How to work when your family needs you most – with Xavier Rees

It's quite amazing that with all of the stuff that you do, you had some time to speak to us, so thank you so much.

So let's jump straight in then.

What is a mental wellness challenge that you've had to face?

Well, a few over the years, I have to say.

Sometimes my own and, but also really significantly, um, some situations in, in my family, uh, with more than one family member, um, which I've written and spoken about before.

I s- um, don't need to go over old ground necessarily in terms of how that all unfolded, but just, just to say that I definitely went through a period of my life where I realized that the mental well-being or illness that, that, um, s- some of my family members were experiencing meant I had to really look at the priorities that I was operating with, made me realize that work really wasn't and could not be the most important thing in lots of moments.

Uh, but also gave me my own challenges about how to, how to deal with that.

I feel like, to some degree, I had it easiest out of all my family members at the time, on reflection.

But at the time, trying to work out how you keep yourself sane while, and hold down a job while you are trying to be a decent husband and parent at a difficult time for the family definitely was an interesting time in my life where I learnt a lot, um, tried my best, but probably, uh, probably, uh, could have, uh, could have done better.

So, um, so yeah, and then like I say, more recently, um, I have...

Uh, I defy anyone, frankly, to, uh, to say that they're operating in this industry right now without some sort of level of higher anxiety than they were naturally operating at 10 years ago, five years ago even.

And, um, and so that comes with its own, the various questions you ask yourself and things you ha- have to do, or at least I've had to do, to keep myself in a good space and to, and to continue to be a half-decent leader.

[chuckles] So, um, so yeah, so I mean, you could sort of s- pick any of those angles, but definitely mental wellness and mental health and, and I would single out mental illness as well, because I think sometimes we think well- mental wellness is, is, uh, all one thing.

But I think, you know, that I've experienced a, a fair bit of mental illness, and I think it's important to point out that that is, uh, and can be quite crippling for, um, families and individuals, uh, so on and so forth.

It can also make you stronger, uh, out the other end.

That's a really important distinction, and the way we view it is, at NABS, is that you will have your mental wellness, which is something that we all have, and we all need to keep topped up, and then sometimes some of us will experience more specific mental illness challenges, and that is a great time to go to your doctor and go and get some specific help for that particular challenge.

With what you're experiencing, when we chatted previously, you were very keen to point out, "Oh, I'm, I'm not the hero in the story.

The people that were affected were my family, but I still had to deal with supporting them and showing up to work," and I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people in the industry whose kids are going through stuff and whose partners-

Mm-hmm