Circling Guide

Learn the group conversation practice that will transform all of your relationships and bring you the love, friendship and community that you want

Circling Guide (3rd Edition) Preface: My Agenda

“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” – Theodore Roosevelt

Table of Contents

  1. Preface: My Agenda (this page)
  2. My Story
  3. How to Use this book
  4. Part 1: Circling
  5. Chapter 1: First Orientation to Circling
  6. Chapter 2: NVC and Circling; how they complement each other
  7. Chapter 3: The Minimum Viable Circle

Preface: My Agenda

The first edition of the Circling Guide was published in  2017 and put into the public domain. A second edition was published in 2021. Since then it has become the most reviewed and downloaded book on Circling, and dozens of people have written to me to share how useful it was to them in understanding the practice, developing their skills or even getting into leadership. I still hear from people who discovered the Circling Guide back in the day, and were inspired to start practicing or even create a local community.

Ten years later, it turns out that everything that I had intuited about the potential of Circling when I wrote the 1st Edition, including the power to heal relationships and create transformational businesses – intuitions which could  have occurred as wishful thinking or inflated – were actually understated. The truth is actually way more interesting and exciting than I had realized at first. I am now married to a woman I met through the movement (a very big deal for me), we are co-leading groups both online and on-the-ground here in Berlin, and we are exploring the formation of an Intentional Community of cultural creatives which would be sourced from the integral we-space. I can hardly believe my good fortune.

What to expect from this 3rd Edition of the Circling and Authentic Relating Practice Guide?

  1. The first edition covered only the Circling practice, and was intended to be read in one sitting. At the time, there was only one other book about Circling (by Bryan Bayer) and there were no books about Authentic Relating (AR is the larger “umbrella group” for Circling).  Now, there are two very good books about Authentic Relating (by Jason Digges and Ryel Kestano). However, I wanted a book which covered the entire AR movement, including but not limited to Circling. A book which could still be read in one sitting if one’s primary goal was to drop-in to one of the many Authentic Relating circles happening daily both online and on-the-ground and be effective there. This is the topic of Part I: Circling.

     

  2. Authentic Relating is an emergent, open-source, peer-led global movement for personal and social transformation, guided by a distributed leadership. It may even be one of the most powerful and accessible such movements of the 21st century. As more of us recognize the depth of what we’ve uncovered, I want to invite our current AR leaders to bring their wisdom to the subtler distinctions and the emerging complexities of the work.
    This is the topic of Part II: Authentic Relating.

     

  3. In my 10 years of practice, I have seen my own life transformed and have met many incredible and beautiful people through the movement. I consider this an excellent beginning, but still only a beginning. The job now is to take AR into every corner of the world and every sphere of life: business, family, therapy & addiction recovery, community, spirituality, marriage and sexuality, and more.
    This is the topic of Part III: Applied We-Space.

Here is the game that I am proposing: Let’s make AR and related we-space modalities the foundations of a new world operating system.

Will you join us?

With love,
Marco
February 2026
https://CirclingGuide.com

Continue reading: My Story