By Sue White
Name: Sharon Darmody
The profession: Organisational therapist
The organisation: Strive Occupational Rehabilitation
The job title: Principal consultant and clinical director
The pay: $80,000 to $135,000
Organisational therapist Sharon Darmody says a lot of the things she does today couldn’t have been done in businesses 10 years ago.
9am: After an early start at home with some meditation, journaling, then coffee and the daily Wordle, I’m ready for my first client. I support people in staying engaged and healthy at work. We spend a lot of time at work, so if you can change someone’s working life, it’s a good day’s work.
My clients are usually large organisations, both private and government. I’ve been doing this type of work 28 years, and my company is 20 years old. My sessions are guided by what my clients need, so today I’m in a debriefing with a leadership team, talking about their ground rules around communication, meetings and emails.
The group set these rules at the start of working with me, but things haven’t been working, so we’re revisiting them – it’s an ongoing conversation. Together, we decide they are going to trial a new way of running their meetings to make these as efficient as possible.
When I started this kind of work, people had to fall over, and then you would pick them up. Now, they don’t have to fall over – we are going upstream more frequently [to stop issues before they happen].
10am: Next is a mindfulness group. Research tells us that 47 per cent of the time we’re not paying attention. It’s a core issue.
Mindfulness has become a bit of a buzzword, so I like to do something different each session, so people can see there is something for everything – you’re just training your brain to be in charge of your thoughts. It’s not sitting in the corner navel-gazing.
11am: Life happens for people, so it’s good to be accessible when things come up. Today I’m in a 1-1 with a client who needs to have a difficult work conversation. Together, we develop some strategies to help them do this.
1pm: Group workshops are a big part of the education I do. If we are looking at prevention in the workplace, we need to teach people skills that keep them well. Today’s workshop is on the neuroscience of self-care, and people are genuinely interested.
Sometimes our hardest critic is ourselves. I often talk about how we can learn skills to regain our focus, and our attention, and also about self-compassion. I don’t think we could have done that in organisations 10 years ago.
2pm: I do a lot of management coaching. The manager I meet today is trying to better support their team, as they have lots of uncertainty and change coming up.
We look at the strategies we can put in place to make sure people navigate this change as well as possible. We want to keep the team productive, but also well.
3pm: At another client’s office, I begin teaching them my “Magic 5” framework, sharing the five pillars I think support people to keep well at work. It’s very practical. Participants work through the framework to see what is missing for them and where the gaps are.
4pm: Another mindfulness session for my earlier client. I like to offer it twice in the day as some people can’t get to one session. Some people prefer mindfulness early in the day as a reset while others prefer it to set a boundary at the end of their day.
After I leave, I do something to mark my own day’s end. I’ve done my own meditation early in the morning, so often the end of the day for me is watching my kid’s sport or walking the dogs.
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