In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Sarah Buino, a psychotherapist, former group practice owner, and nationally recognized voice on wounded healer dynamics in the helping professions. Peer support is one of the most powerful tools available to any organization trying to build psychological safety at scale: it is accessible, human, and uniquely effective at reaching people who would never walk into a therapist's office. But peer support programs have a lifecycle that most organizations do not plan for, and when they fail, it is almost always the most compassionate, most committed helpers who absorb the damage.The episode opens with a pattern I have seen repeatedly across employers, unions, and professional associations: the honeymoon phase. People volunteer to be peer supporters, bring lived experience and genuine care, make meaningful connections, and for a while everything works beautifully. Then, somewhere between six and twelve months in, the emotional labor accumulates. Helpers who came in wanting to serve begin to carry things that are not theirs to carry. Without clear role definition, triage systems, boundary-setting guidance, and structured support of their own, the most dedicated peer supporters are also the most vulnerable to burnout, secondary trauma, and eventually exit from the program.Sarah and I cover the two structural guardrails every program needs before launch: defining the role with precision before a crisis forces the issue, and building support infrastructure for the supporters themselves from day one. The episode is short, practical, and directly applicable to any organization at any stage of peer support program development, whether they are considering a program, in the honeymoon phase, or managing the aftermath of a program that burned out its volunteers.For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/headspace/106

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Saul Malek, a speaker, educator, and problem gambling prevention advocate who travels the world delivering practical programs to workplaces, behavioral health organizations, and schools. Saul brings both professional expertise and deep personal credibility: he developed a gambling addiction as a young college student and has channeled that lived experience into a prevention mission that is, as I note in the episode, reaching people at genuine scale.The framing of this episode matters immediately: sports betting does not wait until the workday ends. It sits in an employee's pocket during meetings, on break, during overnight shifts, and in company vehicles. What presents as distracted phone use, exhaustion, financial stress, irritability, or declining performance may sometimes be connected to a gambling problem that no one in the workplace has thought to ask about. Legal sports wagering in the United States grew from $4.9 billion in 2017 to more than $121 billion in 2023, with 94% of those wagers placed online. Researchers have also documented a 23% increase above expected levels in online searches for gambling-addiction help following the expansion of legal sportsbooks. This is not a fringe concern. It is an escalating, largely invisible workplace wellbeing risk. Saul is not anti-gambling. He is pro-education. The episode is not about policing employees' private lives. It is about equipping workplaces to name a risk that is systematically absent from most wellbeing strategies, recognize the behavioral patterns that may signal distress, and create a credible path to confidential, specialized support before a crisis forces the issue. The practical checklist, manager scripts, and cultural audit items in this episode give any employer something concrete to do on Monday. For more information on this episode go to When the Bet Comes to Work: What Employers Need to Know About Problem Gambling — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Jennifer Moffett, a senior technology leader who has spent over 22 years at PayPal, a national suicide prevention advocate with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a volunteer leader on the Nebraska State Suicide Prevention Coalition, and a suicide loss survivor. We are covering one of the least-discussed parts of the mental health continuum at work: not identification, not crisis intervention, but what happens after. How do you return someone to work from mental health leave in a way that supports recovery rather than simply declaring it complete?Jennifer opens with a framing I use every time I talk about this with employers: silence is not neutral. When a manager is so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they say almost nothing, the employee reads that silence as avoidance, judgment, or indifference. The manager's discomfort becomes the employee's burden. Jennifer's 22 years at PayPal, and the deeply personal story of how they handled her own leave two weeks into her career after losing her stepfather to suicide, give her a grounded, firsthand view of what good reintegration looks like and what it produces in terms of loyalty, longevity, and genuine belonging.The episode is short, practical, and packed with things any manager can do next week. It covers how to prepare before the employee walks back in, how to have the return conversation humanely, how to co-create the reintegration plan rather than handing one down, how to manage the disclosure conversation with consent and collaboration at the center, and how to hold accountability without sacrificing the dignity that makes recovery possible in the first place. For more information on this episode go to Silence Is Not Neutral: How to Welcome Employees Back From Mental Health Leave With Dignity — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with John Brown, a licensed marriage and family therapist, executive coach, and sports psychology specialist who works with early-career professionals, faculty, and athletes at Stanford University and in private practice. John brings a rare combination of backgrounds: years in corporate leadership at Apple, graduate training in therapy, and a practice that sits at the intersection of performance, identity, and wellbeing. Our conversation centers on one of the most urgent and misunderstood dynamics in the modern workplace: what happens to early-career high performers when the systems designed to support them quietly overload them instead. The opening framing of this episode matters: having a strong professional identity is genuinely protective. Research shows it reduces burnout, anxiety, and depression. But when professional identity becomes the only identity, when who I am collapses entirely into what I do, the same dynamic that drove success becomes a vulnerability. We see it in medicine, where identity misalignment produces anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. We see it in elite athletics, where overidentification makes transitions and setbacks hit harder. And we see it in the workplace, where the push-push-push culture targets the most motivated and capable employees first. John's practical experience as a manager at Apple and as a therapist working with the next generation of professionals gives him a clear-eyed view of what early-career employees actually need from their workplaces, and what they are no longer willing to tolerate. The episode delivers two immediately actionable takeaways for anyone managing early-career talent: shifting from the we to the me, and building relationships as the core infrastructure of team performance. For more information on this episode go to Are You What You Do? Supporting Early-Career High Performers Before They Burn Out — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Sonya Bohmann, Executive Director of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention (CIASP), an organization that has quietly become one of the most effective workplace mental health movements in the country. The opening framing of this episode is one I stand behind completely: construction, not tech, not healthcare, not corporate America, has led the way on workplace mental health. It has done something different, making mental health culturally relevant, tackling the hard stuff head-on, and figuring out how to scale it in ways that other industries have not yet managed.Sonya came into this role through a remarkable convergence of lived experience and professional calling. A sibling loss survivor who spent over a decade in construction leadership, she encountered the CIASP job posting twice in the same LinkedIn session and took it as a sign from the universe. Three years into what she describes as her dream job, she has transformed CIASP from a promising initiative into a model that other high-risk industries, oil and gas, manufacturing, mining, healthcare, and the service sector, are now looking to replicate.The episode delivers two immediately actionable takeaways for any organization looking to move beyond the performative wellness calendar and build something real: how to shift from awareness to genuine action at the individual, team, organizational, and industry level; and how to make mental health a 12-month-a-year conversation that doesn't rely on awareness month campaigns or crisis data alone. Sonya also shares the single simplest action anyone can take today to signal allyship and connect colleagues to help, an idea so low-barrier and high-impact it landed as the episode's mic-drop moment. For more information on this episode go to From Awareness to Action: How Construction Is Leading the Way on Workplace Mental Health — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Dr. Virna Little, co-founder and CEO of Zero Overdose, a national initiative bringing overdose safety planning into workplaces, healthcare systems, schools, and communities. Dr. Little and I share a long history through the Zero Suicide Initiative, which aspires to eliminate suicide deaths in healthcare systems. This episode brings that same upstream, systems-level thinking to one of the most urgent and underaddressed safety crises in high-risk industries: overdose. The statistics I share in the opening of this episode stopped my construction clients in their tracks, and they stop me every time: for every 1,000 people who die on a construction job site from physical injuries, approximately 5,000 to 6,000 are dying by suicide, and over 11,000 are dying from overdose. Overdose deaths are outpacing suicide deaths in the construction industry, and yet most workplace safety cultures still treat overdose as a reactive crisis, equipping job sites with Narcan but doing little to prevent the event that requires it. Dr. Little's work with Zero Overdose begins where Narcan ends. Working in rural community health centers, she saw firsthand how workplace injuries, particularly in construction, fishing, and law enforcement, created pathways into opioid dependence that were never adequately planned for at the point of injury. The episode delivers two concrete, immediately actionable takeaways: an overdose safety planning framework that can be integrated into any existing workplace safety culture, and a clear articulation of what leadership must do to make that planning real rather than aspirational. For more information on this episode go to Beyond Narcan: How to Build Overdose Prevention Into Your Workplace Safety Culture — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Alicia Scovill, President of Scovill Construction & Contracting Services, a veteran herself, and a construction workplace mental health expert. We open with a sobering reality: veterans in the United States die by suicide at rates higher than the general population, and most are working at the time of their death, or have immediate family members who are working. That makes the workplace one of the most cross-cutting systems available for veteran suicide prevention, and yet most organizations have no real strategy beyond hiring veterans and calling it a day.Alicia and I connected through the Construction Mental Health and Wellbeing Summit, where we co-chaired a leadership roundtable on construction mental health. In this episode, Alicia brings a unique combination of perspectives to the table: her own military background, her experience building and running a construction business, and the firsthand vantage point of having seen, from inside multiple organizations, the well-intentioned ways companies unintentionally cause harm to their veteran employees.The core argument of the episode is that veteran mental health at work is rarely about trauma or transition in the way most people assume. More often, it is about systems failures: unclear accountability, mismatched authority and responsibility, inconsistent communication, and the absence of the structure that helped many veterans survive and thrive in the military. Alicia and I walk through concrete examples, including a construction-specific scenario involving an estimator and a project manager, to illustrate exactly how these systems gaps create burnout and isolation for veteran employees, even when those employees appear to be high performers on the surface. For more information on this episode go to Systems, Not Slogans: What It Actually Takes to Build a Veteran-Friendly Workplace — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Mitch Wallis, the founder of Heart on My Sleeve and one of the world's leading experts on connection capability in the workplace. Mitch has worked with over 200 companies, most of them Fortune 500, across four continents, including Microsoft, KPMG, Lend Lease, and American Express, training more than 10,000 leaders on how to navigate emotional conversations without crossing into therapy territory. His work is rooted in a simple but radical thesis: connection is a capability (not a personality trait) and organizations that build it systematically will outperform those that don't. Mitch brings deep personal credibility to the work. First diagnosed with complex OCD at age seven, he later experienced depersonalization, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and nearly lost his life to mental ill health. His description of depersonalization - a condition he lived with undiagnosed for nearly 15 years - is one of the most clear and compassionate explanations of the experience available in a leadership context. It is also a reminder that the people sitting in your meetings may be navigating experiences far more complex and disabling than "stress and burnout."The episode delivers two concrete frameworks: the five-step ELSA-B model (Engage, Listen, Safety, Action, Boundaries) for navigating high-stakes emotional conversations at work, and the concept of "crossing the chasm" - the single mindset shift that separates managers who resent the people side of their role from leaders who understand it is the role. Mitch's core argument lands hard: 80% of a people manager's job is the relationship. The technical work is the other 20%. Until leaders internalize that ratio, they will keep doing the wrong things when their people need them most. For more information on this episode go to Stop Fixing, Start Leading: How to Show Up in Your Team's Hardest Moments — Dr. Sally

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sat down with psychologist, author, and organizational consultant Dr. Abby Medcalf who spent years working with executives in mergers and acquisitions to address substance use at the leadership level. The conversation centers on one of the most common and least-discussed dynamics in high-performance workplaces: leaders who are quietly reconsidering their relationship with alcohol and don't know why their efforts to change keep failing.Dr. Abby's own story adds weight to the conversation. She came into this work through recovery from heroin addiction in her early years, which led her from a planned legal career into counseling psychology, and ultimately into a PhD in organizational psychology. That combination of lived experience with addiction plus deep expertise in how organizations and leaders function, gives her a uniquely practical and compassionate lens on the culture of high-performance drinking and why it so often goes unaddressed.The centerpiece of the episode is the Motivational Wheel - a research-backed framework developed by Prochaska and DiClemente that maps how humans actually move through habit change. Dr. Abby walks through each phase (pre-contemplation, contemplation, determination, action, maintenance, and relapse) and identifies the single most common mistake leaders make when they slip back: jumping straight back to the action phase instead of returning to their why. The episode closes with a reframe that is both simple and profound: take action from inspiration, not from negative motivation. for more information on this episdoe go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/headspace/98

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Nick Freud, founder of Fellow Humans - a platform built on a simple but radical idea: the most powerful support a person can receive during a difficult transition isn't clinical expertise. It's lived experience wisdom from someone who has already walked the same path.Nick's journey into this work began when he hit clinical depression while running a successful education business and discovered firsthand how hard it is to reach out for help, even for someone who considers themselves open and authentic. What emerged from that experience was a recognition that most of us are navigating our hardest moments in unnecessary isolation, surrounded by colleagues and communities full of people who have already been through exactly what we're facing and are waiting to be asked.The conversation moves between the personal and the practical: why corporate culture systematically mutes the humanity in our working relationships, what it actually means to make someone feel seen (and why it's different from sympathy), and how leaders who model vulnerability create permission structures that ripple through entire organizations. Dr. Sally and Nick address the three objections leaders most commonly raise - "this isn't a therapy setting," "we'll be held liable," and "people will use it against me" - and offer concrete, low-barrier ways to introduce more human connection into even the most performance-driven workplace cultures. For more information on this episode go to There's No Panacea for Human: The Power of Connection During Life's Transitions at Work — Dr. Sally