SINEAD HOLLAND meets a man who’s clawed his way back from the brink of suicide - and is convinced people can learn to think themselves out of the depths of misery.
SUICIDE seemed like an option when Mark Newey reached rock bottom, so when he tells his desperate patients they can turn their lives around, he understands their despair.
Now content with a new career as a therapist, he stared into the abyss when his high-flying working life crashed.
The 50-year-old father of three from Arkesden had been the original “Mr Corporate” as the brains behind multi-national TV advertising campaigns for big businesses like Braun.
His career took him across the world, but the jet-set lifestyle meant he was spending just one day a week at home with wife of 23 years Vicki and their then young daughters.
He said: “It was very much corporate – travelling all over the place. It took me quite a long while to realise it just wasn’t what I enjoyed doing. So I actually walked out of an extremely well-paid job with nothing to go to.”
He confessed his wife was horrified: “That was about 13-14 years ago. I think she knew I wasn’t happy and that’s something I always say to my clients, ‘You spend 80 per cent of your life at work, so if it’s not right, that’s something you have to look at.’ That comes from the heart because I walked out of a very well-paid job.”
His next step was to set up a Cambridge-based training company. Initially, the project was successful, with a workforce of 29 people, but when a major contractor failed to pay, the business went bust – and Mark was devastated.
He said: “I took it very personally – effectively I had a breakdown. For a period of six months, I just cannot tell you what I was doing. I was on the floor. There’s no other way to put it, it was a breakdown.
“I had suicidal thoughts. It was all my fault – I should have spotted it coming... my self-esteem plummeted through the floor and I had no self-respect.”
While the family struggled simply to keep their home, Mark found himself drawn to a completely new field. His growing appreciation of hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming – or, as he describes it, “the art and the science of how the mind works” – not only brought personal salvation but, finally, fresh and fulfilling work.
In the 10 years since those dark days, his Winning Minds clinic, based in Emson Close, Saffron Walden, has clearly become more of a vocation than a way of paying the bills.
The training – with its central message that we can reprogramme our minds and think differently – was his therapy: “It had such impact – it turned my life around.”
So now his mission is to bring that same relief and release to others trapped on the treadmill of modern life, suffering stress, anxiety, depression, anger and eating disorders.
He admitted: “I’m very understanding of sceptical views people have about this – because I was there.”
However, he said: “A lot of our problems come from the stressful nature of modern life. The way society is set up and the way capitalism is set up is that we’re made to always want more, and the problem with that is we’re then never happy with what we’ve got.
“A lot of my job is getting people to step off the treadmill and look at their life.”
In just two £295 sessions, he believes he can make most clients effect dramatic changes, even if they have already spent years in conventional counselling or taking anti-depressants. The key is their desire to move on.
Lately he has helped people who have lost their highly-pressurised, highly-paid jobs as a result of the recession, but as he looks to the future, his focus is increasingly on preventing problems.
He now regrets that his daughters Alex, 21, who is reading medicine at Cardiff, Jasmine, who is 18 and about to take a gap year before embarking on a sports design and engineering course at Loughborough University, and 13-year-old Antonia witnessed his own troubles and would like to do more to help other youngsters.
A programme of school and university seminars is one option under consideration and he has issued an open invitation to head teachers to get in touch. He said: “Childhood and adolescent programming is fundamental to how we see life as an adult.”
He also wants, in an increasingly fractured world, to build a sense of community and is setting up a series of workshops and an online forum to offer support to many more people.
He said: “I want to workshop myself out of business. As a therapist, one of the things I find really frustrating is I can only see one person at a time, but I know it can be done with 10, 20, 30 – 100 people in the room.”
For more details see
www.winningminds.co.uk