Do your colleagues and yourself a favor - take therapy!

“Hey, do you have 20 mins for a quick coffee chat? I’d love to learn more about the industry, and the product space”, I remember reaching out to this Senior Leader on LinkedIn during my MBA days. I was ecstatic to get on a call with them, and learn more about their product space and their role. In less than five minutes, my excitement fell out of the window, “Listen, I am not going to tell you exactly what my role is, just so that you can write a convincing cover letter. You need to do more research”. I was taken aback by the uncalled rudeness. They had similar responses to my follow-up questions – curt, uninterested, and rude. I cut the conversation short, thanked them for their time, and asked if they had any parting advice. They responded, “Well, talk to more people…just as you’re doing right now.” Ironically, in that moment, they realized that I was just doing my job, and researching more about my interested product space. I almost heard an unsaid apology, as they added, “You know, if you caught me on a better day, this conversation would have been more helpful for you. It’s been a tough day.”

I sighed. I should have been enraged, but instead, I felt sorry for all the weight they had been carrying. I wished they had a healthier mechanism to process their emotions, so that they didn’t have to take it out on random B-school students who reached out for a coffee-chat. I wish they invested in therapy.

I have worked with multiple companies over several years now, and I would be lying if I said that I did not witness multiple misdirected emotional outbreaks, miscommunication, and absolute lack of empathy. I have always wondered how differently those situations may have landed if the people involved did the emotional labor to reflect on their shortcomings, embraced other people’s perspectives, paused, and stood up for themselves in emotionally healthier ways. I wish more people considered therapy.

We often talk about delineating emotions from work, but I challenge that. How can we spend more than 50% of our waking time invested in work, and continue being detached from it? How can we be passionate about our work, yet emotionally removed from it? More importantly, why do we want that?

We often talk about emotions as if it were a dirty word. Emotions are powerful, and push us to succeed, to thrive. Instead, we should focus on building healthier mechanisms to process our emotions, and lead with more empathy and understanding.

I am not a mental health expert, but I have invested considerable time and energy in taking therapy and coaching, to share a thing or two about it. There is so much taboo around therapy that people often wait for something ‘traumatic’ enough to happen to them to feel ‘justified’ for taking therapy. The taboo around therapy carries into gender stereotypes as well, with fewer men feeling comfortable ‘seeking help’ compared to women. In the United States, women are twice as likely as men to have received mental health treatment(counselling or prescription medication). With men constituting 70% of senior leadership in workspaces, I wonder what these statistics mean for the emotional intelligence of our organizations.

Research indicates that employee mental health is positively associated with job performance, and that more emotionally intelligent leaders tend to have teams with higher work satisfaction. While therapy is definitely not a one remedy cure-all for handling organizational dynamics at work, it is definitely a powerful tool to sharpen our emotional intelligence and resilience. Therapy to me is dedicated time to unwind, breathe, celebrate little victories, understand other people’s point of view, and build the framework for my life. We spend so much time building the vision, and multiple-year plans for our work; but oftentimes don’t pause to build that for ourselves.

I fully understand that therapy is a privilege, and is not accessible to everyone. However, I urge those who can access it to move it higher in their priority list. You might realize that it’s not for you, and then, by all means throw it away after trying. Investing in your emotional growth is not just a favor to yourself but to those around you. “People in therapy are often in therapy to deal with people in their lives who won’t go to therapy!”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on mental health, and whether mental health discourse belongs in workplaces.