Michael Goldberg of Counslr: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Worrying doesn’t help, picture a positive outcome. I heard someone say once, “why would I worry? If the bad thing I worried about happens, then I would have lived through it twice.” That made a lot of sense to me. So much of what we worry about never comes to fruition. We think of scenarios, maybe to be prepared or maybe for no good reason. Each time I find myself starting to worry about a situation that hasn’t happened, I’ve trained my mind to catch myself and begin using that energy to picture the same situation that I was worried about, going well. Phenomenally well. For example, an application of this is when flying on a plane. It seems that turbulence happens more frequently than I recall, and not understanding airplane physics and not being in control, I’ve found myself worrying. When I reverse that line of thinking to remind myself that planes are built to handle the turbulence, remind myself that the pilot knows what they are doing and that almost no planes have crashed due to turbulence, then I picture a safe flight\landing and relax.

As a part of my series about the “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Goldberg.

Michael Goldberg is a healthcare strategist with more than 20 years’ experience leading large scale operations and crisis management. He is the former executive director (Hospital President) of Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center.

Passionate about ensuring people have proper access to mental health support, Mr. Goldberg joined Counslr, a company providing access to licensed mental health counselors through a text based app to college students and corporate clients.

Mr. Goldberg is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives. He’s also an adjunct professor in Hofstra University’s Department of Health Professions, School of Health Sciences and Human Services, where he teaches graduate-level students.

Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

The plan in my family for as long as I could remember was to be the 4th generation leader of a business that my great grandfather started in East New York, Brooklyn. Going to work with my father on Saturday’s, during my school breaks, and every summer was something I looked forward to when I was younger. My confidence in my career path was so high that I told my parents I would skip college to jump right into the family business after graduating high school. Wisely, they made college my prerequisite for taking over the business.

In my final semester, just before graduation, my father called me with troubling news, the business had been shut down. There were many stories of the big box retailers harming the local mom and pop neighborhood stores, and ours was one of them.

Lost and uncertain of my path, I enrolled in college to obtain my MBA, which was really a delay tactic to figure out what my options were as well as to explore where my interests aligned. During this time, I realized that I enjoyed and was interested in finance.

I applied to several companies for internships, some on Wall Street and others in corporations. When I met with people working in the finance department of a healthcare organization, there was a sense of purpose that fit into my core values. I was hooked on the mission that healthcare organizations provide, and worked with unbelievably kind, caring, people who were also experts in their specialty.

As the internship completed, I was offered a full-time job as an analyst in the finance department and ultimately progressed in my career to lead NY’s 2nd largest hospital as the Executive Director (Hospital President).

My experience in the healthcare system led me to Counslr, a platform providing unlimited, free access to text-based mental health support via mobile app with licensed counselors for covered members, where I now serve as a board member. During my time as hospital presedeint, I saw first hand how mental health is overlooked within the current healthcare system.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Crisis seems to best describe the situations that I have had significant experience in working through or leading. I became the CFO of the hospital on Memorial Day in 2009 when Queens, NY was declared the epicenter for the H1N1 health pandemic. Over the course of the following 12 years, we managed the hospital through Superstorm Sandy, countless snowstorms, blackouts, fires, surges in patient volume beyond capacity, and ultimately the COVID-19 pandemic where we were again the first epicenter in the United States to be most significantly impacted.

Within every one of those events, I witnessed many stories of heroism, dedication, the answering of miracles, triumph, and some tragedy.

Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?

I had an internship that started in the year 2000, at a time when technology in the world was vastly different than it is today. Before iPhones and social media, and when texting largely required tapping through many letters on your flip phone, which was slow. However, instant messaging was popular through apps that no longer exist.

There was a group of us in the office who were young, technologically astute and became close through the long hours we worked. We always knew that email was an unsecure way to have conversations from our desks, but I found one day that an app that controlled our computers had a way to send messages that no one other than the network administrator knew about, and largely felt it wouldn’t be tracked. And so, I taught a few of my friends in the office how to use it and we began chatting through the app.

Imagine sitting at your computer and a critical warning message pops up. That’s what these messages looked like. Well one day I opened the application to send a message to my friend, but I worked too fast and highlighted all of the people whose names begin with the letters A-N, and proceeded to send a private message. It went to over 700 coworkers, colleagues, and leaders. I didn’t realize the mistake I made until my colleagues in the cubicles around me started approaching my desk and my phone began to ring. The CFO of this $3B company was the first to call me, and he was not amused. I was embarrassed, and ultimately thankful the error didn’t cost me my job. I never messaged through that app again. I learned to slow down and double check what I’m doing in all situations. The lesson turned out to be very valuable.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I’ve been fortunate to have two people in my life who were key to getting me to where I am today. One was the same CFO I just mentioned. I remember the day he changed my life, and I was terrified. Bob Shapiro was a legend in the healthcare finance world. A genius, financial strategist, who could easily find the types of mistakes I would have in my work as an entry level analyst. He was the type of leader who commanded excellence and made you want to provide excellent work for him.

One day while sitting in my cubicle, we all heard that he was in the building, which was our indication to be on our best behavior. He had a practice of walking around through the cubicles. To my surprise, he stopped at my cubicle and asked me to follow him to the conference room. Uncertain what I did wrong or why the CFO of a $3B company wanted to talk to an entry level analyst, I complied and followed him.

We sat across the large conference room table from one another, this was our first time speaking one on one. I was shaking, my breathing was rapid, leaving me out of breath, and when I spoke my voice shook. He asked me about my experience in the department, if I liked the work I was doing, if I had any questions or needed advice. I think he could tell that I was uncertain about his intentions.

He told me that one of the greatest joys he had throughout his career was working with and mentoring others. Just before this conversation took place, he had moved out of the finance office to a corporate location, away from his team. He asked me if it would be ok if we met monthly and if he could be my mentor. I sat there at 22-years-old being introduced to what I now call being a Walkalongside Leader. Out of over one thousand finance team members, he selected me to be one of his mentees, and I felt like I won the lottery.

We met monthly for about 15 years. During these meetings, we talked about everything from work, to life and family. I have no doubt that those conversations helped shape who I am today, and guided me through the growth that I experienced in my career.

What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?

Healthcare post pandemic is in a dire position. Over the past two years it’s been reported that 1 in 5 (or 20%) of healthcare workers have resigned from the field. Even more concerning is the number of hospital services shutting down across the country leaving gaps in care for many communities, with no end in sight. I’ve always believed that we vote with our feet. Meaning that if we like a hotel or restaurant; we’ll go back, if we like a product, we’ll buy it again. The same holds true in my opinion for employees. When we’re happy, satisfied and feeling supported, we’ll stay. When leadership fails to execute on any of the above, we’ll leave. I believe based on the disproportionate number of people that have left healthcare vs other industries, leaders in healthcare must change the fundamentals for how they can support their existing teams and inspire the next generation of healthcare workers.

This begins with acknowledging that healthcare workers need support. They are already burned out and now we need to help them recharge and re-energize. They need time to process all that they have seen, all that they have felt, and all the increased pressure that’s unique to their experience over the past two years. Leaders are also feeling pressure unlike any other time in history. Asking them to motivate a team when they are equally as burnt out is a recipe for disaster.

Companies need to reexamine the way in which they support their teams emotional wellbeing. Healthcare is beyond the point of satisfying their team with salary increases or bonuses. As difficult as it is, the need to encourage time off, which gets increasingly more difficult as more people resign, but it’s critically important. They need to support their teams with people to talk to. It’s healthcare there’s a different dynamic than in other industries, you see when a healthcare worker needs to speak to a licensed mental health worker, psychologist or psychologist, oftentimes, they are talking to someone in their own organization. This could be a colleague, leader, or subordinate. Mental health support is already working through the stigma of asking for help. When you add to that in healthcare the fears of anonymity or perceived impact on job growth\security.

Healthcare organizations are most in need of mental health support for their team and surprisingly misaligned with where it should be provided. I led the hospital through several team member suicides throughout the pandemic and feel strongly that mental health support to healthcare workers must be offered through partnerships with separate companies such as Counslr. Mental health support services like Counslr can help reduce burnout and improve employee mental health before it reaches a crisis. It’s why I joined their board and am passionate about reframing the healthcare leader perspective on this topic.

What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?

I use the term “Walkalongside Leader” as a guide for how to create a strong, supportive culture for your team. That means meeting your people where they are, this can either be physically going to their departments\units to get to know them, or engaging with them on social media.

Leaders must be able to make effective plans at 30,000 feet by understanding the perspective of their team. This requires personally interacting with them, not just relying on filtered communication through the standard chain-of-command. One of my favorite things to do is shadowing team members for an entire shift. It’s a great way to build trust, expand relationships, and also see first hand how your decisions impact the team’s experience. Imagine how powerful it is when you get to see directly how to improve the way your team works. They know that happened because you took the time to understand it and cared enough to follow up and see the improvement through.

Another way to boost morale and elevate company culture is to show that you’re dedicated to supporting your team’s financial, physical and mental wellbeing. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways including cultivating internal growth opportunities, company initiatives or outsourcing to third parties, like Counslr.

Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Mental health is often looked at in binary terms; those who are healthy and those who have mental illness. The truth, however, is that mental wellness is a huge spectrum. Even those who are “mentally healthy” can still improve their mental wellness. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to improve or optimize our mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each.

1. Meditate Daily. I was physically sick for the first 6 months that I was president of the hospital. Doctor visit after doctor visit was inconclusive until an infection surfaced. It was in an odd location and I went to a specialist whom I worked with to seek help. I left with long course antibiotics and some of the best advice I’ve ever received in my life — start meditating. This surprised me greatly. The surgeon who suggested it told me the benefits of meditating, shared apps that could be helpful and said that you can’t underestimate the impact of mindset.
   From that day on, I began meditating. I started first with 5 minutes and expanded over the years to 20 minutes twice a day. Meditation has been shown to be one of the few activities we can do to increase sustained brain function over time. It helps with stress relief, improves your mood, and supports your body physically.
2. Surround yourself with positivity (good people, positive news). In this world of 24/7 news access and social media alerts, it is easy to get caught up in wanting to know what’s going on everywhere. Sadly, the majority centers around the bad news happening in the world. Years ago, I stopped watching or reading the news. I replaced that time with meditation and creating alerts for relevant topics I was interested in.
   One method I use to stay positive is on social media. I only follow/allow positive people into my feed or positive news accounts like @tanksgoodnews or @goodnewsmovement. This ensures that my screen continues to fill with feel-good stories that further support my positivity.
   Additionally, I cut negative people out of my life. I recall a number of people who liked to “stir the pot” and create drama at work. Each time that person moved on, voluntarily or not, the overall dynamic in the office improved. We all felt it. The observation every person would comment on was why did we let that persist for so long. When the toxic person is out of your life, you’ll quickly see how much more enjoyable that aspect of your life can be, and how much they impacted you, even when they weren’t physically around.
3. Plan for things to look forward to (vacations, experiences, events). This is another one of my favorites. Life has a way of becoming routine. We go through realizing that “summers are over” or “I can’t believe it’s already the holiday season.” One of the methods that I, and other successful people I know, use to avoid this feeling of life passing us by is to schedule meaningful experiences in advance each year. Each year, my family and I plan our vacations for the following year so we have something to talk about, research and look forward to. I’ve run the NYC Marathon two times, in 2019 it was all I could talk about, plan and train for. Trust me, that year didn’t fly by as I trained to go from the couch to running 26.2 miles.
   When we have something to look forward to, it helps us dismiss some of the situations that are annoying or difficult because we know that they will be temporary.
4. Learn something new (Spanish, Guitar, Swimming, Dancing). Three years ago, I committed to learning to speak Spanish fluently. My wife and I signed up for a school and attended class once a week. Then, when the pandemic happened, and things calmed down at the hospital, I continued online with a teacher from Bolivia. We would have class 2–5 times a week. Learning a new language or skill stimulates the brain, challenges us and if it’s something you’re interested in, gives you something new to look forward to.
   Additional skills on my “what’s next?” list are swimming efficiently, dancing to not be the awkward guy at the wedding and an instrument; either piano or guitar.
   And as my friend Jesse Itzler says, “it only takes 18 minutes a day of practicing anything for a year to be better than 95% of the world at that skill.”
5. Worrying doesn’t help, picture a positive outcome. I heard someone say once, “why would I worry? If the bad thing I worried about happens, then I would have lived through it twice.” That made a lot of sense to me. So much of what we worry about never comes to fruition. We think of scenarios, maybe to be prepared or maybe for no good reason. Each time I find myself starting to worry about a situation that hasn’t happened, I’ve trained my mind to catch myself and begin using that energy to picture the same situation that I was worried about, going well. Phenomenally well. For example, an application of this is when flying on a plane. It seems that turbulence happens more frequently than I recall, and not understanding airplane physics and not being in control, I’ve found myself worrying. When I reverse that line of thinking to remind myself that planes are built to handle the turbulence, remind myself that the pilot knows what they are doing and that almost no planes have crashed due to turbulence, then I picture a safe flight\landing and relax.

How about teens and pre teens. Are there any specific new ideas you would suggest for teens and pre teens to optimize their mental wellness?

As a father of teenage daughters, I think about this often and am troubled by the statistics that show how rates of depression and anxiety have doubled in this age group between pre and post pandemic studies.

I believe this begins with recognizing that this age group went through something different than any of us who may offer solutions can fully understand. When the world shut down, schooling was remote, people were masked, and interpersonal interaction was removed from their development at a critical time in life. This is backfilled with jaded viewpoints on social media, something I don’t think we will fully know the impact or exact solutions of for a long time.

In the interim, we should have patience with our teens. We should talk with them, understand their questions and concerns, and demonstrate for them what it means to be a positive, kind, supportive member of society.

We also need to ensure that there are enough professionals in the mental health field to provide services to the number of children that require it. There’s another crisis happening that I didn’t mention earlier, and that is the limited availability of services in mental health. Children with severe conditions are sitting in emergency departments without beds or in psychiatric facilities. Children with minor concerns can’t get an appointment to speak with someone and when they do, it’s out of network and cost prohibitive. Finally, parents haven’t universally accepted that their children need help but are at a loss with where to get it. That’s where services like Counslr come in and help reduce barriers for people to receive access to quality mental health support.

It’s up to us to educate the population on the minor indications that it’s time for a child to talk to someone, allowing them to get the help they need prior to it becoming a significant disruption to their ability to function in school or later in life.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was the first book I read that demonstrated so well how to value the parts of life that will matter most for our sense of self-worth and hopefully for the lives we touched along the journey. Originally I was caught up in the traditional routine of push, push, push at work to get ahead. After reading The Alchemist, I realized what was most important and it helped me reframe my priorities.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Practice winning every day. Tomorrow is a great chance to improve on something from today. I think about this in terms of sports. Each team, in every sport, has dedicated time to practice. But we as professionals follow a different path. We go to school and get a job. Then, we’re expected to do that job. When do we go to practice for it? Hockey players watch videos of themselves playing and they watch the other team’s moves before a game to help prepare, but we just show up to work each day.

I think if we change our mindset to play back our own highlights at the end of the day, we can choose 1–2 things that we want to practice doing better tomorrow. Then tomorrow we apply it. These can be aspects of work, how we interacted with our family, or just something we did at the grocery store. If each day all of us purposefully worked to practice improving something about ourselves, then when we look back, we’ll be able to say we played a hell of game. I believe the world would be in a better place than it is today if we all did this.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

“The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.” — Charles Darwin

As we discussed at the beginning, if you asked me what I’d be doing in life when I was in High School, my answer would confidently and proudly have been running a family business, not leading a hospital through a pandemic. This quote from Charles Darwin captures not only this moment in my life, but many decisions that required change and adaptability in order to be where I am today, the person I am today and the comfort in knowing that it will continue to evolve over my lifetime.

What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?

I’d love to connect on social media. Professionally you can find me on Counslr’s LinkedIn. On my personal platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, you can find me @michaelhgoldberg. On LinkedIn, you can find me by my name, Michael H. Goldberg. Thank you for the time today.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!