Having friends at work with whom you can discuss mental health, it totally changes the game.

I'm Maura Aaron's Mealy, and this is the anxious achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health,

leadership, and work, and asks, how can we do it all better?

It's all well and good to hear the most cutting edge leadership and organizational research

about how workplaces can do better. But today, I want to see what that really looks like

in practice. In this episode, I speak to three friends who all met at work at a consumer

tech company and who over time built a bond that included being honest about

mental health. I speak with them about how they started talking about their well-being and their

mental and emotional health, how they helped each other at work through issues of burnout and

stress and challenging bosses and more.

And most important, how the three friends hope managers at all organizations would do things

differently.

The voices you'll hear here are Dan, whose voice you'll hear first.

He's the one who I sort of got to know of first, and then Zoe, who now works in finance

at a different company and Kelly. They come from different places and they didn't all work in

the same department, but they found each other and also found comfort in the open conversations

they had with each other slowly at first. They met in the office at a time when

everyone hadn't returned to work yet. And they say that that empty office environment and the

loneliness that came with the pandemic era actually helped them open up a bit more than other work

situations might have. I started the conversation by asking Dan the question.

I ask a lot of guests what his relationship was with his anxiety on the day that we spoke.

Very different than it was even two years ago, 10 years ago.

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