Sharing Circle Guidelines

Here are our Sharing Circle Participation Guidelines:

1. Please do not ask questions or give advice to the sharer and keep supportive phrases short.

We don’t ask questions so that the sharer does not feel pressured to share more than they are comfortable with, get distracted from their share, or use up their sharing time answering questions. We don’t give advice as we can’t know all the details of someone’s situation in the space of a share, so the advice might turn out to be wrong or unhelpful. Keeping supportive phrases short during the share keeps focus on the sharer, it’s okay to send a longer message once they have finished. 

2. Only members can share.

Sharing Circle is a space for members. If listeners would like to share they are welcome to log in on a member account. There are also Listener Sharing Circles 4 times a day (2am, 8am, 2pm, 8pm ET) in the Listener Sharing Circle room to share about your listener journey. 

3. Please do not interrupt other shares to share your own story.

We ask that you join the queue if you would like to share, so that we can focus on one person at a time and give that sharer our full attention. 

4. Please break your share into short sentences.

Breaking a share into short messages means that we know you are present and still sharing, and it’s also much easier for participants to read than one big block of text. 

5. Please limit your share to under 7 minutes/ 5 minutes for busy sessions.

We have a time limit to ensure that we can hear as many people as possible. The host will time you and give you a one minute warning, you are not expected to time yourself. If the queue isn’t full you are welcome to rejoin the queue and share again if you don’t have time to share what you wanted to share. 

6. Type ‘Over’ or ‘Done’ as a separate message to show that you are done sharing.

This alerts everyone in the room to the fact that you have finished sharing, which means they can share a longer encouraging message than they would while you were sharing. It also allows the host to be certain that you have finished before they reopen the queue/ invite the next sharer to start. 

7. If the share is triggering, please send, “Trigger Warning” and the name of the topic before starting the share.

It would be appreciated if you gave a trigger warning for common triggers such as substance abuse, domestic violence etc. Please don’t worry too much about it though, we accept that the nature of group support means all kinds of topics will come up, and anyone can excuse themselves at any time if they find a topic triggering. We do ask that you keep graphic details to a minimum in the group rooms. 

Here is a copy of Sharing Circle Script and detailed guidelines.