When Leaders Model Openness About Their Mental Health

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:21)
I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. We look at stories from business leaders who've dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they picked themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.
Today, two leaders who learned that being unusually transparent and vulnerable is a fantastic way to motivate people and drive positive change. We'll hear about the world of tech startups and burnout from Buffer's Joel Gascoigne a little later. But my first guest is Brooklyn Borough President, Eric Adams. Now, one of the most stressful places anyone can work is in politics and government. There's managing different interest groups, constituents, budgets, the media. It's a lot, even in a time that's less about life and death than during the coronavirus pandemic. And right now, as I tape in the US, we are living in trauma, ripped more raw every day. The death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and unfolding acts of police brutality demand conversation and acknowledgement at work. But race is difficult for most of us to talk about.
So I'm working on a special show that will try to provide some guidance. We taped this episode before the protests around policing and racial inequality in the US erupted in full force. But it's important to note that Eric Adams is a former police officer himself. He advocates now for the physical and mental health of his constituents, and that includes something you might not expect, meditation. He said, I wish I had started meditating when I was a police officer, because I went through my career with a misaligned center.
Eric Adams is the current Brooklyn Borough President in New York. He served as an officer in the New York City Police Department for 22 years, and then was a Democratic state senator in the New York Senate. And in November 2013, Adams was elected Brooklyn Borough president, the first African American to hold the position. He was re-elected in November 2017 Mr. Adams joined me to speak about leadership, crisis, and meditation.
Well, first of all, just tell us what life is like in your district right now.

**Eric Adams** (3:00)
It is extremely intense.
I think about the days of September 11th when I was a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department, when two planes shattered what we thought was our reality and we watched those buildings collapse in front of our eyes.
And I remembered that, you know, are we gonna make it through this? Will we ever be the same? And something happened amazing on September 12th. We got up, we opened our shops, we taught, we built, and the country watched us and responded to that. And although COVID-19 is not a terrorism, it has created a level of terror that is going to cause us to dig deep as we lost so many loved ones in such a short period of time. And as we also dealing with some of the physical and emotional trauma that's associated with this. So, but we're getting through it one day at a time.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (3:57)
So, let's talk about the emotions and for you in particular, you've been public about anxiety, about dealing with anxiety and using your platform and visibility to lead others to take up meditation. How, was that hard to get people to buy into it? I mean, did people, anyone say, what, Eric, why are you focusing on this of all the things you could talk about?

**Eric Adams** (4:22)
And I'm amazed at how much we learned, we have to unlearn so we could start the process of learning. And one thing is our bodies and our minds. I remember when I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, my son coming to me and say, dad, you spent so much time putting the right oil and gas in your BMW. Why are you gonna do that to your body?
And that was a wake up call for me that, we need to start really understanding how our body operates. And mental health and physical health both need similar nurturing and caring. And so when I started to articulate the power of meditation and showing people, this was not just some hippie type stuff, this was proven science that has been around us for so many years.
People started to really embrace the concept because they started seeing the results.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (5:17)
You know, it's so funny you talk about your body because I think a lot of us, you know, myself included, we have a really complicated relationships with our body. How has meditation helped you have a different relationship with your body?