Jeff Solomon, TD Cowen President and TD Securities Vice Chair, has big feelings when it comes to mental health. "As humans, every one of us has the ability to struggle. It's one of the things that we all have in common… when you are feeling that way in your head, it's important to work it out with somebody – and often times the best person to listen is not somebody who is in your inner circle."
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and Jeff is eager to share his story to encourage leaders, colleagues, employees, friends – anyone – to find support for working through challenging times.
Life is full of peaks and valleys, and sharing about our highs can be much easier to do than sharing about our lows because often those lows are very personal. This may be why we turn to our closest confidants for empathy and advice when we face challenges. However, at certain points in Jeff's career, his professional lows felt so overwhelming that sharing with his wife or friends left him feeling like he was letting them down, too.
Reflecting on the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Jeff recalled one particularly tough incident where he knew the hedge fund he helped to found was facing an existential moment. As he was taking calls from his partners and talking to financial regulators, he sat in his driveway, watching through the dining room window as his family celebrated his daughter's fifth birthday. "If I'm being honest with myself, I could have gone in and participated, but I didn't think I deserved to because I felt like I let everybody down…my partners, my family, myself…everybody. I vowed in that moment that when I make it through this, I'm never going to be back here again," he said.
Caring for mental health drives personal and professional success
We all have mental health, personalities, characteristics, traits and flaws. For Jeff, transition and solitude are two triggers that negatively affect his mental health, and he learned this through therapy. What he also learned about his traits is important – he can keep these feelings in control with the right tools.
After his first two to three sessions of therapy, Jeff had a realization. "Those were some of the best hours of my week. I kept looking forward to them because I just needed to unload to somebody who wasn't in my life on a daily basis, who could give me tools to help me navigate in between (sessions) and to validate what I felt was real, and that was amazing for me," he said. "Therapy and mental health have helped me become a better leader."
Jeff believes that therapy is like a workout for the mind, much like going to the gym is a workout for the body. "How do we reach our full potential without training and guidance and coaching?" Jeff questioned, then continued, "Working on your mental health gives you the opportunity to be the best version of you."
Looking back, he acknowledges how cognitive behavioral therapy in his earlier career years helped him navigate TD's acquisition of Cowen, now TD Cowen. "Can you think of a bigger professional transition? Does anyone think I wasn't scared to think about what I was no longer going to be able to control? Thank God I had tools to deal with that," Jeff shared.
Mental health is key to TD's culture of care
Jeff believes that leaders have the responsibility to enable and empower their people, and that this means much more than providing strategy, tools and technology. It's also about providing openness, honesty and authenticity.
“When I look back on the arc of my career over 40 years, one of the skillsets I wish I'd used earlier, with more intentionality, is to draw people out and get them to tell their stories. When I have done that, my relationship with that person becomes three-dimensional, and the engagement becomes more meaningful,” Jeff shared.
TD has a long-standing commitment to encouraging colleagues at all levels to bring their whole selves to work. It has bolstered this commitment by continuously evolving its health and well-being benefits to offer free therapy sessions for colleagues and their family members, as well as a wide range of tools and resources to help colleagues live and feel their best.
"What if you have the ability to show up as your full self instead of just talking about it?" Jeff mused. "You could be better in this organization than you could be anywhere else," he continued, noting how this aspiration becomes reality when you provide your people with the right resources.
Thinking about TD's commitment to mental well-being, Jeff offered, "The most important thing is the health and wellness of our people." It's his hope that sharing about his positive outcomes through therapy will give others the courage to try it for themselves.
“When you engage in empathetic management, it's so much more rewarding,” he said. “Watching other people win and knowing that I had a role to play in that is one of the purest forms of joy for me. They feel good, so I feel good.”
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