Introducing WONE's Champion Spotlight series: honouring the people who've lived, led and learned through pressure, and are showing us another way: building a more intelligent relationship with stress, inside organizations built to support them.

An early warning (ignored)

One evening in May 2002, shortly after the slightly traumatic birth of his third child and also being promoted to partner, Richard Martin stopped at a cash machine on his way home from work and realised he could not remember how to use it. He sat on the pavement in tears but managed to call a colleague who came and helped him out. He went to see his GP, took a couple of weeks off work, had a few sessions of therapy and then, putting it down to a particularly stressful period personally and professionally, he cracked on, not really thinking about the incident again.

The moment everything stopped

Fast forward nine years and Richard was in a senior role in his firm, on the board and with ambitions to lead the organisation. By every external measure, he was successful: a senior employment law partner in the City, trusted with the biggest human issues for his clients and also inside the firm, operating at a level many lawyers spend their careers trying to reach. He had a lovely family, had recently bought a cottage in rural France, he was generally fit and healthy and had a good circle of friends.

Then, one day in May 2011, he was driving home with the family from France around the Peripherique south of Paris and everything stopped. He experienced what he now knows was a panic attack in which all he could think about was getting away from where he was. Stopping the car amid many lanes of fast moving traffic, he got out and walked away. After a short while the authorities closed the motorway and someone came to get him and that was the start of a rapid decline into serious mental illness.

He was hospitalized for a month and didn't return to work for two years.

The problem was not only how much pressure Richard was under. It was how he had learned to relate to it.

Fifteen years on, Richard runs the Mindful Business Charter, working with law firms on the exact thing that nearly ended his career: the gap between how organisations talk about pressure and stress and what they actually do about it.

When stress looks like success

Before the collapse, stress didn't necessarily feel like a warning. It felt like evidence of importance.

"There's an element where you somehow get a kick out of stress. It's an indication you're in demand," Richard says. "Of course I'm stressed, I've got a big job, this and that."

Underneath, something else was building: everyone always wanting more, and never having quite enough of it. "I don't know what more you want from me," as Richard puts it, alongside the sense of being stuck. A gap opened between the values he held and the life he was actually living. "I got to near the pinnacle of my profession and it was still feeling that way. On the one hand, I seem to be doing well, look at what I've achieved. But it doesn't feel like that inside."

In hindsight, the signals were there: lists piling up, sleep and relationships fraying, but there was no language for reading them as anything other than the cost of being good at his job.

We can ask people to move

At home, surrounded by family, the easy explanation was close at hand. "Everyone wants to point fingers elsewhere, so the easy answer was: yeah, you're in this because of work," Richard recalls. Once in hospital removed from the day-to-day, though, a different answer surfaced. "I realized, well, work was alright. Was it home? No. I realised it was up here in my head, the way I thought about and reacted to stuff and the responsibility I took on."

Stress was not only a demand outside him. It had become a pattern inside him, a way of interpreting pressure, responsibility and worth.

That reckoning could easily have produced the wrong lesson: fix yourself, be tougher. Instead, a moment in group therapy pointed him somewhere else entirely.

"We did an exercise with a therapist. With your right hand, touch the right shoulder of someone you feel connected to today. With your left hand, touch the left shoulder of someone you think you can help. Now your right foot, touch the right foot of someone you can help." Richard ended up balanced on the tiptoes of one foot, under real physical strain.

The therapist walked the room, stopped in front of him. "Richard, you don't look very comfortable there," she said, and asked if he often felt like that.

"Well, actually, now you mention it, I do," Richard told her. "I've got this big job, I've got this, I've got that, I feel like this all the time."

She smiled. "Why don't you just ask someone to move?"

"I didn't know that we could ask people to move," Richard says. "And when you do, generally speaking, if people can, they will."

That small physical moment carried a large realization. He had been living as though the only options were to hold the position or fail. That the position itself could change hadn't occurred to him.

The day resilience stopped meaning armour

Before 2011, resilience meant something close to armour. "Mental armour you have to wear, nothing gets through, you're impervious and strong," Richard says. "There was an assumption: well, I'm a partner at a law firm, I can do anything."

He's wary of how that word gets used now. "Too often, my sense is it gets used to put all the onus on the employee, that you need to be stronger, and if you're struggling that's down to you."

His working definition today is closer to capacity than armour: knowing what's in your bucket, being realistic about what can be absorbed without breaking, and catching the thoughts that make things worse before they compound. One mantra has stayed with him since he was ill: "just because I think something, it doesn't mean it's true." A habit of stepping back from a thought long enough to ask whether it's accurate, or just the loudest version of events.

Resilience was no longer armour. It was awareness, permission and adjustment.

Change the workplace, not the worker

MBC's founding position, change the workplace, not the worker, is easy to state and harder to act on. For Richard, it starts with a distinction between intent and impact. "Most of us don't mean to cause each other stress, but we do, and then we don't talk about it," he says.

He tells the story of a senior lawyer who'd taken to writing emails to her team on Sunday afternoons, the only quiet hours she had, then scheduling them to land at 9am Monday out of consideration for her team's weekends. Months later, someone on her team worked up the nerve to say something. Monday at 9am, it turned out, had become a dreaded flood of "73 gazillion emails" all at once. Nobody had been wrong. Nobody had said anything either, until someone finally did.

The harder part, Richard says, is what sits underneath: a culture that's grown up equating busyness with seriousness. "We've grown up on a diet of believing success is based on mad busyness, running around at 73 gazillion miles an hour the whole time." Shifting that means getting senior leaders to treat organizational health as a precondition for performance, not a nice-to-have alongside it.

His comparison is safety data. "If you were running a railway, you'd have monthly reports on accidents, injuries, near misses, and you'd actively manage that. So first, have that data in your organization. How many people are getting hurt in the way you run this business?" From there, the business case follows quickly, turnover, absence, the cost of losing people. "You can say to your fellow partners: we're throwing away three hundred grand each, per year. Do you want to save some of that?"

What he wishes someone had said

Richard is candid about what he didn't know, even from inside the system. "When I got ill, I'd been at that firm for eight or nine years, the most senior employment partner in the building. It turns out there were other partners off sick with mental health issues who I knew nothing about, because they'd been off sick for so long. Like many firms, we had an issue. We just weren't talking about it."

That silence, he thinks, is what keeps mental health feeling like something that happens to other people. "You believe this mental health business is about other people, isn't it. Not about us." One of the changes he's watched over the last fifteen years, and one he counts as genuinely hopeful, is more people choosing to tell their own version of this story out loud.

Richard's isn't a story about becoming “tougher”. It's a story about a partner who assumed resilience meant carrying everything alone, and found out, on one foot, in a room full of colleagues, that he didn't have to.

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Richard Martin is the first in WONE's Champion Spotlight series. If someone's story belongs here, send us a message to let us know.