Building rituals
TYPE: GUIDED EXERCISE; ORACLE CARDS
“Creating your own sacred practices and rituals can help establish a unique character to your co-leadership. Rituals help build memory and connect you to the human experience of co-leadership.”
Developing rituals
Everyone will have their own style and approach to developing shared practices and rituals. In case it is helpful, we offer this template tool to design and capture your shared rituals together such as Kaospilot’s ritual design template inspired by Ritual Design Lab.
Rituals can be simple regular practices you integrate into your day to day, into regular meetings, or to mark specific occasions, in-person meetings, celebrations and transitions. They can be done alone, between co-leads, or with your team, organisation or board.
Rituals alone
“In ritual, a bit of behaviour or interaction, an aspect of social life, a moment in time is selected, stopped, remarked upon.” - Barbara Myerhoff [1]
“Rituals can be grand, dramatic things, or they can be tiny, personal ones. Either way, rituals help people to understand the world, cope with transitions, express strong emotions, and build their own life story.” - The Ritual Design Lab [2]
In your journal, reflect on these quotes and what they mean to you, using these questions as a prompt.
What rituals have you created in your day to day life? This could be as simple as the process of brewing tea in the morning or repeating a mantra to yourself.
Do you do them alone, with family or friends?
What inspired them?
Thinking back to your self-care plan, is there one more ritual you could create to recognise and honour the co-leadership relationship that you are beginning?
[1] Myerhoff, B (1992) Secular Ritual
[2] http://thewisdomdaily.com/mezuzah-doorbell-design-ritual/
Rituals together
Before meeting your co-lead(s), come prepared to share one of your personal rituals with them, to give insight for them into a precious moment in your day. Are there similarities between the rituals? What are the differences?
Think back together on your collective care plan with the aim of co-creating new rituals to do together. Together, brainstorm rituals that you can build in your regular interactions, whether it is daily, weekly or monthly. Then think about how you will create rituals when you are together in person. You do not need to come up with them now, but decide together how, where, and when you will e.g. while you spend time together in nature before a strategy workshop you will create a ritual to begin any such workshop.
Rituals with the team
Shared rituals can be beautiful to create not only with your co-leads but with your wider team. They can support connection, collective memory and meaning. At annual planning meetings, or during more informal spaces, carve out time for the team to share their personal rituals and to co-create new ones together. Examples of rituals could be circles of appreciation, sharing memories, dancing, sharing things from your different cultures, creating an altar together or embracing rituals to start meetings, celebrate success or to close out the year.
You might want to consider bringing in an external facilitator with experience in this area of work to hold the space. This can help the process to feel less led by leadership and more owned by staff. If it makes sense you may want to consider inviting a First Nations person from the location where you are meeting or based, to support you with opening or closing a space, and offering a ritual that has cultural and ancestral meaning to the place or space where you are meeting.
Reflecting back at the end of the year
Come back to the rituals you have created together throughout the year. Have your rituals changed? Have you created new ones? How have your shared rituals impacted your relationship?
