 Hau, kao, meblumau ysahuq i aturualu. Anatura, teka-panausiai jūtuniai. Uteniai ti eka pabaion. A gata, teka-panausiai tekebi, maniai hanitibata... Ma, betu, aga tata i maatia ti? Pa, betu, mae i raha'i i niri? Apo, betu, mae i raha'i i niri? Apo, betu, i niri? Pai, betu, i nini. Pai, betu, i niri. Pai, betu, i niri. Apo, betu, i niri. Apo, betu, i niri. Apo, betu, i niri. I mean it's not because they've got mental illness. They're just irritating people. So, it doesn't turn you into a saint. You do learn life skills through having difficult experiences and recovering from them. I mean it could be an experience of being made redundant from a big job or losing your love one. Or going through a socially shaming experience. or having another kind of, you know, or surviving cancer or something like that, these experiences shape us and they can enable us to develop ourselves in the ways that I expressed in particular and to bring that into the workplace and if we bring it into the workplace we benefit the customers, we benefit our work colleagues and we benefit the organisation. Great. And how, what would you say to managers, for example, because one of the fears that managers usually bring to training is they ask me, Pedro, how do we manage people with a mental health issue because we're having lots of problems that are coming up for people with mental health issues in the workplace? What would you say to somebody if they ask you that question? There's a kind of a fear of, oh, you know, they've got a mental health problem. I've got to, you know, I don't know what to say to them or I don't know how to approach them. Look, you manage, how do these people manage people who are in the throes of grief or who are really angry because their wife kicked them out or who are really sad because they've had a terrible illness diagnosis? I don't think the rules are very different for people who have experience of mental health problems or who are going through difficulties at the time. And I think one of the great problems is that what we've tended to do with extreme human conditions in the last 200 years is the community said, oh, look, we'll create a bunch of professionals to look after those people and we'll put them in institutions so that we don't have to deal with them. And so I think that often people who are employers get people with, say, mental health problems in the workplace and they kind of feel, well, I need an expert to deal with someone because they've got a label. They might have bipolar or schizophrenia or some sort of label and they feel very underconfident about dealing with them. Look, my advice is to deal with people the same way you deal with any other employers or employees who are in trouble and don't be scared. Okay, so what kind of, do you think their flexible support are needed for people with a mental health problem? Yeah, sometimes there are, look, this flexible support needed for mothers who have to pick up their children at three o'clock. Everyone who comes into the workforce may need flexible support. Now someone who experiences mental health problems while they're on the job may need them as flexible support as well. But I remember once listening to this brilliant talk by a woman in a wheelchair and she said, look, when I go to work, nobody has to provide me with a chair because I bring my own. And if you're blind, nobody has to provide me with lights because I can't see anyway. And so let's stop thinking about these flexible supports as something special that people with a label of mental illness need. There are times in our lives as workers when we all need flexible supports. It may be that we've got, you know, we've got a niggling, ongoing physical complaint. It may be that we've got a dependent child at home who's sick. It may be that we have some episodes of mental health problems. There may be a whole bunch of reasons for it. And we need to normalise the fact that sometimes people with mental health problems do need flexible supports and just think, well, this is just something that employers need to have flexibility about for their whole workforce. Right. So you have a very normalising approach and insight into mental health at work. Yeah, I think the more kind of normalising, the more we normalise it, the more relaxed everyone will be about it because, you know, and the more we sort of think of people with mental illness in the workplace as a special category, the more problems we're going to create. Now, I don't mean to say that there are some particular supports that people with mental health problems may need more than other people in the workplace. I mean, one is if you're on a bunch of medication, you might, and they make you doffy in the morning, you might want to start work later. Some people who hear voices find extraneous noise really difficult, so they might want to have a quiet workspace. Sometimes people need flexible sick leave because, you know, they might have periods where they have to be off work or they might want to deal with a role in some of their other leave into their sick leave or something like that. There are some accommodations. It's just like the parent who has to pick up their child who doesn't have any childcare after school. The typical accommodation would be, well, I need to leave school at about 2 in the afternoon. In your opinion, because you've been dealing with this for 30 years, you've been working for 30 years and highly productive, I would say, what are the coping strategies that a person with mental health issues could tap into in order to make their work experience better? So, really, I can only talk from my own experience there because I think it is different for different people. What strategies have I... Well, you know, one strategy I've had is, I don't want to work for a boss because I don't do very well being told what to do. So, I've decided to be self-employed and I've just traded income anxiety for office politics, but that's okay. But that, again, that's really got nothing to do with the fact that I had a mental health problem. That's just because of my personality. So, but I think there is, with all human beings, maybe a bit more so with people who've had mental health problems, but we need to watch out for stress. So, how do we watch out for stress? Well, we recognise signs that we're getting into stress. We ease back when we're getting really tired or scratchy or kind of anxious. We might tell our employer that, oh, look, this is all getting a bit much for me. I just need to slow down a bit. It's having the, in the workplace, it's about having the ability not only to say to yourself what I need, but to be able to say that to your employer. I think it's very important. And the whole issue of disclosure in the workplace is quite a big thing for people who have been labelled with mental health problems because they're worried about discrimination. That's a question that comes up in training a lot too. Yeah, yeah. So, I think there's a lot, there's a lot we can do. We, and, you know, that whole experience of going through episodes of mental distress does teach you a lot about, well, what can I deal with in life and what can't I? So, even by the time people have come to the workplace, they've probably got a pretty good idea of what, you know, what they can take and what they can't take and probably a better idea than a lot of other workers.