Month: November 2025

• Ben Tye is the CEO and managing partner of a business consultancy.
• He is also a qualified and practicing psychotherapist, who sees private clients every Monday.
• When negotiating a four-day week, he argued that stepping away from work would give him a fresh perspective.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 55-year-old Ben Tye, the CEO of Gate One, who is based in London. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My late 30s and early 40s were a difficult time. I had a successful career in management consulting, yet I was struggling with what I now know was depression and anxiety.

When I was 41, I started seeing a psychotherapist who recommended a book called “The Middle Passage” by James Hollis, which is about making the second part of your life, after your 40s, richer and more meaningful.

It really spoke to me and helped me to understand that, for some, midlife is a time of necessary suffering in order to prompt questions like, “who am I really?” and “what does my life want from me?” rather than, “what do I want from life?” It’s really quite profound and far from any “self-help” manual.

Six years later, in 2017, I began studying and training during the evenings and on weekends to qualify as a psychotherapist. It involved a one-year foundation certificate, a four-year post-graduate diploma, and a two-year research component.

All the while, I continued having my own therapy sessions on Tuesday evenings. That was while I was also running my own consultancy business.

The psychotherapy training took six and a half years and over 700 hours of supervised client contact time.

I pitched my four-day week as a way to get a fresh perspective on the business

I joined Gate One in 2018, and in 2021, when I was a partner, I was given permission to work a four-day week and run my own therapy practice on Mondays. We have a very flexible working policy so the negotiation I had with the company owners and other leaders wasn’t difficult.

I pitched that stepping out of the business a day a week would give me a fresh perspective and clearer headspace when I returned to work the next day. I recommend people who work a four-day week to have Mondays off, because it’s easier to start the week doing something else than it is to finish.

I typically see five clients a week out of a room in a beautiful building in central London’s Little Venice, overlooking a canal.

Little Venice is considered upmarket, but it’s a very mixed area socioeconomically, and clients bring a range of issues to sessions related to bereavement, addiction, relationships, work, their sense of self, and body image. I had experienced or known close friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances who had experienced several of these issues.

My fee is £90 ($118) an hour, but I ask my clients to pay what they can afford. Even if it’s a symbolic amount, it represents an investment in themselves.

Mine and other people’s boundaries are clearer now

It’s been going well at work, as I make sure everyone knows what they should be doing when I’m off. The ability to delegate and trust people to do their work is a key leadership skill.

I received many in-person comments from colleagues, particularly women, who have said that they appreciated seeing a man in a senior role adopt a flexible working style. The policy has been in place for many years, but perhaps people felt it gave them “permission” to take advantage of it.

Balancing a third element of life alongside work and personal commitments brings boundaries more clearly into focus: yours and other people’s. There’s something really positive about having a better awareness of how one is spending one’s time, what one is working on at any given moment, and making sure things aren’t getting dropped or one isn’t taking too much on.

Completely separating myself from my work environment each week puts me in a very different headspace, which has helped me step away from the day-to-day business of being a leader. I’ll check my emails on a Monday evening after I’ve finished with my clients, and return to work on Tuesday with a fresh perspective.

I can’t give advice as a therapist, but I have to be direct as a CEO

But I do have to make sure I’m separating my two roles of psychotherapist and CEO.

Being a psychotherapist certainly makes you a good listener, gives you patience, and the ability to be curious and appreciate where others might be coming from. Work-wise, you also develop an understanding of group dynamics and the unconscious roles that people play.

As a leader, you have to be authoritative and direct, while a therapist shouldn’t tell people what to do or give direct advice. There’s no way I would ever slide into therapist mode with colleagues or professional clients, because that boundary needs to be maintained really carefully.

I hope I can be a therapist for longer than I’m a business consultant

I haven’t considered going full-time as a psychotherapist, as I’m quite senior in my business career and like to think I can add a lot of value.

But I am 55 and heading toward that final furlong of my work life. One of the reasons I became a therapist is to work longer than I might ordinarily be able to do as a business consultant.

Since training as a therapist, I have also done a two-year psychodynamic executive coaching program. That takes the theories and practices of psychoanalytics and psychotherapy and applies them to coaching. That’s the third leg that sits between what I do as a psychotherapist, and what I do as a consultant and a business leader.

After I hand over the baton to Gate One’s next leader, I anticipate I will do a mix of executive coaching, leadership development, and psychotherapy.

Therapy has given me a nice pathway for the last third of my life, allowing me to extend my career and do something really interesting and fulfilling, as I begin to dial down my other commitments in years to come.

• Richard Detty has driven for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu since 2017.
• Detty says it’s a flexible side hustle, but Hawaii needs laws protecting drivers’ pay.
• Some ride-hailing drivers have said their earnings have fallen over the past few years.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Richard Detty, a 58-year-old ride-hailing driver for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu. Business Insider verified Detty’s earnings through screenshots he provided of his payments. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A Lyft spokesperson told Business Insider that “ensuring driver success is vital to our mission, and we’re continually looking to increase driver pay in smart, deliberate ways.” For example, the company has pledged that drivers will make at least 70% of the weekly rider fares after external fees, and has recently started paying drivers for the time they wait for a rider, starting after one minute.

An Uber spokesperson said, “We’re committed to policies that support flexible work and sustainable earnings without reducing opportunities or raising costs for riders.” Most Uber drivers drive for the app part-time, the spokesperson said.

Rideshare is my side hustle.

I grew up on Kauai, Hawaii, and spent years on the US mainland. In 2017, I moved to Honolulu. My main business is selling products from Hawaii, such as mochi crunch cookies, on Amazon. When I’m not doing that, I drive for Lyft and Uber.

Tourism is a big industry here, and there are plenty of rides to take. I often drive between the airport, Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, and other places that tourists want to go. I feel safer driving here than on the mainland, where you never know who you’re going to pick up.

There are also some unique challenges. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up riders with wet bathing suits at the beach and had to dry out my seats before my next ride.

When I was in college here in 1991, I drove a cab part-time two or three times a week. I would give the guy who ran the taxi yard $35, and I could drive from six at night to six in the morning. I paid for the gas, but the taxi company covered everything else, including maintenance.

Back then, a ride from Waikiki to the Honolulu airport paid up to $25. Now, Lyft and Uber are offering me up to $12 as the base rate for the same ride. When I first started driving for the apps here, that same trip would’ve paid $18. Without tips, I’m dead in the water.

I wouldn’t mind some of these rates if Uber and Lyft provided me a car. But I’m now responsible for all the costs. I have to handle all my maintenance, and if my car breaks down, I’m out of luck.

What makes the pay harder to shoulder is that Hawaii is an expensive place to live. Everything costs more here than on the mainland because everything has to be shipped here. I’ve paid more than $4 a gallon for gas at Costco, and I’ve seen milk here for around $8 a gallon. The base rate for rideshare drivers needs to go up here.

Driving for Uber, Lyft full-time didn’t work

When I moved back to Hawaii eight years ago, Lyft and Uber advertised that drivers could make up to $35 an hour. That was very easy to do at the time.

Now, they advertise that drivers make $27 an hour, yet if anything, the fares I’ve seen seem to have gone up in that time. Where did the other $8 go? For me, it’s been one pay cut after another.

In 2022, I worked full-time for Lyft and Uber. I did it for 10 months because I wanted to save money to invest in my Amazon business.

Around that time, I started to notice that the payments I got were falling. I found that doing this full-time wasn’t livable, so I went back to doing it as a side hustle. I drove 30 and 40 hours a week and put close to 1,000 miles on my car each week.

The only thing that keeps me coming back to Uber and Lyft is the flexibility. I can go in and out when I want. I think Uber and Lyft count on that: It seems like they want people to be part-time drivers.

I’m lobbying the Honolulu city council, the mayor, and the state legislature to do something about the pay situation for ride-hailing drivers. We need laws similar to those that gig workers in Minneapolis or Seattle have, which promise a minimum wage and provide other protections. I could make a decent living getting paid like that. In Minneapolis, drivers are being paid at least $1.28 a mile and $0.31 a minute. That’s close to double what I make.

We need a pay rate that’s fair. So many costs that have gone up. We need to be able to make a living.

Do you have a story to share about Uber or other gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.

• Trump’s student-loan repayment overhaul includes new borrowing caps for graduate and professional students.
• It also reclassifies which programs are considered “professional” and eligible for a higher loan cap.
• Advocates expressed concerns that the changes could strain those in healthcare professions.

This year, there’s a new topic to argue about at the Thanksgiving table: What is a professional degree?

It’s a question that President Donald Trump’s Department of Education recently addressed in its overhaul of student-loan repayment. That’s led to criticism from groups that are not included in the department’s narrower degree definition.

The crux of the issue is new borrowing limits. Trump’s “big beautiful” spending legislation that he signed into law in July included new borrowing caps on professional and graduate student loans, aiming to curb excessive borrowing: $20,500 a year for graduate students or $100,000 over a lifetime, and $50,000 a year for professional students or $200,000 over a lifetime.

In addition to the caps, the department also reclassified what constitutes a professional degree, narrowing it down to 10 programs, including dentistry, medicine, and law.

Some advocates said the department’s professional degree definition could strain student-loan borrowing access to those in the healthcare profession seeking post-graduate training, like nurses, although the changes won’t affect undergraduate borrowing.

“At a time when healthcare in our country faces a historic nurse shortage and rising demands, limiting nurses’ access to funding for graduate education threatens the very foundation of patient care,” Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, said in a statement.

The Department of Education said that the new definitions only reflect which programs qualify for higher loan limits and are “not a value judgement about the importance of programs. It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not.”

Student-loan changes to professional degree programs

The Department of Education said 10 post-graduate programs will be counted as professional degrees and will be eligible for the higher student-loan cap: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, and theology.

Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a Monday blog post that Congress “legislated only broad guidelines as to how graduate programs should be classified,” and the distinction between professional and non-professional programs was left to the discretion of the Education Department.

When it comes to nursing programs, Cooper said that the “new caps will affect only a small number of programs charging exorbitant prices.”

The Department of Education said that, based on its data, 95% of nursing students borrow below the new student-loan cap. The average cost of a master’s degree in nursing in 2020 ranged from $15,030 to nearly $43,000, per the National Center for Education Statistics.

The borrowing caps could strain other professions and cause some students to either forgo their advanced degrees or turn to the riskier, private lending market. For example, the Association of American Medical Colleges found that the median cost for four years of public medical school was $286,454 for the class of 2024. For law school, the average total cost was just over $217,000. The $200,000 lifetime cap would be insufficient to cover those tuition amounts.

While negotiations on the changes have concluded, the public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposals early next year before the department moves toward final implementation. The department said that it “may make changes in response to public comments.”