🎟️ Note: This is a free event, please make sure you reserve your spot on Eventbrite here.  

Overview

A facilitated practice space for navigating charged conversations across difference.

The Connectors Circle: Practising Skills for Difficult Conversations

A facilitated practice space for navigating charged conversations across difference

The Connectors Circle is a facilitated, in-person practice space for people who want to build real skill in staying present during difficult, emotionally charged conversations — across political, cultural, ideological, and personal difference. In a culture where conversation often collapses into debate, avoidance, or moral performance, this gathering focuses on how conversations actually function when the stakes are high.

This is not a panel, lecture, debate, or networking event. Conversation itself is the work. Participants co-create shared agreements for how disagreement, challenge, and emotion are handled, then practise exploring a participant-selected charged topic within that container. The emphasis is on inquiry rather than persuasion, understanding rather than agreement, and emotional presence without collapse.

All perspectives are welcome, but none are immune from examination. Identity is respected, while ideas and claims remain open to challenge. Strong emotions are expected and treated as information, not disruption. Clear facilitation and firm boundaries protect the group’s ability to stay in conversation; participation is conditional on respecting the shared practice, and safeguarding measures — including removal if necessary — are in place to support collective continuity.

This space is for those willing to engage with curiosity rather than certainty, hold conviction without immunity from challenge, and prioritise collective understanding over individual validation.

📍83 Queens Rd, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 3XE
🕕 6:00 PM

The Connectors Circle is ongoing practice — imperfect, evolving, and willing to hold real stakes. Conversation isn’t small talk here.

Facilitator

Mark Blake is the facilitator of The Connectors Circle. His work is grounded in a simple but demanding idea: difficult conversations don’t fail because people lack intelligence or care — they fail because most of us were never taught how to stay present when emotional, relational, and identity stakes rise.

Over the past eight years, Mark has worked across high-stakes systems and community spaces where misunderstanding has real consequences. He has led reform work with the police and the NHS to improve responses and outcomes for domestic abuse survivors and sexual assault survivors, worked with politicians whose values and motivational systems differ sharply from his own, led communities of trauma survivors, and supported businesses navigating complex interpersonal and cultural challenges. Across these settings, the same pattern appeared again and again: people were speaking, but understanding remained fragile — and when understanding breaks down, trust, safety, and systems follow.

Alongside this systems-level work, Mark has helped build neuroinclusive community spaces from the ground up. He co-founded Joyfully Different, where he developed safeguarding practices, co-designed learning modules, and facilitated conversations on trauma, neurodivergence, diversity of thought, and joy. These experiences shape a facilitation style that balances emotional holding with clear structure and firm, consistently enforced boundaries.

Mark’s approach recognises that communication is never just about words. It involves nervous systems, identity, values, fear, and meaning-making all operating at once. His role in The Connectors Circle is not to lead people to agreement, offer therapy, or resolve conflict for others, but to hold a clear, consent-based container where participants can practise staying present with disagreement, challenge, and strong emotion — without collapse, avoidance, or moral performance.

Mark has been mentored by international coaches and facilitators, and his work is shaped as much by lived experience in crisis rooms and community circles as by formal frameworks.

The Connectors Circle is for people who want to strengthen their capacity for honest, grounded conversation — in their work, communities, and personal lives — and who are willing to engage with curiosity, accountability, and care for the collective space.