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I'm Maura Erin Smealy 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.

The fact that it's still so hard to talk about mental health in the context of work isn't so much a secret.

It's fighting against a work culture decades, if not longer, in the making.

That culture includes a lot of

stereotypes about what makes a strong leader, someone direct, forceful, unemotional, traits that are

also stereotypically associated with men. Later in the show, we'll hear from listener Darshan Patel,

a regional leader of a multinational company. He's currently based in Mexico

working for an India-based company and reached out to me to share his story of depression and

bipolar and professional success. First, though, I'm joined by Lenny Mandansa, who spent the

majority of his professional career at McKinsey, eventually becoming a senior partner and consultant.

Lenny retired from the company in 2014. Then he served as chief economic and business advisor

to California Governor Gavin Newsom. And it was Lenny's resignation from that role that caught

my attention because he resigned using one of those

cliche phrases about leaving to spend more time with his family and then went quickly public

about his struggle with anxiety and depression. Here's my conversation with Lenny.

Okay. with Lenny. A question I ask a lot of my guests is to think back to the roots of what drove them to achieve, right?

I mean, what was your path to sort of getting to the place where you would get an offer from a firm like McKinsey?

I was one of those kids, so school was relatively easy for me. I did spend a lot of time

doing things outside of the classroom, so I was an athlete in high school. What sport did you play?

Baseball. It was a left-handed junkball pitcher,

which works well in high school, but not very well after that. And then I was a writer,

...