Listen to episode 43
Mental Health and CEOs: Coach Kevin Lawrence on the Secrets of Having It All
Why this episode matters
You can get business advice anywhere. What you can’t easily get is someone trained to notice when the person running the company is starting to melt down, and honest enough to say it to your face. Kevin Lawrence built a coaching practice around that gap. This conversation with Dominic Monkhouse is blunt about the mechanics: why the strongest founders break, how to spot it early, and how to keep giving without emptying the tank.
Five takeaways
A genuine excerpt from the episode
“I thought mental health problems happened to weak people, but it actually happens to the strongest in ways that would blow your mind. They just don’t talk about it because it’s not good for the brand or the marketing. But it happens a lot. I’ve had to become an expert in that stuff.”
Kevin’s point is that the CEOs least likely to admit they’re struggling are often the ones closest to the edge. That’s why an outside coach who knows the warning signs matters more than another source of advice.
“You have to be respectfully selfish to be sustainably generous. You have to take very good care of yourself so you can be more generous to each other. There’s a lot of bad advice in the world about being a selfless leader.”
The practical version: you can only give away a surplus, and you have to keep enough of your best energy to build the surplus in the first place.
About Kevin Lawrence
Kevin Lawrence has spent close to 25 years coaching high-performing CEOs and executive teams from his base in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of Your Oxygen Mask First, which sets out seven things high achievers need to survive and thrive, and he had a major role in writing Scaling Up. He runs executive development programmes and a boutique coaching firm, and works with leaders in companies approaching and beyond a billion dollars in revenue.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a CEO coach and a CEO mentor?
A mentor shares advice drawn from their own path and expects you to apply it yourself. A CEO coach works on how you lead and how you hold up, not just what you decide. Kevin Lawrence’s coaching covers spotting mental health decline, building resilience, hard feedback and talent standards. It’s closer to helping you master yourself than handing you answers, which is why it fits you once your own capacity has become the constraint on the business.
How does a coach spot a CEO heading for burnout?
By watching behaviour, not output. Kevin looks for a leader cancelling social plans, avoiding meetings, sleeping too much or too little, drinking more, or turning rude and unpleasant to work with. He calls it the mental health continuum and trains clients to place themselves on it. The value is early warning. You learn to say you’re drifting into the orange zone before a couple of stray life events tip you into the red.
What are resilience rituals?
Resilience rituals are the specific practices you use to protect your body, your mind and your spirit, and then guard fiercely. For Kevin that means exercise and time in nature, writing and journalling, and getting out on a racetrack. The recipe is personal, but the rule is universal. Know your four, five or six practices and don’t stop doing them, because the crash usually starts the moment you drop them.
Does coaching cover the CEO’s personal wellbeing or just the business?
Both, and that’s the point. Kevin frames the work as managing and mastering yourself on the journey of building a business, so the person and the company get coached together. If you want to understand how CEO coaching supports the whole person, that whole-person scope is what separates it from advice-only mentoring.
Where Monkhouse & Company fits
If this episode lands, the reason is probably that you have hit the point where your own capacity is the ceiling on the business. Advice alone doesn’t catch the slide Kevin describes. By the time the crash arrives, the person who could have flagged it was never watching. That is coaching territory, not mentoring territory. See how CEO coaching at Monkhouse & Company works with founder-CEOs when their own capacity has become the constraint, and read the companion view on CEO mentoring if you want to compare the two.