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In series two of this podcast, we bring you insights into circle holding, whether you are an (aspiring) circle facilitator or attendee, through interviews with experienced circle holders and conversations between Julia and Tessa, the founders of Circle Holding.

In this episode, Julia interviews experienced circle facilitator Mike Irwin. See the show notes on the podcast platform for his biography and links to different projects.

In this episode with Mike Irwin (http://www.michaelirwin.org), he and Julia discussed:

• It’s okay as a facilitator to be learning and not be perfect! People are looking for authenticity and not superconfident

• Your nervousness can be a gift to the nervous attendees

• The first part of starting the circle is to get present yourself as a facilitator

• You can start with a centring question e.g. ‘What’s preventing me from feeling comfortable here?’ or ‘What do I want to feel like at the end of the session?’

• As important aspect of guidelines is to open up the requirements around confidentiality to the attendees eg.’if you see me in the supermarket ignore me’ through to ‘let’s swap phone numbers and keep in touch outside the circle’

• You may also want to discuss how the circle will deal with conflict. A ‘hygiene measure’ that might help is to make ‘I’ statements

• There is a tension between what people want to talk about and what they don’t want to talk about but would be good to, like emotions! For example, relationships with parents, family, sexual relationships, with money. ‘Tell me a time when….(e.g. your relationship with money was difficult)’

• One exercise is to put an empty chair in the room and imagine putting someone in it e.g. mum, partner,

• There is a tension between facilitation and participation – Mike feels you can’t fully be in the group and facilitate

• The process involves understanding ‘Where am I?’ now and being in an intermediary position where you don’t want to be before you can get to ‘Where I’d love to be’. You might ask ‘Can you inhabit this inbetween place?’

• In closing the circle, you might give people a chance to say what they got out of it.

• Circles are important because they counteract the influences on young men from what is on social media

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Our book Circle Holding: A Practical Guide to Facilitating Talking Circles is available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Circle-Holding-Practical-Facilitating-Talking/dp/1805013157/

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Find details of the next free mini training and Q&A here and all our upcoming trainings on the Training menu above.