Day #123

Rituals

This week, for the first time in two years, i’ve been able to spend time with some of my Sea Salt Learning Crew Mates: we’ve had a three day retreat, with a bit of an agenda, a bit of eating and drinking, a bit of walking, and a lot of fun. Our outputs are as much social as task based. But i feel really good for it: we have reinforced and validated some old relationships and forged new ones. Some people had never met face to face before. And we drank a lot of coffee.

I enjoyed making the coffee: it’s a ritual, and a gift. You get to choose the beans, grind them, assemble the aeropress, chat whilst it brews, and at the end, you have one cup, which you give. Then you start again. The way i made the coffee is the slowest, least efficient way possible. I probably spent half an hour making the coffee. But efficiency wasn’t the goal. Coffee brings us together in part because of the ritual: because of the time we spend together whilst it brews.

Use your sixty seconds today to ask yourself which rituals you use each day: where do you seek efficiency and do you ever, like me, tolerate or welcome slow routines as part of a broader social connection?

Ritual is important: it’s part of our choreography of membership and belonging: there are already coffee making robots, but i still would not want one in the house.

If you are interested to take part in a short interview about your own Social Leadership in Practice, to form part of our ‘In Conversation’ series, please ping me a note.