreement around “welcome everything”, aka “surrender.”

It is a suitably broad definition, and all of the post-circling practices do this with their own nuance and continue to develop.

I like that we keep evolving and differentiating, but I find it unfortunate that we are no longer gathered under one name.

Perhaps the trademark will be challenged and overturned, and perhaps we will then be able to go back to calling all of these practices Circling again, but for now, Circling only refers to what the people trained by The Circling Institute are offering, which is a very small minority of the people who do a practice in this tradition.

I call what I lead Surrendered Leadership, and most often when I lead publicly it is for the company Tranformational Connection (which used to be called Circling Europe and which has trained the most leaders of this practice in the world).

Maybe the collective word for all the successors of circling could be something like Open Authentic Relating. Open because it has very few constraints on the format.