We invited Ian Shea to the podcast in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. Ian is the Founder and CEO of I M Human, an organization that works with companies advising on how to think through the variety of creative ways to culturally support the mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being needs of their employees and implements initiatives that are relevant for them. 

Ian shares his Life Moments™, such as going to different countries for a youth exchange program, finally getting accepted at Cornell after several rejections, going to investment banking, coming out of restructuring twice, and eventually going to business school.

Ian then founded a company, Maestro Market, but that business did not work out through a series of twists and turns. And it was a traumatic and very stressful experience for him. However, that particular Life Moments™ started Ian's journey to launching I M Human. Ian shares how he shifted a potentially disastrous moment into one of tremendous growth in this episode. 

Episode Quotes:

Passionate about entrepreneurship ever since he was young

Ever since I was little, I always had started small companies, nothing major. But I was just interested in seeing what I could create on my own. And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that Rubik's cube. Instead of getting "normal jobs" like a camp counselor, I would be doing other things. 

On having different executive positions to gain knowledge about running a business

My original goal was to learn the plumbing, if you will, of the business. Or, if you think of your little learnings as a clock, I was able to go around the whole clock, get some proficiency. I had some great guidance along the way. I had some great mentors. And all along the way, mentors would drop me into particular positions because they said, if you want to go where you say you want to go, these are all valuable skill sets. You don't have to be an expert in all these areas. But you need to know just enough. So, when you're eventually managing or running a company, you have better preview on the holistic elements of the company.

On building I M Human, a “non-traditional’ business

It took many years for me to get my own voice in it to understand, and ultimately, to get confidence that, after a traditional background that I had business-wise, that I could actually be just as successful and "non-traditional." What looks very traditional now was not 10 years ago. You're trying to build a business around emotional and wellbeing was not something that was mainstream nor is talking about mental health as it relates to business. None of that was in the dialogue. And so, the benefits of that was that really forced me to come up with my own words, because if you were to read an article and you have an idea similar to that, that validates you and you can take snippets of that to make you sound better. But if there's nothing of that there, you really have to hone in. And I had a lot of support in that “hone in”. I had support from my family, my friends. I'll never forget this, I was building this, I didn't have any clue what I was doing, but I knew inside where I was going.

And so, people would say, "How are you doing? What are you doing?" I couldn't really articulate it in a confident way, which doesn't make your loved ones feel that confident in what you're doing. But they still supported me throughout.

What is I M Human

We are a trusted advisor for organizations that are at a point where they want to grow their culture to be more supportive of the mental, emotional, and spiritual being their employees. And what that entails is it really boils down to culture transformation and culture growth. 

Show Links:

• LinkedIn
• I M Human

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