A resource for your circle
The circle
retreat.
A year of circle is eleven sessions and one retreat. The retreat is not a longer session and it is not a trip: it is where the group gets to know itself in a different way.
It is what separates a circle that lasts from one that fades out in month four.
And it is the only moment in the year with time for tools that do not fit into a four-hour session.
How the time is divided
A third for being together
Going out, walking, getting to know the place. What never happens around a table.
A third of work
Circle sessions, the review of the year, or someone from outside coming to teach something the group asked for.
A third with no programme
Time with no agenda. It is where the conversations nobody planned happen, and the part that gets underestimated most.
And windows to step out
Planned moments for the phone, home or work. If they are not planned, each woman takes them when she can and the group fragments.
The budget is set by the group and it is set downwards: you choose the place everyone can go to, not the one the women with most would like. Booking off-season and months ahead brings the price down, and the price is what decides who goes.
Four tools for the retreat
All four need more time than a session has, and three of them stir up things that need room to be held.
The money wheel
Eight questions about life with money — what comes in, what goes out, what is saved, what is owed, what protects you, what you know, what you talk about and what you want — and out of that comes a wheel. Each woman picks one segment to raise first.
Each woman looks at her own. The wheels are not compared. In the circle you say which segment you chose and why, never the numbers.
Where it comes from: it is an adaptation of the wheel of life by Paul J. Meyer, in the 1960s. The classic version divides up a whole life; this one divides up money only.
The values card sort
A deck of values — security, freedom, family, recognition, generosity, independence, belonging. Each woman keeps five. Then three. And then she looks at whether the way she spends resembles those three.
The question that closes it: where, in your account, can you see what you put first?
Where it comes from: from the field of motivational interviewing (Miller and Rollnick). The most widely used deck is that of Miller, C'de Baca, Matthews and Wilson (2001), published for free non-commercial use.
The money genogram
The family tree, with a note on how each person behaved with money: who managed it, who kept quiet, who decided, what was inherited without anyone saying so.
It is drawn alone. In the circle you show it and tell one pattern you recognise in yourself. One only: if you tell the whole story, the retreat turns into something else.
Where it comes from: the genogram is Murray Bowen's, from his family systems theory in the 1970s. Applying it to money is common practice in financial therapy.
A warning: it is the most delicate tool in the set. It opens family history. It is not done at the first retreat of a new circle.
The circle of influence
Faced with a money worry, you write everything around it and circle what is in your own hands. From inside that circle you choose one action.
Nobody comments on anyone else's action. You say it out loud and move on to the next woman. Without that rule the exercise turns into a round of advice with another name.
Where it comes from: Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989.