S2:E12 - Balancing Entrepreneurship with Mental Health with George Hodgson

S2:E12 – Balancing Entrepreneurship with Mental Health with George Hodgson

11/02/2019

The Importance of Balancing Entrepreneurship with Mental Health

Hey and welcome to this episode of #TheOpenMike, and it’s a fast track start to 2019.

And on today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing a true entrepreneur’s origin story.

Balancing entrepreneurship with mental health, we’re going to be talking everything from fashion, to storytelling and an awesome deep dive journey.

This particular podcast has a very special meaning to myself. There’s too many entrepreneurs often suffer and sit in silence.

And I sit on a lot of boards as a non-exec and growth coach, and I see, not just the young entrepreneurs out there, but some more seasoned professionals, who maybe when it starts to get tough out there, it can really affect them.

Whether it’s at home, or in business, and mental health is a big part of that.

And despite the UK investing over £115 million in mental health research each year, the mental health network receives only about 5.5% of that in spend.

So there’s clearly so much more that as a business community and as a wider audience that we can do to help raise awareness of this.

We’ll do that through our podcast and we’ll get this shared. We’re going to put some links below, so hopefully you guys can share this as well.

And it’s an absolute pleasure to have a young chap on the show called George Hodgson, who’s not only going to share his journey with us, but he’s also a campaigner for mental health, and does a lot of great volunteering work, and a lot of good contributions to good causes.

So if you want to reach out to somebody, and you’re concerned about mental health, as I mentioned earlier, you don’t have to sit in silence.

We’re going to put some links in to great organisations like Time To Change, Young Minds, and of course the NHS.

And naturally these are just a small selection of the resources that are available. So please don’t sit in silence, take action, speak about it, open up.

And let’s hope this podcast offers some value to you as well.

In this episode we’re going to chat about entrepreneurship and mental health plus much more.

And I’m privileged to welcome to the show a real truly inspiring entrepreneur, George Hodgson from Maison De Choup.

Welcome, George, thanks for taking the time to share your journey and your story, and welcome to #TheOpenMike Podcast.

George Hodgson

George is a fashionpreneur, public speaker and mental health activist. In 2014 he founded the award-winning fashion label ‘Maison de Choup’ out of my severe anxiety and OCD episode. The brand has been recognised by the likes of Vanity Fair, which referred to Maison de Choup as ‘The Fashion Brand with a Mental Health Cause at its Heart’. It also won the British Fashion Startup Award in 2016 for such an inspiring story.

Since launching Maison De Choup, George has gone on to do public speeches and workshops in schools, colleges and universities about how he started my fashion label from such a dark place.

He tells the story of his battle with severe Anxiety and OCD, not being able to leave his bedroom for 3 years and washing his hands up to 50x a day to running a fashion label full time. George is incredibly honest about his suffering and talks about how everyone should be more open about their mental health, especially young men.

George also works with YoungMinds as a Youth Advisor on the Amplified programme giving workshops to professionals.

In August 2017, George became a qualified Youth Mental Health First Aider and received an MHFA Certificate of Completion.