CNA April Journal - Ros & Patrick

🖊️ Ros Rice, April Journal Entry:

Kia ora team, 

This month has been a time-trippy month. Some weeks and days have gone so fast, and others have dragged interminably.  Is it the same for you? But as time moves on, we can forget things that are very important!  How are the people on the east coast and people in Auckland who are still recovering from the weather events managing?  Do they all have somewhere to live? What is happening to their finances? Can they get insurance or is that a battle? It is easy after a disaster for the rest of us to move on, but never forget the tail of a disaster.  The people left behind cleaning up and trying to reassemble their lives.  For them time can be very slow. Let’s keep offering our love and support. 

CNA alongside, CAB and Presbyterian Support held a summit to talk about how Wellington-based national organisations can respond to disasters.  We have a lot of talking points that came out of that discussion so keep watching this spot for further updates. 

CNA is also coming close to bringing our Banking research to fruition.   

We are discussing what kind of responses we would like to see, and what we do with this research.  This is also a moment of ‘watch this space’.  If we can even make a small change to how banks and their ‘for purpose’ customers interact, we will be thrilled, but we hope for more than just that.  Remembering that banks are huge economic powerhouses and in Aotearoa’s case - mainly owned in Australia and that some of the legislation we are looking at that governs how banks operate is international legislation. We believe any small change will be momentous. Big change will be a cause for massive celebration. We are hoping that the for-purpose sector and the banking sector can work together for mutual win-wins. 

🔥 Patrick Davies, April Hot Take: Self-Care. 

Well… being… 

It's on our lips a lot – how are you feeling? Are you coping? And yet, we sometimes say ‘fine’ just so we don’t start in case we don’t stop. 

It’s a very real thing these days, isn’t it? Covid, extreme weather events, cost of living, rent increases and inflation outpacing pay increases (when and if they happen)! If that didn’t depress you… 

In our Sector we are already dealing with the vulnerable and with the dreaded word ‘resilience’. Resilience is “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties”. Now that’s all fine if it’s just one event. But we seem to have one after another in the last two years. How do we keep balance? 

We’ve all been told so many steps to ensure our sanity – you may be driven mad by the word ‘kindness’ but, it is appropriate. And no more than in looking at your own work life. If you were your own client, what would you tell yourself? Write it down – 3 things that get on top of you, and then talk to yourself about it as though you were advising your best friend. Regardless of what they are, they are what you feel strongly about. Take a moment to ‘advise’ yourself about how deep it goes.

Given the context of what has been going on is it the straw that broke the camel’s back, is it really important – it might be right now to you but hear it, say it out loud and listen to what you would reply with. This can take 5 mins, this can take 20 – it doesn’t matter. Acknowledging something out loud puts it in the world and takes it out of you - where it sits like sand in your hotdog. Write it down, make a paper plane and then send it on its way; write it on a balloon and pop it.  We talk to kids about their feelings and find really creative ways to show them how to feel them as they happen and how to release them; why shouldn’t we have a bit of that fun, a bit of that silliness? 

You know what they say- go for a 10-minute walk at lunchtime, just to get you away from your computer and not ‘working through’. Working through your lunch is just the same as bringing in your cold to work ‘because you’re a trooper’. If someone came to work with a streaming nose you’d send them home, right? Same to these habits – get out of them. Put one hour in your calendar as a meeting and have it with yourself. Work should not be a grind, but it is, but it can be more. Be kind to yourself. 

https://mentalhealth.org.nz/five-ways-to-wellbeing