Affirmative rituals

Eric Skiff and Bre Pettis started Affirmative Club in November 2020, when gatherings had disappeared and they wanted a reason to keep making things. Four to eight people meet every two weeks. Everyone must bring creative work and present it in five minutes or less, with no introductions, credentials or apologies for the work. Then each person offers a positive response, the maker says thank you, and the next person goes. No criticism is allowed. The guide is offered “with none of the responsibilities of ownership”: it isn’t trademarked or moderated, so anyone can start one. Its lesson for Affirmativism is to change the rules of an interaction rather than the people in it.

A Quaker practice for discernment. Someone facing a decision invites a few trusted people to sit with them. The group may only ask honest, open questions, meaning questions they don’t already know the answer to and that carry no hidden advice. Silence between questions is expected, and the person at the center can decline to answer anything. No one tries to solve the problem. The assumption is that the person already holds the answer and the questions help them hear it. What happens in the room stays there. It is a space of attention free of criticism, and it shows how much changes when you stop trying to fix someone.

The Quaker writer and teacher Parker Palmer carried the clearness committee into secular settings through the Center for Courage & Renewal. Its short list of “touchstones” is close to Affirmativism’s own spirit. Participants agree to give up fixing, saving, advising and correcting one another, to speak for themselves, and, when things get hard, to “turn to wonder” instead of judgment. It matters here because it shows that this kind of attention can travel outside a religious community and still work. Circle of Trust® is the Center’s registered name, so we point to it rather than borrow it.

The Entrepreneurs’ Organization runs Forums: confidential groups of roughly six to ten members who meet monthly using a set protocol. The central discipline is experience sharing. When someone brings an issue, nobody tells them what to do. Instead, each person shares what happened to them in a similar situation. Advice puts the speaker above the listener. A story puts them side by side, and the person with the issue draws their own conclusions. For Affirmativism, this is the move behind “Trade Stories”: an opinion invites a rebuttal, and an experience doesn’t.

Circl.es is a video platform built for small-group conversation. Instead of one speaker and a large audience, it puts a prompt, a talk or a question at the center and sorts people into small circles where everyone gets a turn. Groups can meet once or keep meeting over time. TED has used it so people could watch a talk together and then talk about it in small groups, and EO and YPO now run their Forums on it. The lesson is about scale. You don’t need one big room to reach many people. You can make thousands of small ones, and connection happens in the small ones.