Leaders Go First: Alex Shevchenko, Co-Founder, Grammarly

Speakers: Alex Shevchenko (he/him), Co-Founder, Grammarly

Alex Shevchenko (he/him): Hi, I'm Alex Shevchenko, Co-Founder of Grammarly. I'm honored to be part of Mind Share Partners' Leaders Go First campaign and share my mental health story with you. Since being a child, I have struggled with attention-deficit disorder, which gave me certain superpowers on one hand, but also triggered severe anxiety and debilitating depression on another.

Alex Shevchenko (he/him): I was born and spent my formative years in Kiev, Ukraine. As a child, I developed many symptoms of ADHD and I struggled to fit in socially and excel academically. Mental health was highly stigmatized in the former Soviet Union. There was no medical support system and even talking about feelings with family members was perceived as a sign of weakness. There was no way to get help, and I was left to my own devices to figure out what was wrong with me. I was not clinically diagnosed with ADHD until I was well into my adulthood. Luckily, I was able to channel my curiosity and my relentless pursuit of intellectual stimulation that are often associated with ADHD and into entrepreneurship, and startups. Building. failing, learning, and building again. Unfortunately, in my early thirties, I started developing symptoms of anxiety, which culminated in two bouts of pretty grave depression, the latest of which was extremely debilitating and lasted for over three years. My initial hypothesis was that my depression was a result of burnout and stress. So I tried to slow down and take breaks from work. But ironically, the more time I spent outside of work resting and not being around people, the more grave and debilitating my depression was becoming. So when I returned to work, I felt much worse during the weekends than I did during the weekdays. The turning point came when I started working with a therapist and we stumbled upon the connection between my ADHD and anxiety that fueled my depression. Shockingly and completely counterintuitively, I learned that leaning into work, taking on more ambiguity of which there is definitely no shortage in startups. Spending more time being surrounded by people and getting more intellectual stimulation helped me reverse the spiral of anxiety that fueled my depression. I was initially skeptical about working with a therapist mostly because of my background and cultural stigma, but the results exceeded all my expectations/ My depression is now mostly gone and my mental health is back to normal. So despite the challenges of last year, when Russia invaded my home country, we scrambled to evacuate four hundred Grammarly team members from Kiev, and on top of that, my dad got diagnosed with stage four cancer, I was able to plow through all the hardships with my mental health in a good place.

Alex Shevchenko (he/him): As someone who personally suffered from the stigma of mental health. I'm on a mission to help destigmatize and normalize conversations about mental health. I try to lead by example and share my story openly at Grammarly. It is eye opening how being transparent about my own mental health challenges ignites really deep conversations with other team members and create really deep bonds with people, especially now when the war in Ukraine is leaving deep marks on every Grammarlian's mental health. When the war in Ukraine broke out last year, we gave our Ukrainian team members access to mental health counseling. However, we repeatedly heard from them that the most efficacious way of coping with the stress of war was to simply have a conversation with our coworkers from outside of Ukraine. Conversations that would otherwise be dismissed as small talk, how their weekends went, what TV shows they watched. Those conversations gave folks in Ukraine a much needed sense of normalcy. To me, this exemplified how the workplace can serve as a safe place to have a conversation about mental health and how a team can effectively become a support group where we all care deeply for each other, we feel each other's pains, and we help each other get through the challenging times.