Normal. But absolutely not healthy.

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A colleague came to me one morning and told me he'd been eating his breakfast, spooning cornflakes into his mouth, while watching a man being beheaded in the Syrian desert.

"And Rich, I felt nothing," he said. "Just numb. Is that normal?"

He was the head of my terrorism analysis team. Brilliant and experienced, he was exactly the person you want doing that job. My first instinct was: of course that's not normal. That should horrify you. You should be appalled and sickened.

But a moment later I understood. His brain had shut down his emotional response to protect him from the trauma of what he was watching. His body had kicked in its most primeval survival mechanism, deployed without thinking to keep him safe. So it was completely normal. But it was absolutely not healthy in the long term. I’ve written before about the physical and mental effects of long term stress if not checked: Tiger

I looked at the whole team at work differently that day.

The wider team was looking at operational risk around the world, more than just terrorism; war, riots, and crime. And we employed people from around the world because of their local language, knowledge and networks. We were tasking people from Lebanon, Colombia, Venezuela, Eritrea, from all across the world to spend their days seeking out evidence of atrocity and violence. These were people who still had friends and family in the places they were analysing. And their job was to gather that evidence, to process it and to turn it into clean, dispassionate intelligence for clients. Every day.

And then we just left them to it.

At that time, we had no framework in place. There was no support designed for what they may be experiencing. We didn’t even have language to describe what was accumulating in them, day after day.

I went to my boss and talked him through what I was thinking. He was on board in a flash. We ran a session for the entire team where we told our own stories, mine included things I hadn't spoken about publicly before. We talked about times that we had struggled and needed help and support. And in that hour, we began to make it okay to ask for help. We took away the shame of finding things hard and we took away the fear of talking about it. We made the team and its culture one that understood and supported the work that we were all doing and the impact that that work may have.

The response was unlike anything I'd seen. One colleague told me he was completely fine, not stressed at all. But knowing that support existed if he ever needed it meant everything to him. We ran the session again for people who hadn’t made the first. HR came to watch and they asked me to build a wellbeing network across the whole company, 10,000 people in over 100 countries.

That was in summer of 2018, before workplace mental health became a mainstream conversation.

I've spent 20+ years in intelligence and risk analysis, in a career that began in the MOD, via the Cabinet Office and into the commercial intelligence space. I know this world from the inside. I know what it asks of people, and I know what it costs them when nobody is paying attention to that cost.

That's why I built NewDay Coaching.

If you lead analytical, intelligence, or investigative teams, I'd like to talk to you about what you're doing, or not doing, for the people processing the worst of what the world produces on your behalf.

They deserve better than cornflakes and numbness.