Why I coach the people who run Northern Territory teams

Sixteen, and working

I started working at sixteen. I have not really stopped since. Sixteen years now, across two worlds that could not look more different, and somewhere in the middle of them I found the thing I actually care about.

One day I was at school with my best friends. The next I was working alongside grown men with children of their own, rough language, rougher humour, and one answer to every question about how anyone was doing. Good.

The first world

The first half was in Switzerland, in supply chain and logistics. Hard, fast, results-driven, and about as male as a workplace gets. You did not talk about how you were doing. You did the job, you carried the load, and you kept your mouth shut about the weight. That was the water we swam in.

In my first week there, one of the men took his own life. Nobody sat us down to talk about it. The next week everyone was back at work, and everyone was good. It was not the last time I saw that in my career, and in male-dominated workforces it is nowhere near as rare as it should be.

Burnout runs on the same rule. It does not matter how big the load gets, everyone is good, right up until the threshold is reached.

The second world

Then I came to the Northern Territory. Originally as a backpacker, and I stayed. The work here was the opposite kind: community services, hospitality, local government. Relational, human, unpredictable. Where the first world taught me to carry the load in silence, this one taught me what it costs to do that, and what happens when people do not have anyone to carry it with.

I am the bridge between those two worlds. The person who learned to carry it quietly, and then spent years watching what that silence does to people. That is not a line on a website. It is the whole reason I do this.

What I kept seeing

Across both worlds, in the depots of one and the councils and community organisations of the other, I kept seeing the same thing. The people at the top of a team, the ones everyone leaned on, carrying more than anyone and admitting to less. Running on empty and calling it strength. And I watched some of them break.

Not the ones you would expect. The strong ones. The reliable ones. The ones who would never say a word until it was too late. In the worlds I worked in, that was mostly men, and it is the pattern I know best from the inside. It is not only men. Anyone who leads a team out here can end up carrying it exactly this way.

I know that road because I went a long way down it myself. I did what these leaders do. I did not stop. I told myself I could carry it a bit longer. My body stopped me instead. The stress put an ulcer in my stomach, and it got bad enough that it could have killed me. Eight straight weeks in hospital. Four surgeries. Two years of recovery and rehab before I was properly back on my feet. That was the wake-up. Not a bad patch, my own body sending the bill and very nearly closing the account.

So when I say I understand these leaders, I do not mean it as sympathy from a comfortable chair. I mean I have been where they are, run myself down the way they do, and found out the hard way where it goes.

Why the usual help does not reach them

The thing is, the people carrying the most rarely go and get help. In the national mental health survey, only about a third of Australian men with a recent mental disorder had seen a health professional about it, compared with half of women, and a quarter of men say they would not seek help from anyone. Out here, regional and remote, it is worse. Suicide rates in remote Australia run at roughly twice the rate of the major cities, and the Territory carries the highest rate in the country. The tougher and more self-reliant someone is, the further they will stay from anything that looks like admitting they are struggling. That is not a flaw in them. It is the world they were built by. I know, because I was built by the same one.

So the support that exists, clinical, city-based, built for people who put their hand up, mostly does not reach the people who need it most. It is not wrong. It just was not made for them, or for out here.

What I decided to build

So I built something for them. Not therapy. I am honest about what I am and what I am not. Coaching, for leaders who are carrying too much, framed the way people who were taught to carry it quietly can actually hear it. Not "something is wrong with you," but "you are running a demanding operation on a tank that never gets refilled, and no operator gets away with that forever."

Capacity, not repair. The leader you actually want to be, not the problem you are ashamed of. Built for the Northern Territory, and grounded in real data about how burnt out this workforce actually is, data I gather through a free tool anyone here can use. That free tool stays free and separate from the paid work. It is there for anyone, and it feeds honest NT evidence, not a sales list.

Where I am honest about myself

I am a second-year Bachelor of Social Work student and a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers. I have done deliberate work on emotional intelligence and leading people, because I had to. I am not a psychologist or a counsellor, and this is not treatment. If someone needs clinical help, I get them to it. I do not pretend to be something I am not. What I am is someone who has carried what these leaders carry, in rooms like theirs, and come out the other side wanting to make sure fewer of them break.

Why it matters

Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian men aged 15 to 44, and men are more than three quarters of the Australians who die by suicide. Most of it is silent. A lot of it starts as exactly the kind of slow, unspoken burnout I watched take good people down in both my worlds, and nearly went down myself. I cannot fix that. But I can sit across from someone who runs a team out here, help them read their own gauges honestly before the tank hits empty, and give them a way to lead that they can actually sustain.

That is the work. That is why I do it.

Denis