5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from Mental Health Advocate Aaron Huey

Guest: Aaron Huey

Episode: Season 1, Episode 5

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Aaron Huey, also known as Coach Huey, is a construction mental health advocate and founder of Hustle Talk Coaching. With over 20 years in the industry and his own history with stress, anxiety and single fatherhood behind his approach, he works to support men to live better lives.

Here’s what he’s learned about showing up as a leader onsite.

Lesson 1: Balance Discipline and Support When Leading Tradies

Long before he was coaching tradies on mental health, Huey was building his own rules for leading a crew as a supervisor and site manager. The first was simple: never ask someone to do something he wasn't prepared to do himself.

"I wouldn't ask guys to do anything I wouldn't be prepared to do myself," Huey says. He's firm that managers who'd rather hide in the office than get down and help when it counts aren’t leading, no matter their title.

The second rule came from a mentor early in his career, who told him leading a crew means knowing when to push and when to ease off.

"You need to use the honey and the stick," Huey says. "Some days you need to beat them into it, other days you need to ease them into it."

Getting that balance right, he's found, is what earns a crew's willingness to go above and beyond on the days it actually matters.

Lesson 2: Role Model Normalising Mental Health Onsite

Huey's coaching career began after his own mental health struggles, including losing friends, pushed him toward life coaching.

What he noticed in his own coaching sessions was that the conversations helping him were ones he'd never once heard happen on a construction site. His own coach pointed out that his lived experience made him exactly the right person to bring those conversations to the industry.

"I hate to tell you, but you're not special; we've all gone through it," Huey tells the tradies he now coaches. "You don't have to go through it alone."

That message, he believes, has to come from people who've actually lived it.

Lesson 3: A Simple Breathing Technique for Stress Onsite

Huey often asks rooms full of tradies who's had a panic attack, and almost no one puts a hand up, until he describes what one actually feels like: heat rising through the body, jumbled thoughts, a tightness in the chest or back.

Most of the room, he says, realises they've had one and didn't have a name for it.

His go-to tool for managing that spike is box breathing, something he still uses himself, whether in the truck, the site office, or the toilet if that's the only privacy available.

"Breathe in for four seconds, hold it, breathe out for four seconds, hold it, and you repeat that," he says. "It drops your heart rate, and it clears up the brain so that you can think clearer."

Lesson 4: How to Separate Work Stress From Home Life

Huey's practice for separating work stress from family time is deliberately simple: before he walks through his own front door, he takes ten minutes to set the day down consciously.

"Take 10 minutes, leave everything, the stress, the struggles, the fights, whatever it may be," Huey says. "Be present for whoever's behind the door."

He's clear this isn't about pretending everything's fine; the stress is still there to deal with once the kids are in bed. It's about not letting the first person he sees carry the weight of a day that had nothing to do with them.

The same rule applies in reverse each morning.

Lesson 5: Check In With Your Mates Onsite

Huey points out how strange it is that crews who spend eight or nine hours a day together can know each other's favourite movie, food and go-to beer, but nothing about what's actually going on underneath.

"The amount of guys who know everything about each other but know nothing about each other is ridiculous," Huey says.

He's watched one comment in a room of mates trigger someone else to open up about something they'd never planned to share, simply because someone else went first.

A problem shared, he says, "is a problem halved", and that culture of checking in is one of the biggest levers for catching struggle before it becomes a crisis. All it takes is talking about more of the real stuff happening in each other’s lives.

Huey’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

Huey's advice on everyday leadership isn't about getting it right every day. It's about not quitting on it.

"You're gonna have good days, you're gonna have bad days," Huey says. The goal isn't perfect consistency; it's noticing when you slip back into old habits and getting up again anyway.

Leadership, from his view, isn't something you switch on once. It's something you keep choosing, one day at a time.

Catch the full conversation with Aaron Huey on Tradies Who Lead for more leadership lessons for tradies, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.