This week’s cuppa opened with a familiar line: “It’s been a week.” People arrived carrying a mix of fatigue, humour and the realities of life. One person shared, “It’s been large,” explaining a week of juggling three kids, including a neurodivergent middle child, and a cat that “ended up at the vets” and “has bled everywhere this morning and scratched my car.” Another said the universe had been “testing so much,” and someone else talked about their daughter preparing for wisdom teeth extraction while their cat was “always very needy.” These check-ins grounded us in the reality that people don’t arrive empty. As someone said, “We have lives as well as mahi.”

A Shift in Seeing

We started off with a reflection after one of our visitors watched the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which follows the final year of life of a poet living with stage four cancer. They described how the honesty and artistry in the film had changed the way they were seeing everything.

They said, “I feel like I’m wearing a different pair of glasses. Everything just looks different. Everything feels different.”

They then shared an experience from earlier that morning. Someone had offered them a small piece of feedback during a meeting and their body reacted strongly, as if hit with something much heavier than the comment itself. They paused and noticed the reaction rather than falling into it, and realised, “You’re in the habit of having big feelings about these things.”

That moment helped them see the difference between genuine weight and learned emotional habits. The documentary had shifted something enough that they could recognise the pattern in real time. This opened a wider kōrero about how perspective shifts can make space for different choices, especially when we can see ourselves with a bit more distance and clarity.

Carrying the Weight of Tasks and Tension

We moved into the pressures many had been facing this week. Someone described feeling caught in “task after task after task,” wanting to avoid staying in that pace from now until Christmas. Others talked about the sheer volume of people approaching them with conflict, tension or emotional overwhelm.

A clear observation emerged: “We’re not using process. We’re just completely in reactive mode.”

One shared examples from their week where leaders explored fight, flight, freeze or fawn without pausing to understand the issue. Together the group explored how grounding in simple steps can help shift from reaction to understanding and then facilitating. This included steps such as:

• writing the problem down as writing the problem down is half the problem solved.
• checking assumptions
• asking what needs are not being met
• zooming out to see the wider system
• and asking where they want to be on the other side of the conflict

The guiding question became, “In the big scheme of things, how is it looking now.”

Why Collaboration Breaks Down

Someone reflected on how often organisations struggle with genuine collaboration, even when the people within them want it. They wondered aloud whether this resistance comes from competitiveness, rigid structures or a fear of losing control. This came after a story from earlier mahi where they had been asked to assess how collaborative a large organisation was. Staff across the organisation were open and honest about the issues, and many of them agreed with the findings. Leadership, however, reacted differently. As the person shared, “All I did was collect the voice and give it to them. They didn’t like what came back.”

This sparked a wider kōrero about how systems often protect themselves. Even when people on the ground can see the problems clearly, hierarchy can shut down uncomfortable truths because acknowledging them would require change, vulnerability or a shift in power. The group reflected on how common it is for organisations to ask for feedback, only to reject it when it reveals something they do not want to face.

Politics, Leadership and What Sits Beneath the Fractures

From here the kōrero shifted into what has been unfolding in Māori political spaces. People spoke about internal splits, sudden exclusions of members from key decisions and grievances being aired publicly. The group connected these events to deeper tensions around sovereignty, authority, long-term community relationships.

A significant moment discussed was a recent press conference where a Te Pati Māori member chose to stand firmly in the middle. They said they had listened to both sides and described themselves as “only the kaitiaki of her role for now,” grounding their authority in those who elected them rather than in party structures.

Māori Ways

This led into a discussion about process. Someone noted that instead of using Māori ways of resolving conflict, which rely on circular, relational dialogue, it seemed like political members had responded with constitutional and hierarchical frameworks. They said, “You can’t go onto a marae when there’s conflict and say, you broke the constitution. You have to go through circular talking until all the needs are satisfied.”

This came after reflections earlier in the kōrero, where someone shared, “All of the conflict this week is cultural. It’s about staying in your mono-cultural lanes and not wanting to cross anything further than that… or if it is, the other conflict is that the hierarchy’s authority has been challenged, and then they’ll come and do the hierarchical things when the authority has been challenged.”

This helped frame a wider pattern people were noticing. When pressure hits, many slip quickly back into hierarchical tools and rule-based processes. It stood in clear contrast to tūturu Te Ao Māori ways of resolving conflict, which rely on relational, circular conversation rather than constitutional responses or positional authority. In those spaces, raru or conflict is surfaced openly and worked through using tikanga and the ways of the marae, the whenua, the hapū, whānau and iwi.

Together, these reflections made it clear that the tension people were experiencing is as much about the cultural frameworks being applied, the espoused values people hold, and the processes they default to when things became difficult.

The In Between and the Creativity it Demands

The in-between became the focus of the topic as the examples above require in-between approaches. Someone shared that being in the space between cultures and systems is not only challenging but requires imagination. “It’s not only difficult to be in the in-between, but it’s also difficult to ideate towards the in-between.”

Some people in the kōrero talked about constantly moving between worlds. They described being used to circular, relational approaches, to pausing and asking deeper questions, to holding space in ways that involve emotion, connection and context. Someone described this by saying, “We’re [reffering to Māori] always having to come in this between space… we experience the opposite, where many won’t come and meet us in the between.”

The response was that for many in this group, the in-between is everyday life. The challenge is not knowing how to stand there. The challenge is that others often refuse to meet there. Once again, culture, worldview and process shaped how people relate, understand and resolve tension.

Closing Moments

As the session came to a close, someone returned to a metaphor shared earlier about life feeling like a jigsaw puzzle. The final line captured the feeling of the week: “I feel like life is chucking us into the center pieces before we’ve even found the edge pieces.” It was an honest reflection of where many people are sitting, navigating conflict, leadership, culture and emotional load, while piecing together the picture as they go.

Another weekly cuppa of real voices, layered insights and the steady willingness to sit together in the in-between. Join us every Friday at 11am for 30 minutes. Register Here to join.

Nau Mai, Haere Mai - all are welcome.