Some of the mental health issues seem like they might be due to individual people not acting as appropriately as they should, but a lot of it seems to me to be due to the inherent stresses of trying to save the world. And if this is indeed the case, then we should probably have some sort of system in place, or training, to prepare people for these psychological stresses before they dive in.
I started musing on this idea earlier in Preparing For Ambition. In that post I focused on my anxiety as a startup founder, but I think it applies to various fields. For example, recently I came across the following excerpt from My Emotions as CEO:
I felt lonely every day – maybe not constantly, but definitely every day for 9+ years. I haven’t talked to a CEO who didn’t feel extreme loneliness. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I could be friends, even work friends, with anyone else on the team. That might have been my own baggage or a consequence of struggling to bring my whole self to work. The loneliness driver I’ve heard of most from other CEOs is the inability to talk with people about the emotional rollercoaster that’s inherent to the role.
It seems like in being a CEO, there are certain emotions that are extremely common, almost unavoidable. So then, it’d probably be a good idea to do what you can to prepare for these emotions beforehand. Maybe you can’t avoid them entirely, but I’d think that in preparing beforehand, you’d be able to mitigate them a good amount. Sorta like learning to fall before learning to run, maybe.
Some of the mental health issues seem like they might be due to individual people not acting as appropriately as they should, but a lot of it seems to me to be due to the inherent stresses of trying to save the world. And if this is indeed the case, then we should probably have some sort of system in place, or training, to prepare people for these psychological stresses before they dive in.
I started musing on this idea earlier in Preparing For Ambition. In that post I focused on my anxiety as a startup founder, but I think it applies to various fields. For example, recently I came across the following excerpt from My Emotions as CEO:
It seems like in being a CEO, there are certain emotions that are extremely common, almost unavoidable. So then, it’d probably be a good idea to do what you can to prepare for these emotions beforehand. Maybe you can’t avoid them entirely, but I’d think that in preparing beforehand, you’d be able to mitigate them a good amount. Sorta like learning to fall before learning to run, maybe.