Workplace Wellness - with Anastasia Vinnikova, City Mental Health Alliance

Welcome to the 7th season of SheepDip - themed Workplace Wellness.

With a different expert on each show, you will be inspired by their insights and walk away with practical advice on how to create a healthy, sustainable culture for teams to thrive.

Our first guest is Anastasia Vinnikova, Head of Workplace Wellbeing at MindForward Alliance UK about which you will learn in the show.  With personal experience, as she openly shares, of mental health issues, Anastasia also volunteers much of her precious spare time as a trustee of InspireUK and a Lived Experience Advisor at Samaritans.

Since Anastasia's career background is in early careers we discuss particularly the impact of, for example, hybrid or remote working on those starting out in their careers.  And importantly how to create an environment in which they can grow and feel a sense of belonging from the outset. 

There are two downloads on this topic in the free resources section below.

If this episode prompts any questions, message us through any of our social channels or email caroline@raisingthebaa.com and we'll ensure it is answered in a future episode or privately by one of our guest experts whichever is most suitable.

Enjoy - and thank ewe for listening :-)

FREE resources (mentioned in the show):

Thriving from the Start - an open mental health network to those in their early careers (or in education and thinking about those first steps into the workforce)

The Time to Act report - into the mental health of young professionals

Connect with the speakers via LinkedIn:
Anastasia Vinnikova - Head of Workplace Wellbeing, City Mental Health Alliance
Caroline Palmer - Top Dog and co-founder, Raising the Baa
Chris Farnsworth - Head Shepherd and co-founder, Raising the Baa & author of 'Sheep Shepherd Dog - Building a Magnificent Team Around You'

What are your main team challenges and desires? Maybe we can help?
Book in a 15-minute Exploratory Call now and let's see.

Transcript

Caroline:

Hello, and welcome to Sheep Dip, the podcast from Raising the Baa: global leaders in team building, with sheep. This season is themed Workplace Wellness. It's an extremely broad topic, and with our expert guests, we'll be embracing as many aspects as possible, which will help to build a healthy and sustainable culture for teams to thrive at work. Expect to hear shepherding analogies from Chris Farnsworth, our Head Shepherd, who co-founded the business with myself, Caroline Palmer. Enjoy the show.

Caroline:

So today we are very delighted to welcome Anastasia Vinnikova, who is the Head of Workplace Wellbeing at the City Mental Health Alliance. Hi Anastasia, nice to see you again.

Anastasia:

Hi, Caroline. Hi, Chris. Lovely to be here today.

Caroline:

First and foremost, tell us a little bit about, well, perhaps a little bit about City Mental Health Alliance first and then onto you and how you came to be there, et cetera. That'd be really helpful.

Anastasia:

Sure. So City Mental Health Alliance is a not-for-profit membership organisation, and we were created very much by businesses and we work for businesses. And we were created in response to all of the human impact that we saw after the financial crisis in 2008, and understanding that actually mental health has a really firm place within the business agenda and the strategic conversations that organisations should be having about how they look after their people and what that means for their business outputs in the end. And it's a really lovely organisation to work for, our specialty essentially is bringing together opportunities for collaboration between different organisations, different businesses. We are called the City Mental Health Alliance. We're not exclusively just for organisations based in the City of London. We do kind of work nationwide. We have a global arm as well, called Mind Forward Alliance, but we offer those safe platforms for conversations, for expertise sharing, for sharing the things that have gone well, but also some of the things that could have gone better and bringing organisations together to try and make change in a very collaborative way. So recognising that, on your own for a business, it can be difficult to affect social change, but when we work together it makes it that little bit easier.

Caroline:

And what about Anastasia? How do you come to be there? What's your background?

Anastasia:

o I'm Head of Workplace Wellbeing at CMHA. I am responsible for looking at our UK programme, making sure that we are scanning the horizon for what's to come, but also being really responsive to the needs of our members when they're looking at their kind of workplace wellbeing journey. But I like to describe myself as a passionate mental health advocate who doesn't like having any spare time. So I'm engaged with kind of quite a few other mental health projects. I'm a trustee for a really lovely new charity called Inspire UK, which is looking at trying to provide access to mental health therapies in a more varied and streamlined way to people who perhaps are facing long NHS waiting lists or who perhaps don't quite meet the criteria for NHS support, but could still really benefit from access to therapy.

And I sit on a subcommittee of the Board of Samaritans, which is a leading UK suicide prevention charity. I think it's a big name that lots of people are familiar with looking at their partnerships, policy and research direction; and started my career in early careers recruitment and development, which is really personal for the conversation I know we're going to have today. Kind of navigated through City organisations and really just found a passion for mental health and wellbeing and ended up streamlining my career into more of a niche that way.

Caroline:

Mm-hmm, because you were at the Bank of England directly before City MHA, is that correct?

Anastasia:

Yes. So I was at the Bank of England for six years and for a period of that time I led their wellbeing programme there. And before that I was in the legal sector specialising in early careers recruitment and development.

Caroline:

Mm-hmm. I found it fascinating actually, that the Bank of England, which I guess we all associate, we all know it, we sort of think of it as very traditional and almost an old fashioned institution, but one that has to be there obviously by its nature. But the fact is you've been at City MHA is it a year, a year and a half?

Anastasia:

Nearly a year, yes.

Caroline:

And then you were at Bank of England directly before, so that's six years ago, so 2014 or so. But that to me seems quite a long time ago for there to be that position of sort of workplace wellbeing in a company; I think this whole area of workplace wellbeing seems to have really come into its own, wrongly or rightly, since the pandemic. I think that possibly even leapfrogged it into where it is now. Would you say Bank of England was quite forward thinking in that sense? Is it something that you championed? I mean, how did it come about that role?

Anastasia:

My kind of personal motivation for having entered the wellbeing mental health space in the first place, I mean there's obviously a moral imperative we want people to have, you know, an emotionally and psychologically healthy time at work and beyond, but I have lived experience, I have an anxiety disorder. I've suffered with depression for a long time. It's been sort of over a decade now, kind of managing these conditions. And being at the Bank of England was, you know, a really emphatic illustration for me of the power that a positive workplace can have on the mental health of the people that work there. So it was because of existing storytelling, championing networks and support frameworks that were set up at the Bank of England when I joined, that actually for the first time I felt like I could talk about what I was going through.

I went to therapy properly for the first time in kind of a meaningful way. nd it was because of work that had been done prior to my arrival and the wellbeing space there. So the Bank of England has had a mental health network, it's just celebrated its 10 year anniversary which I think is phenomenal, and the Bank of England was one of the early signatories of the time to change pledge, which was a movement early on, encouraging workplaces and different institutions to think about opening up conversations about mental health. And I think it's a really interesting kind of institution. It was a really interesting place to work because I think that there's lots of really wonderful things that happen that we don't necessarily hear about, because the big headlines are, you know, interest rates. We hear about all of that side of things, but not about more of the human side of what happens behind the scenes. Which, as I said, was really pivotal for me in being able to be open about my experiences, seeking help properly and then being able to change that into actually a career path and a way to be able to help other people as well.

Caroline:

How many people are employed at the Bank of England?

Anastasia:

Obviously I'm not there anymore, but at last count I think it's around four and a half thousand.

Caroline:

Ah, really? It's way bigger than I thought it would be.

Chris:

And a lot of bean counters.

Anastasia:

<laugh>, <laugh>.

Caroline:

You just don't have this image of a marketing department and an accounts payable department in the Bank of England, but I'm sure they do it. As we've said right at the beginning, workplace wellbeing. Huge, huge broad area. And when we've discussed it before in our previous conversations, we've talked about, well let's hone in on a particular area. And given that your early career was in early careers, we thought that would be a relevant place to start. I mean, certainly from our point of view Raising the Baa, we talk quite a lot with the people involved in early careers and actually how the conversation has moved I guess in the last couple of years has been the concern really for those people in their early career. They've started out, they've been there and I certainly, you know, going back quite a few years now, when I started out in my corporate world, it was so much of my learning I know just simply came from the people around me and going into that office every day. And obviously we never thought twice about it then. Nowadays very different story. You might not necessarily be based in an office, you could be a hundred percent remote or it could be a bit of each or whatever. I don't know, I'd be concerned about the impact that that is having on those people. I mean, what's been your experience either at City MHA or maybe previous to that, the impact on their wellbeing and their progression really in their jobs?

Anastasia:

Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting kind of area and subsection of wellbeing that I feel really strongly about. So you'll have to stop me if I talk pretty long, if I go off on a tangent. I think it's interesting having seen the perspective of going through recruitment processes, working in recruitment and development, seeing lots of candidates both at the marketing stages going to careers fairs, talking to young people and then watching them come through the recruitment process and then try and find their feet in an organisation. And I think that it is very clear that it is one of those touch points within all of those processes that happen for organisations where they touch people's lives, where there's a real potential for a psychological impact. So if we kind of think about the journey that young people go through, I want to be clear that early careers can mean different things.

So someone can be on an early career journey because they start their career later in life or they have a career transition. But I'm going to talk specifically about the younger population, but regardless of what journey they take into the workforce, there are these competitive expectations. So you go to school and you do exams and you are sort of valued on the basis of what your exam output is. And then if you go to university, it's the competition of which university do you go to, and then what kind of degree do you get? Or even if you go straight into work after school on an apprenticeship or a school leaver programme or whatever it might be, there's a recruitment process and there's lots of you. And it sort of generates this feeling that you are always expected to be the best.

You're always expected to be reaching higher and higher and the bar for what becomes the value of the person because we assigned so much to where they work and what degree they had or what grades they had at school. It's very difficult then for that to become a tunnel vision of I am defined by the work that I'm given by other people or by these achievements in a very narrow sense of the word. And so when young people enter into the workforce and they've had many years at this competitiveness, what we hear from young people that we talk to at CMHA and previously when I was working in the early career recruitment space, is that they don't feel that that competition ever stops because suddenly you've sort of made it and you feel like you have to prove that you deserve to be there.

And that gives rise to lots of phenomenon, which we are hearing more and more about, such as toxic perfectionism or imposter syndrome. And they are really difficult concepts to manage, particularly if we are not open and kind of honest about how they feel and how we've arrived at that point where young people are feeling it. And I think what's important to acknowledge is that I think there's a bit of a stereotype about young people. When you think about someone who's finished education and they've started their first few days in the workplace, we imagine, you know, fresh face, energetic, youthful people who are super resilient and ready to go the extra mile. And of course all of those things can be true, but it's also really important to acknowledge that the research also has moved on to illustrate that actually those very people are quite vulnerable to psychological challenges in the context of the workplace and beyond.

So a couple of years ago at City Mental Health Alliance, we conducted a research, we produced a report called the Time to Act report, which we did with YouGov and BUPA which suggested that 72% of young professionals had experienced poor mental health in the last year when they were surveyed. And absolutely devastatingly one in 50 had attempted suicide. So the landscape of the kind of context in which young people are operating for a variety of social and economic and personal reasons, is that they already are in a place of fragility. And I think that organisations are beginning to understand that they need to do more to protect and support those people. Again, not just because it's the right thing to do, which I think absolutely is as a moral imperative, why would you want to envisage a cohort where one in 50 have attempted suicide?

But there's also that business output in that these young people that you are developing and trying to provide them with the skills so that they can stay in your organisation or stay in your sector and become the leaders of tomorrow. And so it's so important that in those first few years we ingrain positive and human and health centric behaviours because otherwise they carry through those ideas of toxic perfectionism, imposter syndrome, whatever it might be, through into their culture of working for years to come. So it's a really challenging demographic because I think there's so much being thrown at them, but also there's lots of opportunity on the bright side for organisations actually to create a really genuine positive impact for those people. And by extension, the societies in which they live and the communities in which they operate as well.

Chris:

I must say exactly what you are saying, which is when we train a dog, you know, and you take it from a young puppy and what often people think is we take an older dog to teach the young puppy what to do. And actually that's the worst thing to do because not only do you get the old dog's bad habits, you also get the habits that the puppy now introduced. So we always start a new puppy with a fresh slate, and I've got a dog where it accidentally came out with me at lambing time and got shocked by a ewe running at it. And today, four years later, it's still having a huge effect on her life. And I think we don't realise that young stage is so important to get correct and it will last for years and years and years, even though you knew you'd try and get over it. That's the key, isn't it? And that's why a young puppy is so exciting, yet so nervous, you've got to handle it with such care.

Caroline:

They're vulnerable as well.

Anastasia:

Absolutely. So I think it really resonates that analogy with, I think sometimes in organisations there can be a tendency to give young entrants who are new to the organisation, new to the world of work, to line managers that are less experienced because I suppose, you might assume that, they're young, they don't need as much managing perhaps, but actually it's the opposite. You want somebody with the experience because they, as you say, their formative years that will inform how they behave and act in the workplace going forward. And you really want to make sure that you're instilling good habits and good behaviours, which I think young people want. But it's about having the access to the guidance and the learning to be able to fulfil that.

Caroline:

And do you feel that hybrid working, because hybrid seems to be the most common thing rather than completely remote, I know some people do but from what we are hearing anyway, all the clients I speak to, all the corporates I'm speaking to, it seems to be that there is an accepted now hybrid environment for the majority. And most typically it seems like, oh well we're all in on a Wednesday because that just helps the management sort out if we're all needed to get together, for example. So how do you think that is impacting, or do you think it's impacting on those in early careers?

Anastasia:

So I'm going to answer the question a bit of a roundabout way and I'm going to talk about the pandemic, which I know people are probably having some fatigue talking about it. But I think that it's important to note that I think the pandemic really highlighted some of the challenges and lots of different demographics and communities of course had their own individual specific challenges during the pandemic. But for young peopleI think that what we found is that, for example, they might be more likely to be those in inadequate home working situations. So perhaps a young person in a house share with six others, there's no study, there's no access to a garden, you know, if they're working from home, they're working off the edge of their bed and trying to make do in that way.

Or perhaps they were forced to move back to family homes, which for some people can be great for others can be really complicated, you know, personal dynamics to try and then navigate a new career around. And so there was this expectation somehow that young people were going to integrate into the social dynamics of the workplace whilst not actually seeing their colleagues. And I think that one of the challenges with hybrid working is that we have so many different needs within an organisation to try and accommodate. And it's important that we do as an, you know, inclusive workplaces recognising the different responsibilities and pools on time that people might have, which might mean that the hybrid model is beneficial. But for young people, I think it means that both their direct and indirect learning is really impacted because they're not having those in-person interactions, they are not overhearing conversations.

It's not easy to just say, oh, actually I'm just popping into a meeting, why don't you come in with me? It'll be really useful for you to hear this. So lots of that kind of latent learning I think is being missed. And I think what's also really interesting is that when we look at some of the phenomena that I mentioned earlier, things like imposter syndrome and toxic perfectionism; when we speak to young people at the City Mental Health Alliance, and its because we have a network called Thriving from the Start, it's a mental health community for young people that are early in their careers or coming to the end of their education that are interested in mental health topics. When we talk to members of the network, one of the things that they say is that actually things like informal feedback, frequent check-ins, having kind of that face-to-face interaction and not being afraid that if they're asking for feedback on Teams or on Zoom, that they're bothering or interrupting their colleagues, are really important for combating things like toxic perfectionism and imposter syndrome.

And so I think it's not surprising that we are hearing more about it because while organisations are finding their feet with hybrid working, those touchpoints which can mitigate some of those negative impacts are missing. And young people aren't getting the full access to them.

But also, you know, to have a think about there are ways that I think if you're not doing it in person, there are still very intentional ways that you can make it work in a hybrid setting, but you have to have the awareness and the understanding as a starting point to do that.

Caroline:

I guess in the farming world, apprentices are quite common, aren't they, in farming? And I guess again they're so used to being alongside the farmer doing and watching and that's how they're learning, isn't it? I can't imagine how that, well, I guess they are left to their own devices quite a bit from the start. Are they?

Chris:

Well, it is interesting what you say about the students, the person learning, yeah, you do, you've got to let them make their own mistakes, which is really quite hard in business. But I was thinking about what you were saying, and actually, you know, the shepherd looks at the sheep and it seems a very idyllic life. You just lean on the gate and you have a look and you just see them wandering around, you're going well they're happy. But when you really look at them, you can really see which ones are not really well. But I was really asking myself the question, who do I talk to as the shepherd? And there's two levels: One, I have to interpret what Mother Nature is up to, which is not easy at the moment, there's times of big change and we are double-guessing this all the time. Whether it's our fault or not is neither here nor there [Caroline: a bigger conversation!] but actually I have to listen to Mother Nature and to see what indications I'm going to get but equally as a shepherd I want to talk to other like-minded people, and when that was taken away i.e. having a fried breakfast because that's the way we talk [laughing] is the most important actual conversation and it was really missed when it was taken away. But now I think it's, as you rightly say, the student comes along and gets that input. We can see where we're thinking and that is so important.

Caroline:

I remember you saying that was something that really affected you, didn't it? I mean subconsciously or consciously that not being able to just bounce ideas off other people and it's all part of it, isn't it? Whatever, whatever part of the level of the career.

If you're enjoying listening to this show, we'd really appreciate your following and rating Sheep Dip wherever you tune in to podcasts. And, if you've got a burning question arising from this show, or there's a topic that you'd like us to cover, simply email me, Caroline@Raisingthebaa.com or send a message through any of our social channels.

If someone is listening thinking, gosh I've got a couple of people who are just starting or they're in their early days. What sort of things might you say to them to do to help the journey?

Anastasia:

Yeah, so I suppose without making it seem daunting, because I don't think that it has to be, I think I'd just really emphasise the important role that managers and leaders can play in the lives of young people in the workplace. Because I think it's easy to underestimate what that impact can be. And just drawing back to the Time to Act report that we launched, it was the research around young people's mental health early in their careers, 31% of young professionals said that a lack of wellbeing support from their line manager was a contributing factor to their poor mental health. And 79% said that having a supportive and approachable line manager would support their positive mental health. So they look to line managers and leaders within the organisation to impact how they're feeling.

And I think that that resonates for all of us. I'm sure we can all think about the time when we had a manager or a leader that either positively or negatively impacted the way that we experience the workplace. But I'd say in terms of practical things that managers and leaders can do, the first is training and education. I think that it is, I know that there's lots of learning available out there and I think there can be a bit of learning fatigue, particularly post pandemic, there's lots of stuff available online and you kind of don't know where to go for what, but I think that mental health training generally is something that is now very adaptable. So there is career specific mental health training, but I think that if it's something that you don't feel you have good literacy in general, mental health training can really equip you with skills that generally can make you a better business person as well.

So active listening, having supportive conversations, emotional intelligence, empathy. And I think that it's important that you have that as a basis. Because really often when we think about mental health in the workplace, yes, on occasion it will be those crisis moments where somebody is at absolute breaking point and somebody needs to make an intervention. But actually quite often it's a lot more casual than that. It's in the conversations and the check-ins that you have, it's going beyond the was your weekend all right? And saying, you know, I've noticed X, Y, Z, how are you really doing? And having the confidence to be able to ask the questions, to tease out an understanding of how somebody's doing and to be able to reciprocate as well. So when we do training and learning around the importance of openness and communication, a lot of it comes from what we communicate to others.

So your ability to role model some of those behaviours and conversations that signal to young people, it's okay to talk about this sort of thing and it's okay to then go on and seek further support. So I think, managers will feel more comfortable with that role and with that responsibility if they've got the adequate up-skilling and learning and education opportunities. And I think that the really interesting thing is that if anybody is resistant to go through training like that, one of the biggest things and one of our mantras at the City Mental Health Alliance really is this understanding that our life at work and the role of business doesn't just impact an isolated community. Because whatever you learn at work is something that you apply in your personal life.

And you may feel that maybe you think you're too distant from your graduates or your apprentices to have those conversations, but how do you know that you're not going to come home and have a family member open up for the first time or notice that a friend isn't doing so well? And so it's really valuable for not just the impact that you can have within your organisations, but also beyond. And I think the other thing to think about practically is that organisations are these machines with all of these processes and systems and touch points, which especially for larger organisations can sometimes feel very sort of mechanical, but at each point there are these moments where we are impacting on people's lives. And I think that when you think about the process that young people go through, particularly the recruitment process, there are lots of those.

And I think that there really is just something so simple as thinking about, okay, well when I have a recruitment process because I want to bring someone into the organisation, how do I behave towards those people? Do I bother sending a rejection email if I do, do I acknowledge the fact that this is a stressful and impactful thing to go through. When I offer somebody a job, do I also acknowledge it's quite scary? You know, they're thinking about making quite a life impacting decision. Am I signposting them to support that's available to them? When they join as part of the induction process, including these conversations around, this is what we've got available in the wellbeing space and this is what you can access in terms of the frameworks of support. So it's a bit about our own interactions and up-skilling ourselves, but it's also about thinking about the way that we contribute to some of those more mechanical processes. And I think humanising them a bit more, I know why they are the way they are, the volumes are massive, especially for larger organisations. But that doesn't mean that we have to lose that human touch because they are people and they are a vulnerable demographic on the other end of it.

Caroline:

And at the end of the day, however large the organisation is, in fact, the larger they are, the more teams they're going to have. And obviously, you know, we are all about teams here at Raising the Baa and creating happy, healthy, productive teams. It is down to the, by and large a manager is most likely only going to have maybe, I don't know, anywhere between 3 and 10/15 people, not going to have much bigger than that. Otherwise you can't really manage it. So, when you break it down like that, it doesn't sound quite so scary, does it? And in that 15, let's say you might just have a couple that are very new or whatever. So it is, I guess it is just about observing those people and being very tuned in and something we notice when we have our teams out to come and do what they do with us, herd sheep, we get them into a completely and utterly different environment, but I think it gives the leader a really good opportunity to see what's going on with their team in a different environment.

I'm interested to know about the whole idea of taking teams and putting them into a different environment and how that might impact on them. Do you think that's a good thing? Are there tips you could give to managers that might be thinking about that?

Anastasia:

Yeah, I mean, I think that life can be monotonous, right? And so the behaviours that we observe with regards to ourselves or with regards to teams quite often can be a response to sort of an autopilot that we go through, because we are in the same environments. And sometimes it takes really plucking yourself out of your usual and putting yourself somewhere else and your team somewhere else as well to be able to take a step back and observe the ways in which you work with other people or observe the connections that people have. And I think it provides an opportunity to not just understand where it's going well, but really to highlight perhaps where there is work that needs to be done on creating stronger links between the teams. Because we know, and there's bodies of research around the ways in which collaboration and team working leads to creativity and innovation and people can really get the best out of themselves and the people around them when they have these healthy relationships with their teams, which enable that idea sharing, that enable the challenge, that kind of allows us to refine the outputs that we are making through all of these wonderful kind of different perspectives that everybody has.

So I think it's so, so important and social wellbeing is really important as well. So if we bring it back to what do exercises, like what you guys do, mean for people, it's also that social wellbeing element. You know, we spend so much time at work, we want to have those social connections with the people that we are working with. Loneliness and poor social connections are as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day according to a 2010 study. So yeah, really really huge outcomes for your physical health as well. So, we want to make sure that we share those experiences with the people around us that we're working with because it's better for our health, but also it's better for business outputs as well.

Chris:

Having a dog is the best thing to have really. Because she's always there, isn't she? She's always there, but you do want to give her every experience, not just work because actually, you know. It is interesting, I often get asked, you know, does your dog sleep outside? And you go, yes, well she sleeps in the porch, so it's not an outside kennel, but it's comfortable. And you say, why do you keep her outside and not want to keep her in the house? Because in the house she's having that interaction with me. And actually when she goes out to her kennel, she needs the time off to chill out and sleep. And not a lot of people realise that actually when they've been that active, they need that time to sleep and to be at peace and to be in her own space. But equally she does love to come in and have that interaction. But it's a fine line because I'm always mindful that she's always listening to me. And even those little comments you make and you often don't realise those little comments she's picking up on and she hears her name and then she goes, oh, am I doing this? It's not giving her that true relaxed time, but it's great time to have with her. Does does that make sense?

Anastasia:

Absolutely. And it's fascinating because it's such a different context, I suppose, to many other people and how they might interact with their dog. But of course she's a working girl, so she needs that specific separation between work and and time to herself as well.

Chris:

I want to add in here that I don't bring the sheep in. [laughing]

Caroline:

Chris in fact when I first met him, he was living on a narrow boat. We have a canal near here. And the amount of people that said to him, where'd you keep your sheep? In a field like I always do! If you're in a house, the sheep would be in the garden? It was the most bizarre question you got.

Chris:

I got that asked a lot, you know, so how does a Shepherd live on a boat?

Anastasia:

Oh how interesting!

Chris:

But then it's everybody's perception that you are okay. And I think it's about that detail. It's when you're looking at the sheep, you've really got to look rather, like you said, you've really got to listen. And observe. And that's what's really important. It's actually being able to have that time to actually sit and watch the sheep. It's important. It's not a waste of time and it's really important to check in with your dog as well as other people. You know, that's the time. And being in the adventure zone sometimes highlights different behaviours. You know, like, why are you getting so stressed about this? Or why are you doing that? And it opens up more questions. Which is great. If you have the time to answer them.

Caroline:

And that again, I think is why it's important, as you were saying, to get people away from wherever it is. Get them out for a social occasion or whatever. And I mean, it answers different needs I guess. But anyway, I'm going to sort of start wrapping it up because we've had a lovely conversation. Now I know that there's a couple of things that we're going to, as I say, put in the show notes. Do you want to talk about those specifically just to say a little bit about what you've got to share with the listener, just in case they are interested in taking it up?

Anastasia:

Sure, so some of the things that I suggested might be interesting to follow up with after having a listen is the Time to Act report, which I've mentioned a couple of times. So this is research that City Mental Health Alliance did in conjunction with YouGov and BUPA, looking at the mental health journeys of young professionals, exploring the opportunities for businesses, what they can do to support mental health, but also highlighting unfortunately the really, you know, tragic statistics around the state of young people's mental health. The other thing which I've shared, which I hope will be of use to anyone working with young people or young people who listen to the podcast as well, is information about the Thriving from the Start network. So this is a fully open, free to join mental health network for people who are early in their careers or who might be coming to the end of their academic journeys and thinking about what those first steps into the working world might look like.

And it's a space where we share lots of the principles that City Mental Health Alliance was founded on, of collaborative story sharing, making sure that you feel that you are not alone if you are feeling some of those kind of psychological pressures of of being in the working world. But also importantly, we try and kind of ground what we share in practical advice and expertise to be able to support people to make changes for themselves that will hopefully inform healthier kind of relationships with the stress that is working life.

Caroline:

They sound really helpful to anybody listening. So as I say, links will be in the show notes and people can download those and if they want to contact you, we'll put your LinkedIn profile on the show notes if that's okay. Now I'm going to finish this off with two very kind of almost silly fun questions just to end the podcast, because I didn't put them in the notes for you, but it won't matter at all. I just wanted to know, if you hadn't gone down the career path you're now doing, what did you want to be as a child when you were seven or six or whatever, what did Anastasia want to do?

Anastasia:

Well, when I was six or seven, I wanted to be a professional ice skater. So that's actually my strange background. I was a competitive figure skater for about 20 years, retired in my early twenties. Doesn't that sound ridiculous to say that? But I think when I was much younger, I wanted to be an Olympian. Didn't quite get there, but when I was a little bit older, I really wanted to be a writer. And I hope that maybe at some point in the future I still will have my dream of sitting by a lake somewhere in the countryside and writing poetry all day long.

Caroline:

Oh, fantastic. And, what's your favourite animal and why?

Anastasia:

I love animals. Very, very happy to interact with anything big, small, slimy, scaly, furry. I have to say I had a really interesting interaction at a safari with a giant anteater and they were adorable and clever and fascinating and unique. So I don't know if they're my favourites, but I think that's the best animal interaction I've ever had.

Caroline:

Is there an animal out there in the whole wide world that you'd really like to see? Because I know I've got one in my mind, but is there one you'd really love to see?

Anastasia:

I'd quite like to see a whale. I went whale watching once and didn't see any whales.

Caroline:

Yeah. That's fairly common I think, isn't it? You look, you sit there on the boats and you just look at this water and just hoping something might appear. Thank you so much again for your time Anastasia, I think that's been really, really useful and it's brought out some interesting thoughts about sheep as well. Shepherd's perspective, always interesting. Okay, so thank you. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening today. What was your biggest takeaway or insight? Let us know on any of our social channels. We'd really love to know. Till next time. Have a baa-rilliant week!