Hello and welcome to late summer.  The days are getting a tiny bit shorter and we’re all trying to squeeze the last drops out of August before September and bursting-at-the-seams diaries are once again upon us.

This month may be a busy one for you or a chance to undo the top button and breathe a bit.  Either way, it is a great time to pause and consider helpful messages to get our heads in the right place and feeling strong for the start of the autumn work term.

Holidays and work breaks are fantastic and necessary, but the effects soon wear off. So here are a few things to say to ourselves and others, useful to keep energy high and get in shape for the season ahead.

You win or you learn

It’s great to do well, walk a smooth path and have a long run of success at work.  Everyone deserves that at least once in a while – but it’s not when the learning happens.  We learn the most through the gnarly, tricky times, when nothing seems to go our way.  So when you hit a big fat failure, take it on the chin.  Life at work has a fair bit of win and lose in it, but losers are also learners.  Review what went wrong, gain the views of others, put right what you need to, then learn and move on.  It doesn’t feel this way at the time but you’ll look back on this period as a time of personal and professional growth that propelled you to a better place.

All feedback is a gift

It really is. Even if it is badly wrapped and seems like the present no one wants.  If all we ever hear is praise, we never know what we need to do to progress to the next level. When someone praises you, thank them but also ask what you could have done even better.  And ask them to be specific so you can really nail what you need to do to improve.  When you’re given negative feedback, learn to value it.  There will be something in the content that is of use, even if you don’t rate the delivery or the messenger.  Challenge it if you need to, ask questions if lacks clarity or substance, then take it and use it in a way it will help you most.  And don’t forget to thank them for the feedback – and not through gritted teeth.

This too shall pass

Resilient people are positive.  Not shiny, smiley positive but sensibly positive in the way they gain perspective and look ahead.  Develop the ability to influence what you can and want to change and make choices about anything you can’t change.  No one can ever take away from you the right to choose your own attitude to the situation.  A positive, assertive attitude will take you a long way and tends to be associated with those high-performance people everyone wants on their team.

It‘s my bad

If like us, you were born before the 1980s, “it’s my fault” is what this means.  We seem to have lost the ability to step up, take responsibility and say sorry if something was our fault and shouldn’t have happened.  Just doing that when you need to, helps develop strength and accountability and you and in your work culture.  It allows us to own up, explain why, put things right and try better next time.  It also stops us expecting to be bailed out all the time by someone with rescuer tendencies.

And there are many more sayings that convert to practical ways to grow a bit of backbone, so if that is what you feel you need for the next few months, talk to us about how you can develop a stronger self and a more resilient team.  We promise to be firm but fair.

 

During a recent coaching session, a senior manager, newly appointed as leader to the team they used to manage, asked for help on building credibility.  They had no issue with team members in non-technical roles. The ones in more technical jobs, however, felt what made a leader credible was how much they knew about the jobs of their team and whether they could do those jobs as well.  We discussed if that was relevant to leadership or not, and how, if you find yourself leading in a field you know less about, it can have its advantages.  You can’t show how clever you are at the work, so you put your energy in to being a good leader and driving others to achieve great things.

Bill Gates said: “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”  He was talking about the century we’re in and he’s right.  To be a good leader, sometimes you have to stop trying to be the best at everything.

Leaders come in different shapes and sizes.  Some rise up the ranks through their technical abilities.  They are good at the work so that earns them promotion.  Some enter through a different route.  They are good at leading teams and managing projects and are able to apply those skills in a range of settings.  Neither one is better; it just is what it is.  You can’t help what you don’t know and you can’t unlearn what you do know, but you can make the best of either situation and avoid the inevitable traps.

So for leaders and managers who are experts in the work of the people in the team:

  1. You will always have credibility. You’ve been there and done it and you have wisdom to offer, so mentor others to grow and develop in their knowledge and skill.
  2. You might find delegation and letting go a bit of a challenge. Will they do it as well as you?  As it happens, they may do it better, which is great, but even if they don’t, they may just do it differently, or cheaper, or quicker than you - and all those things have value.
  3. Take care that all roads don’t lead to you. Technical experts often become fixers of others’ problems rather than coaches who help people work it out for themselves.  One day you may leave and whilst you want a decent send off, people to be a bit sad, say there was no one quite like you etc., you don’t want the place to fall apart.  So encourage people to sort their own problems, with your support.
  4. Your knowledge is not in question here, so take time to develop your leadership skills. Leadership is a skill to be mastered, like any other and the great thing about it is that you can apply it in a variety of settings
  5. Watch out for meddling tendencies dressed up as “being helpful”. If you do it because you are missing something you love (management roles can be very lonely for technical leaders), find something else you love, or be a contributor on a project rather than overpowering others who have a job to do too.

And for leaders who didn’t take the technical route:

  1. Listen hard and learn fast. You don’t need to be able to master the jobs of everyone in the place, but you do need to have intelligent conversations with them about their work and what you can do smooth the path to success and add value to their day.
  2. Consider a stint on whatever happens to be your version of the shop floor, more than one if you can. It’s a first-hand experience you can discuss with people, it will give you a better insight than just observing and may well up your credibility with others. At the very least it will give them something to laugh at.
  3. Join forums where you can develop a bit more technical knowledge. As well as benefitting you it shows commitment to the team and can help you develop some great networks.

We coach leaders and managers at all levels.   Whatever route has got you to where you are now, we’ll commit to helping you use your knowledge and skill – your cleverness - to be the kind of leader people want to have around.

It has been said that competition makes us faster but collaboration makes us better.

Collaboration means everyone can contribute: you get to use all the experience in your team, not just some of it.  Not only does a collaborative culture enable you to ensure opportunities and risks are more transparent and manageable, it also makes work more enjoyable and satisfying.

Yet some organisations subtly discourage collaborative working even though they talk loudly about wanting it.  Individual targets, lack of cross-departmental communication and rigid decision-making processes encourage people to compete and play their cards close to their chests.  When team members get territorial, only look down at their own work and never glance to the left and right to see what others are up to and how they could add value, it is death to collaboration.

The Pandemic made collaborating ever more challenging yet many of us found we put in more of an effort.  We couldn’t take each other’s physical presence for granted so worked harder to build connections. Lots of our clients tell us collaboration between teams increased over the last two years and they continue to ride that wave.  They do this so collaborative behaviour sticks and becomes part of their ways of working.

So, if you want a more collaborative team, you have to make changes.  We know - we’ve seen teams make those changes.  It doesn’t happen overnight and it does take repeated practice, but with time a collaborative spirit starts to spread.  Here are some actions that make an impact.

Destroy silos.  A meaningful way to do this is by agreeing unifying goals.  Everyone should know how their work impacts on the overall goals but also how it impacts other teams and departments.  Create a culture where everyone feels like they are an important piece of the pie and what they do matters.  Banish all talk of who is more important than who.  Because no one is.

Build trust.  It’s the foundation for just about everything.  We trust our colleagues when we believe they will deliver on what they promise, honour their commitments, be reliable and not say one thing and do another.  Collaboration encourages trust and trust encourages collaboration.  One way to build trust is to look at the communication style of your organisation.  Is it as open and inclusive as it could be?  If not, consider what you could do to make it less concealed.

Think it before you do it.  Collaboration begins with a mind-set, not a list of actions.  For people to do collaboration, they first have to think about it (and see its value).  Encourage people to ask themselves questions like:

Questions like these get people thinking in the right way – the actions follow.

That’s not the whole story but it’s a start.  We work with teams at all levels to help them develop collaborative working.  It’s an art and a science, but luckily, it’s not rocket science.

We have noticed something interesting happening in the last few weeks. Human beings enjoy being in each other's company again despite the predictions of a remote workforce being the way to go during various lockdowns.

As with many of you, we have been conducting all our work online –training, facilitation, team coaching – and it's been ok. We worked hard to make it interactive and became mistresses of break outs, Jam Boards, polls, and anything else we could come up with to not replicate face to face but to create a new learning environment. And then we had human contact again and things got interesting.

Training and facilitation online have so many advantages. It's more accessible, people are more awake because they haven't got up at 5 am to catch a train and somehow it works just fine. On the other hand, team coaching is different and is the biggest winner when things get personal. Teams working through what they are here for, how they want to behave together, and generally getting to know each other is so much better when everyone can see the non-verbal language and wander to the kitchen with a colleague to get a drink.

Several teams we have worked with had started online but then made huge strides when they got in a room. Some people have never met in person. The office has been a concept, not a reality and being in the same room suddenly feels more productive. We have witnessed significant breakthroughs in understanding and valuing differences and better ways of behaving to create a high-performance team culture.

How is your team at the moment? Have you maintained communication with weekly huddles, regular one to ones and the encouragement of online coffees to welcome new team members to the crew? All that has been important, but do you now yearn for a deeper bonding, a clearing of the dust and the chance to work as a team and connect outwards more into the organisation and beyond? Maybe in-person team coaching could be just what you need. Working with us, you would create a team mission, agree on what sort of behaviours empower the team and what holds it back, think about the layer below you and how to raise their game so you can raise yours and mend, create, build those critical internal and external relationships that smooth the path to success.

We have been so impressed with the substantial effort leaders and their teams have put into maintaining morale and performance levels in challenging times. Perhaps now is the time to build on that and allow your teams a chance to breathe, reflect and reconnect with authentic, warm human beings and see what breakthroughs they can make.

The year is flying by, isn’t it? Someone stole January, February disappeared in a cloud of smoke and next week will see the start of April. Organisations like yours are juggling a busy workload with all the fun and games of adapting to new ways of working, mainly where we all work post-pandemic. Hybrid working trials have taken place and now we’re trying to bed in longer-term patterns.

This isn’t working out as well as everyone hoped.  It is really difficult to keep all of us happy on the subject of location. Some were and still are champing at the bit to get back in to a shared working space. Others are less keen, preferring working remotely. Business needs must be met but no one wants an unhappy team.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again.  We are great proponents of remote working.  And we should know – we’ve done it for 3 plus decades.  You get more done in less time without hours and money spent getting to and fro. When it is combined with the kind of job that involves some out and about activity and no lockdowns, it’s a recipe for a happy work and life. And it is how we are positioning the out and about element we may be getting wrong right now.

We keep talking about location – where that should be, keep the office, lose the office, convert to a shared work space.  Two days a week in, weekly ratios of 3:2, everyone in on Wednesdays, no more than two teams in at the same time and so on. It’s an emotive discussion and understandably, hard to get people to agree.

So, let’s change the narrative and start talking about why - not where we want to meet up. We want to meet up for connection. We don’t need to be together to plug in and sit silently side by side doing our individual work.  We can do that anywhere that has the necessary resources.

We do want to be together for connection. This might include any or all of the following:

When you look at it like that, it’s less about rules and more about reasons.  We aren’t “coming into the office”, we’re meeting to discuss, relate, learn and get better. And whilst that may involve an office or agreed meeting place, we’re doing it because it makes sense, not because the policy says you have to be in X days a week.

We are meeting to do what is better done in person. Over the last two years, that was stolen from us and whilst we all coped admirably, there was a cost.  Not to work output but to – and here’s the word again – connection.

So, the key message here is – stop talking location and start talking connection. It will help you work out when it makes good sense to bring people to a shared space and when it doesn’t. Involve others in that conversation because you aren’t talking about the where, you’re talking about the why. People always react better when they feel listened to and are encouraged to input to something that makes sense to them. This makes sense. And with any luck, cooperation will follow.

As we emerge into 2022, bleary-eyed, hoping this will finally be the year of steady state (trying to avoid "new normal"), how are you feeling? Many of our clients’ report feeling weather-worn, buffeting by the effort of steering through Covid and all its storms and gales.

Your energy may be low, but maybe your heart is lifted and optimistic about the future if only you could gather yourself up and power on.

In times of turbulence, we often stretch to behaviours and skills that are not natural. This is tiring and takes concentration and is maybe why we feel our reserves are low. As a result, some of us may be tempted to move on from our current roles to feel like we are breaking the habits and renewing ourselves, gaining a sense of doing something different.

One way to reinvent ourselves is a little closer to home, though. Resilience has been at an all-time high in the past few years. It has brought invention, creativity, tenacity and let's not forget pivoting. So maybe a way to rejuvenate ourselves is to step back and do a good old-fashioned review of our resilience and what it has done for us.

We have been coaching individuals and teams around resilience for many years and one of the crucial things to realise is that it isn't about gritting teeth, never moaning or not owning up to finding times tough. It is quite the opposite, in fact. Resilience teaches us to speak up if we need help, actively seek out people that know more than us and purposefully rest and recover.

Have a go at thinking through three of the six resilience factors and how you have benefited from using them.

Determination – the ability to dig deep and welcome challenges. How many times have you done this recently? Have you delayed instant gratification and instead dug in and produced your best work? What satisfaction did you get from that and what have you learned about yourself? Did you have a mantra for tough times that you can still use today? For example, "If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well", "head down, keep walking", "5 o'clock will come". Using mantras can keep our spirits up and team mantras are potent. For example, one of our clients used to work for Cadburys in the IT team. After a tough week of transforming and developing, the team would say, "now let's go make great chocolate". Love this. It reminds them why they have done their best that week and that it was for the good of the whole organisation and themselves. Oh, and for all of us who love chocolate!

A sense of purpose – how much has the last year moved you towards where you want to be in life. It may even have fast-forwarded it. We always knew we should embrace digital online learning but kept putting it off. Several lockdowns later and we feel like we have been doing it forever – have you done something like that? Have you gained experience in one year that might have taken you four if there hadn't been a crisis?

Connections – who have you networked with recently? How many online coffees have you had with colleagues across your organisation that would never have happened in the office? What have you learned from them that helps you now and in the future? Have you gained a broader understanding of your organisation from all those pub quizzes you attended, humanising colleagues from all functions?

Those are just three resilience areas. Use them to reframe last year as rejuvenating, stretching, challenging rather than tiring.

Last year could have been 100% tiring or 100% inspiring!

Get in touch if you want to know more about building resilience for yourself and your teams

Happy new year!  We’re not making any predictions for 2022 – there are enough memes doing that for us.  A personal favourite is:

“Before I agree to 2022, I need to see some Terms and Conditions.”

We may not know what the next 12 months has in store for us but we know there will be change.  There always is. In times of great change, it can be useful to look for constants, especially if they are ones that take us to a better place.

When it comes to personal and professional growth, coaching is one such constant.  Here are 3 reasons why:

  1. It is lockdown-proof. The word ‘hybrid’ has been used so much recently it’s destined for a firm place on the latest Bullshit Bingo card. While it is a new term for how we work, it has applied to coaching for years.  This one-to-one interaction works equally well face to face or from a distance and a combination of both works even better. It means internal coaches can work with colleagues from different teams, sites and parts of the globe and those seeking an external coach can make their choice without the restrictions of geography.
  2. It has survived fads and trends in L&D. Every profession has its flavours of the month.  Learning and development is no different.  If you’ve been in this game for over 30 years as we have, you will have seen a fair few.  A trend has tangible benefits and solves a particular need whereas a fad is often driven by a coolness factor and an “I want some of that too” mentality.  When coaching first came on the scene, many thought it was a fad but decades later, it endures with credibility and impact.  It is going nowhere.
  3. No sheep are dipped in the coaching process. Mass group training has great value where there is a common need.  In a coaching situation, the need is rarely mass-produced and that means coach and client can work together in an individualised way, targeting priorities and taking action where it counts.  In the early days, coaching was viewed as an expensive luxury, the domain of the senior executive, because it only applies to one person at a time.  Years on, it has proved itself money well spent as individuals directly attribute success, advancement and impact on the bottom line, to their coaching sessions.  It is selfish time to think, talk and be supported and challenged to take action.

Coaching can be defined as a relationship of rapport and trust in which the coach uses their ability to listen, to ask questions and to play back what the client has communicated in order to help the client to clarify what matters to them and to work out what to do to achieve their aspirations.

When you put it that way, there is little to lose and much to gain from a coaching relationship.  Many of you reading will know this already and have years under your belt of successful coaching experiences.  If that’s not you yet, consider making 2022 the year you get a coach, become a coach, or open the door to coaching in your organisation.

We don’t know yet how 2022 is going to pan out.  What we do know is that, whatever this year throws our way, will be talked about, planned for and solved at coaching sessions the world over.

Hello again. In part one of this article, we addressed feedback, our motives for giving it and how to ensure you examine your motive before you open your mouth.

Now that is sorted, you can deliver the feedback in a way that is taken well.

It is vital to know the go-zones and no-go zones of feedback.  Derek Biddle, occupational psychologist and co-author of Leading and Developing for High Performance describes the layers of an onion.  The inner layers represent our personality and values - who we are fundamentally and the standards and codes by which we live our lives.  These are incredibly personal and tough to change (you could argue that we shouldn't have to change them and certainly not because someone we work with/for thinks we should).  These are the no-go zones for feedback.  Comment on people's personalities or values and you could be accused of hitting below the belt. The outer layers of the onion represent our attitudes - our approach to and views on things and behaviour - the outward signs of our attitude.  These are the go-zones for feedback.  They concentrate on what a person does, not who they are, they are easier on the ear and more likely to be acted upon.  It's the difference between telling someone you desk share with (a likely scenario as office space shrinks to fit the needs of the hybrid workforce) that their messy papers, Post It note pandemic and nonexistent filing make it impossible for you to work and can you both sort out a better system: above the belt - and telling them they are a shambles with no idea how to organise themselves and you bet their home is in a right old state - below the belt.

It works with positive feedback too.  Telling someone they're a fabulous person is nurturing and kind but more akin to feedback you give a mate and not terribly useful.  Fabulous in what way exactly?  And how can I transfer my "fabulousness" to benefit other areas of my work? Better to be told specifics - your positive impact on the team, your ability to manage a project well, your inspirational pitching style - with examples - than to be fobbed off with sweet but rather sweeping statements.  So, keep your feedback above the belt.

A lot has been written about techniques and structures for feedback. Take it with a pinch of salt.  In some places of work, it would be a start just to get people doing feedback at all, let alone trying to weave it around a fancy process. It goes a long way if you keep your feedback open, honest and respectful. Being open and honest is not enough.  One person’s idea of being open and honest could be another person’s idea of brutal.  The third part - respectful keeps any major offloading in check.

While we're on the subject of technique, beware the unsubtle ones like the Praise Sandwich (sometimes referred to with a different, altogether less palatable sandwich filling). The idea behind it is to sandwich some negative feedback between two bits of positive feedback thereby softening the blow.  Guess what?  We all know when it's being done to us and it gets used mainly when you have only wafer thin positive bread to act as bookends for a massive wedge of negative filling. "Thank you for turning up to work today - just about everything you do in your job is rubbish - but I really like your earrings."  Okay, an exaggeration but you know how it goes.  Better to say what needs to be said, check how they feel about it and what their view is and then look ahead.  Any feedback that is constructive should be followed by some sort of action plan.  If it is positive feedback, then acknowledge what has been done well, discuss how they can be even better and/or spread that success and look to the future.  If the feedback is about something you want them to improve, it's a case of looking at how that might be done.  The essence of constructive feedback really, is that life goes on after it.  There is a future, a way to improve, a path to move on to.

Finally, there is a big element of getting your own house in order when it comes to feedback.  You may be skilled at giving it, but how elegant are you at receiving it?  We worked with a client when he was setting up a new team from scratch.  Once the team had bedded in, he looked to work on his own self-awareness with a “full-circle” feedback tool that encouraged his staff and colleagues to give him constructive feedback about his work style, leadership and communication.  The results were detailed and clear, in many cases extremely complimentary and motivating, in just a few, a little tough to take.  But he took them all, welcoming the feedback and acting on it where he felt appropriate. His example inspired many of the team to be more open to feedback and make it a regular feature of their team culture.  So, before you unleash yourself on unsuspecting colleagues, with your own special brand of feedback, do a quick check that you too can receive feedback with grace.  Listen to it, ask questions about it, decide what you are going to do with it and above all, thank them for taking the time to give it – genuinely and not through gritted teeth.

They say all feedback is a gift.  Sometimes it can feel like a badly wrapped one with unwanted contents.  But it usually has something to offer and a colleague or team member being prepared to share a perspective with you – that takes guts, so take a deep breath and welcome it. They may even surprise you and say something positive.  Now that’s a gift worth having.

We should be so good at doing feedback nowadays. It’s a shame we aren’t. We start with the best intentions – to give regular feedback and be open to receiving it too – yet when the pressure is on, we forget to make it a priority and fall back on the mealy-mouthed act of speedily pointing out the flaws and staying quiet about all the good stuff. We also worry that we don’t have the right to give feedback – to team members, colleagues and bosses. Not only is it our right to give it, it is their right to expect it and to give us feedback in return. It just needs to be done with a modicum of skill, compassion and common sense.

In this two-parter, we’ll examine how you give feedback and receive feedback well and avoid the pitfalls of silly techniques and inauthentic work-speak.

Part 1 - start on the right road by examining your motive. What is compelling you to want to give the feedback in the first place? It might be a genuine desire to help someone grow and develop, the need to stop someone who is behaving in a way that is holding them back, or a wish to comment on something you feel they do really well and the positive impact it has. These are all honourable motives and are likely to result in constructively delivered feedback. A compulsion to get something off your chest or to take someone down a peg or two are less honourable (though understandably tempting at times) and are more likely to lead to destructive feedback - and in the short term certainly, will do more harm than good.

Some motives could go either way for example, the desire to pass on the benefit of your experience through some feedback. If that is your motive then find a way to do it so it doesn't sound patronising: "Let me, the great sage of many years’ experience, pass down to you the rookie, the great honour of a particle of my considerable brain." We have all had that done to us at one time or other and rather than listen to the content of the feedback, it makes you want to thump the person. The benefit of your experience should be offered not imposed, and put into context, for example, this worked for you once but it may not work for them - for it to be a constructive experience.

Finally, beware the motive of cheering someone up where they're having a bad time, by giving praise. If you tell them things are better than they really are, and they are savvy enough to know they're not, they may distrust your feedback in the future. Better to talk to them about what is going wrong and give them some perspective on the situation, than try to stick a smiley plaster on a gaping wound.

Once you have your motive sorted you are ready to deliver the feedback. In Part 2 we’ll discuss how to give it so it is taken well. Then we’ll tackle feedback you might have coming your way – and how to receive it with grace. Because you know what they say – if you can’t take it….

How are your teams feeling about returning to the face-to-face universe? Some may have a spring in their step. But, on the other hand, some may be dragging their heels or worry about finding their work shoes and are considering arriving in their trusty slippers. (Warning – inappropriate footwear for the outer world).

It is finally happening, that normality that we were craving 18 months ago. Grabbing the coffee on the way to the office, the water cooler moments, being able to pop over to your colleague and chat something through. And yet…working from home is alright, your staff have adjusted beautifully, have their little customs and like the home/work balance they have created. If furloughed, they might have been anxious about the future or have enjoyed the freedom and loved taunting the people they live with who are stuck in numerous Team’s meetings.

We know the world has changed in many ways, but what about your workplace? Suffolk Mind has been researching the population throughout the pandemic. As a result, they know which emotional needs have been challenged over the last 12 months and have many ideas about what managers can do to enable their staff to feel better about coming back.

The interesting thing about their research is that many of us are not anxious about what we expect to hear. Overall emotional support was pretty high. Feeling connected to people and the community seemed relatively healthy. Most employers have done an excellent job through the pandemic and individuals have been resourceful about maintaining their emotional health if they can. Of course, there will be exceptions to this. You know your staff well, so you know where the support is still needed.

What is it that your staff may be anxious about? How can you as a manager support your people through re-entering the workplace?

The things keeping many people up at night as they prepare for returning to the workplace are all about practicalities. Some examples for you:

  1. Is the fridge still there for me to put my packed lunch in? Do I still need to label it to stop Bob from Accounts nicking it?
  2. Does the car park still exist opposite the office, or will I have to find another one? Will a new one be a further walk; do I need to pack an umbrella?
  3. Will my Oyster card still work at the barrier, or has life on trains and tubes become a whole new game?
  4. Remind me how I book a desk again? Can I remember how to summon up that killer instinct I need to reserve my favourite spot? Is my favourite spot still there?
  5. What did I wear to the office? Does it all still fit?
  6. My office bag hasn’t been used for 18 months – what did I fill it with? Where is my office pass, my notebook, pens? Why have all the pens disappeared from my house? Do I need one, or did I used to get one from work?
  7. Has the bus route changed? Will it still be the same stop, number, gruff driver?
  8. I think I’ve forgotten the route I used to walk/cycle every day; can I still park my bike at the back of the building?
  9. Can I still get a Metro at the station? I think I used to do the Sudoku to pass the time – can I remember the rules of Sudoku?
  10. I’m used to a morning run before settling at my desk – when can I fit that into my day? Dodging the dog walkers is an essential part of my daily routine.

No doubt you are getting the idea. It reminds us of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, everyone slipping down from self-esteem to physiological and security needs.

The good news is that once we have all done the first couple of days, we will probably get back in the swing of it. The buses still smell the same, chinos are not that bad, and the packed lunch remained chilled.

How can you help the transition? A few ideas for you.

It looks like investing in elaborate wellbeing strategies might not hit the mark for everyone – knowing that the sandwich guy still comes at 11.30 might.

Happy re-entry, everyone.

www.suffolkmind.org.uk

www.suffolkmind.org.uk/ena - emotional needs audit

7/11 breathing with Suffolk Mind - YouTube   - 7/11 breathing from Suffolk Mind