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For more than two decades, Sharon McCormick has been helping businesses support employees through some of the most difficult moments in their lives.

As founder of The Listening Centre in Lichfield, she works with organisations on everything from counselling and workplace mediation to trauma support, training and workshops, backed by a carefully selected network of 34 affiliate therapists working virtually and face-to-face.

Her approach is deliberately personal and, rather than treating workplace wellbeing as a box to tick or assuming a standard employee programme will suit everyone, she believes the right support depends on understanding both the individual and the issue they are facing.

Sometimes that may be anxiety or depression, at other times, what appears to be a mental health problem can have its roots in workplace conflict, bullying, relationships, trauma, caring responsibilities or significant change at home.

“People don’t always arrive at work neatly separated from everything else happening in their lives,” she says. And, it’s this understanding of both people and workplaces that has helped The Listening Centre build long-standing relationships with corporate clients and a reputation largely through recommendation.

But for someone who has spent much of her career listening to other people’s problems, she also understands better than most the importance of protecting your own wellbeing.

For her, that is not about grand gestures, complicated routines or chasing an ideal version of yourself, it’s about knowing what keeps you well, protecting it and making space for the people and things that genuinely make life better.

“I’m very big on self-preservation,” she says. “I have routines that feed me, and those routines are refreshingly simple and can include walking in nature, swimming, reading or booking a massage, alongside something I feel is increasingly underestimated... proper rest from the seriousness of everyday life.

“This can mean switching off the news and watching something completely different instead, I personally don’t watch the news and opt for more light-hearted programmes because, when you spend so much time working around trauma and difficult situations, you need that respite.”

It is an approach shaped by both her professional and personal experience. After leaving school, she joined the RAF, working in surveillance, but it was her own experience of trauma within the forces and subsequent referral for therapy that would ultimately influence the direction of her career.

She later moved into HR and undertook five years of professional training before establishing The Listening Centre in 2002. More than two decades later, the multi-award-winning organisation supports businesses and individuals across the region, but Sharon believes wellbeing begins long before somebody reaches the therapist’s chair.

One of the themes she returns to repeatedly is the importance of relationships, saying: “The quality of our relationships is so important and human connection really matters and that includes relationships with partners, families, friends and colleagues, but also the relationship we have with ourselves.” She believes many of us become very good at suppressing difficult experiences rather than understanding them, adding: “We can unravel things or we can bury them, but when we bury things, they can still affect the way we feel, behave and relate to other people.”

It’s one of the reasons authenticity plays such an important role in her thinking and the ability to be ‘unapologetically you’, as she describes it, is not about disregarding other people, but becoming comfortable enough with yourself that you are no longer constantly performing for the world around you.

It’s a philosophy that also shapes the way The Listening Centre works with businesses, where there can still be a tendency to treat wellbeing as a service or employee benefit rather than something rooted in relationships, culture and human connection.

That is why The Listening Centre takes a more individual approach, matching people with the right practitioner and the right form of support rather than assuming the same solution will work for everyone. It also explains why its therapists are so carefully selected, with everything expected to meet the highest standards.

After more than 20 years in the profession, that attention to quality has become part of the business itself...providing the right help, for the right reasons, from the right person.

Yet despite the seriousness of her work, Sharon’s personal philosophy remains remarkably uncomplicated. Move your body. Spend time outside. Read. Dance. Switch off. Find people you can be yourself around. And never underestimate the therapeutic power of a cuddle.