Te Pūaha Talks - Ngahere for teams

Like the ngahere, the people who we work alongside each play a specific role that contributes to the wider ecosystem of the impact we are trying to create. If one or two members of our team become burnt out, stressed, or disconnected, our mahi and relationships can be thrown off balance.

Te Pūaha Talks – Ngahere for Teams is the latest iteration of our wellbeing webinar series, brought to life by Tuihana Ohia and Louise Marra. The Ngahere for Teams series shares practices and resources to support your teams wellbeing and connection.

When you and your team give so much of yourselves to your kaupapa and community, without also nurturing the self, the ecosystem of our team and mahi no longer draws on fertile soil. The Ngahere for Teams practices acknowledges that we need to actively maintain our energy and wellbeing - and seeks to offer you holistic tools to help you and your team on that journey.

Ngahere for Teams runs over four online sessions, with each session introducing a new wellness practice that will include a whakataukī (significant quote or inspirational statement), honogoa and rongoā (a guidance, a process for your team connection), and a whakata (a reflection).

All your team needs to bring into the Ngahere space is their wisdom, humour, culture, and creativity. Below is the Ngahere for Teams resource document along with the previous online zoom sessions. We invite you to try this practice with your team and see what works.

Mauri tu, mauri ora.

Click here to download the Ngahere for Teams resource

Hononga process: The Six x One Challenge is designed to encourage people to take Hā moments, micropauses throughout the day, every day. It is about taking a minute, six times a day, to come back into your connected, whole and essential self. It’s about making space to plug in the goodness of life, so we can bring that into our bodies, and to our whanau and to our organisations. To cultivate mauri ora! These micropauses help us calm our nervous system. Every day that we practice these micropauses, we teach our minds and bodies to learn the art of unwinding, while reducing stress and reconnecting us to our breathing, loving, living selves. If all individuals within the team make time for Hā moments, it can make a big difference to how everyone connects. Stressed people find it harder to truly connect. It also can have a huge impact on a culture.

Everyone benefits when we wire in this more essential state of ease and wisdom into our working relationships. The Six x One process is a practice, and a discipline, but those six minutes a day do wonders for rewiring a stressed system, bringing it back into connectivity, nourishment and vitality.

The Six x One process: Each Hā moment exercise has three elements to guide and ground you;

• Whakataukī; a significant saying, an inspirational statement, quote, or proverb.
• Pūmanawa; a way to think about our superpowers, the tūpuna ancestor-given gifts which each of us have.
• Rongoā; a remedy, a treatment, a guidance for your Hā moment.
  

The Six x One principles are:

• Commit to giving it a go, suspending judgement of yourself, the practice and the process.
• For each of the six minutes, get off all devices and do something that brings you joy,ease, and connection.
• Use our suggestions to guide your Hā moments if you wish – or find your own pathways to peacefulness.
• Notice what happens in you as you take a minute to nurture yourself.

Challenge all those in the team to give this a go. It would be great if one day a
week you did this all together. Schedule your six one minute Hā moments for the whole team, so everyone stops at the same time. You could do the same thing, or all do your own things. Try each person leading something for the one minute for all of you. It is fun and nourishing, and connective. Try this in your meetings. It is great to have collective pauses in our often tense or pressured meetings.

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What was challenging in implementing this?
• Do you think this simple and nourishing practice is hard? If so, what are the barriers?
• How might you adapt it so it works better for you, without diminishing the amount of pauses?
• Did you try it in some of your team meetings? If so, what are you noticing about it for you and for the team?

Hononga process: Both karakia and waiata have vibrational resonance that shift our kare-a-roto, emotions and feelings. They are a way of sharing stories, of bringing us from sadness into joy, and from darkness into light. They can be waiata-tangi to mourn those whom have passed, waiata aroha to the people and the things we love. They come in the form of mōteatea, traditional type chants to lift, tautoko, support and awhi kaupapa.

Karakia: Karakia can support our ngahere process in many ways. Karakia are a transmission into a space – to gather, protect, acknowledge, centre, clear, integrate, celebrate, heal, transform – all depending on the intent for the karakia and the ability of the speaker. Karakia are used often at the beginning and the end of gatherings and meetings, but you can use them anytime where needed.

Waiata: Waiata are also a powerful way to engage and ground a team. They can celebrate the wholeness of life while helping us to clear, acknowledge, heal, re-centre, re-gather, assist a speaker or support a message. For Pākehā, the potency of karakia and waiata can be accentuated when you stand in your own whakapapa and speak from your own tradition. You may already be working with the beautiful process of waiata. If not, try bringing a waiata to the start and end of your meetings - and in the middle if everyone is getting stressed.

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What are you noticing with these deep practices?
• What is coming alive in you?
  
• What is coming alive in the team?
• What are you seeing from helping your collective nervous system relax, be nourished and focus?

Hononga process: We often talk about grounding but rarely do it. A grounded team can be such a gift to everyone and can help release more pūmanawa into our mahi. Grounding is about connection to Papatuānuku, acknowledging that we are part of nature, part of Papatuānuku. Connecting back to her, connects us back to the flow of life and helps us connect to each other.

Grounding practices are wonderful at the beginning of a meeting, and during the meeting when things get tense or heady. Grounding also helps us reduce the stress in our system. We often come into a meeting with carry-on baggage from the last meeting, from the day before, or from life. Grounding gives people time to digest what belongs to the past and orientate to the kaupapa of the meeting. Doing grounding practices together is both a compassionate practice and a clearing. These practices can reduce or remove tension, and help people bring their attention to their whole body and all their intelligence centres, not just the mind. It creates the conditions for a fully embodied effective meeting.

Doing grounding practices together is both a compassionate practice and a clearing. These practices can reduce or remove tension, and help people bring their attention to their whole body and all their intelligence centres, not just the mind. It creates the conditions for a fully embodied effective meeting. The practice is to invite everyone in the meeting into this simple grounding process:

• Ask them to notice they have arms and legs. This helps bring us out of our heads and more into our bodies.
• Then ask them to feel into their feet and to feel their feet on the ground, then imagine roots growing out of their feet and through the floorboards and into the earth herself. They can grow big and thick and long and go way down - kilometres deep into the earth and find a resting place. Then everyone can feel what it feels like to have their roots way down into the earth.
• Invite everyone to take a few breaths, breathing in the nourishment and grounding of the earth up into all the cells of their body and then releasing tension down through their body, their roots and into the earth. The earth makes compost of our tension and returns nourishment to us.
• You can deepen this process by asking people to digest whatever they are sitting with from the last meeting, or something they haven’t had a chance to process from elsewhere in their life, by inviting this into the body and down through the roots into Papatuānuku.

Again, you can do this grounding practice at the start of meetings, or during when people get contracted and stressed and need a pause, to plug in, to refuel, and reconnect to the mahi.

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What do you notice as a team about practicing this?
• What are the barriers that keep us out of this rich, resourced and intelligent space?
• What does the space feel like after you have all done this?
• What impact does it have on the team and the meeting? Do you feel a growing connection for yourself and your team to Papatuānuku?

Hononga process: Many of us are trapped on trauma highways rushing, fixing, proving, disconnecting – fuelled with tension and pressure. This way of being feels normal but it has an impact on our way of being, with ourselves and together. Coming back into our optimal place of mauri ora and mauri tau is about getting off those trauma highway, its about and coming back into connection with ourselves and each other. This is an approach to doing this.

• Invite people at the start of the meeting (and during the meeting when you feel the need) to pause and connect back to their bodies and breath. Inviting people to take a breath seems small but can do a lot.
• Then ask people to call to mind and imagine they connect with something that supports and re-sources them. It might be their breath, their body, whānau, whenua, moana, ancestors, music - whatever nourishes them. If you invite them each to connect to their special taonga and bring it close, a rich mix of resources comes into the room to nourish each individual and the team. It is a lovely thing to give people the option to share with team the taonga they have brought into the meeting. Nourishing each nervous system, also nourishes the whole team and helps the team come back into a place where they can relax and bring their full self and pūmanawa into the mahi.
• You can also play with some real time resourcing. Play some music, share a breathing exercise, or stretch or dance together or movement or just listen to some music, or sing a waiata. It is great to use this when things get tense – invite everyone to resource for the tension that is arising. This can do wonders in terms of breaking tension and reconnecting people during a meeting. (While it might seem weird, our more orthodox way of holding meetings with tense bodies and not much movement is way more weird!) Tense bodies do not make optimal decisions
  

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What did you try?
• What worked, what didn’t, what are you noticing?
• What did you enjoy about doing this?
• What resources did you find that you can use to refresh and replenish you when you need support? 
• What was common to the team? What was the impact of bringing these into the team meeting?
• What did you appreciate about hearing or feeling other people’s resources?

The following three processes are aimed at helping with clean leadership – keep a team clean and clearing up so that all feel safe enough and the team can truly hum. It all starts with the willingness to be vulnerable and for that we need to increase our safety and sense of belonging. These next three processes will help you with that.

Hononga process: Softening and being vulnerable is a wonderful process if you allow it. We don’t need to be hard to be effective. We can’t practice our truth without being vulnerable. The truth is we are all vulnerable to each other, and to the collective issues we face. To be vulnerable, we need to feel safe. 

Have a team session on what people need to feel safe so they can practice vulnerability. We need more cues of safety in a team than cues of danger for this to work. Aroha atu, aroha mai – what do we give and what do we need to receive? Ask each person what they need as an agreement to feel safe and what they will also give to the group to be safe for the group. See if you can keep these agreements alive and remind the team about these agreements when unsafe behaviour emerges. Lack of safety will always stifle authenticity. Here are some questions to help each member of the team think about vulnerability.

• How can you start naming your own vulnerability more?
• What would you need in order for this to happen?
• How can you help with others sharing their vulnerability?
• How do you work with vulnerability as a core strength?
• What would be true for you in your relationships as a team if you had the courage to speak your truth as a team?
• What might you say and to who? Where might there need more give and where more boundaries.

Give people the option to share together with the team what the questions have revealed for them as individuals – and what that might mean for them as members of the team.

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What was it like to discuss safety in your group?
• How do you want to practice this?
• What worked, and what didn’t?
• How do you think you can keep growing your safety and belonging with each other?

Hononga process: Start a process of working with your triggers and activations. Most triggers are coming with the weight of the past. We grow when we park judgement of these triggers, inquire into them, look to see what is arising that we can use to learn, and heal. Triggers and activations are part of post-traumatic growth. They are trying to help our system grow and expand from its previous position of protection. Here are some questions to help you explore triggers and activations. As you work through these questions, remember self-compassion is key to unlocking our understanding.

• Start with something that someone is doing or saying that is triggering you now. Ask yourself; what am I accusing the other person or people of, or how am I judging them?
• Do I accuse or judge myself in the same way? Do I do this same thing myself? Have I owned or worked with that?
• What in this situation reminds me of something in the past that I am projecting onto the person in front of me?
• What am I angry at myself about in this situation and what would I like to ask for in the situation? What might I need from them?
• What might I need to change?
• How can I resource myself and come back to mauri ora to find out what support I need, do the inquiry and then decide what action or clearing needs to happen?
• What is trying to grow as a capacity in me? This can be hard to find but it can be something like a boundary you need to set, a truth you need to say, a need you could express or a vulnerability you could risk.

When teams are ‘deliberately developmental’ - meaning everyone is prepared to work with their triggers as growth - so much potential for inspiration and innovation can be freed up. That is because our wairua isn’t going round in circles with stories of each other – that can be exhausting!

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What was it like to work through a trigger?
• What were your resistances, what did you find out?
• What do you think is trying to grow in you?
• What did you enjoy?
• What was hard?
• What can you see as the potential for this practice?

Hononga process: Teams often hit tensions that can arise from small interpersonal issues through to systemic issues around major topics such as colonisation. Tension can be a new future trying to emerge, something trying to change. It is how we work with these tensions that matters. As teams we need to know how to work with these issues when they arise.

Here we introduce two processes, one for a team to use to guide them when conversations enter deep and difficult territory, and one for individuals to address the small hurts, slights and relational tensions that drain us as individuals and drain the collective.

The processes, approached with aroha, can help us have challenging and healing conversations. They are designed to be deep enough and safe enough. Use them as guides and change them as necessary for your own cultural context. If you want to adapt the protocols for your culture, remember to retain the key elements that support safety and reconnection.

In all senior teams we work with we require that people commit to regular clearings for the benefit of the whole team. These are deeper conversations between people where the tension has arisen and hasn’t been cleared. The highest form of trust is rupture and repair; we know we will not be perfect, but we commit to staying in relationship to each other, and clearing what needs to be cleared for our connection to be free of tension again.

• Before you start to use one or both of these processes, it is useful for each person in the team to do a mind map of their relationships and what state they are in. Are they clear, or could they do with some clearing? Are there some boundaries needed or more truth telling?
• Put yourself in the centre of your mind map - your relational web and then map your close relationships – work and broader life and consider the quality of them. What is the mauri of that relationship? You could use a scale: robust and intimate; collegial and working well; elephants between us; stuck; need to be built; abusive relationships that need to be walked away from.
• It is illuminating to rate them and then also to note in your mind map what patterns of yours are playing out, and where these came from. Then from here you can practice anew. Once you have done this map then pick one relatively safe and not too hard relationship to start with to do a clearing process. We would really recommend that you stick to the format above as much as possible, it is designed to be safe and deep enough to clear. Of course, amend it for your cultural context.

Once you have done this map then pick one relatively safe and not too hard relationship to start with to do a clearing process. We would really recommend that you stick to the format above as much as possible, it is designed to be safe and deep enough to clear. Of course, amend it for your cultural context.

Whakaata/Reflection:

• What were your fears around doing this practice?
• How did you prepare yourself? What surprised you in the conversation?
• How did you both feel after?
• What can you see might happen if everyone in a team committed to this?

Note: Session three was not recorded.