How I Failed: Losing my temper, my marriage and needing emergency psychiatric help - Lisa Collinson

0:00If you're not doing hiring right, then your business is not going to succeed. But finding the right people is a nightmare. You get sent loads of irrelevant applications, so you spend hours sending LinkedIn messages to great talent, hoping for the best, and honestly, it's just exhausting. The good news though, is I can tell you about Otter, who I use at my company Heights to hire some of our best people. Otter have over a million users on their platform, and they match my jobs to only the most relevant candidates. Plus, Otter makes sure candidates know exactly what kind of company they'd be joining, our mission, our values, and our culture.

0:38This means by the time I get to interviews, the applications that come from Otter are on a completely different level. The whole process is quicker too, so ultimately we get to hire the best people in less time. So if you want to upgrade your hiring, check out otter.com forward slash secret leaders. That's otta.com forward slash secret leaders. just a heads up Lisa mentions being suicidal in this episode it may not be suitable for everyone if you or someone you know is affected by the themes we speak about in this episode you can get help in the UK by visiting samaritans.org I had to learn relearn how to sit at a computer had to relearn how to engage in email so talking to you today a year on feels incredibly therapeutic but also a real a real milestone for me personally to actually be able to talk about this um in the hopes that it can help somebody else that's lisa collinson one of the best guests we've spoken to in a while she's been through the ringer but fortunately she's come out the other side she's here to tell us what happened and how you can pull yourself out of the grimmest pits that life can throw you in.

1:57It's very rare and extremely powerful to hear business leaders talking like she does. Lisa Today is the chief people officer and country manager in the UK of The Next We, a company helping other organisations improve the mindsets of their employees, which is apt because it was shifting her mindset that was key to Lisa getting her life back.

2:23Lisa was leading people and culture at a start-up in Berlin in 2019. After COVID hit, she really stepped up. She supported the people in the organisation as they adapted to the pandemic. But while she was working 60, 70 hours a week supporting others, no one was supporting her. And then, in October 2021, a school friend died. He wasn't a close friend, but the mind works in mysterious ways. Grief stricken, I don't even think begins to describe it as I look back. So, you know, when my mum died, I took a week off work. When he died, this friend, I couldn't function. I just crashed. Couldn't get up, couldn't get out of bed, couldn't go to work and was out of work for three weeks.

3:14and never in a 25 year career had I ever been sick, let alone now be off work for three weeks because I can't get out of bed because I can't stop crying. I think it was, you know, my own mortality and I had nothing left. There were no reserves. You know, I'd given everything I'd had to the company that I was working for, every ounce of energy, every spare minute of every day, sitting in the corner of what was our bedroom, working through COVID, and just hadn't appreciated how much effort and energy that took. So when, you know, when my friend died, and I couldn't get out of bed, that very first morning, I thought, what on earth is the matter with you?

3:59What on earth is wrong with you? You know, he's died, it's, you know, it's sad, and oh my god, and but you've got to get up, you've got two kids, you've got a husband, you've still got a job to do, everybody needs you, everybody needs you, everybody needs you. And the everybody needs you, everybody needs you soon turned into, I can do anything for an hour. I can do anything for an hour. Just get up, get up and do something for an hour. Just do something for an hour. But yeah, looking back, it's a good question. It was just such a difficult time. It was just so hard and ended up in emergency psychiatric care because, yeah, I was suicidal at various stages of that time as well, because I just wanted it to stop.

4:40There's a phenomenon called the arousal curve or the Yerkes-Dodson law. I think that's what's going on here. There's a relationship between stress and performance. More stress equals better performance. It's why so many world records are broken at the Olympics. But you can't operate at the top of the arousal curve in peak stress for too long. If you're at that point, a tiny little thing can push you over the edge. And Lisa wasn't dealing with tiny little things. The death of my mum in 2019 was that moment for me. But I started this new role two weeks later. So my mum died. So I think my mum was my crucible moment.

5:23And I never grieved. I performed. So she died because she'd have wanted me to perform. So she died. And I was anxious and a little stressed for a few weeks. But then I had to perform because I was in a senior role. I had taken a C-level position in an organization that needed me. I had no choice but to perform. So I performed. And if I look back on my career, you know, 2020 was probably the most successful year I ever had in my career. You know, I helped save an organization. We didn't lay anybody off through COVID. You know, I was the face that people came to when they were struggling. So that was my peak of performance driven by adrenaline and stress.

6:05And then when my friend died in 21, I think that was the, it was just all too much now. So the compounding effect of the death of my mom, an incredibly difficult couple of years through COVID, and then his death and my own mortality and my children failing at school and COVID impact on their education and their mental health was, wow, it was just all too much. And I didn't even realize it was a problem until I started losing my temper on phone calls. And, you know, I was having meetings and not remembering half of what people had said. And I think it was the temper that brought my attention to it when, you know, I couldn't be nice to certain people.

6:51and I was very aggressive with our CEO and I was very aggressive with other members of the leadership team, which was completely out of style of my personality. I was there to support and help and lead, not shout and yell and scream. Lisa had made a career out of asking challenging questions, but this version of her, with a temper, was new. It's hardly surprising though that her workplace manner had changed because her home life was in tatters. She'd been working all hours from the corner of her bedroom, homeschooling the kids, and then came the cherry on top. Her husband left her and the kids.

7:29I wondered whether this came as a surprise. Oh, we were in love. We were on holiday in early January. We were, I believed, living a great life. We were in Berlin, the arts crazy social capital of Europe, two children in an international school. I'm doing a job that I loved with a team of people I adored, albeit still shouting at the leadership team. So still struggling behind the scenes. But I thought we were in love and going to live happily ever after. And we've been together nearly 20 years, married 18. so the day he literally said you no longer have anything I want or need and packed his bags and moved out was I don't even have the words I don't even have the words to describe how I feel what I can tell you is that I ended up in emergency psychiatric care I needed help with my children and I was always a strong person you know running a I've run a business of my own for 25 years I was a C-level appointee in a growing business.

8:41So I'd always been successful, had always been strong. And I was literally having to pick myself up off the floor and crawl into bed and take tranquilizers to get through the day. And I was having to take tranquilizers around the school run. So I had to take the children to school. I'd come back to the apartment. I'd pop half a tranquilizer because then I'd have a meeting at two o 'clock in the afternoon. I'd sleep for four hours, turn up, do the meeting, and then go and pick the children up from school, come back, take another tranquilizer and sleep until the following morning. And that went on for what felt like months and months and months.

9:28It wasn't. It was weeks because I had two children. I have two children. They were the reason I got out of bed still every day. My team were the reason that I still tried to turn up to work every day. But eventually turning up to work was something that I could no longer do either. Lisa needed emergency psychiatric help. You go and see, so in Germany, you go and see your house arts, which is your GP. And I'd previously had antidepressants when I had the two children, I suffered with postnatal depression. So I assumed I could turn up and say to my GP, give me some medication. I know what medication I need.

10:13I can even tell you the brand and the milligrams, which is what I tried and got told. Absolutely not. That's not the case at all. I can't prescribe you that you need to see a psychiatrist well I'll never forget the day she said you need to see a psychiatrist because that was almost the that was the moment I realized it was clearly something very wrong because you only see a psychiatrist when there's something very wrong with you and you're dangerous and you know you're a danger to yourself or to other people so I got referred to a psychiatrist you go and see a psychiatrist they then establish whether you need to be admitted into hospital, which fortunately I was, I don't know really how to say this, I was still able to string a sentence together.

10:59So I wasn't quite at the rocking in the chair stage that I suspect would have resulted in being admitted into hospital because they treat mental health in the same way as physical health. You know, if I wasn't able to function, I needed to be treated so I was treated as an outpatient I had to see a psychiatrist I was referred I was given uh prescribed is the word prescribed medication I was prescribed medication um and I'm still on medication now a year on um so yeah so that was psychiatric intervention um over there terrifying is the is the only word so on top of on top of everything else um left with the the stigma that there was something wrong with me when inherently I knew they were there to help me and would always say to somebody, get help, go and speak to somebody because they saved me, I think, physically, mentally, and got me back on my feet with a little bit of chemical intervention.

12:04What an appalling situation to find yourself in. It became clear to Lisa and the company that everyone would be better off with her leaving. The CEO was very grateful for what she'd done previously, but in Lisa's own words, she'd become that employee who was too difficult to manage. She decided after talking with her two sons to return to the UK. Her husband remained to pursue quote unquote, a life of drinking, smoking and all the other joys that Berlin offers. Lisa slowly started putting her life back together. I was very, very foggy for a while until the medication kicked in. So I was very pleased to have previously suffered with depression to know that medication, there was no shame in going and asking for help and asking for some form of medical intervention.

12:55so it took about three or four weeks to the fault for the fog to clear so that's what medication does for me and I've heard that it does that for many people it just it clears the fog and enables you to to return to your ability to think and to and to think clearly so I then knew I needed talking therapy as well so I'm lucky career-wise I've always worked in the people space so I knew I needed help. So I got a therapist, I got a coach. I read everything I could on trauma, on recovering from trauma, on being a single parent, on how to get back up on your feet after your marriage is broken down.

13:36I became addicted to Instagram and reading memes on Instagram. And all of that content gave me back control. So reading and learning about what was going on for me gave me gave me back the control that I think I felt that I'd lost probably in 2019 the control I didn't have in 2020 so learning about it so knowledge dispels fear I'm a huge believer in that so the the more I learned the less scared I was um and then I learned about mindset and what you think drives what you do so every morning you know if I wake up and I think today's going to be hard, then guess what? Today's hard because I end up demonstrating the behaviors of it being hard.

14:26Whereas if I wake up and I say, and as I look at a post-it note on my desk now, 365 new days, 365 new chances. So, you know, that's my current mindset for this week. You know, so every single day is a brand new chance to do something else, to do something you to do something different. So that, you know, when I learned about mindset and then ironically ended up getting a job working for an organization, another startup, of course, because that's where the passion is and that's where the fun is and that's where the energy is in that scene. So of course I was going to go and join another startup that, you know, ironically specialise in mindset.

15:12It was a tough road. Lisa had to learn how to work again, to sit at a desk, a computer, emails, all the things you take for granted. But Lisa says that speaking on this podcast, telling her story, is a real milestone for her. It shows how far she's come. And she's got a few more gems of advice for anyone listening who's struggling. it's about learning it's about learning how you think currently and you can't do it on your own so you need help and whether that help comes through the form of a of a gp who can help you understand how you're currently thinking and what your triggers are now gps are busy that you know you get six minutes to talk to a gp so go to a gp and say i need a counsellor please refer me to a counselor and and if you're not willing to wait the 16 weeks as it is right now for a counselor then go pay for a therapist and you know if you can't afford to do it yourself then find somebody to help you pay for it go pay for a therapist because you need somebody to help you figure out how you're currently thinking and the and the triggers that that's causing in in your behavior and the impact that's having in your life you know I had no idea that some of my mindset associated with my husband was impacting how I was interacting with the children when we were eating dinner.

16:32You know, so I was angry with him and frustrated with him and still hurt and still grieving over the loss of my marriage. So when my eight-year-old didn't want to eat his peas for dinner, I'm taking that out on him. So something had to change. So it was impacting my life at home as much as my ability to sit and do a job. So what would I say? You need somebody to help you. And GP, therapist, counsellor, or an organisation like the one I now work for that coach people and help them change their mindset. So that's, you've got to ask for help. You have to ask for help. And there's no shame in asking.

17:23Lisa Collinson, who has shared so openly because she wants to help others going through dark times. A big thank you to Lisa for that. And she's absolutely right, of course. Getting help and shifting your mindset is fundamental to recover from a mental health collapse. In fact, working on your mindset is arguably the most valuable thing you can do every day of your life. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you liked this episode, please do hit follow or subscribe.