Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
Content warning: This article discusses suicide, self-harm, trauma and brain injury. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time to talk with a trained counsellor. In an emergency, call 111.
I met Sita Proud at an awards dinner. I couldn't tell you what the award was, though for some reason I remember exactly what I was wearing. What I do remember is sitting at a crowded table, quietly drowning in the kind of social anxiety I've never fully shaken, certain that nobody could tell. One person could. She looked across the table and asked if I was okay, and then offered the simplest, kindest thing: "Do you want to walk outside? We'll take a breath. Everything will still be here when we come back."
Some people see you at a level only one or two others ever have. Sita is one of them. So when she agreed to come on Mind Middleware, I knew the conversation would go somewhere real. I didn't quite expect how fast she'd take us there.
The human doing, and the human being
The podcast always opens the same way: tell me about your human doing, so we can get to the human being underneath. Sita is known as a leader in sales and technology — three decades of it — but that's the doing. The being is harder won. "My purpose," she said, "is to pay forward the belief that was given to me."
That belief arrived when she was nineteen. Raised by a single mum in an Indian family without a father in the household, she grew up surrounded by adversity and the cultural weight that came with it. Instead of the path that was expected of her, she fell into a technology sales role in London, left Bristol, and met a boss who believed in her before she believed in herself. "He put me in situations where I could push myself, and I didn't understand why at the time. But he changed the whole trajectory of my life."
Then came the curveballs, the kind no career prepares you for: homelessness as a teenager, a brain aneurysm, a craniotomy, several major surgeries, and several moments she genuinely didn't expect to survive. "And guess what? I'm still here. So what's my purpose?" For Sita, the answer is to be the person who tells you that you have potential — even when you can't yet see the opportunity in front of you.
When someone has been inside your brain
The aneurysm came five years ago, and Sita is careful about how she frames it. It wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to her, she says — it was the last straw. "I felt like I'd taken one for all the teams." What made it different from the emotional traumas she'd survived before was that this one was physical. Someone had been inside her brain, and when she woke up, she wasn't the same person.
The hardest part she shared was something I'd never heard anyone say aloud. For about a year, she lost the ability to love her three sons. "I used to look straight through them. I knew they were mine, and somewhere I loved them — but I just saw through them." When she rang her surgeon to ask whether depression after brain surgery was a thing, she was told no. When she described looking through her own children, she was told that doesn't happen. So she was left to make sense of it alone.
What rescued her wasn't a single breakthrough. It was neuroplasticity — the brain's capacity to rewire — paired with three and a half years of deliberate work: counselling, and eventually medication she'd resisted for a long time. "I thought, I've been through so much, why am I suffering now? But it was the best thing I ever did." The turning point came when she finally found the right counsellor, after others who hadn't helped. A book she picked up before Christmas one year made her realise, with a jolt, "That's me. I've got trauma." She names 2023 as the pivotal year — the one that taught her what had really happened in her past, why she behaves the way she does, and who she wants to be now.
She'll never be the old Sita, and she's mostly made peace with that. "Do I still want her? It's okay. It's fine."
A torch, not a trophy
When I asked Sita to describe her relationship with work as a metaphor, she didn't hesitate: a torch. In her darkest times, someone — that first boss, or sometimes just luck — shone a light to show her the path. Now she wants to be that light for others.
What I love about her framing is what it refuses to be. "I don't want it to be, 'My story's so sad and traumatic, look at my resilience.' It's about hope." Resilience can become a trophy you polish. Hope is something you hand to someone else. If she can show you that she was there — and that she became who she is today — then the light isn't about her at all. It's about the possibility that things change.
The invisible disability
For a woman who has led teams for over twenty years, talked to rooms of 250 men in tech, and built revenue streams from nothing, the cruellest part of recovery is how little of it anyone can see. "It's an invisible disability," she said. "If I'd lost a leg, you could see it. You'd assume trauma. You'd see that I might need help."
Instead, she naps after full-on days, writes things down because recall is slower than it used to be, and occasionally has to ask a stranger at the airport to help with a suitcase — fighting the urge to apologise for it. A couple of weeks before we spoke, she delivered her first keynote to 450 people, convinced she was going to be sick, and got through it by being honest: "I have to write a few things down, and I'm going to own that." Sometimes, she said, she feels she has to show people the photograph of her brain surgery just so they understand. Because when they don't know her story, they forget. Employers forget. Even family forget — because she acts strong, acts normal, is doing all these things. "But inside, there's a slice of me that's in pain."
I told her the truth: we worked together for a while, and everything she was describing had been completely invisible to me. That invisibility doesn't lessen the pain — it just hides it. It's the same lesson I keep relearning with my own daughter, who has type one diabetes, another condition you can't see. The instinct, when something is invisible, is to quietly minimise it. Which is exactly why it has to be said out loud.
Sita has turned that lesson into action. She now leads a monthly support group for people who've survived traumatic brain injuries, because when she went through hers, she had no one. "Everyone's pain is their own pain," she said. "We have a right to feel it, acknowledge it, and share it — to help everyone else."
The state of mental health in tech
I'm always upfront that I'm not a clinician; what I have is lived experience of burnout and depression brought on by work. Sita's read of our industry is sharp. In tech, you're assumed to be brilliant, and that assumption is a quiet, constant pressure. The wellbeing programmes exist — the EAP is "available" — but availability isn't the same as culture. "Which leaders are leading from the front to make sure people actually use what's there? Which are emotionally intelligent enough to ask the right questions? Which are strong enough to be vulnerable in front of their people?"
Her picture of good leadership is refreshingly concrete. Share the real vision and show people how their work connects to it, top to bottom. Protect psychological safety — let people say what they need to, whether or not you agree. Don't micromanage unless you genuinely have to. And never forget what it's like to be on the front line: "Ten dollars means the world to those people. As you get promoted, you can forget where you came from. Don't."
She's equally clear-eyed about AI. Embrace it, learn it, make yourself indispensable — but organisations have to remember there's a person behind their success. Forcing people to use tools without training them is a fast track to burnout. And the budget that usually gets cut first, learning and development, is exactly the one she'd protect. "We've got that wrong."
Soft skills are a superpower
One of the points from her keynote that she repeated to me: our so-called soft skills are not soft. "They're a superpower." When you're willing to be vulnerable and show emotion, people open up to you and trust you. And then she said the thing she's most passionate about — that women need to support other women. There are more women in tech and sales now than there were twenty years ago, but too many who've "made it" will talk about the journey without ever reaching back to lift someone up. So she's set herself a target: change a minimum of two people's lives every year. A minimum, because she's realistic about everything else she carries. "If they want it, I'm theirs."
We talked about the role men play in this, and I admitted I find it a hard line to walk — the last thing a woman should have to do is teach men how to support her. Sita's answer was generous: encouragement, and presence. Men stepping up, men talking, men advocating. She's raising three boys, after all, and feels the responsibility to send three good men into the world. "Women can't do it on their own, and men can't either. It needs to be together."
That instinct shows up beyond the office, too. She sits on the board of a football club, where her focus is equity for the female teams — pathways from first kicks, safe facilities and lighting, the same sponsorships, the same home and away kit. "You'd think these things were normal." We ended up swapping examples of design bias hiding in plain sight: women's tennis kit without pockets, and a book she'd been reading on how products get designed around male data — seatbelts that make women more likely to die in a crash, fixtures built for hands without long nails. (For the record, that book is almost certainly Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez — worth a read if those examples made you sit up.) Her conclusion: we need diversity not as a slogan, but because different lives notice different things.
The day she chose to stay
I asked Sita what actually helped in the dark times — not what got her "out," because you never really get out, you just learn to sideline it. She took us somewhere I didn't expect. At sixteen, she decided she didn't want to be here anymore. What stopped her wasn't that she didn't want to go; it was that she had responsibilities to other people. It took her all day, and she stayed. "Because it was so hard to stay alive, I owed it to myself to make sure I try not to go there again."
Her practical advice is simple and hard-won. Acknowledge when something isn't right. Get help — start with your GP, then a counsellor, an EAP, friends; ask. And the flip side, for the rest of us: when someone asks for help, don't say "what can I do?" and then disappear. "Be the person who's always there, whether they like it or not. Keep checking in." Talking, both ways.
And underneath all of it, hope. "Every time I could have given up, I didn't." She still talks to her younger self. "I look at a little Sita and say, it's going to be okay. I know what you're about to go through, but you're going to be okay. That girl deserves something good."
Two messages for Monday morning
I close every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech before they start their week, what would it be? Most guests speak to the person bracing for a hard day. Sita was the first to split her answer in two.
To everyone: "Surround yourself with good people, because it's going to be okay."
And to the other audience — the ones with power, the ones who can make or break someone's day: "Don't ever underestimate the power of believing in someone. You don't know — you can change their life."
It took one person believing in me for me to believe in myself. Sita knows that better than most, because one person did it for her at nineteen, and she's spent the years since trying to be that person for everyone else. A torch, passed hand to hand.
She wanted to leave one more thing for anyone reading this: she's on LinkedIn, and she's available. "I can't save the world, but I can find someone to help. So reach out."
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.**