Stop living on autopilot. Reconnect with the craft of being a man.

"Circle" just describes the seating. We sit in a ring, nobody at the head of the table, no stage, no flipchart. Everyone is the same distance from the middle and gets the same room to speak. I'm not a teacher who knows how you should live; I keep time and make sure we stick to what we agreed on at the start.

"Transparent" is the part that matters. It means that alongside what happened, you also say what it does to you. The difference runs roughly like this: "my partner drives me crazy" versus "as I'm saying this, my stomach tightens and I feel stupid for saying it out loud". The first sentence is a report about the world. The second is a report about you, and only the second one moves anything.

Everyone talks about "coming back to yourself". Back to where, exactly?

Your true voice. Coming home to yourself. Being in contact with yourself. These phrases get used a lot and almost nobody says what a person is supposed to picture. There is something real underneath them, it just shows up differently for everyone. For some it really is a voice, for others a feeling, for others an image. That's why it's hard to describe, and why it sounds like woo until you've felt it yourself.

For a lot of people it runs through the breath and the body. When you say what's expected of you, the sentences come out smooth and fast and you feel nothing in particular. When you say the true thing, it catches. You have to take a breath, it comes slower, and once it's out there's relief. Something lets go. You know the feeling of a weight coming off you. You go softer, you straighten up without meaning to, your head comes up, you feel calmer and maybe warmer. Where exactly, I can't tell you. Some feel it in the chest, some in the belly, some in the shoulders or the throat. That's the whole point: noticing where it sits for you and what it does to you.

That's how I know it too. Something inside lets go and suddenly there's space that wasn't there a minute ago, breathing gets easier and I feel good. The closest words I have for it are a warm, honeyed sense of home.

Besides that feeling of home, there's one more thing I can point to, something tangible that I understand. An image arrives. I see something before I've had time to think it through. I know how a thing will turn out, where it's sound and where it isn't, what I should do about it and what I definitely shouldn't. It's a very faint signal. Any outside opinion drowns it out, and so does my own reasoning if I give it enough room.

Over the years I've landed on one thing I lean on. I can ask around, read up, explore the options, but in the end I still have to come back to myself, because I have no firmer point than that. Every single time I've overridden that signal with what the people around me were saying, I've paid for it and afterwards thought, damn, I knew.

Hearing it is one thing. Acting on it is a whole different level. I'm not claiming I hear it every time now, or that I always act on it. Nowhere near. And it's partly thanks to the circles that I catch it a bit earlier and act on it a bit more often. Even that shift is enormous.

I see further than reason can reach. Trust what you feel.

That line has stayed with me for years and I'm putting it here on purpose, even though some people will read it and think, ah, so it is woo after all. It isn't an invitation to switch off your head. I use my reason every day. I spent years as Head of Design for foreign startups and large companies, I still enjoy business, and thanks to AI I'm back working in the online world, so I know pretty well what it looks like to decide by numbers and deadlines. But reason only reaches as far as it has data, and plenty of decisions in life arrive before the data does. In that moment you can lean either on what you feel or on what other people expect of you. There's no third option.

In a circle you practise that signal under lab conditions. Nobody cuts you off, nobody gives you advice, and you have time to notice what's actually there before you drown it out.

Why listen to men you don't know

Most of the time in a circle you're not talking. You're listening.

And every so often the man across from you takes off the mask and says out loud the exact thing you've been carrying for twenty years and never named. Something clicks in your chest. Your shoulders drop, your breath deepens, warmth spreads. For a moment it's strange to feel this good.

The closest thing to it is the sense that you've come back from somewhere. That you're home.

I see the same thing every week in my craniosacral practice. The body only lets go once it decides it's safe. You can't force it with willpower, you can't order it, you can't rush it. The same thing happens in a circle, except the work that my hands would do is done by the attention of eleven other men who aren't correcting you and aren't judging you.

Nobody will push you into anything. You can show up, listen all evening and never say a word. If you get to something that's too much, you can stop right there and nobody will talk you into finishing it. I don't open things in people that they haven't asked to open, and I don't do anything for effect. The technical name for this approach is trauma-informed, and it runs through both of my trainings, the facilitation one and the craniosacral one. In practice it means one thing: you set the pace, not me.

What you take home

A circle runs two to three hours, but the more interesting half happens afterwards, at home.

What you're practising is quite practical: staying in a conversation that's uncomfortable instead of escaping into anger, sarcasm or silence. When your partner says something that knocks you flat. When your kid asks you something you have no answer for. When your boss gives you feedback in front of everyone and you want to slam the door.

And it isn't only about conversations. Bit by bit you start noticing things before they blow up. That your jaw has been clenched since morning. That you said "yeah, no problem" and meant the exact opposite. That you agreed to something you never wanted and now you're stuck with it for three more months. The difference between the man who works this out after the explosion and the man who spots it two hours earlier isn't personality. It's a trained skill.

If it still sounds like woo to you, that's fine. I don't need you to believe it in advance. Either you'll feel it for yourself one day or you won't.

The Czech facilitator training in transparent circle communication was built by Zdeněk and Šárka Weber, and I went through it. I'm not mentioning it for the names. I'm mentioning it because people who make it through that filter come out with a different quality of attention and they know how to hold a space where others can breathe. That's about the only guarantee I can give you up front. If you want to see where all of this came from, take a look here.