Story Circles
Circles for women in leadership roles, especially in purpose-driven work. Systems push back hardest on the people trying to change them, and silence is part of what holds them up. Story Circles are a place to name what’s been kept invisible and, together, start telling a truer story than the one we inherited.
Solidarity is what helps people survive
One of the clearest things my research study, The Incentives Are Working, showed was the difference a witness makes. The participant who came through most intact had found peers who named the same experience, and once the suffering was visibly shared, the self-doubt lifted, while another, with a similar distance from the work but nobody alongside her, left broken and disheartened.
What can’t be named can’t be organised around, and Story Circles are a place to name it: to hear that what you’ve been carrying isn’t only yours, and to start seeing the pattern rather than the personal failing.
Small, held and confidential
Women leading purpose-driven work
Founders, executives, directors and practitioners carrying the cost of work they believe in.
Stories, then patterns
Each circle starts with personal experience and works outwards to the conditions that produced it.
From belonging to change
Being heard by people who’ve lived it builds belonging, and belonging is what gives people the steadiness to take what they’ve learned back into their teams and organisations. Over time the circles grow into a community that changes the conditions around it as well as the people inside it. What’s shared stays in the circle unless you choose to take it further.
Join the first circles
The first circles are forming now, and I want to shape the format with the women who join. Tell me a little about yourself, and whether you’d like to help build them or simply take part.