The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realise that actually you're part of quite a big club.

THE ART OF CALM

The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realise that actually you're part of quite a big club.

Prince Harry

Richard Martin qualified as a solicitor in the early nineties and specialised in employment law. He quickly progressed to becoming a partner. He began to realise that what he wanted to be most involved in was the management and so he joined Speechly Birnham, a medium sized City firm with a reputation of having a good culture, and was lined up to be their next managing partner. He had trodden the perfect career path. But it was at this point that everything was to change.

The red flags were there. Richard was aware he had been under a lot of stress and his family were warning him that something wasn't right. But he chose naot to hear.

Richard became ill or as he puts it he “realised just how ill I was”. He had been under a lot of pressure but, like so many others, thought that was just part and parcel of the job. He thought if he just tried harder he could get through the days, the weeks, the months and things would be all right. He never even considered that perhaps something needed to change. The red flags were there. Richard was aware he had been under a lot of stress and his family were warning him that something wasn't right. But he chose not to hear.

“I always had episodic moments which resulted in fairly out of control thinking that did not make any sense and images and recollections of events which cannot possibly have happened. These led to physical sensations and manifestations; low blood pressure. I always associated all this with tiredness, nothing else. Sometimes I may have two or three over a day or two, but as long as I went to bed and rested, it seemed to sort itself out. Now I understand that tiredness and stress are two sides of the same coin.”

In May 2011, Richard went on holiday with his wife and children. While he was driving around the peripherique of Paris he started to feel desperately sick, his head was screaming for him to escape. A chillingly frightening experience. Richard had no idea what was happening to him. He stopped the car and started to walk off, almost oblivious to the fast moving traffic around him. Eventually the motorway was closed and someone came to rescue Richard. He had no idea what he was doing or why.

He was taken to hospital and assessed for a heart attack. On concluding his heart was fine, Richard was sent home and he went to see his GP who agreed it was not his heart but rather his head and told him he had suffered a panic attack.

“I knew about mental health, of course. As an employment lawyer, you are constantly helping people who are going through difficult

times and, often, that has a negative affect on their wellbeing. But I always assumed mental health illness was about other people. Suddenly I was being told that actually it was about me. It was a shock, not just for me but for the people around me. I had always been someone who was very strong, who could cope with most things. I got worse very quickly; no longer could I cope with anything at all, everything felt terrifying.”

The reaction to Richard’s illness from his law firm was utter shock. He had always performed well enough and he was the last person they and, indeed, many others would have suspected to be suffering from such severe stress and mental health issues.

Richard references a book ‘Depressive Illness, The Curse Of The Strong’ written by psychiatrist, Dr Tim Cantopher, who lists classic personality characteristics of those susceptible to burn out as being moral strength, reliability, diligence, strong conscience, a strong sense of responsibility, a tendency to focus on the needs of others before your own, sensitivity, vulnerability to criticism, self-esteem issues dependent on the evaluation of others. Richard identified very strongly with these attributes. As, indeed, most lawyers would. Such people don’t know how to say no, when to stop, how to ask for help. They have an attitude of ‘if the going gets hard, try harder’. Hardly surprising they get ill.

Richard was admitted to hospital and spent about a month in a psychiatric ward and then, after being discharged, began on the long road to recovery which involved therapy and medication. And, fundamentally, it meant making a lot of changes. Richard did not feel able to return to the law firm so he had to set about rebuilding his life. He had spent a lot of time alone while in recovery, not interacting with the wider world because it scared him and so he had to gradually start to re-engage. He volunteered at his local charity shop for just half a day a week just to get used to routine and to interacting with people again. When he felt ready, it was time to embark on a new chapter in his life.

“When I worked in employment law, the way we solved problems was to throw a load of employment law at the issue. Through therapy I realised why people do what they do is because of what is going on in their heads and if we can bring that understanding to the fore, we can be more helpful in addressing workplace issues.”

The concept of workplace consultancy had taken seed in Richard. This led to him to discover an organisation called byrne-dean, who comprise mostly former employment lawyers and their “aim is to create cultures in the workplace where people do not harass, bully or discriminate.” Richard joined them in 2013.

There quickly came a lightbulb moment when Richard realised that in all the talk around cultural change, the whole subject of mental health which was at the very core of their work, was not actually being talked about - and maybe it should be. In October 2014, at Kings College in London, byrne-dean invited a bunch of contacts and clients to a conference precisely on the subject of mental health.

It was the very first time Richard had spoken publicly about his own story and he had no idea what was going to happen.

“What did happen was that nearly everyone in the room came up to one of us afterwards to say that they or someone they were close to or knew had a similar story.”

From this byrne-dean started delivering training around mental health; raising awareness and helping people to have better conversations about it. They worked with organisations to help them create healthier environments where people did not get ill.

This led to byrne-dean helping with and promoting the launch of Mindful Business Charter (MBC) in 2018. Mindful Business Charter states their aim to rehumanise the workplace by identifying the causes of unnecessary stress and working to eradicate them, leading to healthier, more productive workplaces. Richard’s role within MBC has grown to now being almost completely full time.

MBC was born out of a conversation between in-house lawyers at Barclays and two of their law firms; Pinsent Masons LLP and Addleshaw Goddard LLP. They discussed that while lots had been done to raise awareness of mental health issues and to put support in place when people were identified to be struggling, it is often the workplace itself that is causing at least some of the distress and, therefore, the priority should be to remedy that. Rather than simply helping people become more resilient or helping pick up the pieces when they are falling apart, why not stop making them ill in the first place?

What did happen was that nearly everyone in the room came up to one of us afterwards to say that they or someone they were close to or knew had a similar story.

Stress is one of the biggest causes of both physical and mental illnesses. When we are stressed our brains obviously do not function as well so that is detrimental to the quality of work produced. Stress comes from a variety of sources; some directly from the work we are doing, some from our own heads but some comes from the ways we interact with each other.

“Most of us are kind. We don’t mean to cause each other stress but we do. And then we exacerbate it by not talking about it, particularly if we are the sort of people described by Dr Cantopher. If we were all more aware of the impact our behaviours have on each other and we all give ourselves the permission to talk about it, then we should be able to identify the unnecessary sources of stress and remove them, allowing us to work more healthily and more effectively.

The role of Barclays in this was critical. They recognised they were a big, important, scary client and knew the impact that caused. If they asked for something, their lawyers would jump around like mad things to achieve it, even if this resulted in them becoming exhausted. And while that obviously was not good for the individuals concerned, it wasn’t good for Barclays either because it affected the quality of the work. The dynamic had to be changed.”

Richard recalls a group therapy exercise he was asked to participate in during his time in hospital which he thinks sums it all up.

“We were all asked to stand in the middle of the room and asked to touch the right shoulder of someone we felt connected to with our right hand. Keeping that in place we were then asked to touch, with our left hand, the left shoulder

of someone we thought we could help. Finally, we were asked to touch, with our right foot, the right foot of someone who could help us. By this point, I was on tiptoes, feeling unbalanced and under a lot of physical strain and we were told to maintain our positions. The therapist walked around the room and when she reached me she asked me if I felt comfortable. I told her obviously not. She questioned whether I often felt like this. I had to admit yes. She smiled and asked me why I simply hadn’t asked someone to move? That idea of being able to ask for what we need (and most people will oblige because they are nice) in order to do our best is what sits at the heart of MBC.”

As a movement MBC now has around 140 members, mostly law firms, mainly in the UK but increasingly international. Each member firm is trying to work more mindfully and sharing ideas and resources with each other in order to learn and grow,

Richard cites an example of how it all works in practice.

“On New Year’s Eve, 2018, two months after the Charter had been launched, someone at Barclays sent a request to one of their law firms asking for something to be done that day. Ordinarily, the answer would obviously be yes. But the partner concerned decided to test the Charter so emailed back to say if they really wanted it that day, obviously they could have it but pointed out it was New Year’s Eve and they would appreciate the opportunity to spend the time with their family and friends and was it really needed that day? The response from Barclays was that of course it could wait till next week and that it had been a ridiculous request that hadn't been thought through. How simple. But the important point is that there is no way that the law firm would have ever pushed back if Barclays had not given them permission to do so by signing the Charter. That permission is critical.”

None of this is rocket science. It's plain common sense. But, as Richard says, unless there is a permission to ask, to question, then behaviours - however unintentional - go unchallenged and can trigger stress. Ultimately so much harm can be caused from something that could so easily have been avoided.

We all need to be more mindful; of our behaviours and how they may affect others. And we need to allow others to push back on those behaviours when necessary. ■

For more information; https://www.byrnedean.com/training https://www.mindfulbusinesscharter.com/

The art in this article is the Banksy piece featuring piranhas in a police box which was moved to Guildhall to protect it https://www.thecityofldn.com/event/banksy-artwork-guildhall-yard/