Surrendered Leadership

The premise for Surrendered Leadership is that in order to lead others, you must surrender yourself. It is an act of trust in yourself, life and the leadership of others. In this way you’re inviting others to lead themselves by embodying the thing you want to see in the world.

What is Surrendered Leadership?

Surrendered Leadership was invented by John Thompson and Sean Wilkinson and grew out of their experiences leading Circling workshops and practicing with each other.

The core of Surrendered Leadership is about inviting the group to surrendered to the present moment experience and lead themselves from there. Many experience this as very different from all other workshop setting they have been in, as there is “little to hold on to” and you are largely left with your own experience as the guide. And many find this uncomfortable or unusual in the beginning.

The leader of a Surrendered Leadership circle is first and foremost trying to embody the practice to the best of their ability. This is very different from traditional workshop facilitation where the leader is holding a particular structure, teaching content and leading exercises.

Surrendered Leadership is an amazing practice to seeing all the ways in which you are not free. It is very common to start noticing that you are not following your aliveness, trusting your truth in the moment or not setting boundaries in the way you want to. This can be painful, but also very healing. It is also a continuous process.

It is a paradoxical and complex practice. It can be chaotic, unpleasant and full of conflict and disconnection. On the other hand, Surrendered Leadership often leads to deep experiences of group coherence, collective flow and a sense of trust of the human experience.

A key way of looking at Surrendered Leadership is to see it as a karmic practice. It is a mirror of the way you show up in life and to see your own doing in action. A powerful element of this approach is that the leader is not telling you what to do to help you or to coach you into a particular experience, they just show up with you with whatever is true for them in that moment. This means that whatever you do comes from your own sovereign being and that you get the chance to try showing up in new ways, based on your own will to do so.

What does it look like?

Concretely it could look something like this. You are in a room with a group of people (typically 10-20, but it could be as much as 100 if you go to the Transformational Connection Festival), likely sitting in a circle. You sit in silence for a while. For some this can be anxiety inducing and stressful while for others it is a chance to drop into their experience and get time to connect to themselves. At some point someone (often the leader of the workshop) will share something about their present moment experience. This is sometimes framed as “setting context”.

Often the context comes in the form of sharing present moment experience and an invitation for the group. An example could be “I notice that I am really tired and not really that enthusiastic about leading this workshop. There seems to be a lot of pressure to perform and I don’t really want to. I think I also feel a bit unsafe and would like to get a better sense of who “we” are. I wonder what is like for all of you to be hear and to hear this?”

Someone might then say that “it actually makes them relax to hear that. And that they were feeling somewhat anxious themselves, but that it seems to drop now”. Another person might add in that they feel upset that the leader is not feeling enthusiasm for leading the workshop. A third person might add that they were really enjoying the silence and that the anger that they just heard in the room makes them contract.

In this way people continuously share their experiences in a dynamic flow. Conflicts might arise as someone feels the pain of never being heard while someone else experiences their struggle with the victimhood of others. And possibly settled as they start seeing eachother more. People might break the circle and move into smaller groups or stay together in a shared experience.

In this way Surrendered Leadership is an exploration of the dilemmas, polarities and struggles that we all face in our lives and a chance to get a better look at what is really going on. It is a process of getting increasingly more in touch with our own truth in meetings with others and finding connection from there.

Leaders of surrendered leadership

There are many leaders around the world who lead Surrendered Leadership, although not that many who are certified to lead the practice.
Below you can see a list of the leaders that we recommend.

Anežka Marie Sokol

I work for more thriving humans in a more thriving world by helping people develop relational & interpersonal skills. I work with leaders, teams and individuals. I have been in the game of process facilitation & education for 10+ years and am educated in chemical engineering, mindfulness & Circling.

Einar Magnús Boson

Ernst Beyerle

I become more enlivened each day I participate in and support community. A community leader now nestled in Gothenburg coming all the way from Australia, I've been facilitating relational presence practice groups locally and internationally since 2021 after delving deeper into what was already nourishing my own discovery, growth and opening the doorways to better relationality with the world.

Lærke Inanna Trunjé

Mareike Christensen

Martje Witzel

I am a leader of Surrendered Leadership and Transformational Connection events in Europe and online. I offer 1:1 presence based sessions where I support people to lead a life in deeper relationship with themselves and the world. I love mystery, being in wild nature and building altars.

Navi Camilla Säregård

I'm Navi Camilla Säregård, I'm a somatic coach and experimentalist with a background in individual bodywork and nervous system regulation, as well as facilitation of relational- and embodiment based practices in groups. I hold that we both as individuals and groups absolutely can find real alignment and aliveness in all aspects of life, and my kink is working with change ...

Peter Munthe-Kaas

I am a Copenhagen based researcher, body therapist, coach and workshop facilitator. I am interested in practices that support me and others in relating and listening better and believe that the ability to relate to myself, others, society and nature is key to living a happy life in service of what is good in the world.

Ronja Lofstad

Ronja Lofstad discovered circling in 2014 and it has been an active part of her life since. She has facilitated circling evenings, weekends, retreats and courses for years and is a senior leader for Transformational Connection (formerly Circling Europe). Ronja is deeply inspired by nature and silence and spends a lot of time outdoors, listening to forests and mountains.

Tova Ekenberg

Tova Ekenberg first discovered Circling in 2018 and has been leading the practice since completing the leadership training with Circling Europe (now Transformational Connection) last year. With a background in the Performing Arts she has been facilitating spaces for adults for the past few years translating her training in theater and dance into transformative practices that foster playfulness, embodiment and ...

Upcoming surrendered leadership events

These are the Surrendered Leadership events that are coming up on Relating Arts.

Relating Arts Retreats 2025

With the Relating Arts retreats we invite you into an exploration of body and mind, moving towards effortless being and action in everyday life. The retreats are intimate experiences for max 13 participants and takes place in the beautiful archipelago of Southern Norway.

Time and Place
August 4-10 and August 25-31
Norway

Leaders
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Ronja Lofstad

The Art of Listening

It seems that, most of the time, we are not really listening. We walk around in our own limited worlds believing that what we see is all there is. We are comfortable in the known, but also profoundly limited. This changes when we start listening.

Time and Place
April 11-13
Gothenburg, Sweden

Leaders
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Tova Ekenberg
Navi Camilla Säregård

Where to learn

There is currently only one school where you can learn how to lead Surrendered Leadership. Transformational Connection hosts the SAS 6 month training that will give you a sense of the practice and Surrendered Leadership trainings where you can go deeper.

Transformational Connection

The vision of TC is to make Transformational Connection and Surrendered Leadership as widely accessible as possible and to help it get to the places that most need it. We've run events in 5 continents and to hundreds of thousands of people as well as training hundreds of facilitators worldwide.

Thank you For reading this!

This article was written by Peter Munthe-Kaas. If you feel like something is missing or want to add something feel free to get in touch.