Compassion Focussed Consultations [bees and breaking bread]
This week I was lucky enough to visit Telford and Wrekin EPS and work with them around Compassion Focussed Consultations (yes, you can see Pukka tea bags laid out on the resource booklets! And, YES they are all energising infusions, I took all the night time ones out!")
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Seriously though, this day was, wow.
I have so many reflections which will need to percolate for a bit. So, I will share a few memories from the day:
❤️ Walking through a wonderful sunny park on the way to the venue. Bees buzzing (🐝) water flowing, trees swishing.
❤️ Seeing the epic Colette Soan, who as well as embodying psychology in the most profound way, also supervised my viva in 2018. I knew Colette would be there and was excited about the reunion. However, in the set up-prep-focus I forgot. Then Colette walks in and says “hey, I still think about your thesis”. Ok. Bam. I felt so at ease and welcome. Later on, in my workshop, I talked about how we can help provide external cues of safeness for people. This was the perfect example and a lovely way to start the day.
❤️ Feeling the values which were alive in the room. They shone through in every conversation and activity, across the team. The room was buzzing with compassion. I found myself smiling at multiple points throughout the day, as I listened to people discuss models and participate in the activities.
❤️ The passion and experience around consultation was tangible. I kept on imagining the ripple effect - what is must be like having the whole team bring those qualities into their work - everyday! I have not been able to meet the Kensington and Chelsea team and did not manage to professionally cross over with the seminal Patsy Wagner. The day with the Telford team made me imagine what it might have been like to work with K&C in the early days of their move to be a consultation-led service.
❤️Midway through the morning we opened the door because it was warm. As they do, a bee flew in. The energy in the room changed. Suddenly, everyone is looking at the bee. My mind went back to being a child in class and the pandemonium which would breakout if a bee or wasp entered the chat. This was different though - and not because we were all adults - it turns out someone had an allergy. Luckily, as they told me later, there are different types of bee and this was not the type they were allergic to. True story though, the person with the allergy, found out because they used to keep bees (the honey kind) and got stung. We were visited by the bumble kind, So, thankfully there was no danger.
❤️ Sharing lunch. We all brought a contribution and it was a lovely way to connect. Real talk, breaking bread is a human ritual for a reason. Talking to people about the things they had made, while eating them was a real treat. Yes, we all had a little energy slump after lunch, but I also felt even more connected to the practitioners in the room.
On the train back home, I was left thinking about the White Paper (the reforms and the future of the EP profession etc etc). I was eating my supper from a tuppaware (tasty lunch leftovers) and something about the space on the train and the lovely food, helped me properly connect with the potential of consultation to provide the systemic support which the “experts at hand” model describes.
Change can lead to feelings of anxiety and the imagination of future difficulties. This is human and natural. Compassion can help us to understand the trickiness around us and create courageous and wise plans to make things better.
As EPs, we know consultation can be such a powerful tool for helping children, families and school staff. There feels like a big opportunity for practitioners to develop their consultation practice as a way to meet the demands of the “experts at hand” model. For me, it feels very cool to be able to support with this. So, if this feels like something you want to focus on, get in touch, I would love to think about how compassion focussed approaches could help.
You can also book a place on my Autumn training here, which will introduce tools and models which you could use to infuse your consultation spaces with compassion:
https://buytickets.at/constellationspsychology/2037053
