Fifteen years in the making.
This isn't a generic wellness add-on borrowed from another industry. It's built on fifteen years spent working directly with boys, men, and leaders — helping them become better role models, build real support systems, and shift the culture around them, at home and at work. Mining and construction are simply the industries where that work is needed most urgently. While the focus is on the male culture that shapes these sites, every session is built for the whole crew — because the culture men carry shapes the day-to-day experience of everyone working alongside them.
This industry loses a worker every second day.
Construction, mining, and energy carry some of the highest suicide rates of any industry in Australia — and the culture that surrounds these sites plays a real part in why. "Harden up" isn't a joke on many sites. It's the whole operating system. Isolation, silence, and the belief that struggling is weakness aren't personal failings — they're what the culture has trained people to do, men in particular. For the women working alongside them, that same culture often shows up differently: added pressure to prove themselves, exclusion from the informal support networks men do have, or simply navigating a workplace built around someone else's silence.
FIFO and remote site work compounds it further — roughly one in three FIFO workers report psychological distress, depression, or anxiety above clinical thresholds, driven largely by isolation from family, disrupted rosters, and a culture that discourages speaking up.
Sources: MATES in Construction, "The Problem" — 190 deaths per year, 8× workplace-accident risk, 2× youth risk · Vojnovic & Bahn (2015), FIFO mental health research · Medical Journal of Australia, remote mining and construction worker wellbeing survey
If anything here raises something for you personally, support is available now — Lifeline, 13 11 14, 24 hours a day.
It's not toughness. It's disconnection.
The men on your sites aren't broken, and they don't need to be fixed. Neither are the women working alongside them, absorbing a culture they didn't create. Men have been taught — by decades of culture, not by choice — that silence is strength and connection is weakness. Real strength looks different: it's a person who can be present in their own body, honest about what they're carrying, and still show up fully for the work. That's not soft. It's embodied leadership, and it's what actually holds a crew together when things get hard — for everyone on it.
From toxic culture to embodied leadership.
Built for sites, not seminar rooms. Practical, on-site, and led by someone who has spent fifteen years doing this work with men directly — not theorising about it from the outside.
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This program works alongside — not instead of — clinical and crisis services already active in this industry, including MATES in Construction and Lifeline. Real Talk builds the everyday culture that makes those services easier to reach for.
Partnership organisations.
The man behind the mission.
Recipient of the 7News Young Achiever Award in 2021, after impacting thousands across Western Australia with his education and leadership programs. A lifelong student of human behaviour — yoga, NLP, meditation, breathwork, exercise physiology, suicide prevention, hypnosis, nutrition and subconscious aspecting among many others.
Experience working within various high-performance cultures such as Cricket Australia, AFL, GeniusU, Catholic Education WA, NSW school principals, corporate finance and more. He has also hosted over 35 global retreats across Australia, Peru and Bali, including programs for over 200 men specifically.
Qualifications & certifications+
Scaled to your site or workforce.
For context: this industry loses 190 workers a year to suicide, and construction workers are eight times more likely to die this way than from a workplace accident. A program built to shift the culture underneath those numbers is the more affordable outcome, measured against what's actually at stake.
Getting real isn't weakness. It's what makes it safe for the next man to do the same.
A safer site starts with one honest conversation.
Begin the conversationShaun Kay · Real Talk · Mining & Construction
Lived, not studied.
Shaun grew up in a small town in Western Australia, where he saw first-hand what it cost men and boys to stay silent, stay hard, and never let anyone see them struggle. It wasn't a case study to him. It was the culture he was raised in.
By fifteen, he was already searching for a way through it. What followed was a real breakdown — anxiety and depression that at times left him barely able to leave the house, and long stretches on medication just to get through the day. Over the seventeen years since, he's worked his way out the other side — breaking a long line of inherited, ancestral pain and turning what nearly defeated him into the foundation for a different kind of leadership.
Through a decade teaching students and elite athletes, and the six years since delivering retreats, workshops, and programs to hundreds of men and women, he's fortified that craft into something real — a living, breathing example of how culture actually changes, and how a genuine support system for community gets built.
That journey — from breakdown to breakthrough — is what Real Talk is built on. Not theory borrowed from a textbook, but a path Shaun walked himself, and now guides others through: leaders, teams, and the men and women working in some of Australia's toughest, most male-dominated industries.