My son turned 7 last week. When I picked him up from school he described his day… Isaac: ‘Everyone sang happy birthday to me. It was nice but a bit embarrassing.’ Me: ‘So you felt embarrassed but still liked it?’ Isaac: ‘No - I mean I mostly liked it but was a little bit embarrassed too.’

It may seem a minor thing to celebrate, but I'd just spent time with a senior team, teaching them to notice and name their emotions. Their inability to do this has kept them stuck in a perpetual, unconscious cycle of mistrust, reacting to each other without really understanding why. So to be corrected by my son for emphasising the wrong emotion felt reassuring…

A few weeks into lockdown, I started to realise that one of the things I was finding hard was that I had no team to help through the Covid-19 crisis. […] This longing to help people was painful at first as I felt powerless. Stuck at home, self employed, team-less. It was as if my wings had been clipped. And on top of that, my planned team facilitation and mediation projects were put on hold due to Covid-19…