There was a time when Matty Dixon would find himself routinely breaking down in tears on his drive to work. Until a run of injuries, he had juggled engineering roles at energy services company Petrofac with a parallel career playing rugby for Aberdeen Grammar in the Scottish Premiership. Then slipped discs forced his early retirement from the game in 2014.
Dixon lost his sense of purpose. “I was struggling with depression,” he says, but because of “toxic masculinity” he would tell himself to “just man up”. Eventually, he realised that he had to “deal with my problems or it was lights out — I planned my suicide”.
In 2017, he applied to the MBA at London Business School to find a new niche. Once there, he was assigned a therapist on campus, who helped him to see strengths stemming from his depression, which was also caused by childhood trauma, including “discovering I was adopted”.