Using the Professional Tree of Life with staff and teams

Tree of Life workshops originated in Zimbabwe as part of therapeutic work with traumatised communities (Ncube-Mlilo and Denborough, 2007). It is a form of narrative practice that supports people to tell stories of themselves in ways that make them stronger.

A ‘professional’ adaptation of the Tree of Life model was developed for use with youth workers by Kis-Sines and Pluznic (n.d.) in Canada. The Professional Tree of Life approach encourages staff to reflect on our relationship to our work, the professional identities we share and co-create at work and how we contribute to each other’s’ working lives, the team and the services.

The stories gathered from a Professional Tree of Life workshop can help teams to remember and reconnect to the values that brought them to this work, the individual skills and strengths of each team member, and the team as a whole. These are stories that should continue to be told, strengthened, and privileged about people and teams in the NHS. The NHS and its staff are not only defined by waiting lists, under–resourced services, and too much paperwork, but by the people working in it every day and their positive stories about their work and each other.

The Professional Tree of Life uses the power of the metaphor of the tree and its forest to embody the statement ‘we are stronger in a forest and greater than the sum of our parts if we stand together and support each other’.

“The forest must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree therefore is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible.”

From, Peter Wohleben, The Hidden Life of Trees