99 | The Pandemic Pushed Mental Health Out of the Workplace Shadows | Niamh Fitzpatrick

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

In the awful trauma of this last few years, there are gifts to take away. And if the gift for some people is a heightened awareness of their emotional world, then I think that's a good thing going forward.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. First of all, as I always do, a little thank you out to Workvivo, our friend and sponsor. We're going to be chatting today with our guests a lot about connection. And I think that as we move more and more into hybrid working, as we end up, you know, some days in the office and some days at home, and even employing people that aren't in the same country or jurisdiction as you, then maintaining that sense of purpose, that sense of connection is going to become even more important. So, have a look at Workvivo. Their online engagement platform does exactly that, helps to create connections between people in organizations. You'll hear a little bit more on them later, or you can go and have a look at workvivo.com. Now, on that subject of connection, as I said, I think people are really struggling out there, and I think they're going to continue to, and I think we've seen the growth or the, or the rising issue of mental health coming up time and time and time again. And I think it's a really good thing. I think it's an awful shame that it's taken a global pandemic to try and get that on the boardroom table and on the table of leaders and managers across organizations. But it has, and we're here. I think we all know that the pandemic has taken a bit of a toll on people's mental health. I don't think we know yet what that toll looks like or is going to be longer term. We talk about the pandemic kind of finishing up now, And now I just wonder, and I'll be interested to chat to today's guest about this, if that pandemic, that mental health pandemic, is perhaps just beginning and will go on a good bit longer. So it was actually a friend of mine, Tony Murphy. I'm name-checking you, Tony, just to check and see, have you listened to this episode? Who said, you must have a chat with Niamh Fitzpatrick. We had her as a speaker at a corporate do, and she was really, really, really good. So I'm really pleased to welcome Niamh today. She's a psychologist who specializes in this area of mental health. And hopefully we're going to get a bit into the whys and the wherefores, particularly of mental health at work, what organizations can do, and hopefully what people can do as well to mind their own mental health. So Niamh, hello there. You're very welcome to the podcast.

Hello. It's lovely to talk to you and thanks for inviting me on.

You're very welcome. Very welcome indeed. Listen, I always start with an easy one. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you've come from, your background, and what you do today to help businesses and sports teams be more successful?

Yes, I'm a psychologist. 30 years. I'm going on to year 31 now since I saw my first client, and I tend to work in two main areas. So the first one is the mental health space, so all around anxiety, grief, depression, stress, those kind of pieces. And then the other part of my work would be a performance piece, so that's around, you know, sport, business, exams, the arts, things like confidence, bouncing back from errors, cohesion. Belief, achievement, ambition, all of those kind of things. And I, I love my work. I love the variety of work. I love the scope and the range of it. But yet I find, although those two areas perhaps sound initially to be quite different, I find the mental health piece and the performance piece, they actually— the work I do in one area helps me with people that I'm dealing with in the other area. So it's a lovely, it's a lovely mix. If I win the EuroMillions, I'm I'm still going to be doing this because it just feels like what I'm meant to do.

And that, you know what, that makes such a difference when it's your kind of nearly your calling, isn't it? It makes such a difference to the work that you do, and I think just makes each of us better at the work that we do, doesn't it?

Yeah, I do think you have to be careful with that, in that the problem is, is when you love it, it doesn't feel like work. So the tendency in the banana skin that we can slip on and slide across the floor on is that we say yes to too much because we like, we love, we enjoy, we have a and fur. So it's yes, I'd love to do that. Yes, I'd love to do that. Yes, I can help with this. But of course, it's walking the walk and minding yourself in that balance too. So I think that's probably the downside of it. The good side of it is it just doesn't feel like work. It does feel like a calling. And that's not meant to sound in any way odd. It really just feels like, like what you're meant to do, I think, when you're doing something that's your thing.

Yeah, for sure. And of course, people listening in Ireland, they probably know your name, or they may have heard your voice, because this— you're no stranger to broadcasting, are you?

I started off many years ago, a radio station in Ireland called Today FM, and there was— it was the Ray D'Arcy Show at the time, and there was a listener who was about to take her driving test for the 7th time, and Ray said, this is not a driving issue, this girl can drive, this is a psychological issue. How does she prepare herself to take this test again, incorporating the fact that she has has not succeeded 6 times. So I was doing some work with the Olympic teams at the time. I think I was going to my first Olympic Games as the HQ psych with the Irish team. And so the radio station contacted the Olympic Council or somebody in that sphere. My name came up. I did some work with this girl and she passed her driving test, and I started to do bits and pieces on air then, and then moving maybe into later on with Ray D'Arcy again into an agony aunt slot. And that was very much about trying to help get information about mental health out to a wider audience and to make it normal and understandable, um, and to have these conversations around mental health. So yeah, I love broadcasting. I have to say, radio feels home to me. Sitting in front of a microphone feels home to me. I, I just love it.

Brilliant, brilliant. Listen, one of the things that we spoke about— let's just kick off here— one of the things we spoke about when you and I did our little pre-brief was this idea of tribe. You talked about having a sense of tribe. What did you mean by that, and why do you think that's so important?

Belonging. For me, tribe is about finding your belonging, finding your crew, finding where, where you're in that space where you get them and they get you. Sometimes there's a common goal, sometimes there's not. So for instance, I would think of— I have a tribe in my family. My family completely are my tribe, and we get one another, we have one another's backs. We're tight. We've, we've been through some tough things in life the last few years as a family, and we, we've cleaved together in that. So it's very much a tribe. In my workspace, I have colleagues who, for instance, are in the mental health space, and I have colleagues in the performance psychology space, and we are each other's tribes. We know one another, we support one another, we encourage one another, we call one another out, as in the family situation, we need to. But I also think then There are tribes around, you know, in life, finding your people. So for me, the people who are my tribe are people who turn towards their feelings, who express their feelings, who acknowledge their feelings, who allow their feelings. And they— those type of people, I gravitate towards those. I like that. People who aren't my tribe are people who just look for something to moan about. Who want to take offense that day and they will find something to take offense about. They're just not my tribe. So I think it's about understanding who you are, what you value, what you stand for, what you believe in, and then really seeing in life in your different areas, can you find people, do you find yourself around people who are your tribe in that way?

It's really interesting. And I think that we've all had that sense of kind of peace or calm or acceptance or something because we found people, as you say, that we are like, that we want to hang out with. And I think what's really interesting about what you just described there was that I think that lots of people would see tribe as the people I work with or my family or my group of friends, and it's a very distinct group of people. Whereas actually, from the way you described it there, which is actually an angle, I'd never thought about before. It's actually much more about just there being lots and lots of people all around the place, and your tribe is just very dispersed, and you're just finding them as you go through life. And I think that's a lovely way to put it.

Yeah, and probably that bit maybe has come to me around, say, when I think of the social media piece. So I'm not really on social media except for Twitter, and I tend to be one of those people, I either do something or I don't. So I love Twitter, and and I engage quite well in it, and I have a lovely space on there. I've found actually a tribe there in the grieving community on Twitter. If I post something about how I find my experience of loss and grief, the comments from other people who follow me or don't follow me towards one another within the replies are immense. And that feels like a tribe. There's people I've never even met, but this understanding that we all have this pain of loss, and we're trying to learn, and we are learning to live with that pain of loss, and sometimes we just need to express it. So there are people we haven't even met. And if you wanted to take it a step further on tribe, I've felt a sense of tribe if I've been in with a sports team. So especially a hurling team or a football team. I nearly get shivers down my spine now when I think of that, because that's really tribal. You know, you're wearing the same uniform, you're in the same colors, you're working within the same county border. It really is my tribe against the next county's tribe, you know. So I think that sense of tribe can be wider than we might initially imagine.

Yeah, I love that. And I think probably one of the tribes that we see, because the vast majority of us, because we haven't won the EuroMillions yet, still go to work. So we have our workplace and we have our tribe of people in work. And I think that back to a point I made earlier on, on about the mental health impacts of the pandemic and of COVID I wonder why, particularly around the work piece and the work-life balance piece, I wonder why it's taken a global pandemic to get the issue of mental health on the table because it's not like it's only just started. It's been here for ages. Why has it taken a global pandemic to get us to start talking about it and for it to become common parlance. And for us to, you know, from a very personal perspective, a very good friend of mine was diagnosed with prostate cancer and we were having a cup of coffee the other day and he just completely changed tack and he said, "Have you been for a prostate check yet?" And I said, "No, I haven't." And by the way, lads, you totally should. If you're in your mid to late 40s, just go for a prostate check, okay? It's not as bad as it sounds. That's the end of this public health message. But he just jumped in and just said that, and that's not something that I would have expected somebody to just lash into a conversation about going for a prostate check. But these types of conversations and subjects are becoming much less perhaps taboo or embarrassing than they were before. Why is that? Why suddenly now do you think that that's the case?

I suppose the first thing to say is that this is not an A to Z of an answer on that. You and I could probably talk for a full week on that particular question, so obviously I'm going to throw out my initial thoughts on it. For starters, I think why it took a global pandemic for the mental health piece to come into that conversation, one of the reasons is that when the pandemic came along and our lives changed overnight, we went from 60 or 80 or 100 or whatever speed we were going to zero, and everything changed. Our whole world's changed. The way we live, the way we work, the way we interacted with one another, the way we the way we buried our dead, the way we mourned our— everything, the way we schooled our children, everything changed. So what that meant was within that, the elements of life that help us with our mental health ongoing were taken away. So for some people, that's going to be social gatherings, connections with their friends. We weren't allowed to do that. For others, it might have been sport. We weren't allowed to do that. Art groups, dance, music. Goodness, if we think of the, you know, the music industry, the comedy industry, the entertainment space completely halted. So, so some of those things that people would have done, even when you think of at one point we were 2K, allowed 2K around the perimeter of our homes. So if you were somewhere who loved to get up into the mountains and hike and that was your way to wind down from the week and just let things roll off you and find your sort of sense of calm again. Well, if that mountain wasn't within 2K of you, you weren't allowed to do that. So I think a lot of the things that were actually helping us with our mental health to start off with were taken away. That's one reason. The second reason I think that it has brought it into this table and space and why it has taken this is the pandemic impacted everybody. So often the sense before was, well, if somebody's having trouble with anxiety or somebody's, you know, maybe it's depression, stress, burnout, whatever it is, there perhaps often was a sense of othering with that. Well, that happens to other people. That's not me. That's what a lot of people would have thought. But then what was happening with the pandemic was so many more people were having a response of around anxiety or around not sleeping or around low mood or irritability or not feeling like themselves and just really mentally and emotionally feeling out of whack and offline, which of course I know as a psychologist and I spent the pandemic trying to help people understand was a normal reaction to what we were going through. But for a lot of people who might never have felt anxious and saw photos from Italy in March 2020 and said, my word, what's happening to us? Is this going to happen to us next? Will our hospitals be like this? And began to feel anxious about them. I think the whole mental health and emotional world and psychological world came into maybe more of a relevant space for a greater number of people. They would be my two initial off-the-top-of-my-head answers to your question. Hi, I'm Cliona from Workvivo. When working away from the office, it's easy for your people to feel isolated and disconnected from your culture and each other. That's where we come in with our quick-to-deploy employee communications platform. It's all about ensuring that your people feel informed, informed, engaged, and connected to your company culture, values, goals, and each other wherever they work from. For more, see workvivo.com.

Brilliant. And for me, I think that the whole issue of mental health, I think when people look at it often, maybe prior to the pandemic happening, they look at it as if you've got poor mental health, you're going to be sitting in a corner sobbing and rocking back and forth. And actually, yes, that's one extreme, but actually, I mean, you'll know and much better than I, that that's kind of a bit of a range of emotions and presentations. And the one thing that I always said was the bit that people have missed, and I kind of likened it to when you walked past one of those electricity substations on the street and there was a hum. It was constant and it was there all the time. It wasn't as if, it wasn't as if you— so personally, I never felt stressed. I never felt anxious. But there was probably a very, very heightened, just a very slightly heightened sense of anxiousness, perhaps. And that was because it's there all the time. It became kind of part of just the daily, the daily do, I guess. Is that, is that, I think, a reasonable thing to— place to go or thing to see.

Yeah, that makes sense. I love that idea that there's a sort of a hum there that's a low-level peace. And I think that's quite relevant for this conversation because maybe what's happened in the pandemic is people have been more aware of that, more aware of their emotional state. But because we're all human beings, and so anybody who thinks, I don't feel, You know, what is your mental health about? It's about your emotions. So the sensations within the body, within the mind when we go through life. It's about your feelings, how you interpret those emotions. What do you say to yourself about them? And, you know, some people will of course go through life thinking, well, I'm a doing person, not a feeling thing. That stuff doesn't relate to me. Yes, it does. It just might have been what you, Scott McInnes, have said beautifully there. It might have just been a low hum somewhere in the background hand of your life and you never noticed it. But the pandemic came along, and whereas at once it might have been somebody who worked in a home, uh, or lived in a home, and everybody left that home that morning to the four corners of the city, did their school or their work or their whatever, and now they found themselves in this home 24/7 with all of these people. And, you know, there's something not natural about that. We're not meant to be together like that. We're not meant to be separated either, but it's about a balanced piece. And so maybe what's happened in the pandemic is there's just been a dialing up of that home and a sense of a highlight spotlighted on that home. And, you know, and I think that's really useful because we need to move away from this idea that, you know, I don't have issues with you know, my feelings, or I don't have feelings, or feelings aren't relevant to me. If you were a human being, they are. Your mental health, what you think about yourself, what you feel about yourself, what you feel about the world and your expectations and how you navigate what goes on in the world, it's relevant to you. Maybe, you know, I've written a book on grief, and one of the things I wrote as a chapter was grief is the gift Grief is the gatecrasher that brings gifts to the party. And talking about when we can't change what has happened in life, can we take— there may be some things from it that can help us onwards in our life. The pandemic has been, for me, looking at people and working with people quite like that. There are, in the awful trauma of this last few years, there are gifts to take away. And if the gift for some people is a heightened awareness of their emotional world, then I think that's a good thing going forward.

Yeah, that whole idea that I suppose every cloud has a silver lining. There's always, there's always some silver lining, no matter how microscopically thin it might be at the time of a trauma or a death or, or whatever it might be that's happened in your life. But, you know, there is definitely something that you can, that you can carry forward.

We do need to be careful. I just have to say on that one, we have to be gently very gently careful with that one, because even as you, even as you say those words, silver lining, I, I hesitate, and I, there's a part of me just winces with it because we have to separate out so that it's not any sense of, you know, well, things happen for a reason, and aren't we better now that we have more balance in our lives because we learned of the imbalance we had before the pandemic? We're not in any way saying that. We are saying we cannot change the fact that the pandemic happened. What have we learned about ourselves, about life, about balance, about alignment through surviving that pandemic? It's just to just gently make that distinction and say we are absolutely not saying, well, sure, didn't it work out well and we're glad this happened? And I just want to be very gentle with that silver lining thing. Just made me wince a little bit. I hope that's okay to say.

Of course that's okay to say. That's what this space is all about. And I take my chastising standing up like a man. I shall never say it again. Let's talk a little bit about work because that's of course what the podcast is about and leadership and engagement and communications and culture in organizations. And I wonder, at the heart of all of those things are people. And what impact is this mental health challenge having on people? What have you seen over the past couple of years?

I think what's important to remember is that when you're in a team, in a business, in an organization, whatever skill set you're bringing to that space, you are a person first. So in the same way as in sport, I always say you're a person before you're a player. So the impact that has is however somebody is navigating their emotional world around the pandemic, they bring that, understandably— that's not a judgment, that's an observation of really fact of what we see— they bring that with them into that workspace, or they pay the cost, the high cost psychologically, if they don't bring it into the workplace. So if they somehow manage to squash down, sit down, press down their feelings and if you like show up to work, you know, jazz hands and all on, what is the cost to them there on that? So that's what I would see in, in, in client work. It's around helping people, I suppose, manage their emotional world, be authentic in that emotional space, you know, notice, understand, describe process that emotional world so that they get to the place where their professional world— and they are able then to deliver in that space. They're not depleted, um, or anything like that. That's what we're trying to achieve from the therapy space. But often what I see happens is, you know, I'm having trouble in my emotional world at home, and so I bring that into the workplace. So that might mean I'm not present. It might mean I'm not performing. It might mean I'm irritable with others. It might mean I'm unrealistic in my expectations with others. This can be real problems if the person having the issues outside of work is in a managerial position in work. You, you then have somebody who's just not really themselves outside of work, therefore not really themselves inside work, and they are having a direct impact on those around them. Because those unrealistic expectations are being shoved at other people. So, the answer to that question, what impact I think it can have, a great impact, and we have to watch for that.

Yeah, and I've said more than once on this podcast, particularly when we talk about people leaders, and you're absolutely right, they have such an impact on huge swathes of the working population, a relatively small number of people that we forget. And I say often to clients that Don't forget that people leaders are also people. So, if you're going through a traumatic experience where you're saying to your people leaders, listen, we really need to lean on you guys and girls to help support your teams through this change. Well, let's not forget that the impact is on them as well. They might be worried about losing their jobs, losing control, not knowing what the future looks like, not knowing what the impact on them is going to be, and we don't probably spend enough time focusing on them as people. So you're absolutely right. And I think something else we've spoken about often is that whole idea of psychological safety at work, of feeling as though that I have the— I'm going to use the word permission with a very little P to bring my whole self to work, which is something else that we hear all the time. It's important that everyone brings their whole self to work. And I do sometimes think that there's a lack of authenticity when those things are said. They're said often because people think we should say them. But it's only the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It's when you actually go into those working environments and you realize, actually, I can break down and that be okay in work. I can have a cry and somebody put their arm around me and say, are you okay? I can have a day when I'm just in a really shitty mood. And rather than somebody giving out, they'll just take me aside and say, come on, that's not— this isn't you. Let's go and grab a cup of coffee and have a chat. And that's okay.

And I find that is very, very So when I think of the work, you know, with people that I do, there are some people whose workplace does that and will have somebody who will say that's okay. And there— that word, I'm so glad you used it, those two words actually, the psychological safety piece. There are some places where people know that's the case. There are other cases where somebody might be struggling with anxiety, grappling with depression, stress, whatever the thing is that's going on for them, and they know or they feel unsafe in that workplace. I must keep going because they will not understand, or if I go anywhere in this space, they will label me and either sort of push me off to one side, or, um, I will be written off, you know, not just for one side for now, but I will be written off forever. So there's huge pressure, and I think huge range in that in terms of how companies respond in that space.

And what types of things, just chatting about leaders and chatting about people presenting with particular— I don't even know if symptoms is the right word, you can correct me on that— when they come into work and they're maybe not in a great place, what are the types of things that perhaps leaders should be looking out for to be able to say? And I think it's even harder now. Only this morning I was having a conversation with a leader in a big organization, he said, it's just so much harder now on Zoom to work out if people are okay or not because we're still seeing their faces, but we're not seeing their whole selves. So, how do leaders spot if there's an issue? What are they looking out for?

Well, if you're a leader and you're listening to this, the first thing you do, again, we're going to put the context on this, if you're able to do it, as in if your workload allows you to do it, this is the ideal, what I I would be suggesting you do is you tune into the people you're working with and you get to know their baseline. So I have clients now— I have a few little physical health issues myself, so I've not gone back to in-person work yet. So all my work is on Zoom. So I have a raft of clients who I've never met, we have never sat in the same room. But what has happened is I've had to learn to just dial up those skills that I would have always had in person and apply them in this environment. And you can do that even though it's difficult, it is entirely possible. And what I mean by that is get to know your people, get to know the people that are in your team that you're working with, who report into you. So, you know, when you're talking to them in person or on Zoom or Teams or whatever it is, what do you notice about them consistently? So what's their baseline? What are you looking at in terms of facial expression, tone of voice, distraction, being present. Are they coming hurried to the meeting? Are they there on time? Are they prepared? Are things done? Are they— so start dialing up that sense of, you know, your ears, your eyes, your senses. Trust yourself. Let's hope that you've got to a place as a leader because you have some skills that bring you into that right space for you. I mean, the reality is that there are some people who shouldn't be leaders. They're not the right people in— they're neither personality nor skill-wise. But, but, but let's say for a lot of people, I feel there are people in the leader space who have those skills. So tune in, dial up, use your eyes, use your ears. What do I know about— think of one of the people on your team and think about what do I know about them? What have I seen consistently with them across the boards? And part of that also might be staying within your lane, within your boundaries. What do I know about their life outside? So if you knew somebody who had had a bereavement in COVID, for example, where there's no rituals at that stage, there was no wakes, there was— there were some people maybe in your team whose loved one died and their last goodbye was through a window in a hospital. You know, remember, they come to you as people first. So what do you know about their life? Outside without, as I said, staying in your lane. But, but that's information for you. And then starting to watch for and notice changes in that. I know, for example, I know within, I would say, the first 2 seconds when I see a client on Zoom, I can tell a sense of where they are today versus where they were when I might have seen them a month ago or 6 weeks ago or whatever, because I'm trained to tune into that. As a leader, start dialing that up. That's a starting place, I would say, for you.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. I love that idea of your colleagues being people first. It's so true and so powerful. And if that's where you start from, then you're going to be riding the pig's back. It's such a powerful thing to think about. When I kind of extend that on a little bit further, Niamh, and I think about about friends of mine who are, they're counselors or they're psychologists. And what you often hear from them is, well, I've got, so I'm often burdening myself with other people's issues, but I can then offload in a safe space to somebody else. Maybe I've got a more senior counselor or somebody else who then is a counselor to me. I wonder from a leadership perspective and that whole idea of it's important to put your own mask on first when you're on an airplane. I think the same is true for leaders, that leaders have to be in a good place in order to help the people that they need to help. So, what do those leaders need to do to get themselves into a good place so that they don't get a sense of burnout or overwhelm from all of that that they could be taking on? What would you say to them?

Two things there. So, think of— I've seen this go around psychology space, and I think it's a great analogy. Think of a table. So you have a tabletop, and that table has 4 legs on it. And those 4 legs, think of them, them as the sort of pillars they're holding up, literally holding up that table. For you as a leader, start with your 4 pillars and the 4 in your own life, and making sure you're paying attention to them so that you are coming to the workplace not depleted but coming to the workplace replenished and ready and able for that workspace. What are the four legs of the table? Sleep and rest, number one. Fresh air and movement, number two. Nutrition and hydration, number three. And connection, number four. So if you as a leader can say, I am going to do my best to look after myself, to look after my body so my body looks after me, to look after my body and my mind and my connections and all those pieces so that I'm in a better place to be able to navigate the challenges of leading a team. Leading a team is one of the toughest things you can do. Dealing with people has to be one of the hardest things there is. So start off with your own basics and see what am I doing to mind the four legs of my table. There's your starting place. The second place is I would say to people and to leaders. Think of your emotions as being like the lights on the dashboard of the car. When you turn on the ignition in your car, say if the little fuel tank gauge comes on, it tells you that you need to get to Applegreen or Circle K or wherever you get your fuel. And there's nothing inherently right or wrong about that little sort of sign on your dashboard. It just tells you what needs your attention. If you as a leader, as a person, can remember that your emotions tell you what needs your attention. Is my life overwhelmed with too much stuff? Am I lonely because I'm isolated? I have no stuff or no people or no connections. What is it that your feelings, your emotional world, is trying to tell you? If you can look at your emotions as being signals or signs or signposts towards something that needs your attention. You will tune into your mental health in a way that will be useful for you as a person, which will be useful for you as a leader. So 4 legs of the table, and, um, really sort of tune into that— what are my emotions telling me needs my attention in my own life? I think those 2 things would be great things for you to do as a leader.

I love that. So practical, just so simple. And so, and like, like many things, isn't it, that they are so simple and so practical most of the time, but we just don't do them. You know, common sense. Funny thing is, it's not very common, is it?

100%. We— and also, I think what happens is we, we tend to compare. So we look at other people and we think, well, they have their stuff together, or they can cope, or they're okay and I'm not. And one of the things I often say to people is, how do you know?

How—

when did you ever get inside their head? You don't get inside their head. You don't know. I don't know. We don't know what's inside somebody's head. We don't know what they have gotten to, to get to the place they are. We just see the end product that they're showing at that time. So there's a lovely image online of— it's a mirror, and in the mirror there's a reflection of an apple, and it's a bright, shiny red apple, like a Snow White sort of apple. But— and we look at it and we think, that's beautiful. But we can see from our vantage point the back of the apple. Not just what's in the mirror. And the back of the apple has a bite taken out of it and it's oxidized. So what happens there is that shows— that's the kind of— indicates what we do in life. We see the front of people's apple, we don't see the bite around the back of the apple. And I think it's really important to recognize that, you know, in life we just need to not compare our insides to somebody else's outside. Just allow yourself to feel what you feel and understand that it's normal and that it's okay to feel these things. And if you're a leader, allow people to feel what they feel. You know, most people— and I, I see this in the sporting space first— if you look at the papers or the pundits on a Monday after a sporting match at the weekend, you know, often players are slated for different things they've done on a pitch or in a pool or on a court or wherever. But as I often say, no athlete gets up in the morning to say, I am going to go and make an unholy mess of this. I'm going to let myself down, my teammates down, my country down, my county down. Nobody does that. Human beings with the best of intent, and sometimes it just doesn't hit the mark. And so there's something important there in terms of allowing ourselves to be human beings and to to err and to learn and to grow from that. And I think that whole space is really good for your mental health— not expecting this polished, shiny Instagram, you know, perfect kind of life, because it's just rubbish. It doesn't exist. And it's not good for your mental health thinking that space. I don't know why I ended up saying that to you. I've distracted myself with my tangent, but I still think it's probably an okay But no, that permission piece is fundamentally important.

I find myself talking about that very early on in the pandemic on this podcast, actually, when I said I'd gone through a bit of, well, okay, well, we're stuck 2K from our house, but I've got a nice house with a nice garden and a nice area with a nice cabin at the back of the garden where I can work. And I really don't have the right to moan about anything or be upset about anything or have depression or anxiety or anything because look at all the things that I've got compared to what other people might have. And it's It's easy to do that today by maybe going, "Well, geez, I'm not in Ukraine right now, so I'm doing okay. What do I have to complain about?" It's not fair to hold yourself to somebody else's account. It doesn't matter how much better or worse it is, it's not fair. Hold yourself to your own account. That's, I suppose, where I got to on my journey.

That makes so much sense. And that's a great place to have gotten to because what you've done there is you've allowed for your feelings. If you think of a few years ago in Thailand, was, um, the football team got trapped in a cave system when the rains came down. And at one stage in the early days, there was talk of, you know, would they leave them down there and send supplies down? But eventually the rescuers decided they were going to, um, sedate the team, the young boys, and they strapped them to divers and took them out through the underwater tunnels. There was only one way out for that team, as it turned out. There is only one way out for your feelings. You've got to allow and accept and validate them and understand them. It takes us time sometimes to get there, but we do need to get to a space where we can say, I can understand how I can feel this way, and to not judge it or diminish it or try and numb it with substance, but instead to say, if others down the road are in a worse position objectively than me, financially or job-wise or health-wise or whatever, I'm still allowed to have these worries. And I think that's a huge thing. So that permission for yourself in that space is massive and a huge help to us mentally.

And actually, just on that whole— the Thailand cave thing, listeners, if you've got Amazon Prime, I think it is, or Netflix, one of the two, The Rescue— oh my God— feature-length documentary about that rescue. It is, it is mind-boggling what those guys did down there. Just, just mind-boggling. I'll leave that there. I'll let you watch it. Niamh, we could talk about this stuff all week. Tony was right. You are amazing. I'm so glad I had you on. It's been absolutely brilliant. I'm going to ask you one question to finish up, which is this. What's your one piece of advice to listeners? Just one thing that they could perhaps do to protect and strengthen their own mental health?

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. So whatever it is that's going on in your life that has you feeling anxious or depressed or down or burnt out or anything like that, most times it tends to be there's something that's gone on in your life and your emotional response is actually a normal response because whatever you're dealing with is, is not normal for you or is not okay for you or is not aligned with your life for you. Allow yourself that. An abnormal reaction— this is from Viktor Frankl— an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Allow yourself those feelings because then it allows us to get to a place of, all right then, what am I going to do about it? What changes might I need to make in my life internally or externally? But allow those feelings first. That's the biggest thing you can do for yourself.

Brilliant. Before we go, Niamh, where can people get in touch with you or find out more about you and what you do?

My website is niamhfitzpatrickpsychology.ie. I've written a book on grief called Tell Me the Truth About Loss, and I'm on Twitter @nfitzpsychology.

Brilliant stuff. Listen, it has been a joy talking to you. I think we've covered some brilliant stuff there, and I think some of the advice that you've given has been absolutely golden. And just practical and just stuff that people can take away and put in place tomorrow if they choose to. So, Niamh, thank you very much for coming on the pod today. I really, really appreciate your time. You're welcome. Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.