Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article discusses suicide (including the death of a colleague), depression, suicide attempts, burnout and bereavement. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand call or text 1737; in Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.
Some careers read like a straight line on a CV. Marisa Branscombe's reads like a coastline. Over 25 years she's gone from a Perth farming newspaper to her dream job at an AFL club, through financial services and eight years at AMP, and now into tech as Head of Marketing Communications, Corporate at Atturra. When I asked her for a metaphor for her relationship with work — the question I put to every guest — she didn't reach for anything grand. "A winding road," she said. "Never linear. It's good to not be complacent." This episode is about what that road has taught her, and the honesty was a gift.
The dream job, and the line she wouldn't cross
Marisa is a born-and-bred Perth girl who's spent 17 years in Sydney. She started at a rural newspaper doing a bit of everything — costing ads, payroll, photography, admin — and then, as a passionate AFL supporter, simply refused to stop applying to the best football club in town until they hired her. She landed at the West Coast Eagles the year they won the Grand Final, flew to Melbourne for the whole circus, and recently put the game back on the TV just to take herself there again. "Girls, let's watch the grand final."
But the dream job came with a lesson about values. In 2007 — public knowledge — the club's star player got heavily involved in drugs, and Marisa, managing ten sponsorship accounts, found herself doing damage control with every sponsor. The professional part she could handle. What she couldn't stomach was the absence of consequences: the club wasn't pulling him into line. She pushed — "how has he rocked up in a club car? That should be taken off him" — and got told, "Marisa, just be quiet." She didn't. She quietly started applying for jobs in Sydney and Melbourne, even doing phone interviews with Google from a park bench. "It just didn't sit well with me."
What I found striking is how un-tortured the decision was, and Marisa is clear-eyed about why. She didn't yet have kids or a mortgage pressing on her, so she had the freedom to act on principle. And it wasn't only the club — it was five or six things at once. Her dad, who's always pushed her, telling her she was "a glorified waitress" who was meant for bigger things. A friend in Sydney going through a brutal breakup. And her nana dying of cancer, with Marisa beside her in palliative care for ten weeks. Out of all of it, she chose to read the upheaval as an opening: independence, freedom, a chance to make it on her own. It rhymes with something I've lived — being made redundant, moving through the phases of grief, and eventually realising that the thing that felt like a loss was, in hindsight, the best thing that happened to my career.
COVID, and the weight of holding a team together
By the time COVID hit, Marisa was at AMP — eight years, two kids born along the way — and had just been handed a secondment leading a team of six while her boss was on maternity leave. The timing was brutal: one child at home, the whole team suddenly remote, and a customer base in genuine financial crisis, many of them withdrawing their superannuation just to get by. She felt a double responsibility: get vital information out to customers, and hold her team together — some of them living alone — with walking meetings and check-ins. It was 11pm finishes and relentless content. And it was during this stretch that she trained as a Mental Health First Aid officer.
Beyond listening
This is where Marisa and I found a lot of common ground, because I hold the same accreditation, and we'd both arrived at it for personal reasons. Mine was introspection — if I was going through it, and offices are rarely places you can say so, then I could at least be someone who listens, which is most of what people need. (As I say every episode: I'm not a clinician, just someone who'll listen and offer a perspective.) Marisa had always been drawn to psychology — she nearly studied it alongside criminology instead of commerce — and when AMP offered the two-day training, she took it. But her reason for going was sharper than mine, and it stopped me cold. "I wanted to go beyond just listening. I wanted to be equipped to identify if people are in real trouble — because some people might be at the point where they're suicidal." One woman at AMP did die by suicide. She wasn't close to Marisa, but she was in the same marketing world, and everyone was struck by it.
I'll be honest: it's one of the few times on this podcast I've been lost for words. I told Marisa what I rarely lead with — that I've lived with depression for years, that I've had attempts — and that for me the signs are something I read almost natively, while the training added tools to recognise them in others, where they never look quite the same as they did in me. What we agreed on is how rare that training still is. Hers and mine are the only two times either of us has heard of a company simply offering it. We both think that's backwards. We have physical first-aiders in every office. Marisa walked into Atturra and asked People & Culture the obvious question — "I'm qualified; can we do this?" — because, as she puts it, you've got physical wellbeing and you've got mental and emotional wellbeing, and only one of them has a trained person by the fire exit. EAP is good, she's quick to say, but having someone internal who can point you to it, and sit with you on the way, would be better.
There's a maturity in how she holds the limits of that role, too. We both know the moment when you realise you're not equipped for the conversation in front of you — and the most useful thing you can do is say so, gently, and point the person onward. Caring isn't the same as being the cure.
When the road buckles
For someone with a personal-training background, Marisa is wry about how well she reads her own body — "I've heard that I'm not, but I think I am." Then she told the story that proves the point both ways. Four weeks before we spoke, she came in on a Friday, opened an email, and simply lost it at her desk — swearing, agitated, until a colleague came over to check she was okay. The eruption was the alarm, but the cause was quieter: she hadn't taken a single proper break all year, just an endless juggle of kids half the week and the office the rest. She took three days, lay in bed for one, and did five or six workouts in the other two, because exercise is her reset.
She's also learned, the harder way, when to stop. Mid-degree — a fourth year of psychology through Monash, online, on top of two daughters and a full-time job — she logged on at 8:30pm to a punishing stats unit and pulled the plug. "It's too much, I'm stopping." That clarity is rarer than it sounds, and I told her so, because I didn't have it. During my own master's, working a punishing vendor job across Australia and New Zealand, I hit the same wall — and didn't stop. I told myself the thing so many of us do: finish what you started. People around me were saying out loud that they could see me declining, and I kept going. I finished the degree, and then spent three years, maybe more, clawing my way back from the depression and burnout it helped trigger. Marisa's version of the warning was physical: a year earlier, studying late and rushing to the train exhausted, she fell and bent every finger back. It took a year to heal. "There aren't enough hours in the day — and what if that happens again? It's not worth it." Or, as Frazer put it in episode one: 24 hours is 24 hours. You can't argue with the clock.
The quiet ones
On whether tech has a particular problem with mental health, Marisa's view is generous and un-tribal: the stigma is real, it's everywhere, not just in tech, and it's improving — she's watched EAP usage and internal training tick up over her three years at Atturra. But the mechanism she names is worth pinning down. When people are frightened about their roles disappearing, they work harder, and their mental health erodes without them noticing. And leaders, often without any malice, assume someone's fine because they haven't said otherwise.
Her correction to that is the most practical thing in the episode. "It's often the opposite. When people go quiet, put their camera off, stop engaging — those are the signs to look out for." The ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves will tell you they're drowning, and you can step in and take work off their plate. It's the quiet ones you have to go to. Reading the absence, not just the cry, is the skill — and it's one you can only use if you're actually looking.
She also named the cost of the stigma in a way that landed personally for me. I've had people agree to come on this podcast and then back out once they understood the premise, because telling the truth about a breakdown "would be seen as weakness," or, in one person's words, "would affect my next career move." There's no judgement in that — it's an indictment of the rest of us that talking honestly still feels career-threatening. Which is exactly why the talking matters. The more we do it, the closer we get to the day it reads as normal. Not okay — but normal. We all go through it.
Tough, and learning to be soft
The most courageous part of the conversation was about vulnerability — specifically, that Marisa finds it hard. A recent DISC profile (a behavioural-style assessment her leadership group did) told her plainly that she needs to lean into the vulnerable, harder conversations to keep growing as a leader. "I'm not good at that," she admitted. "Not good at all. I'd prefer to be tough." Why? Partly the mental image — "if I'm tough, I can hold the team up" — and partly her upbringing. So she's doing it in baby steps: exposing herself to the uncomfortable, the awkward, the honest.
And she's already seen what it buys her, which is the thing I most wanted her to say out loud. When she brings her walls down, other people bring theirs down too. "They go, 'she's in this leadership position, but she's willing to share that things are really hard.' It creates more empathy." It makes the relationship stronger, on both sides, because now each of you is carrying a little of the other's context — "she's got a lot going on, I'll go a bit easier on her," and the same back. It's a small revolution disguised as a soft skill, and it was, for me, the highlight of the whole episode.
Coffee, Wise Mind, and a therapy dog
Marisa's grounding kit is refreshingly ordinary and entirely usable. Coffee first — "girls, I need my coffee" — for the simple neurological focus it brings. Then the Wise Mind, a concept from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: the balance point between the rational mind and the emotional mind. When she feels herself getting agitated, she returns to it and asks, "What's effective for me to do right now?" — a deep breath, water on the face, a different approach. Then exercise: lunch-break workouts, running, yoga, bodyweight, and walking her sighthound, who doubles as a therapy animal. And, threaded through all of it, connection — her kid-free time is largely for the people she loves.
It's a pattern I keep seeing across these conversations and never tire of: connection with others, connection with your body and what it's actually doing, and connection with your own mind. As Ritia put it last episode, sometimes it's as simple as getting outside and touching grass. As Frazer framed it in episode one, when something's gnawing at you, ask: is this a fact, or a feeling? Marisa's whole approach is a working answer to that question.
The whisper
I end every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech — or any industry — before they start tomorrow, what would it be? Marisa's was as balanced as her Wise Mind. "Be good to yourself, and be good to others." Be good to yourself means boundaries — the real, enforced kind. It's 5:30, I'm not logging on, I'm not putting Teams or email on my phone. And be good to others means remembering that everyone is carrying work pressure and a private life you can't see, and choosing kindness and context anyway. Treat people the way you'd want to be treated. It's not a complicated philosophy. Coming from someone who learned it on a winding road — past an ethical line, through a colleague's death, into and back out of burnout — it's one worth taking to heart.
Mind Middleware is a podcast about the invisible space between doing and being — honest conversations about mental health in tech. If this resonated, share it with someone you care about. And if you're struggling, you're not alone: in Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737; in Australia, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.