Redefining Strength

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0:36I'm Danny, and this is Behind the Title. I'm so excited for our guest that's joining us today. Hamish Nicklin, former Google, AOL, Guardian, and Dentsu executive, is going to talk about his journey to the top and specific experiences that he was facing and challenges around mental health during his rise. My name is Hamish Nicklin, and I've been in the media and advertising industry for 25 years. I have been the CEO of media at Dentsu and the chief revenue officer at The Guardian, as well as a trustee of NABs. So this topic of mental health is one that's really, really important to me, both as a trustee of NABs, but also somebody who has had their own challenges with mental health.

1:21Thank you so much for joining us today, Hamish. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. We kind of want to hear from people from all different levels but uh namely people that have been in i guess leadership positions that have possibly struggled or have had to overcome or address certain mental health challenges so um it's a privilege for me to have you here it would be great if you could maybe just introduce the audience like a bit about you your background and why why you're sitting in this chair today that would be lovely to hear well listen first of all thanks for having me uh it's brilliant to be here and talking about this really important subject.

1:57You know, from my perspective, I feel it's really, really important to talk about for two reasons. One, I'm a trustee of NABs and have been for quite some time. And the second reason is I had my own struggles with it, which I've talked about quite openly, actually. And what I find is that when I write about it on LinkedIn or talk about it at events, the amount of messages I get afterwards from people on, you know, direct messages, WhatsApps, whatever, saying that they've also struggled uh and it's really good to have people talking about this it just constantly blows my mind how many people have in some form or another struggled with this um which is what so that's why i'm here really to make sure that we can we can talk about it i mean the journey as to why you know i had my challenges um it's i suppose it's it's um extraordinary in how lacking in extraordinaryness it is my story do you know what i mean it's remarkable in its unremarkable nature uh in the the life i'd had was a classic sort of middle class well-to-do happy seeming life right you know uh there was no big t trauma that happened there was no event that would have made the headlines for look at the trauma of this individual that explains the mental health challenges they're facing and it was just i was just running my own race i was just living my own life.

3:20And, you know, specifically through the ages of like three to eight, which is when most of our core values get programmed into us and are sort of like a sign as to whether we're going to have challenges in our forties or later in life. I just look back at those and go, it was just a normal childhood, wasn't it? It's just totally normal. No big T traumas. But it turns out that like everybody, there were little things that meant that I had my own outlook on life. I had my own core beliefs my own belief in how the world should be and how i should interact with it and that was fine until i got to a a title i had a c in front of it and suddenly those core beliefs bumped into a load of realities that seemed to contradict quite massively what i believed either in terms of who i was what my purpose in life was what my relationship with the rest of the world should be like uh and when you have that sort of belief level contradiction it causes stress and it's fine if you just have that once but like because of the sort of beliefs that i had it's just constantly bumping into this thing and we can talk about this later i'm sure but the more you bump into those those sort of like um challenges the more the stress that you have the more it sort of just builds and builds and builds and builds until eventually after about seven years of this i just burnt out um and you know it slowly built up and then suddenly snap you know my wife had to make an intervention because i was about to do something really silly which meant that we wouldn't be here and from that moment on i started getting help and uh talked about it and that's that's physically why i'm here today and how i'm here today it's it's fascinating you talked about um when you share things on linkedin and that's how we that's right that's how we we came across each other and i'm not even too sure someone must have liked a post of yours and i saw that and i was like well you're not following me for my i know but it felt quite serendipitous because at the time i was just conceiving this this idea of this podcast because i'd spent the last six months investing in uh creating content that i felt would be helpful for people developing in their career, whether that was around client services or how you, uh, how you might grow your own personal brand or indeed mental health challenges.

5:50I personally have shared with you before, I'm, you know, uh, uh, a day at a time, you know, 16 years sober and, and that remains part of my intrinsic every day. I don't, I don't separate that from my house, my home life and work life. And so when you posted that, I was like, wow, I was like, this is the epitome of what Behind the Title is all about. I really wanted to be able to create a forum in which we can elevate, I guess, the challenges that leaders have had to overcome to normalize some of these taboo subjects in the workplace every day. I think that everyone has the right intentions and you know for everything that you could see online about people celebrating creativity at different festivals at the moment or you know uh huge growth and development in you know new business or whatever those successes might be at the heart and core of what certainly we do in this industry and other industries are people and i think it's my responsibility as someone you know who got my life back many years ago is to give back what's really given to me and that's what this this platform is all about well i think it's brilliant you're doing it i really do i appreciate that and i appreciate you giving your time um we've got a couple of pointed questions we we we had a bit of a joke about this before um over the last few weeks um really what i want to do is try and use these as a framing for anyone that comes on um and i think the question or perhaps the perception that's always there is outwardly everything's okay but backstage jesus you know it's like it's like the swan yeah yeah grace gracious up top but paddling underneath like i'd love to just get behind you know um a moment in your career and maybe that was that point that you you had there in which it looked fine on the outside but on the inside it was the opposite i mean like listen i think there are probably loads of leaders who don't have the challenges that i face and they look fine on the outside and they are but you know i love the fact you're doing this podcast because if there are those who are going through what i went through i hope this can help because it's a pretty lonely time when you're going through that sort of thing when you're you know constantly suffering from panic attacks like I was or having this constant sense of existential dread and fear and despair just lurking around all the time whilst having to stand up in front of a couple of thousand people and tell them that our future is going to be fantastic you know that's tough um so to your question about were there any moments I mean there were loads there's one super ironic one and you love the irony of this two or three days before I had that that sort of like you know crescendo moment that I talked to you about when my wife had to intervene two or three days before that I was on a panel talking about um imposter syndrome and I was wanging on about how important it was to you know learn to be able to express yourself to um learn to uh be true to who you were and to be authentic and to really be comfortable with who you were because that was one of the steps that you know I found that in the past I needed to get through to get over my own version of imposter syndrome um and when it was me talking very calmly and hopefully articulately about uh uh being authentic whilst suffering from the most horrific panic attack so like as i was getting onto the stage not because i was about to get on the stage because i loved physically experienced that it was internally it was just this thing it was just this it was all the symptoms were there and so i had to do everything i could do just to sort of not show it and yet there was me talking about being authentic and I was just hiding this horrible shit that was going on and hiding the feeling of existential dread that I had which was sort of really symptomatic of what I had for about seven years whilst talking about being authentic and sharing how you felt and what you hope to do and all achieve it was just I just sat there at the time thinking this is what am I doing this is mad anyway two days later it all just sort of culminated but I had loads of experiences like that you know maybe not quite so ironic as that but and and did you you know during that time either seek external support obviously being a part of nabs you know who are an incredible organization that are supporting any level did you seek the support of organizations like that mental health charities your leaders or even your family like yeah i do you know what i did i i I went, I looked, you know, I went through a really interesting journey.

10:36I was lucky to have a brilliant coach who was a therapist by nature and had become an exec coach. And we didn't talk anything about business. We ended up, he ended up, they were therapy sessions. So he gave me a lot of help in understanding what, broadly what was going on. And he used to go back to childhood as you would expect them to do, to unpick what those key beliefs were and drivers. And while that was really cool, it wasn't the thing that really helped. That didn't come until later. It was interesting to understand what was causing this, but that didn't help me find the solutions. Like a lot of therapy will say, yes, well, it's because this, that, and the rest of it happened.

11:16Yeah, cool. Great. Now I know that about myself. How do I use that information to stop this feeling of dread and anxiety? What do I do now? And we could never get past that. I could never find the solution. That didn't come until later. but because it wasn't really working i also went down this fabulously spiritual eastern path you know where i learned all about meditation and the vedic philosophy and i went in loads of sort of retreats where i learned all this stuff and to this day i love all that like this sort of you know because i can see now that i've done so much research into the human physiology and in neurology about what causes these feelings of existential angst um the east and the west fusing like all the stuff that you know my parents certainly would have looked at about the vedic theory and what come what came out of india they'd have looked at it as all just hippie mumbo jumbo right whereas now you talk to neurologists and neuroscientists and they're like yeah no there's some i can prove why that shit works i can prove why meditation works i can blues why positive you know affirmations and uh manifestation works you know it's mad yeah it's you know what i i made a decision on the 20th of may 2008 right to you know stop taking any kind of mind-altering chemicals and substances and and i've never looked back right you know the the reality is is that the journey that I went on from that day has uncovered so much of that stuff you talked about there you know I think more often than not in just in society if we bother to just pause for a second before rushing out day to day if I was able to spot let's call it my defects of character you know where I'm selfish self-seeking you know manipulative fearful dishonest all that sort of uh all that sort of behavior the chances are is that i wouldn't then act or react to a situation which then brings on what i think you're describing there as is that you know existential you know anxiety that is hard to control because more often than not my experience tells me that if i'm feeling anxious the chances are is that it's one of those you know behavior defects that's creeping in i either am in front of my peers and i'm thinking i'm going to be judged right or i'm with a boss and yeah god forbid i should tell them that i have a family commitment yeah you know you know there's many examples like that um and and and if i'm honest there was times i can't i can't pinpoint lots of them but there are times when there was shit I wish I'd said to people not in a rude way yeah not antagonistically but where I'd spoken up where there was something that was happening whether it was a crisis or where I'd stayed silent in a in in a room or a meeting you know being in a c-level position I would assume that there's a lot of as you say smile you know tight-lipped just get on with it were there things that you wish you said either to your your you know teams that you're working with or you know clients or or at home or you know yeah definitely i mean there's it's interesting you say that because um there's one that pops out straight away and it because it's so relevant to this conversation i you know at one stage i had a new boss came in and as you do when you get new bosses you sort of talk them through what's going on in the business and all that sort of stuff um um and we were in this update we were covering our um employee results survey that we'd done and the results from that and i was talking about how you know my leadership team and i was so pleased because we'd clearly made progress over the last couple of years at the top level numbers and all the ones that we said we wanted to focus on and specifically the one around uh well-being which was a relatively new question but we'd seen progress over the few years and i was like really chuffed on it's amazing that whole point around it's a it's a relatively new It still is.

15:25I still think it is. And we saw that it was pretty poor and that we wanted to improve it. And we'd made progress. And so I was saying, look, I'm really pleased with the progress we've made, but I'm actually really disappointed that it's still so high. Like of all of these metrics, that's the one that worries me the most because it's a driver of so much. And I was about to start explaining why I thought it was so important. I thought, I don't need to talk about that, do you? And I just said to them, and I asked them, I said, um so what do you think about this issue and the challenge of mental health in the workplace and they said look they took sort of they said look the reality is we've got a lot of work to do and if people can't keep up and they can't cope uh they know where the door is and i'll make it really easy for them and i just thought i was shocked i was honestly shocked because i thought at least i was going to get some platitudes like we'd only just met uh and i thought i was at least going to get some sort of classic script about yes it's all really important and then i could of wanged on about why it really is important but i was in such a state of shock i just left it what i should have said is are you a fucking psychopath because who honestly says that in this day and age right i mean who doesn't understand the importance of well-being of your people based on basically a human level but also even if you want to go completely corporate about it the bottom line the cost to the bottom line is mad both in terms of the amount you have to pay people when they leave if you're going to do that uh because of you know issues that they have or the the lost productivity or the lack of growth and creativity that comes from a fully functioning happy you know engaged uh workforce that's all well i mean it's mad that you would go down that route i wish i'd said that or at least you know toned it down and then tried to explain why it's important i find it fascinating because i don't and again maybe this is why kindred spirits i don't feel like it's a lot to do this sort of stuff now that's not saying that that doesn't either come at a cost or there is a challenge to shift behavior but i sometimes sit there i think without the people in your business yeah what is the business i mean we work in a world of advertising communication media where understanding humans is core to what we do and the only people who can really do that are humans and if you don't have them you're never going to deliver anything you're not going to build client relationships you're not going to relate build relationships with your media owners or whichever way whichever seat you're sitting in those three you need human you need humans to be on form and you need your humans to be to be focused and well and engaged and to be so dismissive of one of the key drivers of whether people are going to turn up today and give their all it just blows my mind that leaders and do you think do you think that the that experience uh accelerated your your desire to kind of champion this issue you know do you know what i think were you part of nabs before i was part of nabs before yeah i've been part of nabs for a long time almost 10 years i think and um uh you know i don't want to talk about i'm trying i'm trying to be careful with how much context i give to that conversation because i don't want to name a shame right no this is not what this is about so i don't want to give too much context to it but the reality is i think it definitely did subconsciously yeah right at the time i wasn't in a place because i was it was still very much something that nobody talked about nams was beginning to talk about it but like um it was definitely not something that people talked about you know the only time people talked about anxiety and depression and any sort of mental health was as i said if there'd been some clear big t trauma that yeah could justify it because what i've what i noticed is and i don't know if you're the same but if you look at society the way it's been over the last certainly for most of my life and i'm turned 50 a few months ago so you know for quite a long time i would say that um society is in the last i suppose 20 30 years started to accept the fact that there's mental health issues but we've only accepted it if we can pinpoint a trauma that probably caused it right and if there's no obvious big thing that could have caused this sort of this person to what's my mum call it my mum called it the other day she said I had a nervous breakdown that was a classic sort of her generation yeah you know oh they had a nervous day and it was such a belittling way they used to talk about people having nervous breakdowns it's like mum that's what happened to me you know but it's that sort of attitude of oh it's just they couldn't cope right because they couldn't see what was going on inside the person because there was no obvious as I say big t trauma what it was was just a lifetime of little events that caused them to have some beliefs about themselves and their relationship with the world that were butting up into reality that they didn't know how to manage because we'd never taught people how to deal with the way our nervous system is wired and that's really important to understand i i uh i have this i have this phrase that i i learned from someone uh many many years ago which is often so so so i think there are triggers right and and I'd love to unpack that within a second but for me the triggers are often in place because I've got what are known as sitting tenants in my head that are paying nothing to be up there they're living rent free got you and it's it's the little things yeah over time that keep building and building and building what you don't realize is 10 year 10 years removed you know from that and suddenly I'm behaving like this now I've learned that because I've gone through yeah in my own way different different methods to to process um but there are certain I would say triggers and I still get them now um you know the I think often bring out either that existential anxiety caused me to react in a certain way that I don't want to then as a result I'm in fear of what I've done you know however small it's this it's this never-ending cycle so were there specific triggers that brought out that anxiety in and and also kind of accelerated that burnout period for you so yes let me give uh let me give some context to the answer is is safe with the context though yeah no no yeah okay i won't give you time in context i'm gonna go into um i think the way i answer this best is to sort of share with you some of the stuff i've learned about the nervous system right uh because it really helped me was um what i discovered was reading reading this book by a neuroscientist he was basically saying look neuroscience has proven that if you're in fight or flight because you evolved to have fight or flight in order to survive you're either going to run away or fight the beast right anything that you've got that helps you do that better gets turned 10 out of 10 volume switch gets turned to 10 and anything you don't need gets turned down and we all know this because we've all heard about people losing their bowels and and you know suddenly having the power of bears to save their children but what we don't know is how other behaviors that get turned on and off all right so what's really interesting and this and i will come to the triggers thing in a minute let's take time is what i found really interesting anyway is um those parts of the brain that we need to help us build relationships with other people so like empathy and listening and caring um they get turned off because frankly if you're about to fight something or run away you don't need that shit right you don't need it but what that means is in our workplace is collaboration goes out the window so if people are stuck in fight or flight they won't collaborate and we because we're humans and we're working in the industry we're in we need collaboration right so that's one of the things i noticed was was that the second thing though going back to your trigger is um when you are in that fight or flight stage your brain hyper focuses on threats to such an extent that anything that is actually neutral is perceived as a threat just in case now what that means when you apply it to everyday living and the workplace is your face right now is neutral.

23:38If I was in fight or flight, I wouldn't be able to help myself. Neurologically, I'm designed, now you're smiling, but before, neurologically, I was designed to see that as a threat, all right? So that would have been a trigger. If you get an email from somebody that's perfectly neutral, you're triggered because it's a threat. If you get a text like I used to get all the time because it was super close to my finance directors, in my different roles because given what i did you sort of talk to them twice a day and the text might go just need to have a chat something you need to see right neutral trigger me shit man what's gone on what's happened there's a disaster a client's left a budget's been pulled uh they found some hidden costs or something got to write off like what is this thing constantly so do you want to question whether any triggers for seven years there were shit loads of triggers every day because i was literally sitting in fight or flight having to deal with those because even the most neutral things like you like me like all the listeners to this podcast we're neurologically designed to see anything neutral as a threat and that is tiring so so do you think if they were when you received the news that was either or the reactions that were either or sad you know happy sad that's actually easy to process because you're like okay i know how to yeah the happy stuff is all right because you wouldn't see that was a threat and actually what i found was ended up and maybe this was just me and not everybody goes through it but you end up being quite sort of hyper so when you see someone who's coming to you with happy news you go oh yeah and it takes you right up and but the problem is you go up too quickly and we can talk about dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and endorphins later but um you know you basically get this massive hit and of course the way that the body works is whatever goes up quickly has to come down quickly so you know it it i feel fascinating feels good in the moment but shit man you know you're you're down is coming it's funny because you know when you do receive correspondence or you know an email or a text i know personally that i can read that five times over and interpret it in five different ways and often i present it to my other half and she just says what's wrong it's just a normal it's a normal message and and that tells to me that my brain is probably not wired you know as as as others is but you know what what i i do think is really interesting is this neutral reaction i've never heard that before so um that probably explains why when you're sitting in a client meeting or a pitch or yeah you're going to be you're going to be heightened right you're going to be in that sense of fight or flight because your body want because you just naturally are you're nervous and so that's where if you are in that state you've got to take some deep breaths you've got to find tools to get you back to a place of normal regulation and because you can misinterpret something so badly and then make a decision based on that misinterpreted signal that then takes you in a path that you wish you hadn't gone down later yeah um and you know that's why creating an environment for people that isn't full of stress that isn't full of, you know, angst, that isn't encouraging people to get into fight or flight is so important.

26:55That's why workplace culture is so important. That's why looking after people is so important because it means they're going to have a chance of, you know, collaborating with people because that part of the brain gets switched on as opposed to switched off. There are going to be less fights. There's going to be less politics. There's going to be less intrigue because people have more trust, because there's less defaulting to negative and fear that happens naturally when you're in flight or flight and there's nothing any human being can do apart from recognize it, take a breath and try and regulate quickly and then go, ah, it's a neutral face.

27:29How much does this you pass on to the kids? Oh, we talk about it all the time. They are so bored of baddie lectures. They're so bored of it. They've had two years of it since I haven't been working. I hope it works. I hope it's going through in some way, but they go, oh, here we go. He's talking about polyvagal theory again. I think it does And, you know, one of the big aspects for me in my role internally is to move the borders of the barriers, you know, from someone who's come in as an apprentice and exec to someone who is, you know, a director. Because I think often there is a perception, you know, and I think, you know, the title of this podcast behind the title is exactly that.

28:08is to give people a sense or a feeling that you know you hamish are a normal person that you know has a family and yes you have progressed into a senior level role but the reality is is that actually you're probably quite approachable right but by title you're not right you know by proximity people think i could there is no chance i could ever have gone to my boss who is you know whatever level they are and ask them that question whereas i i feel the opposite to that and it's an ongoing joke certainly with the people i work with now and probably before uh i kind of want to be one of them sometimes i don't want them to see me as yes i'm you know i'm i'm senior by title i'm respected in my role but i want them to feel a level of comfort and confidence that when they've got stuff going on yeah and you know what's a really tough balance yeah because uh i suppose where the victorians in the military did get it right is sometimes you just need to jfdi stuff stuff just needs to happen and difficult decisions need to be enacted because it is the right thing to do um and that's why if you're super close super and amongst it it's really difficult and so as a leader you getting that balance right between being close enough so that there's a relationship of trust and empathy and approachability is important but going too far and you lose your ability to be able to have the distance in the space to be able to make tough decisions and just say i'm sorry god just get this done and if you're too close you can't do that and if you're too far away you can't get the empathy and the closeness and so it is a really i think for modern day leadership it's difficult like my old man's generation had it much easier you know it was basically post-war generation of you know i'm saying do it so just do it and move on you know technically that's easier but it was a probably horrible environment and i think what modern day leaders have got to do is just try and find the balance between the two and did you um did you find yourself did you ever find yourself in tears all the time all the time yeah i mean god it was a lots of times i mean we in most of the places i work there'll be a quiet room somewhere i just often take myself off and just really yeah go for a walk outside in the park by the canal you know whatever and was it a sense you it just was all too overwhelming you were trying to juggle too many things or perhaps to your earlier point you weren't speaking your truth all of the above all of the above rarely too many things because actually you know I had amazing EAs throughout my, who just managed to keep the to-do list in check and manageable.

30:55I mean, it was always long, but that's not whatever what stressed me out. It was more other stuff. Yeah, I mean, it was all of the above, really. It was definitely not being able to speak the truth. But I keep coming back to this phrase, the existential angst and the dread that I felt. You know, at times that just became overwhelming. So when you've only slept for three hours a night for two or three weeks, you know your sense of a your ability yeah to to see sense just disappears and that sense of elbow just gets too much and you know the reality is going on for a good weep man you feel bulletproof afterwards and again that's neurologically proven as to why right i can't remember the exact science but but it's i read it i read it in a brilliant book by a guy called tj power which is a scientist called dose which is dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins it's a it's a it's a must read manual for humans interesting and it talks about those four drugs which basically make us happy and peaceful and relaxed and how crying really helps release those i find it fascinating like a lot of these um there's this loads of these uh uh literatures out there now right so many books Cause I go to the airport and I'm like, you know, self-help, you know, one to a hundred.

32:11And it's knowing which one to choose. Um, funny, you know, one of the, one of the, the best things I was taught when I went through and did cognitive behavioral therapy, and I've done lots of therapy over the years, um, was how to ace my day. Okay. Um, so when you ace your day, it's one about feeling a sense of achievement. So doing something in your day that could be you know emptying the bins it could be you know uh cleaning up your to-do list right uh the second is um is about how you connect who am i connecting with in that day so am i having a conversation with a colleague that i you know perhaps don't speak to or someone i speak to a lot or an old friend a family member i've got to feel that sense of connection with someone and the third one is what am i doing to enjoy so have i gone out for a walk you know have i eaten a bar of chocolate um you know and obviously the spectrum's broad all that stuff and and i talk quite a lot about this stuff on the linkedin videos that i i create but i just i would love to hear more of it from leaders right well listen i'll talk about leaders in a second but those three points you've made there i map those exactly to three of the drugs that i just talked about dopamine oxytocin and serotonin because feeling like you've achieved something dopamine hit uh connecting with someone oxytocin getting outside doing something fun serotonin it's it's absolutely mad that's why that book like if when next time you or any of your listeners are in the airport and they're looking at self-help find three books there's i i mean my these are for my opinion right and there could be others that book dose by tj power tells you how to how it basically talks about why modern day life is meaning the pace of it and the stress of it and the mobile phones and distractions like that i mean that human's ability to create dogs dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins basically diminishing which is why we're all feeling so anxious and stressed because those are the four drugs that basically stop us feeling like that and help us feel happy and at peace.

34:22And so it gives you ticks and techniques, just like the ones you've talked about. Really simple things to do every day that just raises your dose levels. That's one book. It's a fundamental book. Second one is Polyvagal Theory by a woman called Deb Dana. It's slightly scientific, but it really helps you understand why humans act the way they do, why our body and our physiology has evolved the way it has to give us stress like stress is a good thing right why it gives us that and how we regulate ourselves and all this stuff it's fascinating and then on that same theme but in a less scientific version is um uh the chimp paradox i've heard of that i mean when i was first told to read that when i had my um breakdown that changed my life that was the big step changer took all the therapy that i'd had with those coaches and suddenly turned it practical so that polyvagal theory by deb dana and dose by tj power all those things love that um now going back to leaders yeah i mean i look at it and i go i tried to exhibit a lot of these behaviors myself and to show people that it was okay for me to do it therefore it's okay for you to do it it's okay I was like I'm not missing my daughter's um uh sports day I'm not missing her Christmas you know nativity I'm not missing xyz those because to me that was about oxytocin that was about being with my loved ones you know I'm definitely going for a walk now I'm getting some sunshine because I need to clear my head I didn't realize at the time it was related to all the different drugs but I tried to do this stuff and I think more leaders need to just i don't know this we've all had those bosses who just seem to be machines they get in at half seven they leave eight or nine they get home and then you're still getting emails at 11 o 'clock i'm like when when the hell do you ever stop like fine don't be that leader if you can help it and if you are going to be that person because that's who you are and how you have to fine try and my opinion is you've got to try and hide that shit don't show it off you've got to fate find times in your diary to show what most humans need, which is downtime, which is break, which is spending time with whatever it is that makes you happy.

36:41Whether for me, it's my wife and kids, or for other people, it could be sports, it could be going for a walk, whatever it happens to be, you've got to do that and role model it, as opposed to the old school, sort of like Victorian way of doing things. Because when people see it, you know, they follow it. So you've, well, you've teed up the next point I want to unpack, you've also put a mirror in front of me. Right. Because I am that person. I do have an ability to crunch through lots of work. So much so that my other half says to me at home, you know, this is not a dictatorship. You know, like just because you do things in that way does not mean we have to.

37:24Right. And, you know, I have to exercise in home and at work, as you say, a degree of empathy, b pause c lower my expectations just because i do things you know up to that level both in speed uh uh the time um and the quality doesn't mean that everyone else will be there immediately no and also the reality is people work in different ways yeah so you know when you talk about level i'm never wanting my teams to reduce the level of quality or output but i don't i just don't care i just i want that i want the best they can be but if that means for them they work 12 hours a day and that's how they achieve that and they're okay with it go for your life yeah but if your way of doing it is to work two hours in the morning take a break a couple of hours going to see i frankly don't care just keep doing what you need to do in order to deliver this yeah and the problem we find is a lot of people um a lot of leaders think that because all the previous leaders have been robots that they have to be robots and so people who aspire to be leaders look at those leaders and go we all need to be those 15 hour day non-stop workers well that's bollocks we we do what we each need to do to raise the highest level of output that we can achieve um and as leaders we need to understand that not everybody is the same as us yeah do you know what i mean it's uh it's funny because i think a lot of people nowadays aren't looking for those leadership positions right because i think because they don't want what they see and you know i think that that behavior is is triggering you know people think well i just i'm quite happy to do my job and i'll do it really well and i'll be recognized but i'm not chasing yeah you know said title i just want to shift the gear for a second um so you talked about it a second ago and you talked about it earlier um and i reference you know that that that mirror moment you know and and and perhaps you know if you'll feel comfortable I'd love to unpack that point which it changed for you because it sounded like it was quite a big deal um both for you for your family and you know could have gone a very different direction like do you mind unpacking that a little bit more within the bounds of where you feel comfortable um okay so the the the that morning in october 2022 when it all could have gone horribly wrong yeah i mean whatever it is for you yeah no i mean i'll talk about that but then i'll talk about the the moment where it suddenly i suddenly felt like oh this is gonna be okay so i want to end on a positive on that yeah definitely definitely um because no one just wants to hear the gruesome bits i hope uh so i mean that morning it was in October is 2022.

40:10And it started like any other day, four o 'clock, big panic attack, big surge of cortisol woke me up from my sleep. Oh, God, here we go again. I've practiced my breathing techniques to sort of calm it down so I can go back to sleep for a bit. And it didn't work. Those things didn't work. And it just kept coming in waves, which it has done before, just coming waves and waves and waves and it wouldn't go away. And this feeling of existential angst and dread and the panics just was just overwhelming and because it had been seven years i just thought enough is enough i'm done and you know i'd made rumblings and stuff about calling it the day before and you know i started i'm not i won't go into the detail because it's actually but then my wife my wife basically came along and she intervened right she was like i think I think you're being really fucking serious now and I'm really worried I'm stopping this uh and um one of the things she did was she took my phone she found my boss's email and she wrote them an email from her thing at like half past five in the morning from her email address telling her the story telling you know my boss the story and saying this is where he's at uh and I remember thinking at the time well that's my career done the industry with all the good chat.

41:32They don't want to hear this stuff. I'm done. But at the same time as feeling that, I was like, oh, and relief. And I've got my life's shoulders off. It's like, okay. And to be fair, my work were amazing. They really were. They gave me help. You know, Dentsu were brilliant. I'm happy to talk about Dentsu in this respect. And the HR team there put me in touch with some brilliant medical people. and that's where the real mirror I suppose came when I when I spoke to uh one of the what are they called um occupational health doctors who specialize in mental health and mental well-being not like in a factory because people have hurt themselves with you know on the factory floor which is equally important but this was a guy who specialized with um mental health problems and actually he'd had a lot of leaders recently uh and he said the words which I will never forget and they, because they overcame a perception I had about what I was going through.

42:29He said to me, hang on, relax. You are not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do. I was like, what? I was designed to have panic attacks. He was like, not quite, but you were designed to have stress, right? What your body is not designed to do is have quite as much stress that you were facing and feeling because of your core beliefs, et cetera, et cetera. Not necessarily because of work right but because of my my beliefs about myself and how i was bumping into things um you're not quite designed to have that much because we were designed for a system that was like 10 000 years ago when we were walking around leading much quote-unquote simpler lives on savannah right not with all of the stress and the pace that we have today um so your body's just doing what it's meant to do it's just that nobody's giving you the tools and techniques and an understanding of that to change how you deal with life and the surrounding environment such that you can regulate your nervous system more quickly but you're not broken and it was those it was those words of you're not broken that made a huge change because I spent seven years thinking everyone else is fine it's just me I must be broken I must be the weak one when in actual fact and I'm just doing what any human being who had had my life experience up until that point and my physiology and neurology would have had exactly the same experience.

43:50And that was life changing. Because that sort of like thing that we all do when we compare to other people, you know, it's true that comparison is a thief of joy. Because I was comparing myself to all my mates who were equally senior, going, well, they're all all right.

44:05Hamish Nicklin: Why am I the broken one? But so to find out I wasn't broken was huge. And that was a big moment. And it started this journey of learning and discovery about the physiology and neurology of human beings and uh those three books that would eventually take me to the place where the other day i was at the nabs stranger than summer oh yeah someone came on to me and said god you're obnoxiously happy and if someone had told me three years ago that i'd be accused of being obnoxiously happy i'd be like so so i i get that quite a lot i get that um with my family because normally i speak to them when i'm not in work and therefore I don't have distresses.

44:43Right. And I might call them on the way back from, you know, a meeting that I've been to, a recovery meeting, and I don't mean to do it. Right. And I don't mean to make them feel uneasy or less than or more. It's just the feeling. Now, sometimes I need to temper that, and I've learned over time that it's not all about me and it's not all, you know, how good I'm feeling. equally in the work there are times when my team will say we're never quite sure if you're approachable or not but we know you know most of the time when you are approachable it's like it's visible and so that's something that I'm you know I'm continually having to work on is making sure that the people around me yeah um you know I'm not just paying lip service I'm actively as I said earlier they can come to me with anything now I might be distracted with something but I think most people that work with me know if they've got something to talk about, I'm there, you know, and I have the privilege of, you know, I did, um, I did some work with channel four a few years ago, uh, called a series called brave stories.

45:50And I shared about my journey and, um, I was quite raw and open and similar to you, the feedback that I got either in person on WhatsApp through LinkedIn where people were actively saying wow like i'd love to have a chat with you or you know this has impacted a family member or um i just you know it's great to have someone speaking out about that stuff and there are connections that i've made that i've maintained you know for four or five years from that so you know what you've just shared there i i wouldn't underestimate how that all make people feel right to know the well you know already but the raw nature of what leaders go through um yes whilst externally you might not know what the other seven are feeling actually it's the one you know it's the age-old mental health ads you see uh yeah that's right i think it was the samaritan samaritan one of the charities did uh the football yeah the football one and and And you look at it, and I still look at it now after I've seen it several times.

46:55I'm like, for me, it's one of the best mental health ads I've seen in a long time. I totally agree. Because smiles and happy means nothing because those other seven leaders. Well, it's like that ad. So the football one where they're in the crowd. It was Norwich. I think it was Norwich. Yeah, yeah. And that's because that's brilliant. But there's the other one that was done. And I think it won loads of awards. I can't remember who the mental health charity was. So it was the great, the work was great. The branding, obviously. it was the last photo yes the campaign was called the last yeah yeah yeah and you know the last photo that people take before they commit suicide is usually a happy one because they've made the decision and they're happy and i suppose that's not quite the same as the norwich city one but it's not it's not too dissimilar right it's that people put on a mask and you never know what's going on underneath and that's true you don't and that's why at nabs there was the campaign that we had for a long time you know the strap line um oh god i'm probably gonna get it wrong but like how's things yeah you know how's work like simple simple because it was just asking a question like trying to get people to ask a very open question to see will they open up and if people give you an inch are you going to try and take it and see if people want to open because what i found subsequently is that maybe it's because people know what i've been through so they're much more likely to open up but you ask them a question and then another question and another question very quickly it they just open and suddenly they go god i feel so much better and it's like yeah I would love to have known what difference that would have had to me in seven years if I'd had a few of those outlets where I could have just released, you know, I don't know, maybe it would have made no difference.

48:27But the more we talk about it, I tell you what would have happened is the stigma side of it that I thought I felt that definitely exacerbated the whole thing. And that thing thinking that I was the only one who was broken. And, you know, that's one part that just exacerbated it, as well as the stigma attached to, you know, mental health exacerbated it. So I suppose us two talking about it like this and more people talking about it, hopefully at least pops those two things so that, you know, people who are in a bad place don't become worse by worrying what other people are thinking and being judged and that they're broken.

49:02I mean, it's a privilege to speak to anyone who's willing to share their story. And this is, you know, if it's the right word, it's quite cathartic, you know, being able to sit here and have a conversation, you know, part of my recovery is identify with, you know, someone else who has the same issue with me. I talk about it and I immediately feel, uh, uh, more free and uplifted. Um, uh, and I guess, you know, to try and bring this to, uh, you know, a positive close, I'm you know really keen to help give people permission right permission to uh to speak up and out um if you could say you know uh one thing or you know share um you know permission for others to speak up and out what would you say to them well I mean in terms of giving people permission I would, in terms of speaking up and out, I don't know.

50:03I think what I would do in terms of giving people permission to think, if that's okay too, is like, if like me, like I loved, I loved for years, I loved the poem If by Rajar Klipling. And his very first line, or, you know, a couple of lines would later haunt me. And I've talked about this in some of my posts because it says, you know, if you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, you'll be a man. Right. And so there was this sort of Victorian perspective that being a man, being masculine, being strong, being successful meant being a brick of granite. and being, you know, not stoical, because actually there's misunderstanding of stoic, but being sort of like stiff upper lipped, you know, never showing emotion, not being vulnerable, never, you know, always being confident and in control.

51:01That's what that poem used to say to me. And so I lived my life thinking and supported by Hollywood and supported by culture and this. So I grew up in the 70s and 80s, where if you watch a Hollywood film in the 80s, the men were like strong, silent, powerful, domineering, never shed emotion, right? That's what I grew up knowing it meant to be a man, which was freaking toxic. And it didn't give you permission to just go, you know, it is tough. I'm feeling broken. And so my view is if you've got the words of some Victorian poet on your wall and you're being guided by that as your definition of what masculinity or strength, whether you're a man or a woman, you know, strength is, rip it off the wall and burn it.

51:46And accept the fact that the modern day definition of strength is knowing when enough is. Right? It's knowing when to call time on something. For me, it was I need to take a break from the job and the industry. And I need to step back from it and know that, you know, enough is enough. I need to look after myself. I need to spend time connecting with my family and nature. I need to think differently about what I want from the world. Enough. to others it could just be I don't know what your version of enough is right but it's to know I honestly I think give yourself permission to say enough and to know that that actually takes strength sometimes and courage as does that whole sort of faking it you know to be strong that takes courage because I know I had seven years of it it takes a lot of effort but that will burn you out saying enough won't saying enough will keep you alive and get you to a place of obnoxious happiness well will you be back into the industry i look i'm very very would love to come back i know so much more about myself now about my drivers my motivations my boundaries enough uh but yeah like if the opportunity arrives i'd love to i mean right now i'm loving doing what i'm doing i've set up an AI tech consultancy with a programmer, developer friend of mine who really gets the geeky tech stuff of it.

53:08And I understand the commercial business operations side. And we're having a lot of fun, actually, going out on our own, setting something up. Never say never, you know? Amazing. Wow. That was an uplifting conversation. We could go on, I think, for a long time. I'd love to carry on chatting to you, but I'm sure our listeners, your listeners would... Well, I'm sure they don't want to hear from me or you for that long. But, you know, phenomenal, you know, to hear a leader like yourself speaking up and out. I don't think there's enough of it. And that's not a criticism. It's just a, if more people come together and elevate these topics, you know, and we show what sits behind the title of that individual, the more change that we can bring about.

53:52And that, for me, is what this is all about. If I can help or we can help one person alone. with one person. And that's why I came on this podcast. Like if we can help one person, hopefully two, three, brilliant, brilliant. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining. Hey, no worries. Have a safe journey back. And hopefully we'll get many more of these in the diary. Indeed, yeah, absolutely. Amazing, thank you.

54:29Hamish Nicklin: So why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago? That's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else. Podcast listeners are a different audience entirely, more engaged, harder to reach through traditional channels, and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation. We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you. Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast. Acast.com slash advertise.