circular leadership
A different way of holding a project, a team, or a community—where power circulates, responsibilities are shared, and no one has to carry everything alone
“« For a long time, I believed that leadership meant either taking care of everything myself or stepping back and hoping it would somehow organize itself. Neither of those ever felt right to me. »”
I Question Everything
- Especially in Community
I deeply love questioning things. Deconstructing what we are told is “normal,” then refining my way of living again and again. And nowhere has that inquiry come alive more strongly than in community.
In 2019, I set off alone in my van across the United States, seeking out communities that were already embodying a different way of living. I eventually lived in some of them—sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for an entire year. Small intentional communities, collectives of more than one hundred people, farms, and retreat centres.
Having a shared vision is not always enough.
Who decides? Who carries what?
How do we move through conflict without one person eventually having to hold everything together?
I watched these questions repeat themselves from one place to another, and I experienced them from every angle: sometimes as a simple member, sometimes as part of the decision-making teams, and with Sanctuarium, as the person holding the space, the responsibilities, and part of the power itself.
Between my training in facilitation and years of guiding groups, workshops, and collective projects, everything began to come together. I came to understand that we can deeply want to do things differently—and still fall back into control, hierarchy, or exhaustion.
That is where I found words for what I had already been searching for intuitively:
circular leadership.
Neither the absence of structure.
Nor the absence of leadership.
It is a way of working in which power can genuinely circulate, responsibilities are held consciously and shared, collective intelligence has a real place, and nothing rests on one person alone.
In a linear system, energy drains from one point to another until exhaustion. In a circle, it moves, returns, and regenerates. This is what makes this way of working generative: the more power and responsibility move through the group, the more the whole group is nourished—rather than depleted.
What It Is Not
One person carrying everything
Mistaking control for leadership
A hierarchy no one has chosen
Silence mistaken for peace
A vision without a structure to support it
What It Is
Shared decision-making
Collaboration instead of control
Honouring multiple ways of knowing
Responsiveness to one another—and to the land
Allowing what wants to emerge to emerge
Signs Your Leadership Structure No Longer Supports the Project
If you are holding a collective project, team, community, circle, or collaboration, the structure supporting it needs to be felt—not simply assumed.
You are always the one thinking of everything.
It is not clear who decides what.
You feel that some people are carrying much more than others.
You avoid certain conflicts in order to keep the peace.
You have a beautiful shared vision, but not always the structure to support it.
If You’re Carrying All of This Alone Right Now
This is exactly what I explore in my private consultations on circular leadership and community living—a one-to-one space to look at group dynamics, power, communication, or exhaustion, and to find greater clarity and ease.
Not a formula to impose on you. A way of seeing what is really happening and finding a healthier way forward for everyone.
Blissipline - A Calendar for a Different Relationship With Time
Circular leadership also lives in our relationship with time. Blissipline was born from my desire to decolonize my own—to step out of a linear, urgent rhythm and return to a way of working inspired by the cycles of living things, rather than the clock.
Each season carries its own energy: some are for creating, others for structuring, integrating, or simply slowing down. Receive the mini calendar for free and feel the difference for yourself.
