Sunday, May 20, 2012

Circle of Trust

This week I went to a neat conference for student leaders from all across Utah’s college campuses. The first class I attended was given by David Coleman, a pretty famous relationships speaker. At the beginning of the class he said, “at the end of this class, you will all feel more unified than you have with almost any other group you’ve ever been in.” I of course was skeptical. No way after an hour could you feel so close to a bunch of strangers you've never met before. There were maybe 60 of us in the room and after doing some team building games we all got into a circle. By this point we all felt decently comfortable around each other and agreed to do the next activity and put ourselves out there a bit. As part of the activity, David would say something that we had done or believed, and we would step into the middle and look out at everyone else if it were true. So at first he asked basic stuff like “You did marching band in high school” and people would step in, “you were valedictorian” and two kids were in the middle, “you are a democrat”, and so on. But then he started saying things like “you have a bad relationship with your parents”, “you are not a virgin”, “you have used drugs”, “you have cheated on a college test”, "you have contemplated suicide", etc, and so on and so on. And people really stepped into the circle during those things. It was intense and it was amazing. I had friends step in that completely surprised me. I stepped in for things I hadn’t told people before. And by the end there was so much love and trust and understanding in that circle. We realized how much there is that we don’t tell people, how much we are similar to each other, and how much capacity there is to love another person if given the opportunity. And as we left that circle, David’s promise came true, and our little group felt more unified than most groups I have ever been with. We realized that we're really all humans. We're all in this together. And we weren't afraid to communicate.

6 comments:

  1. Wow that's pretty cool actually

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  2. Wow! That's amazing! That would be so cool to be a part of!

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    1. Yeah, it seemed like something you would really enjoy Janae!

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  3. Hey Travis, Thanks for sharing this experience. That would be really powerful! Ward opening social? :P

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