Someone hesitates, and we reassure them before we've decided to.

We leave a conversation carrying something we never consciously chose to carry.

A meeting settles around certainty before anything unfamiliar has had the chance to emerge.

By the time we notice what happened, the encounter has already become memory.

Eventually, these movements stop feeling like participation at all. They feel inevitable.

We begin to experience them as personality - as just the way I am:

I am the one who takes responsibility, I am the one who smooths things over. I am the one who explains, who knows, who jokes, or who disappears.

But what if some of what you've taken to be your personality is actually a familiar repertoire of participation shaped by the social worlds you've inherited?

What if what feels most like you is, in part, what your social world has repeatedly invited, rewarded, and required?

School begins there.

What once felt like personality begins to reveal itself as participation.

So, how do we study participation while we are still participating?

School of the Small and Imperfect isn't a place to learn better participation. It's a place where different participation becomes possible.

Every cycle is an experiment.

I know which condition we'll change. I don't know what that change will make possible.

Something I notice

During the first week, someone will share something painful. Almost immediately, people reassure them. Someone thanks them for sharing. Someone offers an explanation.

The room reorganizes itself around care.

Nothing is wrong, and everyone is being thoughtful.

Several weeks later, something similar often happens again. Someone shares something painful, but this time no one rushes.

It isn't that people have become less caring. It’s that the room no longer has to reorganize itself for something to matter.

The experience remains alive without immediately becoming everyone's responsibility to repair.

The speaker stays, the listeners stay, and the uncertainty stays.

Reassurance turns out not to have been the only form care could take.

Watching that happen still surprises me.

The room becomes less preoccupied with getting it right and starts to feel more alive.

What begins to change

People begin noticing forms of participation that had previously felt inevitable:

• responsibilities they had been assuming without realizing it

• moments they habitually organized around reassurance, explanation, or certain

• ways they had protected themselves from being altered by what they encountered

Gradually, ordinary life becomes newly perceptible.

"I remembered that I didn't have to."

"I handed on responsibility, and she took it."

"One thing I can now notice that I couldn't notice a few weeks ago is what feels like incapacity is actually resistance."

"I noticed how quickly I assume discomfort means something has gone wrong."

People begin leaving encounters with less to carry. Care no longer has to take familiar forms.

They discover responses that previously weren't available. They find themselves staying where they would once have rushed.

They yield where they would once have explained.

They become more available to be changed by what they encounter.

Once participation becomes perceptible, it no longer has to remain inevitable.

Why we meet this way

This couldn't happen alone.

What we're exploring only becomes visible in relationship, and it doesn't reveal itself all at once.

Over four weeks, it emerges gradually through the ordinary ways we respond to one another, make sense of what unfolds, and discover possibilities that weren't available at the beginning.

Every group changes the inquiry because every group creates different conditions for what can become visible.

Why return?

School isn't something you finish. It's something you return to.

No cycle repeats the last one because the people, the conditions, and you are different.

Every return is another opportunity to discover what becomes possible under different conditions.

Is this for you?

You might recognize yourself here if:

• You leave important conversations feeling something disappeared before you knew what it was.

• You often realize what mattered only after the encounter is over.

• You regularly leave conversations carrying something you didn't have when you entered.

• You keep recreating patterns you can recognize but can't seem to interrupt.

• You suspect you're shaping far more than you can currently perceive.

• You wonder whether the ways you've learned to care, lead, reassure, or take responsibility are the only ways available.

No particular professional background is needed. Only a willingness to enter an encounter without already knowing what it will become.

Current cycle

Four weeks
Live online
75-minute sessions
Small group only

Join at the beginning of any cycle.

Tuesdays
15:00–16:15 CET
9:00–10:15 Eastern

2300 SEK · 240 USD · 205 EUR

Upcoming cycles
August 11
September 15
October 20

Reflections

“These practices are subtle and powerful. I find myself with colleagues, friends, and family noticing that lifelong patterns of relating have begun to shift. The changes unfold slowly, over time, and they hold, as if the bones of relationship to self and other are being realigned.”
- Alissa Di Franco

“A trustworthy kind of disorientation. Our hours together altered how I moved, noticed, and responded to my life. Here there is the possibility of relational habits becoming visible, becoming relational skills to move with rather than be bound by.”
-Karalyn Riepert

“I've noticed patterns repeating across different people and situations with such similarity that I can't help but see my own participation in creating the outcomes. There's a kind of zoomed-out perspective now, like I'm in the interaction and also watching it unfold while it's happening.”
-Kevin Karpinski