Cup’a tea please

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting at a restaurant in Fourways waiting for Roger, my breakfast meeting to arrive. I ask the waiter to bring an extra menu and give me a minute as I buy some time. Roger arrives and he is spotted by the waiter who quickly comes to the table with the ever so keen question “to drink”?

I order my usual Roibos tea with honey and lemon while Roger orders some complicated fruit juice and gives me the “we know these things” look. Minutes later, my tea arrives with lemon, milk and no honey. On the table is brown and white sugar as well as that fake powder looking sweetening thing. So many tea sweetening options but no honey.

I decide to rather use brown sugar and pick up two sachets and open them as I pour my first cup. I put them into the tea and the sugar settles at the bottom. I reach for the spoon... there is non. While all this happens, Roger is sipping on his complicated juice with those ugly new paper straws.

I now have tea, lemon & milk, (insane combination) no honey, no spoon and 2 sachets of sugar sitting at the bottom of the cup. As I consider using a fork to stir my tea, the waiter walks past, I now have no choice but to ask for the missing honey and a spoon. The waiter apologizes and quickly grabs them from the table next to ours and I’m good to go. I grab the spoon, add a slice or lemon, look into my cup and use the spoon to pick up the wet sugar from the bottom of my cup and this moment gets me thinking.

A good cup of tea is a mixture of hot water, a tea bag, lemon or milk (not both) and potentially some sugar or honey. The key word here is MIXTURE. All of these elements sitting independently in a cup are fairly useless to delivering the desired taste.

Like Roger’s well made complicated juice, there are people who’s careers are laid out on a silver platter and all they have to do is take sips with paper straws. For the rest of us however, things are slightly different. We mix our way to progress and how well we do depends largely on the ingredients we add, the tools we make use of and how well we mix them.

Although I could go crazy with lessons here, I would like to stop and ask a question. If your career were my cup of tea, and the various elements that went into this cup were your skills, qualifications, experience, emotional intelligence, attitude, relationships with colleagues and so on, how well are they mixed and what does it taste like when a potential employer takes a sip?

As I stir and mix everything up before tasting my master piece, the one thing that doesn’t blend in and disappear is the lemon. I gently squeeze it, take the slice out of the cup and put it aside as I drink my tea.

What lemons do you need to remove from your cup’a tea?