Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article discusses burnout, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, racism and the sudden deaths of colleagues. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.
Some guests give you a philosophy. Ritia Karati gives you a toolkit. Over fifteen years in technology sales — most of it with multinational vendors, currently at NetApp — she's worked out, often the hard way, how to stay well in an industry that rewards always being available. This episode of Mind Middleware is full of the kind of practical, hard-won wisdom you can actually use on a Monday morning. It's also a clear-eyed account of what it's like to do that job as a woman, and a Pacific woman at that, in rooms that mostly aren't built for you.
Coming in hot
Ritia is honest about who she was at the start. "Like many of the youth I see coming through, I came in really hot — thinking I knew exactly how things worked, that I knew better." Fifteen years on, two things have happened, and they pull in opposite directions. She's softened: "I can now recognise that I don't know everything, and that listening to other people was better most of the time." And she's hardened: "I'm definitely firmer in my boundaries than I was." The naive, eager version of her said yes to everything, and paid for it.
Because saying yes to everything has a cost, and it took her a while to read the bill. "I'd put my hand up to do a lot of extra things, and then you become the person they rely on. You're the go-to one who goes over and above the hours you should be putting in." She remembers getting up at five and finishing at ten — "not sustainable at all, and not something I'd ever accept for myself or my team now." But at the time, she didn't recognise it for what it was.
When your body keeps the score
What eventually named it for her wasn't a concept; it was her own skin. "That's where I learned that I physically manifest my stress. If I'm stressed, you can see it — my eczema flares up, insomnia kicks in." The first time, she thought she had a bad flu — she was so burnt out she had to take time off to recover. Then it happened again, and she clocked the pattern.
Her response is one of the most useful things in the whole episode, because it's specific. She built boundaries around a simple triage: not everything that's labelled urgent actually is. "There's a saying — your emergency is not my emergency. Your urgent requirement is not my responsibility." Where she used to jump on everything and work herself into a tizzy, she now sorts: this is genuinely urgent; this can wait till tomorrow; this can take a week. "You prioritise based on your own schedule rather than other people's pressures." And she's learned to rest a little, all of the time, rather than running on empty until she has to take a big chunk off — which, ironically, only generates more stress because it's more time to make up. It's a compounding problem solved by small, constant maintenance.
A long drive, on shuffle
When I ask every guest for a metaphor for their relationship with work, Ritia protested that she's "not good at creative thinking" — which, having spent hours talking with her, I wasn't going to let stand. What she came up with is my favourite kind of metaphor: oddly specific, and instantly true.
On long road trips — Wellington to Auckland, near enough eight hours — she doesn't play a curated playlist. She puts it on shuffle, every genre, "literally everything." And there's a rule she invented for herself and has never broken: you're not allowed to skip. "You must listen to everything in its entirety." Work, she says, is the same. "You're on your long journey, and you must enjoy or suffer through every single song that comes on, because you can't skip it. Then that song's over, the next one plays, and you repeat that until you get where you're going."
Pushed for what the songs are, she maps it neatly onto a sales career with no project end and a dozen plates always spinning. Some songs you love — things are going well. Some you're sick of — maybe that's the endless forecasting. And some you hate: "maybe that's a deal you worked on for three years and lost." You take what you're given, you don't dwell, you go to the next track. As someone who'd find that no-skipping rule a particular kind of torture, I loved it — and I loved that she'd built her whole relationship with work out of two things she enjoys, driving and music.
The room that doesn't hear you
Then there's the part of the job nobody puts in the brochure. Ritia can count on one hand the female customers she deals with; on any given day she's in rooms full of men, roughly 40 to 60. "It's been a real learning," she says, generously. The challenge she didn't anticipate was having to "consistently prove that I know what I'm talking about." She describes walking into meetings and watching faces fall — "oh God, what's she going to say?" — then watching them turn as she talks, until someone says, with apparent surprise, "you really knew a lot about that." Her reply is perfect: "Yes. That's literally my job."
The sharpest version of this is one a lot of women will recognise in their bones. "I'll say something and the room doesn't hear it. My male counterpart says the exact same words, and everyone goes, 'great idea.' And I'm sitting there going, did no one hear me? Am I saying this out loud?" It happened in her twenties; it still happens now. But her response has evolved. She no longer stays quiet, and she's stopped thanking the colleague who repeated her. Instead she asks him to redirect: "Point everyone back to me. Even if you answer the question — just so I don't get passed over." Diego had the phrase for it: be an ally, not a translator.
And it isn't confined to tech. Mid-renovation, she keeps getting asked whether her partner is home, whether the tradie can talk to him — about the house she bought herself, as a single mum. It rhymes with a story Diego tells about going to Bunnings with his wife, who'd ask a question and watch the staff member answer it to him instead. The bias is ambient. Naming it, both of them agree, is where it starts to shift.
Distractions, and touching grass
Ask Ritia how she grounds herself and she gently corrects the premise. "I don't know that I have grounding things. I think I just have distractions." Chief among them is a three-year-old. At five o'clock, "that hat comes off and the Mum hat comes on" — and because a toddler will not let you keep working, parenting enforces the boundary her willpower used to negotiate. The other thing she's added is almost comically simple, and she knows it: going outside. "You know how people say 'go outside and touch grass'? That's so important." She does some of her best thinking moving, outdoors — something she'd never have prioritised before. It's not a wellness programme. It's a walk. And it works.
It's not that deep
The centrepiece of the conversation, for me, is how Ritia handles the spiral. When work stress spikes — the 3am, can't-sleep, the-email-must-go-out-tomorrow kind — she reaches for perspective, deliberately. She talks to friends who work in healthcare and teaching, people with "real outcomes." She's careful not to minimise anyone, including herself, but she lands somewhere clarifying: "No one's going to die. I didn't have to watch a child come to school with no shoes in the middle of winter. My stress is kind of self-inflicted. It's not that deep."
What makes this more than a platitude is that she's honest about the dissonance it can open up — the "what's the point of anything" trapdoor. Her answer, and Diego's, is the same, and it's worth holding onto. The goal of the perspective isn't to decide your work is worthless. It's to tell your nervous system the truth. "My body's acting like I'm going to die — fight-or-flight, survival mode — but I'm not actually in that situation." It's the lesson therapy keeps teaching Diego, who's lived through panic attacks and deep depressive episodes: name the response, and say I'm safe. And the reframe that lets the work still matter is to measure it by value rather than importance. They're not on the frontline — but they move the small thing that lets the healthcare worker get the x-ray in time. Value, without the heaviness that tips into burnout.
Imposter syndrome, interrogated
On the state of mental health in the industry, Ritia is balanced: it's improved, there are managers who genuinely get it and companies that have introduced wellness days and seen lower attrition — set against a recent retreat from DEI and from that emphasis on wellbeing. She also names something sobering: more than one colleague lost suddenly, in recent years, to heart attacks. She can't know they were stress-related, but in this industry it feels far too common.
Then she does something I didn't expect: she takes apart imposter syndrome. The term, she notes, came out of work focused on a narrow group of women — and she asks whether it really fits everyone, or whether it sometimes mislabels something else entirely. "You feel like you don't belong in a certain environment. But could it also be racism, bigotry, xenophobia — something actually real in that room? You're like, 'I feel like an imposter,' but really there are people making you feel uncomfortable being there." (For the record: the impostor phenomenon was named by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, based on a study of high-achieving women — Ritia's instinct about its origins is close, and her critique is shared by plenty of researchers since.)
She speaks from experience. As a Pacific woman and a single mum, she's been told, to her face, that she was an "easy diversity hire" — ticking boxes for being Pacific Islander and a woman. She's lost count of the times someone has told her, "your English is really good." Her answer is dry and devastating: "Thank you. It's the only language I know. I grew up in Wellington." Diego, whose first language is Spanish and who carries his own accent through these same rooms, recognised all of it — and made the connection that ties the episode together. When someone makes you feel like you don't belong, it lands on your mental health regardless of the label. Bias and burnout aren't separate conversations.
Talk to someone
I close every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech tomorrow morning, what would it be? Ritia, true to form, refused to be saccharine. "You don't know everything, and you should talk to other people about things all of the time." Her pet peeve is the person who walks in certain they know it all — and she points, fairly, at a LinkedIn full of self-declared "AI experts" for a technology that isn't even that mature yet. The industry, she reckons, has gone quiet and closed-off; her prescription is to go and talk to someone outside your usual realm and actually learn something.
She ended on the most generous note of all. There are a lot of people right now who need help — looking for work, needing a hand with a CV, needing to get out of the house, needing a coffee. Her message to them was an open door: reach out, to her or to anyone. "Asking for help isn't a weakness," she said. "It's the first step to getting better." Coming from someone who spent years learning that lesson on her own skin, it's worth listening to.
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 any time. In an emergency, call 111.**