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.
[Written by: Peter Munthe-Kaas]
Related practices
Surrendered Leadership has grown out of the Transformational Connection school, but is in many ways similar to Circling and Relatefulness.
Circling
Relatefulness
Transformational Connection
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.
Andrew Venezia
Anežka Marie Sokol
David Brundige
Diane Ellefsen
Ellen Waenink
Ernest Holm Svendsen
Magdalena Tran
Mareike Christensen
Martje Witzel
Mateusz Jędrzejewski
Navi Camilla Säregård
Peter Munthe-Kaas
Ronja Lofstad
Rósanna Seigi Róbertsdóttir
Stephanie Ginter
Stephanie Hall
Tova Ekenberg
Selected videos from youtube
Upcoming surrendered leadership events
These are the Surrendered Leadership events that are coming up on Relating Arts.
Circling & Surrendered Leadership weekend: Berlin
Holographic Healing Nest, Eisenbahnstraße 11, 10997 Berlin, Germany.
Circling & Surrendered Leadership weekend Gothenburg
Soul Yoga, Nordostpassagen 19, Göteborg, Sweden
Moving from source
Yogarummet Björkhagen, Halmstadsvägen 43, 121 53 Johanneshov, Sweden.
Circling & Surrendered Leadership weekend: Copenhagen
Enten Eller, Carl Plougs Vej 4C, Fredriksberg, Denmark.
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.