Cook Your Way To Social & Emotional Intelligence

Is there a link between the work I do with young people in schools and other company activities? I'd like to think so. We have built high quality working relationships with schools that purchase a service from us, delivering individual mentoring programmes to more generic support to young people, their teachers and mentors. This means that there opportunities to try something different.

I had delivered a piece of work to a group of year 8 & 9 boys. Their profiles were familiar enough-quarrelsome, poor concentration spans and a series of risk/vulnerability factors. We had talked a lot and made efforts to help them prepare to take a higher degree of responsibility for and ownership of the image they project to others.

Talk is fine but it's actions that count and with this in mind I suggested to them that they might consider choosing the ingredients for, preparing, coking and serving a Christmas Meal for some of their teachers and mentors. We had to restrict it to eight. Their invitation list included the Head Teacher, Assistant Head and two members of the Senior Management Team. Learning Mentors and a subject specialist were also invited.

We shopped, they chose and stayed within budget. We met the following day and working to a tight timescale, produced the meal-ably and enthusiastically led by a Senior Support Assistant who clearly enjoys a first class, respect led relationship with the lads.
They did it! They cooked and served a 3 course Christmas Meal. There was, I think, a considerable amount of emotion around the table: what had taken place was much bigger than the sum of its parts and at what still, in spite of financially pressed times, commercialism and cynicism, Christmas remains an important time of year every adult around the table received an unexpected gift when the Head Teacher asked the lads what they would take away from and remember about the occasion. Although all the food had been eaten, several of us swallowed very hard one one of the cooks said "Your faces when we served the meal."

How does this link to our other activities? Well, reputations get tarnished, we are all capable of huge acts of self sabotage and we sometimes need an opportunity to prove to others that there is more to us than the day to day, sometimes highly reactive exposure we have to each other. When this opportunity arises, it needs to be witnessed and affirmed by respected others who need to hear the perceived impact of "doing things better and differently". Whether as a Coach, Mediator, Teacher, Mentor, there are experiences that occur daily that mean as much in one context as they do in another. I drove away that evening with much more in my heart and soul than I had arrived with earlier or dreamed possible. For not the first time, the Coach was coached, the Teacher was taught and the Mediator was not needed when this leap of faith was taken.