Last year during Mental Health Month, we talked about our core value of Harmony – about trading the impossible standard of balance for something more honest: an ebb and flow, a willingness to step back or step forward depending on what the moment demands. We shared the idea of a choir sustaining a note together, each voice breathing at different times so the music never stops.
This year, we want to talk about what makes harmony possible.
Because here’s the truth: you cannot find your harmony alone. It lives in the spaces between people. In the teammates who cover for you when you’re depleted, in the work that genuinely means something to you, in the daily practice of learning and growing instead of pretending you already have all the answers.
At Bellwether, our core values are Excellence, Teamwork, Growth, and Harmony. This year, we want to explore how the first three make the fourth possible, and why building our professional lives around these values isn’t just a business decision. It’s a mental health one.
The data shows this issue has only grown more urgent. A PRSA report found that 91% of PR professionals reported poor mental health in the past year. A Muck Rack survey found that half considered leaving their jobs due to burnout, with agency practitioners rating their stress at an average of 8 out of 10. Meanwhile, a 2025 Mind Share Partners report found that employees whose mental health is supported at work are twice as likely to experience no burnout at all.
Twice as likely. The gap between struggling and thriving isn’t about resilience or self-care rituals. It’s about the environment you work in, and the values that shape it.
Teamwork: The Antidote to “Every Person for Themselves”
One of the quieter crises in our industry is the culture of internal competition — the sense that colleagues are rivals as much as collaborators, that admitting weakness is career risk. It’s a culture that isolates people precisely when they need connection most.
At Bellwether, teamwork means relationships are always personal, never transactional, and our work is a collective effort. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed. We don’t just tolerate each other’s strengths, but rather, we genuinely rely on them.
A Gallup study found that having a trusted friend at work is one of the strongest predictors of employee wellbeing, yet it’s far from guaranteed in competitive workplace cultures. When people feel they can bring their full selves to their team, including the days when they’re running low, the weight of this industry becomes something shared rather than something shouldered alone.
Excellence: Doing Work That Means Something
There’s a version of excellence that damages mental health: perfectionism, overwork, never enough. That is not our version.
To us, excellence means immersing ourselves in our clients’ worlds and delivering our best on work, because we actually believe in it. Research consistently points to purpose as one of the strongest buffers against burnout. When you care about your clients and delivering real outcomes and not just vanity metrics for them, the effort you put in feeds rather than drains you. A 2024 Institute for Public Relations study found that communicators whose personal values aligned with their organizations’ were among the most satisfied and least likely to disengage.
At Bellwether, we are fortunate to work on issues and with organizations our team genuinely cares about. That is not an accident. It’s on purpose, and it provides purpose.
Growth: Permission to Not Have All the Answers
One of the most exhausting aspects about working in PR is the pressure to always have an answer or solution to a problem. Admitting uncertainty can feel like weakness.
Our growth core value is a direct rejection of that pressure. We end every day a little smarter and stronger than we started it; not because we had every answer going in, but because we stayed curious and asked for help when we needed it. As we consistently uphold in our media and speaker training sessions: it is okay to say “I don’t know” when it’s the truth. A culture that treats that as intellectual courage makes it easier for people to ask for the support they need, professionally and personally. And when they have that support, growth not only becomes possible, it makes us stronger.
A Call to Act
We are not writing this to say Bellwether has it all figured out. We are sharing these thoughts because this industry asks a great deal of us, and how we structure our work – including the core values we hold ourselves to – shapes our wellbeing in ways no amount of individual self-care can fully compensate for.
So as we recognize Mental Health Month, we invite our PR colleagues to reflect as we have done. What are the values within your workplace? Do you compete with or genuinely trust your colleagues? Does your work feel meaningful, or are you grinding toward outcomes that you don’t connect with? Does your culture reward certainty, or make room for growth?
These are the structural conditions that determine whether harmony is possible at all.
The choir metaphor still holds. But a choir isn’t just about breathing at the right times. It’s also about trusting the people singing beside you, knowing that when your voice gives out, theirs will carry it.
Find your team. Do work that means something. Stay curious. And most importantly, find your harmony.
If you or someone you know is struggling, free mental health resources are available:
- National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)
- 24/7 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988
- Online Treatment Finder: findtreatment.gov