OUR STORY
We spent years pulling people out of the river downstream. Katherine as a psychotherapist, session after session, working with people who were already in crisis, already burnt out, already struggling to hold their lives together. Sillse saw the same thing from a different angle, training clients whose bodies were carrying the same weight, long before either of us had the word for what it actually was.
Downstream work matters. But it was never where our instincts pulled us. What we actually wanted was to go upstream, and stop people falling into the river in the first place. Most of what we were treating didn't have to happen. If someone had explained how the nervous system actually works, years earlier, it wouldn't have.
So we built the solution. Expanding Circles teaches people and organisations how capacity actually works, before it's lost, not after.
OUR MISSION
We exist to work in the gap between one-to-one clinical therapy and doing nothing. Almost nobody operates in that gap with genuine quality. Most people never reach therapy at all, because of cost, stigma, availability, or identity. They just keep going until they can't.
We close that gap by teaching people how their nervous system actually works, before it costs them their capacity to function. This is educational, accessible, and genuinely enjoyable to be part of. It isn't therapy, and it isn't nothing. It's the depth that was always missing in between.
Things don't have to be hard. They have to be clear.
OUR VISION
We're building toward a world where organisations protect capacity before it's lost, not after someone's already collapsed under it. Where the standard response to a company going through change isn't a single unmeasured workshop or a wellbeing app nobody logs into, it's real, structured, clinically grounded education delivered by people who know what they're doing.
Longer term, we're working toward certification that makes this reimbursable through German statutory health insurance, so preventative education like ours stops being something only well-resourced companies can access. We're also building toward a digital instrument, grown out of our diagnostic work, that extends what we do beyond the two of us in a room, without losing the depth that makes it work in the first place.
We started as two clinicians bootstrapping a better answer. We're building toward being the standard other companies get compared against.
THE DIAGNOSTIC
Before we design anything, we run a diagnostic profiling assessment. It tells us where each person actually stands, not where a generic framework assumes they stand, and it's what makes everything that follows bespoke rather than templated.
Individual results go only to the individual. Never to you. If we're working with a full cohort, group patterns are only ever reported at ten people or more, so nobody's data is identifiable inside it.
WHO WE ARE
Sillse Giesen
A sports and training scientist, a former professional athlete, and co-founder of Expanding Circles. She leads movement and fitness delivery across every programme, and runs the company's business operations. She spent years competing at a professional level before she ever coached anyone, which is exactly why she's credible on the performance side of this work, not only the movement side of it.
Katherine Dennis
A psychologist, neuropsychologist, and co-founder of Expanding Circles. With over twelve years of clinical practice, she leads all psychological education, clinical methodology, and the diagnostic framework the programmes are built on. She delivers the Personal Performance Strategy directly, and leads client-facing pitches, speaking, and public content, working with organisations and institutions across Europe including Berlinale, Locarno, Vienna Film Festival, When East Meets West, and Talent Labs Vienna.
WHY SHAME REDUCTION AND COMMUNITY
We approach this through a shame reduction lens, because self-compassion training has been shown in controlled research to directly reduce stress and burnout by addressing self-coldness, the tendency to treat struggle as personal failure. That's not a wellness framing, it's the applied version of our own core belief: capacity loss is the nervous system responding to an unpredictable environment, not a character flaw. Removing shame is how that belief becomes something a person can actually feel and use. The strongest evidence for this specific mechanism sits in clinical and healthcare populations rather than corporate high performers. The underlying mechanism isn't population specific, but we're precise about that distinction when asked.
Community is built in through shared movement, not added alongside it. Social support has been shown to buffer the physiological stress response itself, not just the emotional experience of stress. Group delivered exercise specifically improves social connection and recovery from stress in ways solo movement doesn't reach. This is why Sillse's role isn't a wellness add-on to the psychological work. It's doing something the psychological work alone can't.