By Rachel Musson

What happens when you begin a day with gratitude? This is a question I’ve explored a lot over the years, both to support my own resilience in this crazy-beautiful world, and to enable more ‘humane’ spaces at work to be bringing people together.

"Share one thing you are grateful for"- is the invitation we’ve used to begin many of our workshops over the years. Folks share all sorts of things:

“My baby smiling at me this morning”
“The sunset last night”
“Having a day off from school today”
“My partner who just cooked me breakfast”
“The robin in the garden that I watched for a while this morning”
“My gran’s apple pie”…

When we come from a place of gratitude, we naturally open ourselves up to connect. Perhaps it’s the resonance of positive vibes that are being shared in a room, or the mutual appreciation of some of the things others are also grateful for – or maybe it’s just the simple act of being hopeful in a world so often telling us to be otherwise.

Last Friday, Holly Everett and I launched the Triple WellBeing Fellowship with a one-day course for educators exploring the roots of our nested crises and focusing on a healthier future of learning. We welcomed educators from right across the globe – from Fife in Scotland to Abu Dhabi in the UAE; from Leicestershire to Kampala, Uganda; from Milan to Tel-Aviv; Ontario to Bangkok and everywhere in between. And we began the day sharing all of the things we were grateful for that morning, dancing into 33 brief stories of unique humans living out their daily lives.

It is the diversity of people that turn up to our workshops that always makes the experience so rich. Last week, people came from a wide range of backgrounds, contexts and cultures and very different life-stories, but all with a shared vision of a healthier story of education.

It would have been easy to see the differences that existed amongst us, and allow these to become barriers throughout the day. What happened instead – through simple, regular invitations to share some of our humanity (e.g. “What did you do over the lunchbreak?” “What breaks your heart about the world right now?” “Tell me something you did today to be kind to yourself”) was the forming of a murmuration.

I’m so interested in the idea of ‘rehumanising’ our places and spaces, and I think this is what sits at the heart of all of our work at ThoughtBox Education. This also seemed to echo in the participants, as their feedback at the end shared appreciation for having the space to come together and explore big, complex issues with folks from across the world and to just be human together. I was asked yesterday to sum up the culture of the organisation in one word and chose ‘Relational’ for that’s what this is all about – practising relating with ourselves, with others and with nature

Today my gratitude extends to these wonderful folks who showed up with hearts and minds wide-open and helped co-create a hugely energising day.

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