Authentic Relating, Changing People’s Minds, and Increasing Communication Capacity
Summary
We would like to share insights and discuss an authentic relating practise known as circling. Circling is an activity designed to create an “authentic” and “alive” atmosphere, as well as increase the participants’ (and facilitators) capacity for empathy, connection, and sharing “cruxes”.
Background
A common problem around “convincing” people to adopt EA values or change their behaviors to be more EA aligned, is accessing the emotional part(s) of themselves that can make the decisions and feel good about it in a way that can permeate into their lives.
The kind of circling that we do creates an atmosphere of vulnerability, emotional openness. During these sessions participants connect to what they personally find truly important and how they want to live their lives.
A secondary effect of participating in these circling (among many), is an increased capacity for those involved to have a better experiential understanding of how people make decisions, how they choose what to share, and how vulnerable they can be.
Presentation
We would like to present a brief introduction to circling, some common states of mind that it can produce, and some future possibilities.
Who We are
My name is Daniel Tabakman, I founded the rationality meetup group in Ottawa, and ran the Toronto branch for some time. Currently I am part of ThinkBetter, (thinkbetter.ca) a decentralized meta community who’s founders came out of EA.
Time Slot
Strong preference to not overlap with any other ThinkBetter speakers .
Great to see this here, Daniel! After a few years helping to run a local EA group and working for an EA org, my focus at the moment is how to bring EA and AR (Authentic Relating) together in the most impactful way. I’ve just landed a trial with a leading AR org with the hope that I can work with them to increase their impact. I also just ran my first online AR workshop with a bunch of EAs.
Your pitch for AR/circling to be a means of increasing the abilities of EAs to effectively spread our ideas is interesting! My initial thoughts are that the primary impact AR could have might lie in its capability to increase the quality of relationships in the workplace and thus the impact of the most impactful orgs. Secondly, as a practice to help people repair damaged relationships or to foster high quality relationships thus to increase individual wellbeing (this might be targeted at people doing particularly high impact work, or at people/cultures which could particularly benefit from these practices (prisons, schools...)
I totally agree. The amount of potential value in creating and fostering these kinds of relationships are huge. I’m part of an organization called ThinkBetter thinkbetter.ca and we are looking into this as well.
I’m not going to be able to cover everything we are doing even just related to circling in my talk, and it feels like we would have a lot in common and would love to chat with you and see where our approaches intersect.
Authentic Relating, Changing People’s Minds, and Increasing Communication Capacity
Summary
We would like to share insights and discuss an authentic relating practise known as circling. Circling is an activity designed to create an “authentic” and “alive” atmosphere, as well as increase the participants’ (and facilitators) capacity for empathy, connection, and sharing “cruxes”.
Background
A common problem around “convincing” people to adopt EA values or change their behaviors to be more EA aligned, is accessing the emotional part(s) of themselves that can make the decisions and feel good about it in a way that can permeate into their lives.
The kind of circling that we do creates an atmosphere of vulnerability, emotional openness. During these sessions participants connect to what they personally find truly important and how they want to live their lives.
A secondary effect of participating in these circling (among many), is an increased capacity for those involved to have a better experiential understanding of how people make decisions, how they choose what to share, and how vulnerable they can be.
Presentation
We would like to present a brief introduction to circling, some common states of mind that it can produce, and some future possibilities.
Who We are
My name is Daniel Tabakman, I founded the rationality meetup group in Ottawa, and ran the Toronto branch for some time. Currently I am part of ThinkBetter, (thinkbetter.ca) a decentralized meta community who’s founders came out of EA.
Time Slot
Strong preference to not overlap with any other ThinkBetter speakers .
More information
ThinkBetter website- thinkbetter.ca
Contact info danielszev@gmail.com
Great to see this here, Daniel! After a few years helping to run a local EA group and working for an EA org, my focus at the moment is how to bring EA and AR (Authentic Relating) together in the most impactful way. I’ve just landed a trial with a leading AR org with the hope that I can work with them to increase their impact. I also just ran my first online AR workshop with a bunch of EAs.
Your pitch for AR/circling to be a means of increasing the abilities of EAs to effectively spread our ideas is interesting! My initial thoughts are that the primary impact AR could have might lie in its capability to increase the quality of relationships in the workplace and thus the impact of the most impactful orgs. Secondly, as a practice to help people repair damaged relationships or to foster high quality relationships thus to increase individual wellbeing (this might be targeted at people doing particularly high impact work, or at people/cultures which could particularly benefit from these practices (prisons, schools...)
I totally agree. The amount of potential value in creating and fostering these kinds of relationships are huge. I’m part of an organization called ThinkBetter thinkbetter.ca and we are looking into this as well.
I’m not going to be able to cover everything we are doing even just related to circling in my talk, and it feels like we would have a lot in common and would love to chat with you and see where our approaches intersect.
Sounds interesting! I’m curious what circling actually entails. Could you describe what happens in one of the sessions?
I will share what happens in the talk.