unwilling-to-quite-express-preferences-but-expressing-them-anyway kind of very circling-way?
I think expressing preferences is fine, but there’s usually some more fine-grained aspect of your experience of having the preference that you can also talk about. E.g. “I want to change topics” is fine, but better would be “I’m feeling impatient with the current discussion and want to talk about something that will feel more productive,” or something. And then someone else might ask you more about how it feels to be impatient and want something more productive to happen, etc.
The suggestions on facilitation style point towards the don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept being important, since it doesn’t seem compatible with not following that principle.
Little confused about how to parse this sentence. Not sure what “don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept” means, or what principle you’re referring to with the phrase “that principle.”
It sounds like you think that having an explicit object-other-than-itself that isn’t pure raw ground level is a mistake, or at least a different class of thing than what you think is the valuable thing? Say a bit more there?
I think it’s something like an advanced thing to try, and it’s not something I’d start beginners on by default, although this isn’t a strong opinion, and I might change my mind if I experimented with it more.
What I expect to happen to most groups of people if you try to start them circling on an explicit object-level topic is that they’ll mostly talk about the topic in a way that makes it harder for them to see what’s going on in their experience and the experience of other people in the circle, e.g. if everyone is regurgitating cached thoughts and/or signaling intelligence or whatever. If there are enough experienced circlers in the circle then I’d feel more confident that this sort of thing will get called out if it starts happening, but I’d be uncomfortable trying it with a circle consisting entirely of beginners, especially if the facilitator isn’t very experienced. There’s a thing about building form here.
What often happens in the absence of a topic to start with, especially in groups of people who know each other already, is that a topic sort of emerges naturally out of the circling dynamics, e.g. maybe Person A says something that triggers Person B and then the topic is whatever’s happening between A and B, and sometimes a third Person C gets involved and then the topic is whatever’s happening with the three of them. But in order to get to this point with beginners, the facilitator needs to be able to guide people to the point where they feel comfortable saying things that might make other people in the circle feel uncomfortable, and that’s tricky to do as a beginner.
In general, it’s worth mentioning that, in my view, a lot of the advice and guidelines people give beginners about circling are training wheels / band-aids meant to help you avoid various flavors of being distracted away from your experience, and once you get good enough at zeroing in on your experience you can mostly discard them.
I think expressing preferences is fine, but there’s usually some more fine-grained aspect of your experience of having the preference that you can also talk about. E.g. “I want to change topics” is fine, but better would be “I’m feeling impatient with the current discussion and want to talk about something that will feel more productive,” or something. And then someone else might ask you more about how it feels to be impatient and want something more productive to happen, etc.
Little confused about how to parse this sentence. Not sure what “don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept” means, or what principle you’re referring to with the phrase “that principle.”
I think it’s something like an advanced thing to try, and it’s not something I’d start beginners on by default, although this isn’t a strong opinion, and I might change my mind if I experimented with it more.
What I expect to happen to most groups of people if you try to start them circling on an explicit object-level topic is that they’ll mostly talk about the topic in a way that makes it harder for them to see what’s going on in their experience and the experience of other people in the circle, e.g. if everyone is regurgitating cached thoughts and/or signaling intelligence or whatever. If there are enough experienced circlers in the circle then I’d feel more confident that this sort of thing will get called out if it starts happening, but I’d be uncomfortable trying it with a circle consisting entirely of beginners, especially if the facilitator isn’t very experienced. There’s a thing about building form here.
What often happens in the absence of a topic to start with, especially in groups of people who know each other already, is that a topic sort of emerges naturally out of the circling dynamics, e.g. maybe Person A says something that triggers Person B and then the topic is whatever’s happening between A and B, and sometimes a third Person C gets involved and then the topic is whatever’s happening with the three of them. But in order to get to this point with beginners, the facilitator needs to be able to guide people to the point where they feel comfortable saying things that might make other people in the circle feel uncomfortable, and that’s tricky to do as a beginner.
In general, it’s worth mentioning that, in my view, a lot of the advice and guidelines people give beginners about circling are training wheels / band-aids meant to help you avoid various flavors of being distracted away from your experience, and once you get good enough at zeroing in on your experience you can mostly discard them.