Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to the brand new season of Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today kicking off the series in typically pioneering change making style is Maryam Meddin, Founder and CEO of The Soke, a mental health and wellness clinic with a modern service-led approach. Born in Iran and sent to an English boarding school aged 5, Maryam moved between the two countries until becoming stuck in a post-revolutionary Iran with her parents destitute. Returning to the UK as a refugee with just £10 in her pocket, Maryam worked in a restaurant, studied Law and then spent 22 years in the branding and communications industry. Having lost her eldest brother and father to suicide, Maryam trained as a psychotherapist to better understand her own mental health and that of others. She saw how clinical and impersonal the mental health sector was toward potential users and felt the need to reshape the experience using her communications knowledge. In 2020 she launched The Soke, a Chelsea-based private mental health centre, providing the full range of services to adults, families, schools and corporations, delivered by collaborative practitioners in a comfortable, non-clinical environment. It’s lovely to have you here.
Maryam Meddin
Thank you very much for having me.
Elliot Moss
I want to start the last few years and The Soke itself. What precipitated you to actually do something about the instincts that you had about the sector, about mental health? What pushed you over the line as it were to make this happen?
Maryam Meddin
I was sharing an office with a friend who had recently set up her own business and I spoke to her about this idea that I’d had many years before about setting up a mental health centre that would fill all the, sort of the gaps that existed in the experience of both the user and the provider of mental health services and quite simply, she said, ‘this is a brilliant idea and if you do it, I’ll back you’ and so sort of what was almost the joke became a daily sort of lunchtime conversation and that sort of one-to-one conversation became a conversation with more people and it was to put it simply a result of the encouragement of lots of different people. I was used to, I have been used for most of my life to being told to sort of calm down and slow down and think smaller and this was the first time that I’d ever thought of something and everybody not only encouraged me but encouraged me to see the future potential and how necessary it was. It became a no-brainer and I had nothing to lose, which is a situation that I found myself in at various points in my life where you know I’m not married, I don’t have children, you know I have a manageable mortgage and I was prepared to sort of take that leap of faith knowing that the people around me are rooting for me whether I win or lose, I can count on their support and that meant a lot to me, so I, yeah.
Elliot Moss
You did it.
Maryam Meddin
I did it, yeah.
Elliot Moss
The gap, you talked about the gap and identifying it, how in your own head was it possible that no one had seen the gap before and how did you articulate or rather how did you come to see those gaps or the gap itself in your own life, what brought you to that point where your analysis was but why aren’t they doing it like this?
Maryam Meddin
I think from what I continue to see and what was apparent to me then, so I had gone for therapy myself and it had become very quickly apparent that I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was choosing or what the process would be and there was nobody I could ask. My relationship was with my therapist and I had a lot of practical questions, how long is this going to take, how do I know if it’s working, what is it going to cost me and so on. The therapeutic relationship is so boundaried that every time I would ask a question, the response would relate to my sort of recovery so to speak. The question would be why do you feel the need to know? You know, why do you feel the need to be in control of the situation? So I sensed then that this is, there’s something missing here. I want somebody to answer my questions who knows about what’s going on in this particular relationship, so not something I can Google but something that’s actually you know, I have spoken to your therapist and this is what she thinks. I then trained as a psychotherapist partly because I am a control freak, as my therapist had sort of tried to highlight, and I…
Elliot Moss
Your therapist was right. It’s okay. You’re in safe hands, Maryam. I won’t tell anybody.
Maryam Meddin
I wanted to know, everybody knows now, I wanted to know how it all worked but that then gave me an insight to what it’s like for the therapist as well and equally, they have a lot of practical needs that if it’s left to them to deal with, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the sort of the optimal outcome. I think going from that to talking about why it hasn’t been done, it’s because most of the people who work in this sector are themselves clinicians or practitioners and they’re just not wired to think about things beyond what is going on in the brain of the person who they’re sitting opposite. I mean you’ll know coming from the creative world, you don’t allow sort of designers to run a big agency because they would give their ideas away for free, you know you always need some people who can say okay this is what the process is going to be and this is how we’re going to make it more efficient and be able to look with an objective eye and I think that’s what has been missing, continue, you know the people who come together to set up mental health centres are usually practitioners themselves so they’re not thinking about beyond what’s going on inside the therapy room.
Elliot Moss
You talked about your thesis, the exposition was excellent in terms of why we are where we are. Your own journey with mental health and I touched on at the beginning, you’ve had loss, you’ve had displacement, you’ve had pretty much you know, most people in their lives may experience one of those things. And you lost your mum back in October 2021, I think, so where do you with all of this and unpacking it for you and how has that impacted the way that you have developed the business?
Maryam Meddin
I’ll go back to my childhood and say that I’ve sort of carried this melancholy within me pretty much from the minute that I can remember but I’ve always been very highly functional and my mother was alive until not long ago, my father died when I was about eighteen. I was always not expected to be but I think I expected myself to be a pillar of strength for them and indeed for my brothers who although they were older than me, both seemed more fragile than me in many ways. And I think that what I wanted to do was to make people understand that mental health services are for people like me, you don’t have to have a diagnosable sort of neurodevelopmental issue or a breakdown or anything, you can be a highly functioning, ‘perfectly normal’, in inverted commas, person and still have issues that would benefit from an airing at the very least.
Elliot Moss
You say that about you know normal people, undiagnosed, and yet, and yet, you know your father passing away, your brother, being a refugee, I mean these are not regular things, Maryam, and I just wonder at the time and you said you know I wanted to be a pillar of strength, why did you feel that you needed to be?
Maryam Meddin
Because my parents weren’t and somebody had to be the grown-up. My parents had us when they were very young and were both emotionally quite fragile people, in different ways, in entirely different ways, so I just learnt that in order to keep the peace, and I don’t mean in terms of sort of raging arguments, I mean in terms of my general happiness of my parents and the atmosphere that we were a part of, not all the time but during school holidays and so on, you know we had to sort of grin and bear it. I don’t remember ever, until adulthood, thinking or knowing that I didn’t like boarding school. It was, in fact I was walking up Regent Street about 20-25 years ago and there was a smell and it was that smell that suddenly transported me back to boarding school and in that moment I felt my heart sink and as my heart sank, I thought oh my god this is the feeling that I had all of those years but if you asked me, as a child, you know how do you like boarding school, which a lot of people did because I’d been sent to boarding school at such a young age, that adults would constantly sort of say to me, what is it like being at boarding school aged five, six, whatever I was and I remember having a stock answer, saying it’s fantastic, I’m with my friends all day and in the evening, and I think that just became a sort of a well-worn phrase that didn’t mean anything by the end of it. So, yeah, it was by compulsion I suppose that I learnt to grin and bear it and partly I suppose that’s part of an upbringing in the UK and sort of the ‘70s where you didn’t sort of make a fuss and you just go on with it. And there was no choice, you know, you ask me the question as if I had a choice. I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted to make something of my life then I couldn’t afford to stop and sort of take stock of what was going on, I just needed to keep soldiering on through and to some extent I still do that, I don’t really stop to reflect a great deal, I’m very good with sort of my own thoughts and in my own time but I don’t, yeah, I don’t let it stop me from getting to whatever the end goal is.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, it’s Maryam Meddin, she’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now though we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series and they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip focusing on the health and wellness industries, we hear from Ruby Raut, CEO and Co-Founder of WUKA, the UK’s first eco-friendly period underwear brand.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Maryam Meddin, Founder and CEO of The Soke, a wellness and mental health centre. You came as a refugee and how old were you when that was the case?
Maryam Meddin
Fifteen.
Elliot Moss
Fifteen. And you had a tenner in your pocket and you had nowhere to stay, and you just talked before about, you just keep on going and in your own words, you sort of had to just soldier on whenever. Could that person have imagined that they would have set up their own branding and communications business however many years later or was it just, you arrived there and that’s where you were and then you did that? Because I’m just wondering how much of you know, sometimes we think about entrepreneurialism as a very positive action and everyone, it’s wonderful and it’s uplifting. Yours sounds like it’s rooted in survival and next step. Is that right?
Maryam Meddin
Yeah, I knew, I knew that I needed to be able to stand on my own two feet. At that point, that’s as far as my ambitions went. I need a roof over my head, I needed to be safe and I needed to sort of have some sort of security. My mother, the last thing she said to me as, before she went back to Iran because she travelled to the UK with me, left me here and then went back, she said ‘I’m leaving you here because you’ve promised me that you’ll get an education’ and you know, leaving a fifteen year old in London, you can imagine as a parent you’re thinking oh my god, how is this going to pan out and she was very worried about me sort of just thinking hey, I’m in London, it’s the ‘80s, never mind that I didn’t have two pennies to rub together but generally as a young person you might prioritise other activities over education and sort of stability so, she did say to me that if you don’t get an education, don’t come home, she pretty much threatened me and said that she you know, she would not be supportive of my life in any way shape or form unless I took the opportunity that had been given to me, which was simply to be in the UK when there were thousands, if not millions, of others in Iran who were stuck and couldn’t leave.
Elliot Moss
But in the UK with no money.
Maryam Meddin
But in the UK with no money.
Elliot Moss
And nowhere to stay and no school signed up, nothing.
Maryam Meddin
No. But the, well, I had said for the sort of preceding two to three years when I’d been stuck in Iran, I’d kept saying you know, get me back to the UK, I need to go back and my parents would say, ‘We’ve got nothing to give you, we can’t send you back to a private school and do all those things that you had as a child’ and I kept saying, ‘I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine’. And in fact one occasion with extended family, the topic came up and those other members of our family said ‘Oh Maryam, of course she’ll be fine, ah, she can do anything’.
Elliot Moss
Why did they say that?
Maryam Meddin
I have no idea. Genuinely, I have no idea and my mum when she left and gave me that £10 note, she also gave me a return ticket to Iran and said, ‘If you can’t cope, you can come home but don’t use it if you’ve been out partying’ and then you just think I’ve had enough and I want to go back. I did have the option of giving up but I couldn’t use it because I’d have been so humiliated in front of all of those people who’d believed in me and actually those particular relatives, who now live in Paris, they continue to be sort of my cheerleading squad and every time I do something, they’re like ‘of course you did’.
Elliot Moss
Of course you did.
Maryam Meddin
Whereas you know I’m filled with doubt, they sort of give me that boost and make me believe that I could do it and it started when I was thirteen, fourteen.
Elliot Moss
Well they must be right because this is the person in front me who set up their own business twice and you’ve got a Law degree as well just thrown in the middle, just because, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more from her, she’s Maryam Meddin and she’s my Business Shaper today. It doesn’t do justice to your life to do what I’m about to, which is to say ‘And then you set up a business and then you moved from the world of advertising and branding into mental health’ because that is sort of fifteen, twenty years of your life but I’m going to, I’m going to do that for a moment so, we’re going to suspend the fact that there would be fifty hours of conversation, we can have about every single in between. In terms of the way that you have led this business and the experience you had leading a different business in the world of branding and communications, is your style of leadership, looking through the lens of it’s a project, we charge money, I have clients, has that informed a business-like positively put, business-like approach to managing what are very personal issues? Has that worked easily for you or have you had to adapt the way you think about the mental health business versus the branding business?
Maryam Meddin
It’s not so much that we’ve had to change the way we think or I’ve personally had to change the way I think, it’s much more a question of if I was a customer, for want of a better word, what would my expectations be? So that’s the significant difference between what exists and what we bring to the table, I treat the clients who come to The Soke as if they were my clients from a previous business, it’s not relevant to me what they’re coming there for.
Elliot Moss
And you won’t call them a control-freak if they say how much is this, how long will it take, how will I know if I’m getting better?
Maryam Meddin
No, and in fact the whole reason I pretty much every single element and service that exists at The Soke, certainly from the client perspective, has come from personal experience. So, I wanted to be able to pick up the phone and speak to somebody who could tell me how to choose a practitioner. They would be able to give me information on all the practical stuff, they would be able to give me options and tell me a little bit about the process and then after I’d seen my practitioner, I wanted to be able to talk to somebody and say actually I didn’t like them or I you know.
Elliot Moss
Practical stuff.
Maryam Meddin
I’d like all the practical stuff.
Elliot Moss
And on the other side though, Maryam, this is the thing, as someone who has had many impacts on your mental health for really good reasons, I mean properly in the parlance it would be externalities that have happened to Maryam, this is not come from your own even if you have a sense of melancholy, even if the family is predisposed to depression and anything else that might be true, stuff has happened to you. Has it changed the way you think about leadership because actually when you’re dealing with people’s health even though that you are giving them what clients want, it’s a different ball game, the product is improving mental health, has that changed your view of how this business ought to be run?
Maryam Meddin
Yeah, I’m definitely, the way that I am sort of leading now compared to the way that I was leading even five years ago, it’s night and day, it’s very, very different.
Elliot Moss
And just give me an example of how it’s different, just one example.
Maryam Meddin
Well I don’t know, I might sort of just come across as a, you know I might be showing my age but I do find myself sort of often thinking things like young people, you can’t tell them to show up on time these days and all of that kind of stuff but you can’t say that, you know and I’m much, much more aware of sort of work-life balance now, which means that there’s a huge change compared to when I was leading a creative agency where nobody went home before sort of 10.00 o’clock in the evening.
Elliot Moss
Quite right too.
Maryam Meddin
So, there are things that I’m learning every day about being a sensitive and thoughtful leader but in terms of the business itself, no I think I still have the same thoughts, you know is the client getting what they need, are we doing a good job, you know I’m not interested to some extent on what’s going on inside the therapy room, I haven’t tried to influence that in any way but I want every single step of the way outside the therapy room to be, you know every single touch point so to speak to be effected by good service, feeling safe, feeling secure, feeling cared for, all of those things. And the priorities have changed as well, before I worked in a business where ultimately the client was always right and they paid the bills so even if they had a terrible idea, ultimately you know I had a small agency, I couldn’t afford like the big agencies to say no, if you don’t do it our way, go away, so I deferred to the client or to the invoice I should say, being paid a lot more often than I would now. Now, clients come to us, they don’t necessarily know what’s best for them so we really have to think about what is in their best interest.
Elliot Moss
We’ll have our final chat with my guest today, Maryam Meddin, and we’ve also got some Eliane Elias to join her and that’s coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Maryam Meddin is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. As I’ve been talking to you, the thing that strikes me is the look in your eyes, which obviously you can’t see but I’m going to describe them. There’s a certain power in the way when you talk, you look, and it is that sense of you have to just keep going and that sense you said something to me which I thought was really important about ‘I don’t stop and think about what I need to do, I just carry on’. Do you ever give yourself a break? Do you ever say it’s alright Maryam, you can stop for a bit, you don’t have to open the next thing, you don’t have to keep driving? Can you ever just sort of settle and be nice to yourself?
Maryam Meddin
No, I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m hopeful that this will be my last job. I started in Law, then went into branding and finally in my fifties found what I wanted to do and I’m enjoying it, it’s restful, it’s exciting, it keeps me awake at night but I feel like I do have an end goal. I’m 54, I want to stop working when I’m 60 and in the meantime I’m giving it all I’ve got so, no time for a break now.
Elliot Moss
But is that thing that’s driven you which is, I’m going to call it consequences of failure but it’s really just about survival actually in your life, is that still burning brightly or has it morphed into something else? Do you still fear for the fact that that young teenager with the tenner in her pocket is still not going to have a roof over her head or has it evolved?
Maryam Meddin
It’s evolved. I still don’t feel like I’ve quite made something of my life in the sense that I could leave a legacy.
Elliot Moss
How can you feel that? Sorry, how can you feel that? That’s a corrective, that’s just crazy talk as they say.
Maryam Meddin
Because I’m still running, I’m still running, I haven’t had the chance to sort of…
Elliot Moss
But that’s your choice isn’t it to run?
Maryam Meddin
It is, it is. I still haven’t got to the point where I can think okay, I can stop now but do I have the same fear, no, I mean I think the fear above anything else that I had in those days was that I was alone and now I know I’m not alone, I know that there are plenty of people to pick me up if I fall and I am very unlikely to be without a roof over my head due to the kindness of those around me.
Elliot Moss
Can I ask you a question about the immigrant thing though and the refugee thing? Is the biggest fear of when you landed then, if you can go back, is the biggest fear that you are alone or is the biggest fear that you won’t survive, literally? I’m just wondering because it’s a really interesting point you make about being alone and all that.
Maryam Meddin
I think it’s a combination of both. I won’t survive because I’m alone perhaps is the thought process. I was very, very lonely and I think some of the experiences that I had then, I wouldn’t be able to put up with now, just too old and too tired but…
Elliot Moss
But now you’ve created a team, you’ve created a family, you’ve got your collaboration is I guess your answer to the question of being alone and do you see, is this just now, is this peak Maryam? Are we looking at basically the best six years of your working life ahead of you? Is that how you’re looking at things? Is that how you feel?
Maryam Meddin
Yeah, that’s what I hope for. I’m learning all the time and with every sort of passing week I think this is going to be a better week than the last one.
Elliot Moss
And involve opening in new places, internationally.
Maryam Meddin
Exactly. Exactly. And I want to, I want to do something that’s great for business, I want to do something that is going to change the landscape of mental health for everybody, not just private providers which have to sort of clean up their act to some extent and provide all the things that people need but also set a precedent for anybody looking for therapy whether they’re paying for it or not, that’s really important. I think I’m one of the very lucky people that gained a great deal from being a refugee in this country back when refugees were still welcome, you know I had my education paid for and I was able to take advantage of the hospitality of this country to make something of myself. I do feel that I’d like to give something back and so, you know we’ve got a foundation and that’s quite important to me and being able to take that one step further, you know we want to collect data and analytics and make information available on an open source for all practitioners to be able to access it and I think those things are bigger picture things that would make me feel that I’ve, I’ve earned the right to sit down but until then, it goes on.
Elliot Moss
Well it’s really great you’re not tough on yourself, I mean I suppose there is that to celebrate at this moment. I think you’ve been contributing beyond but anyway that’s just, what do I know. Good luck, be kind to yourself, you’re doing amazing things and you will continue to do so, I’m sure. Just before I let you go off and do more amazing things and push yourself very hard, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Maryam Meddin
I have chosen Melody Gardot, So We Meet Again My Heartache, and I think it’s because I’ve sort of made room for that melancholy that I spoke about and I also now run a business where we hope the best we can hope for people who have you know chronic long-term sort of mental health issues is that they find the sort of peace around their depression or anxiety or whatever it is and this seems to talk to that, the lyrics of this song seem to talk about sort of just accommodating that side of yourself.
Elliot Moss
Melody Gardot with So We Meet Again My Heartache, the melancholic song choice of my Business Shaper today, Maryam Meddin. She talked about having nothing to lose and I think about that in the context of her landing as a refugee, as well as the fact that she just created this latest business. She talked about the reframing of mental health and how critical is that right now in terms of the way that we think about dealing with mental health issues and questions and she’s doing a fabulous job of ensuring that we do indeed think differently. And finally her on a personal note, I’m not done yet, if anything summed up her attitude towards her own life and her own sense of what she wants to achieve, it would be that. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.