The below is a reprint of an article written by Andrea Kay, career consultant, author of “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers” and syndicated columnist; www.andreakay.com, video podcast: http://andreakay.com/index-pod2.htm. The article is reprinted here with permission from Andrea Kay.
By Andrea Kay ©2006

CEOs vulnerable to depression

The person I was talking to was not the confident, I-can-handle-anything, king-of-entrepreneurs I had known. His voice was cracking. He said he felt useless and empty inside. He was depressed.

It is hard to understand how those who seem to have it all can find life so empty. But “corporate executives, and especially entrepreneurs, may in fact be even more vulnerable to depression than others,” says Hara Estroff Marano in Psychology Today.

It’s not that times are suddenly tough for CEOs, who, as she says are at this moment enjoying “as much trust as a car salesman.” It’s a combination of forces from within and without that are particularly durable and deeply embedded in men.

“The very qualities that propel them to success can arise from an extremely dark place in the psyche,” Marano writes. “The tendency to build their identity on achievement makes a downturn unbearable.”

Calling the recent events of this man’s life “a downturn” is putting it mildly. He experienced four deaths in his immediate family, the closing of his business and loss of steady income. From the outside, he seemed to be coping.

This is partly what makes people like him such a distinguished species. They’re smart, charming and have extraordinary coping skills, says Marano.

“But the orientation to action that so distinguishes them can work spectacularly against them when problems arise, preventing them from getting help or even recognizing they need it, ultimately pulling them into a depression so subterranean it resists treatment.”

Other executives have come before him. In 2001, 59-year old entrepreneur Heinz Prechter, who struggled with depression for 30 years and sought treatment, committed suicide.

It’s a disease with a high level of treatment success, “if people only would recognize it and seek help,” said behavioral-health consultant Lynne DeGrande in Crain’s Detroit Business.

Executives are among the most difficult groups to reach, says the article. They’re used to being in control. They tend to think if they can’t solve their own problem, nobody else will. There’s also a stigma attached to admitting you have an emotional disorder, let alone any weakness.

I was relieved to find other executives who have depression talk openly about it — a key to getting better.

The Psychology Today article discussed Philip J. Burguieres, a successful CEO who collapsed from depression and in his search for a cure went to a mental health facility and took a slew of antidepressants that didn’t help. Then he had a chance encounter with another executive, John Sage, who had suffered from depression. Burguieres couldn’t believe it. Sage seemed so tough, so successful.

The two forged a friendship and talked regularly. Sage says he came to see that external achievements “were not the sole measure of who I was.” Depression, in part, he says, came from denying his and others’ pain, destroying the ability to have empathy.

When Burguieres and Sage first met, they didn’t think they’d ever do significant work again. Today Burguieres divides his time between running a family business and serving as vice chair of the Houston Texans football team, according to Texans Working Together. He is also chairman of the Advisory Council of the Mental Health Association of Greater Houston and an advocate of creating mental-health-friendly work practices.

He also runs a “secret network” of CEOs with depression, where they can “come out” among their own. It’s part of his cure to reach out to others, saying, “the only way out of it is by paying attention to others.”

My hope is that the man I know — or someone you know who needs help — will discover and reach out to someone like Philip Burguieres.

For resources in your community, contact the National Mental Health Association (www.nmha.org) or the National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org).

This article is written by Andrea Kay, career consultant, author of “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers” and syndicated columnist; www.andreakay.com, video podcast: http://andreakay.com/index-pod2.htm. The article is reprinted here with permission from Andrea Kay.

By Andrea Kay ©2006

The below is a portion of an article written by Richard B. Gunderman, MD, PhD of the Department of Radiology, Indiana University Medical Center, 702 Barnhill Dr, Rm 1053, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5200. It is an article that was first published in 2002 addressing the question of why some people succeed and others fail.

Why Do Some People Succeed Where Others Fail?

Everyone wants to succeed, but few people take the time to study success. Similarly, everyone dislikes failure, but few people invest the time and energy necessary to learn from their mistakes. Often we are too busy basking in the glory of our triumphs to think through what we did right, or the pain of failure is sufficiently intense that many of us want to “move on” and “put it behind us” as soon as we can. Yet those who want to improve their chances of success can ill afford to disregard the issue of why; despite seemingly equal levels of intelligence and education, some people succeed where others fail.

A substantial amount of educational research indicates that how learners understand success and failure exerts an important influence on their level of achievement (2). In this editorial, I outline several parameters according to which high achievers tend to differ from low achievers. These parameters are derived in part from a psychologic approach to motivation and performance referred to as attribution theory (3). While some factors in the larger equation of achievement may be difficult to alter, each of us can revisit and perhaps revise our understanding of what makes a person successful. In so doing, we can help learners such as medical students, residents, fellows, and even practicing radiologists enhance their opportunities for success.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factors
The factors that contribute to or detract from success can be assigned into two categories, extrinsic and intrinsic (4). Extrinsic factors flow from decisions made by people other than learners and include their expectations, reactions of praise or blame, and any rewards or punishments they may offer. Intrinsic factors, by contrast, arise from learners themselves and include their expectations, their level of desire to succeed, and their sense of whether or not they were challenged in a meaningful way. For example, learners tend to feel a greater sense of pride in their achievement if the task they face is a moderately difficult one, as opposed to one that they regard as very easy. Learning effectiveness is enhanced when learners approach tasks with a high degree of intrinsic engagement and a reasonable expectation that they will perform well.

It is important to present learners with tasks that challenge but do not overwhelm them. If they feel that they never had a chance or that they did not need to push themselves at all in order to succeed, they are not likely to benefit substantially from the experience. In medical student education, for example, it is important to operate from a clear sense of what students at each particular level of training might be expected to know and to tailor learning tasks accordingly. For example, in a course for 2nd-year medical students, discussions of imaging findings might include questions about key points of anatomy and pathology. In reviewing the same case with 4th-year students, by contrast, greater emphasis might be placed on the clinical setting in which the examination was performed and the management implications of the findings.

Enabling and Disabling Learning Environments
Different learning environments can dramatically alter what learners expect of themselves, as well as how they evaluate their performance. If people are confronted with tasks for which they have no means of preparing, they are less likely to feel pride in their work, even when they happen to succeed (5). Because learners are more likely to fail in situations for which they lack preparation, confronting learners with questions for which they are not prepared can prove counterproductive, producing discouragement and reducing the motivation to learn. To put this principle into practice, educators should structure learning experiences in such a way that learners recognize the relevance of their own preparation.

A good example of tailoring the learning environment to foster a sense of preparedness is the use of an environment that approximates the actual setting of the American Board of Radiology oral examination in helping residents to prepare for the oral board examination. If residents have never before been shown cases in a setting where the examiner provides no feedback about performance, they may find the actual examination unfamiliar and unsettling and, hence, perform below their potential. Residents should be encouraged to show one another cases and they should be shown cases by the faculty in a no-feedback environment so that they will not be accustomed to looking for clues from their examiner on how they are doing. At another level, having board examiners pretend to be referring physicians can be helpful as well, by encouraging residents to develop their facility at discussing cases in the environment where it matters most; namely, the care of real patients.

High Expectations and Low Expectations
By indicating to learners the level of effort that is expected from them, educators can further enhance their sense of learning effectiveness. The goal should be to give learners a sense that they are in control of their own destiny. Fostering this sense of self-reliance is not difficult, and yet many educators forego opportunities to do so. For example, medical students and residents should be given a set of performance objectives each time they begin a new rotation, and day-to-day teaching and assessment should be tailored to them. Expectations need not be low, but they should be as explicit as possible so that learners know not only what they should study but also what they should be able to do with what they have learned.

Consider a group of 1st-year residents undergoing an orientation to the radiology residency program. One objective of such an orientation program might be that residents develop the ability to recognize and appropriately manage an adverse reaction to intravenously administered contrast material. In order to set the appropriate expectations, they might be told that they will receive not only a lecture on the subject with a set of readings but also an objective structured clinical examination in which various types of adverse reactions would be simulated. With such expectations in mind, they would be able to prepare in a much more focused fashion, paying dividends in terms of their actual level of clinical competence.

Active and Passive Responsibility
One of the traits shared in common by successful people is a sense that they make things happen, as opposed to the sense that things happen to them (6). The key parameter here is the locus of control. Learners who view the locus of control as lying outside of themselves often see little correlation between the choices they make and their level of achievement. When things go poorly, they blame it on bad luck or on actions of others over which they have no control. By contrast, learners with a high sense of effectiveness are likely to regard setbacks not as the immutable will of the fates but as mistakes from which they can learn and improve in the future. They study their experiences, failures as well as successes. Even when others contribute to their difficulties, they look for factors in situations over which they can exert some measure of control and try to devise means to exploit them more effectively in the future.

With the critical incident approach, people are asked to recall personally meaningful successes or failures and to explain why things turned out as they did (7). Such an approach can prove very helpful in attempting to evaluate and rank candidates for a position. If residency or faculty candidates respond to such a question with a look of befuddlement and cannot offer any coherent response, this is a good sign that they are not accustomed to reflecting on past experiences as learning opportunities. Similarly, if they portray themselves as innocent dupes or victims of forces beyond their control, this may indicate that they tend to experience events passively rather than taking an active role in creating and influencing circumstances. Successful people, by contrast, characteristically tend to describe events as flowing from decisions they helped to make and are likely to offer reflections on how they would do things differently in the future.

The full article can be read online at http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/226/1/29

I came across an article a short while ago that pretty much expresses what I myself felt, for the briefest seconds, when I first learned that Google had bought youtube for billions. I am not in the same position as Greg Brill, the author of the article. I’ve never had Microsoft for a client. Heaven knows I probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now had I ever had a client as big as Microsoft. So by all means, the author of the article in question is thousands of miles ahead of me and probably has more valid reason for having felt depressed when he heard the news about Google’s acquisiton of youtube.

My reasons are the kind that make you want to kick yourself, like when the numbers you usually play in the lotto came up on the day you decided not to bother playing since you never win a dime anyway.

Some time ago my son suggested building a site that allows people to post home videos on the Internet. I didn’t give his suggestion any serious thought. I was looking for “viable” ideas for making millions. I probably told my son something like, “It’s not doable. It wouldn’t work.” Maybe I didn’t think I would have the capability of building such a site. Maybe I didn’t think it was possible because I didn’t realize how much video streaming technology had improved since I first entered the world of web development. I’m sure I can come up with many valid excuses for why I dismissed my son’s idea; but I’ve decided it’s pointless to think about it. I couldn’t have afforded to pay for hosting for such a site anyway. It’s already tough coming up with money every month to pay for my dedicated server. There was no way I would have been able to manage the bandwidth fees for a video sharing website.

Nonetheless, I can understand and identify with the frustrations of people like Greg Brill, founder and president of Infusion Development Corporation (”a technology training and consulting firm that specializes in architecting securities trading and analytic systems for several of the world’s largest investment banks”). It does indeed seem like coming up with million dollar ideas, or in the case of youtbe, billion-dollar ideas is like trying to come up with the winning lotto numbers. You can try a million different combinations and still lose. And someone who tried only one combination wins. It is definitely depressing.

Here’s a portion of the article in question with a link to the full text:

Depression, Shadenfreuder, and “Why didn’t I think of that.”: How youtube.com and Google Have Depressed a Generation of Entrepreneurs
By: Greg Brills Infusionblogs.com

Click here to read the full article on infusionblogs.com

***Ephosting.com does not own the copyright to “Depression, Shadenfreuder, and “Why didn’t I think of that.”: How youtube.com and Google Have Depressed a Generation of Entrepreneurs” For information about the copyright please refer to: Infusionblogs.com