Mental health

Live & Learn

MENTAL HEALTH

Matter of life or death

A leader’s personal experiences highlight the relationship between self-awareness and mental health

was 39 years old, married to Mel, with three lovely children. It was a Thursday morning in July, around 10am. I was cycling down a country lane when I threw myself in front of a ten-tonne truck. It appears that I had attempted to take my own life. I had spent the previous four months at home, signed off work with agitated depression, brought on by extreme stress at work. Twelve months before that, I had set up a new agency with two very gifted individuals. I was supposedly at the peak of my career.

What had gone wrong? Here are five things that I should have considered at the time:

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1My genetic footprint I was born with two genes. One was called Winner, and this was responsible for my ambitious and competitive streak. The other was called Worry, which I inherited from my mother. Its positive side was that it made me extremely diligent. The negative was that it did not sit well with the Winner gene. An entrepreneur’s environment does not have much room for a natural ‘worry guts’.

Illustration by Janne Iivonen 2 My personality I was an introvert and my energy came from within. I didn’t need to be surrounded by other people. In fact, finding myself in the company of others for too long would have a detrimental effect on my wellbeing. But working in a small, dynamic and vibrant agency meant that I could not afford the luxury of tucking myself away in a quiet little room for too long. 3 I was people-driven, not task-driven Setting up a new business from scratch requires you to Shutterstock

By Mark Simmonds

‘get lots of stuff done’. Whether it’s sorting out the accounts, fine-tuning legal documents, developing business plans or writing HR policies, there are plenty of tasks to tick off your to-do list. My career to date had been that of a management trainer, delivering training courses to young managers, all hungry to learn. I had been coaching, connecting and listening. I was people-driven, not task-driven. 4 My work-life balance requirements My two business partners were both extraordinarily ambitious – prepared to put in the hours and burn the midnight oil. They sacrificed a lot. My Winner gene paled into insignificance compared with theirs. I misjudged my work-life balance requirements. Yes, I wanted to succeed, but never at all costs. 5 I didn’t ask for advice Well, that’s not quite true. I did sort of check out with my wife whether she thought it was a good idea or not to jump from a relatively stable job into one fraught with risk. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t listening too hard. As soon as the exciting opportunity popped up, my mind was made up and, as a result, I didn’t undertake proper due diligence.

The five considerations above all seem pretty obvious with the benefit of hindsight. But maybe I was blinded by my ambition. Maybe we all have to take wrong turns in life so that we get things right second time around. We can’t always rely on others to show us the way. Mark Simmonds trains major organisations in creativity, insight and innovation. He talks candidly about his own experiences with mental ill health in his book ‘Breakdown and Repair’