In this talk, the speaker highlights the disproportionate mental‑health burden faced by leaders—especially male CEOs—citing data that CEOs are twice as likely to experience depression. He explains how cultural expectations of masculinity create shame that prevents leaders from acknowledging anxiety, panic attacks, or PTSD, and stresses the need for safe spaces where leaders can share without judgment. Drawing on his own experience of unnoticed mild depression during a period of personal stress (new baby, his wife's crisis), he outlines a suite of therapeutic interventions that helped his family: somatic psychotherapy to reconnect the body, neurofeedback to increase brain flexibility, NAD IV therapy and supplementation to restore brain metabolic function, and psychedelic‑assisted treatments (psilocybin, MDMA) for trauma re‑programming. He describes how PTSD operates as a nervous‑system trigger loop and how modalities like EMDR, ketamine, and NLP can rewrite those neural pathways. The speaker argues that leaders who prioritize their own emotional health and cultivate healing, emotionally intelligent workplaces generate ripple effects that improve team performance, attract talent, and foster overall well‑being. He concludes with a call to action for leaders to seek professional help, adopt integrative treatments, and intentionally build supportive organizational cultures.
Chapters
If you are a leader, how do you elevate your mental health and how do you pay attention to signs that you are suffering from a mental health battle or that some of your other leaders or staff or team members are as well? Well, I was flying home from an event and I was watching a LinkedIn special on airplane TV and guess what? They said CEOs are twice as likely to experience mental health challenges or depression. That was crazy. That blew my mind. And as I looked more deeply into it, it made sense, right? Men especially, men are twice as likely to not share their mental health journeys and their problems they're facing, not even be aware that they're battling a depression, panic attacks, or anxiety, or PTSD, because we're men. We're not supposed to share our feelings. Shame often is our greatest fear. We don't want to experience shame. So that means if I share that I'm struggling with I'm dealing with depression with my spouse, with my boss, with my team members, whatever, you know what, I'm probably going to experience shame. And that's a challenge, right? We want to be healthier. And that's one of the biggest things I see when I'm working with leaders is when I create a safe space for them to share and then I help them recognize that it's actually not shameful to share that, hey, you're battling some mental health issues, then they feel comfortable and they feel safe. And so as a leader, you want to create that space. For yourself and for others. Because when you are battling mental health, what it means is, is you have blocks. It's like your potential is up here, but now you've got a block right here, and so the highest you're going to go is right there. Because it's an energetic block. When you're in depression, when you're in PTSD, it's literally an energy suck. It's like a drain that's pulling you down back into the cycle of untapped potential. And my wife's mental health journey And ultimately my mental health journey, I had a little bit of mild, I would say mild depression in 2021. I wasn't even aware of it. I thought it started occurring to me towards the end that I was like, yeah, maybe I was dealing with some depression. And because in depression you often feel hopeless, you feel like, oh, this is never going to change. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get out of this cycle. And I was feeling that because we were exhausted. We had just had a baby. My wife was in deep mental health crisis. And I didn't know if we were ever going to find a solution. I had hope. I was not going to give up, but I was at my wit's end. Eventually, obviously, we found hope through— I'll mention a couple things— somatic psychotherapy, which is different than CBD. Somatic psychotherapy lets you get connected with your body, which is a huge part of depression and mental health. Second thing, we did neurofeedback. Really, really helpful for reprogramming your brain to be more flexible from a rigid or inflexible state, which helps with anxiety. My wife at the time was having 3 to 4 panic attacks a week. So that helped reduce those panic attacks. Uh, next thing, NAD IV therapy and NAD supplementation. Because what happens when you're experiencing brain disorders, Dr. Chris Palmer, that's his name, Harvard psychiatrist, and he found that oftentimes when we are experiencing mental health disorders, there's a brain metabolic function that is like off. It's off rhythm. It's not functioning right. So when you experience metabolic dysfunction, that means your body is not optimally utilizing energy. So if you boost your brain's energy back up to normal levels, guess what? Your body starts performing and acting normally. So that's where NAD comes into play. It was a lifesaver for us. Last thing I'll mention is the psychedelic side of things, psilocybin and MDMA-like substances that have helped us heal. Uh, we don't talk super openly about it, but those things have been massively helpful for reprogramming, creating new neuroplasticity, shedding the trauma, shedding the PTSD, which What happens when you have PTSD is, say X action causes this response in your nervous system. Think, you know, PTSD was coined and determined as a real condition in 1983, primarily because of the push of Vietnam veterans that were all suffering, right? A loud sound triggers this response, okay? Triggers that nervous system memory. And literally your body secretes chemicals like that's happening again, like you're in a war zone or you're being abused again or whatever it is, right? So when you experience that, your nervous system continually gets hammered. And if you want your nervous system to feel alive, to have space and capacity to heal and to restore itself back to optimal state, yes, you gotta either reprogram that or remove yourself from any triggers. Well, for example, my wife, crying baby would trigger her back to her childhood. We had a daughter, we had a toddler, right? That toddler is gonna cry. There's no getting around that. What are you gonna do? We gotta change the programming. That's where NLP, that's where all this other stuff that we're talking about comes into play. But as a leader, one of the things I want to mention is healing leaders create healing organizations, or healing leaders create healing environments. So that's why it's so important for us as leaders. What type of environment am I creating? Am I creating an environment that's filled with love and consciousness and connectedness and emotional intelligence and emotional flexibility to be able to help serve and guide people to a greater state of emotional attunement and health? Because trauma is a real thing, and we're becoming much more conscious and aware of mental health issues, trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc. And it's legitimate. Most people experience trauma or some sort of mental health issue or challenge. I think the stat I read last year was 67% of Americans experienced a mental health challenge in the last 2 years. That's pretty significant. So you as a leader, if you create this healthy environment, your team will support you. You'll feel healthier. You'll have an organization that creates health not just in the workplace, but in their homes and has a ripple effect. And that attracts and galvanizes more dynamic individuals because people realize when they leave a toxic environment, they step in a healthy environment, it feels great. And people will come back and be more devoted and more committed to organizations that promote health. So I invite you, get serious about emotional health. Deal with the serious issues that people are facing. Create supportive space for them to deal with it. Deal with your own. Seek help. Great therapy can be hugely helpful. Other methods and methodologies that we talked about, EMDR, ketamine for PTSD. It's also really, really helpful. Psychedelic-assisted therapy— highly recommended doing psychedelic-assisted therapy. And ketamine's obviously one of the most powerful and legalized, uh, tools. So that's a great one. And it takes another level than just doing the psychedelic. You want to do those things with guidance. And then when you go and revisit those old memories or those old triggers, what happens is, because you're in a different state and a different emotional connection, those memories now are recreated with a new neuroassociation. So now you have a whole new pathway and you don't get triggered in the same way you were before. That's why it's so, so powerful. So feel free to comment and let me know if I can help in any other way as well. But I'm really, really passionate about mental health because I feel like if you don't have mental health, then you're not able to perform anywhere close to your highest levels. You're dumbed down. You're a dumbed-down version of yourself. So get serious about that. Leaders, get serious about creating healthy environments so that your people can rise to their greatest level of potential.
