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

The Connectors Circle: Practising Skills for Difficult Conversations

A facilitated practice space for navigating charged conversations across difference

We live in a time when conversations often fall apart—into arguments, awkward silences, or people talking past each other. The Connectors Circle offers an intentional alternative: an in-person, facilitated space for people who want to develop genuine skill in staying present and curious when conversations become politically, culturally, or personally charged. Unlikely connections can emerge when people feel safe enough to go deeper, even across lines of disagreement. Rather than avoiding difficult topics, we practise remaining steady within them, learning to navigate discomfort together.

How It Works

This is not a talk, a debate, or a  traditioanal networking event. The conversation itself is the event. Together, participants create shared agreements about how to handle disagreement and strong emotion.

To provide structure and depth, a topic is selected ahead of each event to anchor the discussion and help us go beyond surface-level reactions. At the start of every session, members can suggest topics they would like to explore. If there is a clear majority in favour of a member’s suggestion, the group may choose to pivot. This balance allows both preparation and responsiveness—structure without rigidity.

This balance allows both preparation and responsiveness — structure without rigidity.

Once the topic is set, we engage with it in real time, supported by clear facilitation. The focus remains on understanding rather than winning, asking questions rather than persuading, and staying emotionally present without shutting down. This way, the conversation itself becomes the learning and the practice.

What Makes This Different

All perspectives are welcome, and all ideas—including your own—are open to exploration and challenge. Strong emotions are treated as meaningful information, not a disruption. In this environment, rich, deep connection is possible, even with people you might never otherwise meet. Clear boundaries and safeguarding keep the space focused and respectful. This is structured practice, not unmoderated debate.

Clear boundaries protect the integrity of the space. Participation requires respect for the shared practice, and safeguarding measures — including removal if necessary — are in place to ensure the group can stay in meaningful dialogue.

This is structured practice, not unmoderated debate.

Building Connection Over Time

The Connectors Circle is an ongoing practice, and that continuity matters. As people return, trust and familiarity grow. Disagreement becomes less threatening, and members experience what psychologically safe challenge actually feels like.

Over time, participants develop relational confidence, deeper listening, and the ability to hold conviction without losing connection. Often, this leads to unexpected bonds across real divides. The aim isn’t forced agreement, but more resilient relationships across difference.

Is This for You?

This space is for people willing to lead with curiosity, stay open while holding their values, and prioritise understanding over being right. Real connection isn’t built through sameness, but by staying present with difference. If you want meaningful connection with people outside your usual circles, this space is for you.

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

If you want to strengthen your ability to navigate complex conversations without shutting down or escalating, this is where you practise.

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.