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Hello and welcome to our first program of 2022.

And this week we're doing something slightly different.

We're focusing on one topic with one guest.

The topic is character and the workplace.

And the guest is Nairmi Shragai, who is a psychotherapist and family

therapist, decades of experience, and who now specialises in helping businesses and their staff

with psychological problems that get in the way of work. Her book, The Man Who Mistook

His Job for His Life, was published last year. It catalogues a number of ways in which we tend to bring our emotional baggage to work

and the effect that family dynamics can have on the way we act.

Now, so much of what we succeed in doing in our working lives

and perhaps even more of what we fail to achieve is a result of character and how we work with others.

And with many of us returning to the workplace after a period of life at the Home Office,

it's a good time to reflect on the relationships we have with colleagues.

And I should say we also thought it might be good to talk about this,

as in the last two months,

politics has been dominated by questions of character, function and dysfunction in Downing Street.

Things have gone wrong there, so can a therapist tell us anything useful about how to repair an organisation?

Nairme, it is good to have you with me. I should say, by the way,

in the book, you talk about lots of cases. Reassure our listeners that you're not giving away

any patient confidential information here. That's right. Well, everybody who has been described in

my book, everybody who has agreed to participate. So they've actually collaborated in the book.

...