Morning Tea

I love how life can throw you themes and collections of ‘things’. This might be a lesson to learn, so you keep making mistakes or not getting things quite right. Or it might be a skill to develop so the opportunities to hone and develop this keep appearing in your path. Or there might be topics or conversations that you have with a number of people, giving you the sense of a collective feeling or direction. Then it might be an actual ‘thing’. For me, at the moment it’s morning tea.

Stopping to connect over tea, and coffee (plus or minus the cake of course) is a worldwide thing. When I holidayed in New Zealand (many many many years ago) I was delighted on a horse riding trip where we stopped at a point and the guide got out a flask and we sat drinking tea with a couple of biscuits and chatted about all sorts of things.

I attended a conference where the concepts of Fika were brought into how we connect and generate change in healthcare. One of the things on my ‘to-do list’ is to get an RCT off the ground. This randomised coffee trial is a tool to allow people in a large organisation to connect and build relationships.

There is an action and an act of leadership about making tea for someone. It is a way to connect and show care and compassion. It is a way to heal relationships and it is a way to build well-being for you and your team. This amazing webinar with Dame Nadia Glavish encapsulates these elements so brilliantly and reaches the points of how you start that sense of safety within your team. Listening to this is 20 minutes that you need to take for yourself - you are worth it.

For patient safety day is coming up in Aotearoa the HQSC encouraged teams to share a morning or afternoon tea to thank health care workers for the work everyone has done during the year and the COVID responses they have been part of - which there are numerous and varied.

So with all the whirling around morning tea and ways of connecting, I took part in Morning Tea with Mark from Jumpshift. Mark and I talked about how we find a sense of balance in the whirlwind we can find ourselves in. These sessions are a chance to take a moment to connect with others and think about some of the things that can support you and your team while we all live with the uncertainties and unknowns that have elevated from normal over this last year.