Mental Health, Healing, and Leadership

0:00:12.0 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today’s episode is about mental health, and it’s not an abstract, macro view of the challenge, it’s a raw, radically honest conversation about one man’s journey through childhood trauma, depression, addiction, recovery, and to becoming a highly respected university president. The conversation is ultimately about the connection between mental health, healing, and serving others, so give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:51.5 Paul Gunther: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Paul Gunther, and I’m a managing director in Strategic Advisory Services. One of the best parts about my job is learning from the unique backgrounds and powerful experiences of higher ed leaders with whom I work. My guest today is someone with whom I’ve spoken with only briefly but haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. But this person was recently named president of the University of British Columbia, and he came to my attention somewhat by accident. I was speaking with the CFO from a flagship university who mentioned that the fall keynote presentation at EACUBO, which stands for the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officers, received a standing ovation, the first that my CFO colleague could remember witnessing at this annual gathering of senior financial administrators.

0:01:40.3 PG: Now, you might assume, as I did, that this person’s presentation focused on some clever cost strategy or innovation in the world of budgeting or accounting. You would be wrong. The focus of his remarks was on the importance of supporting mental health across the entire campus community, and in the course of his speech, he was refreshingly honest in sharing his own struggles with depression and substance use. It is truly an honor for me to introduce the president of the University of British Columbia, Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon, for a conversation on the risks we all face if we don’t make mental health a central or even a primary focus of our personal and professional lives. Benoit, welcome to Office Hours.

0:02:23.0 Benoit-Antoine Bacon: Hi, Paul. Great to be here, thanks so much for having me, and thanks for caring about mental health.

0:02:28.6 PG: Absolutely. As I was saying, I was having this conversation with the CFO, and she’s recounting this powerful experience that she had. And it just got me wondering, had you ever spoken so honestly about your struggles and the journey in front of such a large, professional gathering like you did at EACUBO?

0:02:45.6 BB: I do it regularly now, and people are always a little bit surprised that a university president would talk about mental health. And I would talk honestly about their own mental health struggles, including substance use issues, but look, these are just facts, it’s life. Life is messy. And the short story for me is, I was raised in a dysfunctional family, an unsafe home, an abusive home. My dad drank, he was fighting his own demons, he was losing that battle. It’s tragic, really. That made him tyrannical, narcissistic, dangerous. That made our living environment very dangerous. And when you spend time, years, really, in an environment like this, it has profound effects on you and your nervous system, on your mind, on the way that you interact with the world. That’s what trauma is.

0:03:47.1 BB: And then when you exit that kind of situation, you think everything’s gotta be beautiful suddenly. But it’s not because you’re conditioned, you’ve been affected in a way that makes it very, very difficult to see yourself as anything else than shameful and ineffectual, and to see the world as anything else than dangerous and unwelcoming. So for me, that took the form of a complex childhood PTSD, that took the form of chronic depression. And then of course, you seek a remedy through alcohol and other substances, which I used, I used to be ashamed of that. No longer, I’m actually quite proud of the young guy who was able to use to survive for about 20 years.

0:04:31.2 PG: Wow.

0:04:31.9 BB: And I’m in recovery. I never say I’m recovered, it’s an ongoing process. And every time I speak about mental health, what I wanna say is, many more people than you realize suffer, and know that you’re not alone in that suffering, and healing is always, always possible. So you ask, Was it the first time at EACUBO? It wasn’t, by then, I’ve been doing this for about five, six years. The first time I spoke honestly about my own journey was in the interview for the presidency of Carleton University in Ottawa.

0:05:08.1 PG: Wow.

0:05:08.8 BB: And it was a very interesting time for me. I had been healing for a number of years, but I was making particular breakthroughs around that time because I’d finally gone to therapy way too late. I waited until my late 40s to go to therapy. I would advise, people should go much earlier. You can’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes a therapist can help you through some blockages and accelerate your healing. So I was in this process of rediscovering some parts of myself, some emotional parts of myself, and was asked to interview for Carleton University. And I figured, I figured they deserve to know who they’re hiring, they deserve to know the real story of why I serve in these roles. And serving in these roles is intrinsically linked to my healing journey, in both sense, bidirectionally. Serving in these roles has helped to heal, and healing has helped me serve into these roles from a place of love, from a positive place. So I laid it all out at the interview.

0:06:17.3 BB: And the funniest thing was the face of the headhunter that brought me to the interview, when I started to speak about these things. I think he thought he was gonna lose his job. And you can imagine my surprise when Carleton called me back for a second interview, and then when they offered me the job. And I’ll always be grateful for that. I don’t think I expected to get the job, I think I was doing it as part of my healing journey, as part of the process of facing the truth because the truth will set you free.

0:06:49.3 PG: I mean, it’s just incredible, I mean, Benoit, just hearing you talk about your early experiences, hearing you talk about your journey, it’s so matter of fact now. And I can imagine that’s part of… You’ve shared this story a lot, but there’s also a ton of work that goes into just getting to that moment, where you can recount those and not get tripped up by it. But thinking about that in the context of the interview, and I’m clearly projecting here, I would’ve been terrified in that moment to have that moment of radical honesty and candor. To what extent did you feel empowered by that experience in interviewing for the job at Carleton? And how did that inform the work that you undertook there?

0:07:27.1 BB: I’m glad it sounds matter of fact, Paul. I’m really glad because that’s what it should sound like. These are just facts, and these facts don’t define you as a person, but for sure, when you’re raised under those kinds of conditions or if you’ve suffered any kind of trauma… And trauma takes many form. And my contention in that is that we all have some trauma, big T or small T, inside of ourselves, that’s Gabor Maté’s opinion as well, if you’ve read the Myth of Normal, he lays it all out. That trauma brings about a shame and a kind of omerta, a law of silence. You’re not supposed to talk about these things.

0:08:13.0 BB: For me, I was very lucky. About 10 years ago, I heard the great Canadian Olympian Clara Hughes, who won several gold medals at the Olympics. We were honoring her at a university I was working at. And instead of coming and basking in the glory of her Olympic career, she shared some stories about her own childhood and her own dad and the difficult environment that she faced. And I found myself crying in the audience, thinking, Is she really saying this? Can you really say this in public? Turns out you can, turns out you can. And every time you do it, it gets easier because every time something gets acknowledged, it has the opportunity to be released, to be freed, to be exorcised out of your body.

0:09:07.8 BB: So at first, the first times that I did this, it would take me three days to ramp up to it and three days to recover. Now it’s really more an hour to ramp up to it and an hour to recover. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am to Carleton for seeing that rather than being a weakness or a liability, to have come through that kind of lived experience could be a strength. You’ll learn a thing or two along the journey of healing. You’ll learn that everybody suffers in one way or another, that we all carry a burden, that there’s nothing more important than to walk each other home. To try to interact with others in a loving way, to try to put fear aside, and to try to see what you can build together. And on the basis of those early conversations at Carleton, we were able to put mental health and wellbeing at the very center of the strategic plan, to develop an all-encompassing mental health framework for our students, to work around a mental health at work plan for our faculty and staff. And I think that served us extraordinarily well through the pandemic and after the pandemic years. And I’m extraordinarily proud of this community. And now I’m at UBC, and we’re starting these same conversations. And I’m hopeful that they will spread through academia.

0:10:36.8 BB: Paul, maybe we can speak about this a little bit later on, but academia is very head-focused, it’s all up here with logic and reason and problem-solving. And that’s all good, but that’s not the whole experience of being human. The whole experience of being human is embodied, the whole experience of being human and to interact with each other is something that you feel in the chest, that’s something that you feel in the heart. And I think it would behoove universities, especially when I look at the new generation and the problem that they’re facing, to better rebalance the head and the heart and to better rebalance thinking and feeling or perhaps doing and just being. Are we doing our best to teach our students not only how to think, but how to be, how to be free, how to be whole, how to be fulfilled?

0:11:28.4 PG: I definitely want to pick up on some of those themes because I couldn’t agree more that the role of the university is changing. And in many ways, because of your personal experience, Carleton was ahead of its time, right? It brought that conversation to the fore. I want to detour for a second and just ask about how it changed your personal leadership. You had mentioned you had taken on leadership roles a number of times, that was part of your healing, but now when you have this really open moment and you’re coming into a presidency with that level of candor and openness, did it change your own personal leadership style or the way that you worked with your leadership team?

0:12:02.4 BB: There’s only two basic motivations in the world. There’s fear and there’s love. And the basic setting seems to be fear. I used to live in fear, fear of not being enough, fear of failure, fear of disappointing the people I loved, fear of being judged, all sorts of fear, fear, fear, fear. And when you live in fear, all your actions are geared to minimize the fear. But if you realize, if you realize that you’re living from fear… And I’m grateful to my studies in psychology and discovering the unconscious, and we can talk a little bit about that too, we think our mind is who we are, but it’s not, really. Our mind just generates thoughts based on our past, based on our conditioning, based on our trauma. And if you have the kind of past that I’ve had, all those thoughts are fear-based. So when you heal from that, you’re able to create a space, and it’s impossible to go from fearful motivations to loving motivations in one go. It’s a process. I think you have to go from fear to neutral, and that’s why quieting the mind is so important, so you can do it through prayer, you can do it through meditation, you can do it through mindfulness. You need to find a way to quiet the mind to realize that these self-generated thoughts are not who you are. And then that creates a space. And if you pay attention to that space, new forms of thoughts will emerge.

0:13:49.6 BB: For me, one of the early experiences of that is, I was a long-distance runner. A lot of former drug users become long-distance runners, so I did that for a long time. But my mental dialogue would always be, Come on, you’re so slow, you’re awful, you’re so lazy. And then one time, I was running, and my mental dialogue said, Come on, buddy, you can do it. And that just stopped me in my track. There was self-love seeping through. And then I started to feel it happen at work too. And self-love and the love of others is very much interrelated. If you’re able to love others, then you’ll love yourself. If you’re able to love yourself, you’ll love others because we’re all one ultimately. So your question is whether that’s changed my leadership. I hate to admit that I used to lead from fear, but it’s a fact, it’s a fact. Now I try to lead from love, I’m far from perfect. Sometimes you forget and you get caught right back into the old patterns. Or the world itself, by its fearful nature, snatches you out of love and into fear. And suddenly, you’re defensive and you’re protecting yourself. But then you need to recenter and reopen and restart from a perspective of love. You have to… You have to do your work every day from a perspective of love without attachment to the outcomes. You can’t control what will happen. If you try to control what happens, then you’re right back into fear.

0:15:35.6 PG: It’s so much easier said than done, right? I started a mindfulness practice a couple of years ago for many of the same reasons that you’re talking about. And it was that moment to create the space so that you could react differently. That has just been so powerful. But like many of those comments you made around the self-doubt around it, you still have those days where even your meditation doesn’t go the way that you want it to, and you’re right back even to that moment of judging yourself, so I think creating that space is such a powerful thing. But that’s why they call it a “practice,” because you’re not gonna get it right every single time, and being okay with that. But I’m curious, I want you to tell me…

0:16:12.6 BB: Can I ask you, Paul, because you mentioned mindfulness in your own practice?

0:16:14.7 PG: Yeah.

0:16:18.4 BB: I’m interested in that. People don’t always understand what mindfulness is. They think it’s to pay attention to what’s happening in your mind and then to honor that or act on it. I see it the exact other way. It really is to consciously witness what’s happening in your mind, realize that it’s not who you are…

0:16:38.9 PG: Yep, it was that practice.

0:16:40.0 BB: Acknowledge it without acting on it, and then creating that space that allows for something else to occur, because if you don’t do that, you’re just a stimulus response machine, something comes in, you respond, something comes in, you respond. And if you’re a good stimulus response machine, that will work for you and you’ll be successful and you’ll be loved. But if you’re a defective stimulus response machine because of trauma, then only bad things will follow. But you know the funny thing, Paul, is even good stimulus response machines can be very unhappy because…

0:17:13.3 PG: Well, of course, you can get praised for the outcome, that stimulus response can create great things, and so we want to celebrate those great outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that what’s behind it has always been the best process or what comes out of it. I love what you’re talking about with the practice of mindfulness, it’s that noting that they talk about, that concept of, I’m aware of this thing, I acknowledge it, but I don’t need to react to it in the moment. You bring another layer of this to this as well. And you mentioned it in passing a moment ago, but your own academic research is in neuropsychology. How has that kind of perspective helped in battling your own demons, but also guiding your efforts to establish that more robust mental health supports on campus for both faculty, staff, and students?

0:17:57.9 BB: I didn’t go into psychology by chance, I didn’t go into neuroscience by chance, I was looking for sense. When you come out of nonsense and you’re looking for sense, psychology is very promising. And I remember learning about the unconscious early on. And now it’s kind of accepted that there’s a part of ourselves that drives us from the depth, but people usually think, My conscious mind is huge and my unconscious is quite small, and I just got to keep that under wraps. It really is the opposite, the rational mind is tiny and the unconscious is enormous, unfathomable depths, and out of these depths come all our motivations and all our dreams and all our wants and all our unconscious thoughts and actions. So that’s been important for me along the way.

0:18:52.9 BB: And you mentioned being praised for outcomes, I think this ties into that quite nicely. We’re taught that we should with our rational mind set goals and achieve those goals, and then joy will flow from these outcomes. Very little joy flows from outcomes. Outcomes are rapidly forgotten, they’re very fleeting, as soon as you achieve this outcome, you’ll want the next outcome. We’re taught in other ways to externalize joy. If only I had the right car, the right girlfriend, the right job, more money, the admiration of people, then I’ll be happy. But joy, joy flows from intention. You gotta move through the world with the right intention, and that’s where the joy is in the present moment. And you gotta be agnostic as to what the best outcome is and live the adventure that if you move through the world from a loving intention without attachment to outcomes, these outcomes will be better than anything that you could have ever imagined.

0:20:05.0 PG: Again, some of the wisdom of what you are sharing seems so matter of fact, it seems so simple. And oftentimes, it is that the answer itself may be simple, but the work to get there, to accept it and to own that is incredibly difficult, it is a process, and so to me, this sense of, you almost need to hardwire something or put it into the bedrock of your belief so it becomes second nature over time. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Because your level of self-awareness and the self-examination that you have done for a leader has really built some incredibly strong bedrock or foundations for building organizational culture as well. So can you talk about how you…, how do you scale that, the thing that you do so well, how do you scale that externally into the world around you?

0:20:56.1 BB: Do you know Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Does that ring a bell?

0:21:03.1 PG: It does. I read it in college, and I can remember, it was the ethics and social justice class that I took with Royal Roads. I can remember it well. But it’s been a couple of years, remind me.

0:21:10.6 BB: I love Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; I’ve read it every decade of my life since I was 20. The first time I misunderstood it and bought myself a motorcycle. That’s not the point at all. I understand it better now. And the phrase that I always use from Pirsig is, The way to improve the world is first in your heart, and then in your head and hands, and then to work out from there. So it’s a practice, it’s a practice, it’s been going on for me for 20 years, and it’s been accelerating in recent times. What does it mean? What does it mean to heal your heart and to heal your mind? That means to unlearn what you’ve learned, that means to find a way to release the fear outta your muscles, outta your nervous system, outta your thoughts, outta your actions. It means changing your habits step by step, it means changing your patterns of thinking, it means developing routines that empower this. And you don’t have to invent this. People have been talking about this since the Bhagavad Gita, it’s a 3000-year-old text, it’s all in there. If you don’t know where to start, read the Bhagavad Gita, it will tell you. So day by day, you can release the fear. And for me, some of that fear has been released in physical form. You can actually feel it exit your muscles and your nervous system. And that does involve some crying, that does involve some screaming but it feels extraordinarily good. And then through meditation, and most of my meditations are terrible.

0:22:57.2 BB: You shouldn’t expect, oh, I’ll just have a great 4-hour perfectly centered meditation. Most of my meditations are short and fidgety and unsatisfactory, and thoughts keep intruding, but that’s okay. That’s why they call it “a practice.” And if you achieve 5 minutes of a rather quiet mind where thoughts float, but you’re able to acknowledge them and let them go, over time that will change you. It’s like going to the gym. You can’t think, I’m gonna go to the gym today, I’m gonna work out for 5 hours, and then I’ll have a beautiful physique. That’s not how it works. You gotta do it over time, consistently, you get better at it, and eventually, you realize that you’ve changed, you’ve emerged out of one way of being into a different way of being.

0:23:47.9 BB: And I consider myself blessed and so lucky that I’ve experienced both. I’m so blessed for the years of suffering and fear and unhappiness and suicidal thoughts. I’m grateful for that, I’m grateful to my father, whom I love for what he gave to me, and I’m also grateful now to be in a different world, where I can be more open and more loving and contribute, hopefully, to share the good news that healing is always possible.

0:24:20.6 BB: So you ask about organizational culture. That’s difficult. Universities have been going on for hundreds of years. There’s a fixed set of assumptions as to what universities should be and what universities should teach, and what students should learn from universities. I think over time, they have transformed themselves. Certainly, the curriculum has transformed itself profoundly, I think some of our objectives of what we give our students are also transforming themselves, but slowly. But that’s okay. It’s generational work. But our students are leading the way. They’re demanding conversations around mental health, they’re demanding conversations around wellness. And I think it would behoove us to follow their lead and see what happens if we openly talk about these topics, not only in a peripheral way in terms of mental health support but in a central way as part of our values and as part of our curriculum.

0:25:19.8 PG: I think it’s a great point, that the students are leading the way on this. I mean, we’ve certainly seen that in our own work through our mental health collaborative or even in our new partnership with Mantra Health, in pushing the boundaries and thinking about, How do we take that support to the next level? But they are asking for it, it is something that they are almost modeling back for us that we are now adjusting to and reacting to. And so I think that’s a shift that we’re all making. And your comments a moment ago about almost creating this virtuous cycle of, you do one thing better. Whether it was working out, and that creates the space for you to have a mindfulness practice. Where you talk about building these pieces together. It makes me stop and just recognize how fortunate I am to work for a company like EAB, that actively supports mental health. Not only do they provide resources like the Calm app, which is great, or have an employee resource group that normalizes it and gives space to this and models that behavior for each other. But we even look at this in terms of all levels of the organization, right?

0:26:20.1 PG: We set time apart to have conversations around psychological safety, and, How do you foster a psychologically safe environment? We set time apart to talk about things like imposter syndrome and many of those feelings that you talked about with that unconscious that is just so pervasive. How does that show up in the workplace and for ourselves? And so I think EAB does a great job on that. But I’ll admit, I think it’s really the beginning of a conversation.

0:26:46.1 PG: More and more, this is a place where we show up as a place of community. And knowing that our students are there to be that physical reminder for us, I think there’s still a lot of work we’re doing around the employee and the staff and the faculty side of mental health. As you were thinking about the culture you wanna bring from Carleton and the experiences there as you’re thinking about UBC and this new community that you’re in, what does that look like for you? What are the things that you want to bring forward in that larger community, not just with the students but with the campus as a whole?

0:27:17.0 BB: I’m really glad to hear that EAB has a wellness-oriented culture. I would guess that this is fairly recent, over the past 10 years, perhaps.

0:27:27.4 PG: Yeah.

0:27:27.5 BB: And the same is happening in universities. And that’s a tremendous change and an important and positive change. It started with specific programs to support students perhaps around 2010, and originally, it was only for people who were in crisis, but increasingly, mental health programming, wellness programming in university covers the whole spectrum of mental health. Mental health is not an on, off. You don’t have poor or good mental health, we’re all on the spectrum to different degrees at different time in different ways. And a culture of mental health, a culture of wellness is an environment that will be able to support your mental health and wellness, whether you’re currently thriving or whether you’re experiencing some stress or anxiety. Perhaps you have mild depressive disorders or larger issues, all the way to very severe cases. Can we have activities support for everyone at every time on that spectrum of mental health? That’s at the core of what a culture of mental health is.

0:28:38.8 BB: And if you’re able to do that, then it shifts the mental health and wellness conversation from the periphery, something that you need to think about only when you’re not doing well, to the center, something that you’re always conscious of, something that is always top of mind, no pun intended, and something that can be reinforced daily because if it’s top of mind for you, when we’ll talk, that will carry through in our conversation, and that will reinforce that it needs to be top of mind for me.

0:29:14.6 BB: So that’s how cultures change. And I think it is underway. I think universities are on the brink of reconceiving of their missions, not as training workers, which has been the 20th century focus, to empowering full human beings. Which is not a new idea, it’s an idea that is thousands of years old, and that’s where universities started. In Greece and even in the Middle Ages. I think in everything that we do here at UBC, we need to return to this classical idea of education not just as the acquisition of practical and critical thinking skills, these are very important, but they’re not the whole thing. But a university education should be a journey, a personal journey that leads to the expansion and refinement of our individual and shared consciousness towards being whole, towards being free, free-thinking, free-loving, fulfilled. When we graduate our students, and we graduate about 14,000 students a year here at UBC, what I want to be able to think is, Here are 14,000 students who are more whole, more free, and more fulfilled than when they came in, and they’re on their way to professional success. Yes, but they’re on their way to a self-determined life.

0:30:51.4 PG: And as you said, that’s not new, but that shift is a returning, it is a returning to a mission and to a calling that universities have had at various points in their history. But it sounds like it is that time for us to shift and to return there again, and that the university plays a key role in that.

0:31:08.9 BB: I can’t imagine anything being more important than that because if you improve mental health and wellness on campus and you make mental health and wellness central to the conversation on campus, that will spread out in society.

0:31:25.6 PG: Yeah. I can see why your speech, why your keynote at EACUBO got a standing ovation. I could personally talk about this with you for hours. Thank you for your time, thank you for your openness in sharing your insight with us. Before you go, would you mind telling us a little bit more about what you hope to accomplish at UBC in general, not just on this topic, and maybe share some of your top pieces of advice for other university leaders who might be just starting some of these conversations and this returning on their own campuses?

0:31:55.5 BB: Thank you for that, Paul. We’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground and I’m grateful that you invited me here this morning to talk about mental health and substance use. I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to lead here at UBC, it’s a remarkable institution, about 70,000 students, over 20,000 employees, to give you a sense of the scope, the total operating budget is well in excess of $3 billion a year. It’s a leading institution here in Canada and around the world, really. This is one of the places that can change the conversation nationally and this is one of the places that can influence the conversation internationally as well. And I’m really glad that I get to speak to you down in the States. That’s amazing.

0:32:48.4 BB: Certainly, mental health and wellness will always be at the center of my life personally and professionally. And I think that’s one of the things that resonated with the people who hired me here at UBC. It’s also becoming more and more evident to me that many of these social ills that we’re facing, either personally, whether it’s homelessness or child abuse, domestic violence, various forms of criminality, suicide, or as a society, whether it’s inequality or climate change indeed. These are all tied to mental health issues.

0:33:32.9 BB: People always pause when I say this. It’s always tempting to say, Well, this is one problem, mental health, and this is one problem, climate change, for example. But everything is interrelated, and it interacts in complex ways. Don’t tell me war is not a mental health issue. So as we changed ourselves, starting with our hearts and our heads and our hands, and work outwards from there, elevating our consciousness, being more loving is the only way to solve the ills that are affecting us as a society. And where is that gonna happen? It’s gonna happen in universities first, I don’t see where else. So I’m excited, I’m excited about the years ahead.

0:34:27.9 PG: Well, Benoit, thank you so much for your time. It is rare to have this type of authentic conversation in the middle of a workplace. Rare for me, sometimes, maybe less so for you because you have normalized it in such a way, because you’re such an advocate for this work. And I see it show up… Even the way that you address your campus. I was looking at your remarks for the end of the semester before you were sending students off, and you were congratulating them, but even in there, you just took a moment to acknowledge, Hey, it hasn’t all been perfect, there have been things that are hard that we’re responding to as a community. And so I see the way that you are walking that walk on a daily basis in the UBC community. Thank you so much for spending this time with us and sharing your thoughts and your insights with us. We deeply appreciate it.

0:35:10.0 BB: I always remind myself that many more people than we like to admit are not well, and that every time we speak honestly and openly about mental health and substance use, we make it more likely that people heal, that people get the help they need, and deserve to heal, and that we heal collectively as a society. Thanks so much, Paul. It’s been great.

0:35:32.6 PG: Thanks, Benoit.

0:35:33.2 BB: Thank you so much.