Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to ive up to , let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.

– Parker J. Palmer             

What is this Work we call a
Circle of Trust?

The Circle of Trust® approach, described by Parker J. Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness is used in programs offered by facilitators prepared by the Center for Courage & Renewal (www.couragerenewal.org) to encourage people to connect the inner life of mind and spirit with the outer life of work and service.

The Courage to Teach, The Courage to Lead, and Circle of Trust are some of the names for the programs grounded in the principle that, without denying or abandoning the outer world, we must reclaim the reality and power of our inner lives. The Courage to Teach was initially created to sustain and inspire public school teachers. Participants now include people in healthcare, ministry, business, philanthropy, nonprofits and others who wish to work and live more wholeheartedly. Beginning with the individual, the Circle of Trust approach has the potential to weave together soul, role, institution and social transformation.

Other key principles of this work include:

• This work is about the identity and integrity of the individual.

• Each person has access to an inner source of truth, named in various wisdom traditions as soul, spirit, or heart, a source that can be accessed to guide the work we do, but that is often neglected in professional education and service training.

• We can create open and trustworthy spaces in which people can listen for and speak their own truth without fear and listen to the truth of others without rushing to judgment, fully respecting the confidentiality of what is said. In this trustworthy space of a Circle of Trust, we stay in relationship with one another, neither trying to fix one another nor ignore one another.

• Through the use of metaphorical materials — poems, stories, the various arts media — we can live into the deeper questions of meaning and purpose that arise in our work and in ourselves.

• We can create a space for a respectful, evocative, and yet challenging communal inquiry about the inner dimensions of our work that will not only affirm us, but stretch us and may even at times correct or change our course, since one of the many paradoxes of this work is that inner work can only be done alone — and yet we can do together in community what we sometimes cannot do alone. Surprisingly, that includes hearing our own "inner teachers".