Is anyone waving back? Are you truly seeing your team?
We’ll explore.
What lies are they telling?
What is hiding in plain sight?
How well do you know them?
Did they fall or let go?
Inspired by the musical Dear Evan Hansen, we are exploring our attitudes towards mental health and lies.
I saw Dear Evan Hansen the other night, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Not just the songs, but two things it nailed about the world we’re in right now.
First, our weird relationship with mental health. Evan’s social anxiety is painfully real—you feel it in your gut. But then you see how the community latches onto the story of a tragedy, this explosion of hashtags and “awareness.” It highlights that strange gap between us all talking more about mental health, and connecting with the person quietly struggling right in front of us.
That led straight to the second thing: lying. Not just to others, but to ourselves.
Evan’s lie is huge, but it starts small. It’s a clumsy, panicked response that just snowballs. It gets out of control because everyone, including him, starts needing it to be true. He builds a life on something that never happened, and even starts to believe his own story.
It’s a powerful look at how we can get tangled in the narratives we create. How we convince ourselves a bad situation is fine, or that we’re happy when we’re not, because the truth is just too hard to face.
This isn’t just a personal reflection; it’s a lesson for the workplace. For any leader or team, it poses a couple of clear challenges:
- Go beyond awareness posters. It’s easy to share a helpline. It’s harder to build a culture where a team member can say, “I’m not okay today,” and be met with support, not silence. As a leader, the next time you ask “How are you?”, take a breath and actually listen to the answer. That’s where the real work begins.
“I try to speak, but nobody can hear.”
- Make it safe to tell the truth. Evan lied because he was terrified. At work, people will hide problems if they fear blame. The single most important thing a leader can do is thank the person who brings them bad news. When you make it safe to admit a mistake or flag a risk, you kill the small lies before they snowball into project-destroying crises.
“I’ve learned to slam on the brake before I even turn the key.”
- Challenge the stories you tell yourself. In the show, everyone writes a story for Connor Murphy that fits their own needs. We do this at work all the time. We see a quiet colleague and decide they’re not engaged. We see a missed deadline and assume someone is lazy. The challenge is to stop casting our teammates in roles they never auditioned for. Instead of creating a narrative, get curious. Replace the fiction in your head with a fact-finding question.
- Remember that mental health is health. We all have mental health, just as we all have physical health. Because of this, the only way to lead effectively is to treat every person as an individual. Go beyond the surface-level status update; make time for deep and meaningful conversations to truly understand the person behind the professional role.
“When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around, do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?”
In the play, it all starts with Evan writing a letter to himself as prescribed by his therapist:
“Dear Evan Hansen,
Today is going to be an amazing day and here’s why, Because, today, all you have to do is be yourself. But also confident. That’s important.”
You don’t need to be a therapist to ask this question!
Why is today going to be amazing for you and your team?
