IAM2255 – Michigan Based Therapist Helps Support Wellbeing in the Workplace

Erin Barbossa Teaser 00:00

And it was frustrating for me. It was sad for me that people would wait so long to get support. And then it became very clear to me that we don't do anything preventative for our mental health.

And that was a problem that I saw needed a solution and needed somebody to be working on it.

Intro 00:20

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs, without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:45

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Erin Barbossa of Intuissa Mental Health at Work. Erin, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Erin Barbossa 00:54

Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Gresham Harkless 00:57

I'm excited as well. And what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Erin so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

And Erin started her career in television and worked for NBC in New York and was a producer on The Oprah Show. After Oprah Show ended, she went back to school to become a therapist.

She now has a private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she specializes in leadership stress, anxiety, and depression in high functioning professionals, transition to parenting, and maternal mental health.

Erin holds a master's in social work from Loyola University in Chicago and is a full licensed clinician. Her unique background as a journalist, TV producer, and social worker allows her to bring a blend of creativity, evidence-based training, and passion to her work and well-being in the workplace.

Erin, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Erin Barbossa 01:43

I am.

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Gresham Harkless 01:45

So I wanted to hear, I guess, a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

 

Erin Barbossa 01:49

Yeah. So I get this question a lot of like, how did you go from being a producer at the Oprah Show to being a therapist and starting a business about mental health at work.

And Basically, when I worked at Oprah, I had some of the most amazing experiences. What I realized is that wherever you see high stress, you see mental health issues.

I saw that there were a lot of people struggling because it was such a high performing environment. Everyone around me was at the peak of their career.

We're also a lot of people who were struggling with their mental health. And I was really blessed. My mom from a very early point had said early and often when it comes to taking care of your mental health.

And I always had a therapist that wasn't anything strange to me, but I realized that there were a lot of people who did that was, I didn't know how progressive that was.

And it wasn't until I became a clinician myself that I realized that by the time working professionals got to my couch, they were in really rough shape.

And it was frustrating for me. It was sad for me that people would wait so long to get support. And then it became very clear to me that we don't do anything preventative for our mental health.

When you think about the dentist, we get routine professional care to make sure that there aren't issues going on with your teeth that need further addressing.

We don't do anything like that for mental health and that was a problem that I saw needed a solution and needed somebody to be working on it. And so that's when I started my company.

Gresham Harkless 03:22

Well, that's awesome that you've devoted your practice and everything that you're doing towards that.

And it makes perfect sense to me when you're saying that, you know, anybody that's usually high performing, usually they have, I guess, I don't know if I want to say ego.

But usually really are high performing because sometimes you just you know get your sleeves up and then you just start going to work on whatever but sometimes when you have issues like that a lot of people are not necessarily open to it.

And they don't talk about it because you're so high performing that you're supposed to be able to just kind of push through anything that's kind of happening.

Erin Barbossa 03:49

Exactly. And there's way too much of pushing through and powering through. And what happens is people hit brick walls and there is no way to push through or power through it.

And I don't necessarily think we need to wait till we get to a brick wall to do things to take care of our mental health preventatively and proactively.

Gresham Harkless 04:08

Yeah, and that makes sense. And I love the kind of analogy you talked about earlier between like, you know, you go to the dentist every 6 months to a year to make sure that you're getting the preventative maintenance.

Or if you're working out or whatever, you're doing those things at a regular basis. So why not do the same thing with your mental health as well.

Gresham Harkless 04:23

Absolutely. And so now I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper in here. How exactly are you serving these clients? How exactly are you helping people with their mental health?

Erin Barbossa 04:29

So What we do at Intuisa is we bring proactive mental health services, psychotherapy to the workplace.

And what we've found after I started really digging in and learning about this market is that this is a way larger problem in the business world than what we're talking about.

We're not really talking about how big of a problem it is. So Mental Health America, which is an organization, they did a big study in 2017 and they found that our economy is losing $500 billion in lost productivity.

And that's directly related to mental health. And the CDC, they say that 78% of companies say that their number 1 risk factor is stress.

And again, when you see stress, you're gonna see that those mental health problems. Because mental health problems are literally just a form of our stressors becoming more than what we can manage with our own internal resources.

So what we do and what we say is a different way to approach this is to kind of, I say it's like flu shots and tuition reimbursement, a combination of the 2, in that we are saying companies paying for their employees to get preventative mental health care is helping them in a way of preventative health.

But also helping them to learn about themselves and learn about their internal triggers and learn about how to work with people, their relational dynamics.

Which is another thing that therapy does for you when you're engaged in therapy. You're working on your relationships and how you engage with relationships and learning about your own role within your relationships.

So when you're working on something, an issue at home with your husband or your kids, you're actually learning through that about how you relate to people, which has a trickling effect into the workplace.

How you relate with your boss and your colleagues has so many similar crossovers to how you relate with your spouse and your kids.

So basically to say there's a lot of different reasons why working on your mental health is going to have a positive impact in the workplace.

Gresham Harkless 06:42

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you definitely can correct me if I'm wrong.

Seems like there's more of an awareness and a push towards companies as a whole, largely, I guess, because they probably also see the actual maybe ROI of making sure that they're taking care of their employees.

And they're making sure that they're creating good environments. They're trying to reduce the stress as you kind of spoke to because that helps out in terms of creating an overall better experience and like you said, better relationships and it manifests itself in a lot of different ways, it seems like.

Erin Barbossa 07:08

It definitely does. I mean, we see that companies are realizing that they have to put that investment number 1 in their people.

And we're finding that the companies used into ESA are companies that are really progressive in that like the names of their HR departments are you know employee success department or it's the chief people officer It's those really kind of forward thinking companies who?

See that investing in their people is the best way to help invest in their business. And this is just another way that they can do it. And the great thing is that it's actually clinically proven.

So you're investing in your people in a way that is also a health care prevention thing. So it works both ways.

You're investing in their growth and their development, but then you're also investing in making sure they don't get a problem like addiction that's going to end up costing the company a lot more in the long run.

Gresham Harkless 07:59

Exactly. Exactly. It makes sense. You know, taking a long-term approach. And you might have already touched on this. Could you tell us, I guess, a little bit, if you didn't already, about your secret sauce for yourself or even for Intuissa?

Erin Barbossa 08:09

Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about what we're doing is that it's on, you know, have you seen the hit show Billions on Showtime?

Gresham Harkless 08:18

Yes. Yes, so, okay, so… Oxarad, Bobby

Erin Barbossa 08:19

Oxarad. Yeah, exactly. So we say we use that show as an example because 1 of the main characters side by side with Bobby is Wendy Rhodes and she's a psychiatrist on the show.

And so of course it's a little Hollywood-glammed, the version of it, but really what she's doing is making sure that all those guys that work at the hedge fund are fit and ready to go.

And it's performance psychology. So we're kind of bringing that to the masses. We're saying you don't have to be a hedge fund to be able to bring psychotherapy to your employees.

And what's awesome about what Bobby, across from Bobby is Wendy Rhodes, and she is a psychiatrist. So she's doing psychotherapy with all of these employees who work at the hedge fund and she's able to give them that performance psychology piece of it.

And so what's really cool about what we're doing in Intuisa is there's no 1 out there that we know of that is marketing towards businesses directly to bring therapists to the office.

What exists right now in the marketplace are employee assistance programs, but the way they do it is you see a therapist if you have a problem, you see a coach if you don't have a problem.

And that really isn't how it should be or it doesn't have to be that way because what therapists provide someone and what a coach provides someone are 2 completely different services.

And so to provide therapy proactively isn't something that's really out there. So that is our secret sauce, the fact that we're doing this because it's not out there yet.

I mean it's out there in pop culture like on billions but it's not necessarily something that's mean stream.

Gresham Harkless 09:59

And now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Erin Barbossa 10:09

So my hack is actually not too far of switching gears. My hack is that I see a therapist. I think it's really important. And the way I say it, and it was another CEO I heard speak about this, about why she sees a therapist.

She said, I have to get good with my dark. She said, you've got to get good with your own dark shit to make sure you're not passing that on to your culture of your community at work.

If you're not aware of those triggers and aren't working with them, then you're not able to make sure that that's not seeping into the culture of your working environment.

So I think that for me, I go to therapy. I went to therapy today, actually. Today was my appointment was today. And I just think that my therapy makes such an impact on my ability to steer clear of letting my subconscious make decisions for me.

And I actually be able to make them out of a place that comes from my values and that's why I use therapy the way I do and I highly recommend it to every CEO out there.

Make sure you're in therapy so that you are making decisions from that place.

Gresham Harkless 11:14

Yep and that makes perfect sense and it's good to hear of course that you're, I guess, pun intended taking your own medicine because it's important to definitely do that. And you can see the impact, so you can speak to others on the impact that they can see as well.

So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, and this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Erin Barbossa 11:34

Well, I would say to get comfortable with failure and rejection. I think that we don't want to talk about that if I even say those words. We talk a big game about like, oh yeah, fail forward and everybody, oh, you better get used to rejection because that's just part of the game.

But we don't really talk about how it makes us feel. We don't talk about how we might take home that feelings of rejection. And I think that, you know, digging into what that actually feels like to fail is something that I think I needed to start doing sooner than I did.

But now that I am, I think that it made a really big impact.

Gresham Harkless 12:14

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And, you know, I think everybody kind of, you know, struggles with that.

You kind of understand, because if you hear it enough that, you know, fail forward as you say, or failure is the next step to success, but when you're actually failing, or you go through some difficult time, it actually sucks a lot.

So sometimes people don't really talk about like that emotional feeling or all the things that manifest themselves as a result of it. So a lot, it's great that you're kind of devoting your practice and everything you're doing to kind of help people out.

And with those kinds of maybe emotional things that happen along as a result of failure or mistakes or things like that.

Erin Barbossa 12:45

Yep, absolutely. And mistakes too. I think that right along with failure, you know, making a mistake, it can kind of eat at you if you, if you aren't able to really process what the emotions are that, you know, whether it's helplessness or powerlessness or just sad, those things, they need space to move through you. And I think that's really important. Part of my practice is doing that for myself.

Gresham Harkless 13:10

Makes perfect sense. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition for what it means to be a CEO.

And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show, but Erin, I want to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Erin Barbossa 13:22

So I am not even comfortable with the title. I will tell you that right away. I actually, I am like not, I don't when people use that title or it's on our website. And I'm definitely, my team definitely sees me and refers to me that way.

But it's still kind of sinking in that I have that to me it means responsibility. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of autonomy in being able to, and I feel really it's a privilege to be able to put my energy where I want it to be.

I get to make the decision about that and waking up every day and knowing that today I get to put my energy where I want it to be, whether it's I get to do something for my kids because my job allows me to schedule myself the way I need to and I get to schedule that as needed.

Or if it's something that I'm doing for work, I know it's because I want to be doing it and because it needs to happen. And so I think it's a privilege to have that, the ability to throttle your work like that.

Gresham Harkless 14:24

Yeah, definitely. I would definitely agree with that. And I think that's a good perspective. And I appreciate you for sharing that with us. And Erin, I truly appreciate you again for taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there is anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and then also how best it can get a hold of you.

Erin Barbossa 14:40

Yeah, so I think what I would want to make sure the listeners know is that I just would want people to walk away thinking about the fact that investing in your psychological health is an investment in your company.

I can't stress enough that that part about our relational dynamic that we what happens in therapy and what you learn about about yourself and your family beliefs and the process of the evolution that comes out of therapy personal therapy how much of an impact that can have in the workplace.

I have seen it happen where I working with clients where I'm you know both in my private practice and when I'm servicing a client for Intuisa, where things that they're discovering through the therapeutic process is rippling out in the relationships at work in ways that you would never even imagine.

People who have come to realize that the way that they interacted with their father had an impact on how they were working with all men at work. That kind of thing, it's intangible what kind of value that can bring.

And if you have multiple people within 1 work setting all doing that work, what kind of harmony you can get and what kind of productivity can come from that.

Gresham Harkless 15:57

Yes, and that makes perfect sense. It's great to have that perspective and keep that in mind because it could have a huge impact on not just the world culture.

But like you mentioned also the relationships at home and everywhere else in life. So it's important to kind of make sure you take care of that.

Erin Barbossa 16:08

Yeah, absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 16:09

And if somebody wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way they can do that?

Erin Barbossa 16:13

Oh, so anyone can email me. I'm just Erin at Intuisa, which is I-N-T-U-I-S-S-A. And yeah, Erin at Intuissa.com. Feel free to reach out. I would love to hear from you.

Gresham Harkless 16:25

Awesome. Well, we'll definitely have those links in the show notes and that information. Erin, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Erin Barbossa 16:32

Okay, wonderful. You too, Gresh.

Outro 16:31

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation  and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. 

Thank you for listening.

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