[2023-09-11] Tea and TED
Today on my walk with Chris, I recalled a series of events that a couple of young public servants (Fadi and Rosita) had created back in the mid-2010s in Natural Resources Canada. It was called Tea and TED. The concept was simple: gather a dozen or so coworkers, watch one or a few TED talks (maximum 20 minutes), then have a conversation—all while drinking tea and eating snacks (usually biscuits). Each Tea and TED lasted no more than an hour.
I participated in a few Tea and TED sessions organized by Fadi and Rosita (one on gender equity and another on drone technology). I loved the idea so much that I proposed to Fadi and Rosita to bring Tea and TED to a larger audience through a partnership with the Changing our Organization through Respect (COR) Initiative, which I led.
Kindness and happiness in the workplace
Our first Tea and TED + COR event focused on kindness and happiness in the workplace. Here's an excerpt from the Café Jen post I wrote in March 2015.
In A life lesson from a volunteer firefighter, Marc Bezos explains that he is "witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale" but also to "acts of grace and courage on an individual basis." He has learned that every act of kindness matters—no matter how small. His message to the audience was not to wait to show kindness but to give what they had to give now. "Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life," he concludes, "but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one."
In The happy secret to better work, Shaun Achor shares what he has learned through his research on positive psychology. [I've written about Achor's TED talk before in Jenesis.] Despite our assumptions to the contrary, only 10% of our happiness is dependent on our external world. In fact, 90% of our long-term happiness is predicted by the way our brains process the world, Achor says. For example, our success at work is three times as likely to be predicted by our level of optimism, our social support and our ability to see stress as a challenge than by our IQ.
Achor argues that we have the formula for happiness backwards. Most of us believe: "If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier." But this formula doesn't work, he maintains: as soon as we achieve success, we move the goalposts, defining a new measure of success.
Instead of waiting for success to be happy, he argues, we should focus on happiness, which facilitates success. "If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present," says Achor, "then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage." When we're feeling positive, we perform significantly better than when we're feeling neutral, negative or stressed. We're more intelligent, creative and energetic. We're faster, more productive, and more accurate.
Achor suggests five activities which—when performed each day for 21 days—can help us rewire our brains to make us more positive:
- Three gratitudes – Writing down three new things for which we're grateful will encourage us to start scanning the world for the positive rather than the negative.
- Journaling – Writing down a positive experience we've had in the past 24 hours will allow us to relive it.
- Exercise – Exercise teaches our brain that our behaviour matters.
- Meditate – Meditation allows our brain to focus on the task at hand, countering the cultural ADHD we've created by trying to multitask.
- Random Acts of Kindness – Performing random acts of kindness—such as writing a complimentary email or letter to someone—makes us feel more positive.
In our discussion after the TED talks, one woman at my table shared that she used to buy thank-you cards and give them to colleagues for the simplest things, like doing a travel claim. Some of her recipients would keep those cards for years, moving them from office to office.
Mental health
Our second Tea and TED + COR event focused on mental health. Here's an excerpt from the Café Jen post I wrote in October 2015.
Psychologist Guy Winch explains in his talk Why we all need to practice emotional first aid that we learn from a young age to take care of our physical health—putting a bandage on a cut or brushing our teeth twice a day—but not our psychological health. Winch talks about three emotional injuries that distort our thinking:
- Loneliness – which makes us feel that the people around us care for us much less than they do.
- Failure – which can make us convinced that we can't succeed.
- Rejection – which leads us to focus on our shortcomings.
Many of us respond to emotional pain by ruminating, replaying upsetting events in our mind, thereby making our psychological injuries worse. When you catch yourself ruminating, says Winch, even a two-minute distraction can be enough to stop ruminating. "When you're in emotional pain," he says, "treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend." Indeed, that’s what the conversation following the screening of the TED talk felt like: a conversation with a good friend.
Tea and TED
I left Natural Resources Canada in 2016, so I don't know whether Tea and TED continued. Certainly, it would have gone on hiatus in 2020, when working from home became the norm. But now that more employees are back in the office, the Tea and TED idea may be a good way to encourage face-to-face interaction among employees. I found that the formula of sharing food and drink, viewing an interesting TED Talk and discussing the presentation put people at ease and resulted in some stimulating conversations.
