LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Maura Erin's Mealy, and this is the Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health and work, and how we can all do both better.

Adam Baru is CEO and founder of the tech company Sweet Centric, a consulting agency that is a

NetSuite solution provider. But like so many of us, he also has a side hustle. Hustle isn't quite the

right word, though, because Adam's mission in that endeavor is really about improving how we work

and making space for CEOs to be more

vulnerable. Adam is reframing the stereotype of what he calls a CEO type guy sounds like, and you'll

love hearing about his journey from Park Ranger to wedding photographer to now founder and CEO,

and also the imposter syndrome that accompanied him for a long time.

On his podcast called The Change, he talks with servant leaders,

people looking to normalize mental health conversations.

He started this work in part because he finally learned to face a pretty serious past childhood trauma,

something he'd ignored for much of his life. We'll talk about that, so a quick warning for those

listening that this episode does briefly include mention of child sexual abuse. I was honored to

speak with Adam as he shared his personal and professional story, and I started by asking him if he had always wanted to be a CEO.

No, no, and that's a good question.

So my degree in college is in environmental studies, and I wanted to be a park ranger. In fact, I worked

for the National Park Service when I was working on my master's degree. And so that was kind of

the track that, you know, I saw for myself. But what happened was I ended up, you know, having,

you know, now my oldest daughter, who's almost 23, and, you know, I had some

computer skills from my job with the park service and kind of leverage that to, you know,

now that I had a kid, I had to get a real job, right? So that's how I started in tech. And,

...