Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas
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Headspace for the Workplace – A Podcast on How to Cultivate a Vibrant and Psychologically Safe and Healthy Workforce with your host Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas In our brain-based economy, we depend on fully engaged, mentally healthy teams. Organizations that have figured this out not only have a competitive advantage, they are awesome places to work. Take a listen to the lessons learned and actionable take-aways to promote mental health and wellbeing and support people through tough times – at work.

  1. Jul 15

    From Awareness to Action: How Construction Is Leading the Way on Workplace Mental Health with Sonya Bohmann

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Sonya Bohmann, Executive Director of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention (CIASP), an organization that has quietly become one of the most effective workplace mental health movements in the country. The opening framing of this episode is one I stand behind completely: construction, not tech, not healthcare, not corporate America, has led the way on workplace mental health. It has done something different, making mental health culturally relevant, tackling the hard stuff head-on, and figuring out how to scale it in ways that other industries have not yet managed.Sonya came into this role through a remarkable convergence of lived experience and professional calling. A sibling loss survivor who spent over a decade in construction leadership, she encountered the CIASP job posting twice in the same LinkedIn session and took it as a sign from the universe. Three years into what she describes as her dream job, she has transformed CIASP from a promising initiative into a model that other high-risk industries, oil and gas, manufacturing, mining, healthcare, and the service sector, are now looking to replicate.The episode delivers two immediately actionable takeaways for any organization looking to move beyond the performative wellness calendar and build something real: how to shift from awareness to genuine action at the individual, team, organizational, and industry level; and how to make mental health a 12-month-a-year conversation that doesn't rely on awareness month campaigns or crisis data alone. Sonya also shares the single simplest action anyone can take today to signal allyship and connect colleagues to help, an idea so low-barrier and high-impact it landed as the episode's mic-drop moment. For more information on this episode go to From Awareness to Action: How Construction Is Leading the Way on Workplace Mental Health — Dr. Sally

  2. Jul 9

    Beyond Narcan: How to Build Overdose Prevention Into Your Workplace Safety Culture

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Dr. Virna Little, co-founder and CEO of Zero Overdose, a national initiative bringing overdose safety planning into workplaces, healthcare systems, schools, and communities. Dr. Little and I share a long history through the Zero Suicide Initiative, which aspires to eliminate suicide deaths in healthcare systems. This episode brings that same upstream, systems-level thinking to one of the most urgent and underaddressed safety crises in high-risk industries: overdose. The statistics I share in the opening of this episode stopped my construction clients in their tracks, and they stop me every time: for every 1,000 people who die on a construction job site from physical injuries, approximately 5,000 to 6,000 are dying by suicide, and over 11,000 are dying from overdose. Overdose deaths are outpacing suicide deaths in the construction industry, and yet most workplace safety cultures still treat overdose as a reactive crisis, equipping job sites with Narcan but doing little to prevent the event that requires it. Dr. Little's work with Zero Overdose begins where Narcan ends. Working in rural community health centers, she saw firsthand how workplace injuries, particularly in construction, fishing, and law enforcement, created pathways into opioid dependence that were never adequately planned for at the point of injury. The episode delivers two concrete, immediately actionable takeaways: an overdose safety planning framework that can be integrated into any existing workplace safety culture, and a clear articulation of what leadership must do to make that planning real rather than aspirational. For more information on this episode go to Beyond Narcan: How to Build Overdose Prevention Into Your Workplace Safety Culture — Dr. Sally

  3. Jun 23

    Systems, Not Slogans: What It Actually Takes to Build a Veteran-Friendly Workplace

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Alicia Scovill, President of Scovill Construction & Contracting Services, a veteran herself, and a construction workplace mental health expert. We open with a sobering reality: veterans in the United States die by suicide at rates higher than the general population, and most are working at the time of their death, or have immediate family members who are working. That makes the workplace one of the most cross-cutting systems available for veteran suicide prevention, and yet most organizations have no real strategy beyond hiring veterans and calling it a day.Alicia and I connected through the Construction Mental Health and Wellbeing Summit, where we co-chaired a leadership roundtable on construction mental health. In this episode, Alicia brings a unique combination of perspectives to the table: her own military background, her experience building and running a construction business, and the firsthand vantage point of having seen, from inside multiple organizations, the well-intentioned ways companies unintentionally cause harm to their veteran employees.The core argument of the episode is that veteran mental health at work is rarely about trauma or transition in the way most people assume. More often, it is about systems failures: unclear accountability, mismatched authority and responsibility, inconsistent communication, and the absence of the structure that helped many veterans survive and thrive in the military. Alicia and I walk through concrete examples, including a construction-specific scenario involving an estimator and a project manager, to illustrate exactly how these systems gaps create burnout and isolation for veteran employees, even when those employees appear to be high performers on the surface. For more information on this episode go to Systems, Not Slogans: What It Actually Takes to Build a Veteran-Friendly Workplace — Dr. Sally

  4. Jun 17

    Stop Fixing, Start Leading: How to Show Up in Your Team's Hardest Moments

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Mitch Wallis, the founder of Heart on My Sleeve and one of the world's leading experts on connection capability in the workplace. Mitch has worked with over 200 companies, most of them Fortune 500, across four continents, including Microsoft, KPMG, Lend Lease, and American Express, training more than 10,000 leaders on how to navigate emotional conversations without crossing into therapy territory. His work is rooted in a simple but radical thesis: connection is a capability (not a personality trait) and organizations that build it systematically will outperform those that don't. Mitch brings deep personal credibility to the work. First diagnosed with complex OCD at age seven, he later experienced depersonalization, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and nearly lost his life to mental ill health. His description of depersonalization - a condition he lived with undiagnosed for nearly 15 years - is one of the most clear and compassionate explanations of the experience available in a leadership context. It is also a reminder that the people sitting in your meetings may be navigating experiences far more complex and disabling than "stress and burnout."The episode delivers two concrete frameworks: the five-step ELSA-B model (Engage, Listen, Safety, Action, Boundaries) for navigating high-stakes emotional conversations at work, and the concept of "crossing the chasm" - the single mindset shift that separates managers who resent the people side of their role from leaders who understand it is the role. Mitch's core argument lands hard: 80% of a people manager's job is the relationship. The technical work is the other 20%. Until leaders internalize that ratio, they will keep doing the wrong things when their people need them most. For more information on this episode go to Stop Fixing, Start Leading: How to Show Up in Your Team's Hardest Moments — Dr. Sally

  5. Jun 9

    Get Real With Your Why: What Leaders Need to Know About Rethinking Their Relationship With Alcohol

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sat down with psychologist, author, and organizational consultant Dr. Abby Medcalf who spent years working with executives in mergers and acquisitions to address substance use at the leadership level. The conversation centers on one of the most common and least-discussed dynamics in high-performance workplaces: leaders who are quietly reconsidering their relationship with alcohol and don't know why their efforts to change keep failing.Dr. Abby's own story adds weight to the conversation. She came into this work through recovery from heroin addiction in her early years, which led her from a planned legal career into counseling psychology, and ultimately into a PhD in organizational psychology. That combination of lived experience with addiction plus deep expertise in how organizations and leaders function, gives her a uniquely practical and compassionate lens on the culture of high-performance drinking and why it so often goes unaddressed.The centerpiece of the episode is the Motivational Wheel - a research-backed framework developed by Prochaska and DiClemente that maps how humans actually move through habit change. Dr. Abby walks through each phase (pre-contemplation, contemplation, determination, action, maintenance, and relapse) and identifies the single most common mistake leaders make when they slip back: jumping straight back to the action phase instead of returning to their why. The episode closes with a reframe that is both simple and profound: take action from inspiration, not from negative motivation. for more information on this episdoe go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/headspace/98

  6. May 27

    There's No Panacea for Human: The Power of Connection During Life's Transitions at Work with Nick Freud

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Nick Freud, founder of Fellow Humans - a platform built on a simple but radical idea: the most powerful support a person can receive during a difficult transition isn't clinical expertise. It's lived experience wisdom from someone who has already walked the same path.Nick's journey into this work began when he hit clinical depression while running a successful education business and discovered firsthand how hard it is to reach out for help, even for someone who considers themselves open and authentic. What emerged from that experience was a recognition that most of us are navigating our hardest moments in unnecessary isolation, surrounded by colleagues and communities full of people who have already been through exactly what we're facing and are waiting to be asked.The conversation moves between the personal and the practical: why corporate culture systematically mutes the humanity in our working relationships, what it actually means to make someone feel seen (and why it's different from sympathy), and how leaders who model vulnerability create permission structures that ripple through entire organizations. Dr. Sally and Nick address the three objections leaders most commonly raise - "this isn't a therapy setting," "we'll be held liable," and "people will use it against me" - and offer concrete, low-barrier ways to introduce more human connection into even the most performance-driven workplace cultures. For more information on this episode go to There's No Panacea for Human: The Power of Connection During Life's Transitions at Work — Dr. Sally

  7. May 19

    SPECIAL EPISODE: Work-Related Suicide - How Do We Define and Measure Work-Related Suicide?

    This special episode of Headspace for the Workplace is produced in partnership with the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) Workplace Special Interest Group, co-chaired by Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas and Jørgen Gullestrup. It is part of an ongoing series examining work-related suicide - cases where workplace factors contribute, in whole or in part, to a suicide death - a topic that remains critically underdiscussed in most of the world.In this episode, Dr. Sally and Jørgen are joined by Liam O'Brien, Assistant Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), one of the most advanced voices in the world on psychosocial workplace regulation. Australia has recently implemented groundbreaking legal reforms that require employers to identify and control psychosocial hazards and critically, to notify regulators when a suicide or suicide attempt may have been contributed to by workplace factors. These are not wellness programs. They are legally binding safety standards.The conversation covers the architecture of Australia's regulatory framework, the ACTU's Mind Your Head campaign, the hierarchy of controls applied to mental health hazards, the employer education gap, and how the global suicide prevention and occupational health communities can partner to move this agenda forward. It is a fundamental challenge to the dominant narrative in most Western countries. Mental health at work is a personal responsibility and a compelling argument for treating psychological harm as a shared, collective, and legally enforceable workplace duty. For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/headspace/96

  8. May 12

    The Cost of the Chase: Can You Build Profit and Protect People?

    In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Aaron Witt, founder of BuildWitt, a people-first training and development company on a mission to build the construction industry's next generation of leaders. The conversation centers on one of the most persistent tensions in business, especially in high-pressure industries like construction: how do you drive growth, performance, and profit without burning out the very people who make it possible? Aaron brings a grounded, practical perspective shaped by years of working alongside hundreds of world-class leaders across the United States and around the world. His observation is consistent - leaders who take care of themselves first are consistently better equipped to take care of those around them. And teams that build genuine relationships before the chaos hits are far better positioned to weather it together.The episode also digs into the construction industry's complex relationship with grit, a cultural value that fuels extraordinary work but can quietly become self-destructive when it's the only tool in the toolbox. Aaron and I challenge listeners to expand their definition of what it means to be a strong leader, arguing that sustainable performance requires identity, connection, and intentional investment in people, not just grinding through. For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/headspace/95

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Headspace for the Workplace – A Podcast on How to Cultivate a Vibrant and Psychologically Safe and Healthy Workforce with your host Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas In our brain-based economy, we depend on fully engaged, mentally healthy teams. Organizations that have figured this out not only have a competitive advantage, they are awesome places to work. Take a listen to the lessons learned and actionable take-aways to promote mental health and wellbeing and support people through tough times – at work.

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