Welcome to Headroom, where we discuss all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm your host, Jim Owens, a licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College. I'd like to emphasize that while this podcast does not contain medical advice, it does introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you in your life. So let's jump into the Headroom today and continue our conversation with LCC's president, Dr. Steve Robinson.

Hey, Jim. It's great to be back.

Thank you. And for those of you who are watching us on our YouTube channel, no, we're not wearing the same clothes we wore last time. This is just part two. Okay, so the first section, we got to talk about you personally. What was life like for you as a kid? What did you learn about mental health? And what were the struggles you had while you were in college? And then finally, just as a grown person, how do you take care of yourself? So this segment, I want to reach out to your experience as a professor and as a college president. Twice you've been a president, you've been a dean, you've been a leader in many places over big organizations with lots of people. I don't like to say over.

No, it's with. Definitely with.

And you have a voice not only on this campus, but on the national stage. So I want to talk to you about your thoughts on some of those kinds of things.

I'm very excited to talk about that.

So people may not know you were a college professor for a long time.

I was.

What did you learn about students mental health from that position?

You know, there's firsthand, there's academic knowledge about what college students are going through. You can read it in a journal, you can study it in a class. But when you have the lived experience of being maybe the only put together person in a student's life, you probably have that as a counselor, right?

Absolutely.

So for 15 years, I taught developmental English, I taught freshman composition, I taught basic writing, I taught a little bit of literature, and I love the classroom. And I did this at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan, a pretty distressed community, so for a period of about 15 years, and loved it. I loved every minute of it. I was prepared for that experience, by the way, by doing an internship here at LCC. So I was an intern, learned how to teach writing, went out on the job market, got this great job at Mott and taught there for 15 years. I learned a bunch of things. First of all, students are a heterogeneous group. They are not all the same. And I Can think of so many examples of very specific different types of struggles that students had. One that came to mind just because you were asking me about my own college. But my third year of teaching, I had a student in my class who. And it wasn't uncommon for me to have students who were returning after a failed attempt at a university. Right.

Okay.

So this student was exactly my age, graduated from high school the exact year I did and started Michigan State the same year I did. But her mom died her freshman year. And when her mom got sick, her socioeconomic status was, you have to stop pursuing your goals and come and take care of the family. I had a very similar situation. My mom got very ill my freshman year of college. But I think there was a. Maybe it was a gender privilege, maybe it was a class privilege. But you know, nobody said, steve, you need to interrupt your studies and come take care of the family. So we started off having the same experience, but our lives took very different trajectories and we came back. I actually wrote about her in my doctoral dissertation. But what I saw students dealing with a lot of trauma. And I know we've seen an increase in that. But students with experiencing violence, domestic violence, partner violence, food insecurity, homelessness. Yeah, we had a student that the writing faculty kind of adopted. And we actually tried to get our. I wrote, I wrote an article with him actually before he moved. But we tried to get him set up to be successful in Flint. It just wasn't going to work. So we all pooled our money together and flew him down to Florida to live with relatives. I mean, and everybody who's taught at a community colleges have stories like that. And I think I've been out of the classroom for about 15 years, but I think it's intensified. I think I've gotten worse. There is a lot of trauma.

I'm glad you brought that word up. It's interesting that you've zeroed in on that as a non professional, non academic in the field of mental health, because I've been in the mental health business now for 25 years. And my colleagues and I now who have been working in the field for 25 years, when we first went to school, we learned about all the different treatments and all the different disorders and all the different ways of helping people and the different reasons for all that. But now when we sit around and talk, and we do every year or two, we all get together and share. These are my graduate student friends that, you know, we trauma bonded.

That's right.

You had your own using that Term lightly. But we sit around, we go, you know what it is? It's all trauma. That's what we're doing. We're doing trauma counseling every day. Yeah. Where we say it's all trauma bond or it's all trauma is trauma.

Yeah. Before, you were talking about treatments and symptoms, and now you're talking about causes and trauma.

Causes and trauma. Yeah. And it's unresolved trauma. And it's things that people, you know, decisions people made about themselves in the midst of trauma that are sometimes very limiting beliefs because of the trauma they experience. No fault of their own. And we have to dig into that as counselors, and we'll get into all of that in this episode. That's not really what it's about, but we got to face our trauma. Frankly, I hate to say it like that, but for people who are wondering, how do you get through your trauma? You can run from it for a long time. And that actually works pretty well for some people. For a long time. For some people, it doesn't work. And when you get to the end of that run and you look over your shoulder and the trauma is still right there at your heels, it's time to turn around and face it. Now, I don't want you to do it alone. That's why I'm here.

That's your job. Yeah. You're going to help people with that.

But I don't want people to pretend that it's not nipping at their heels after 20 years.

Right. And our students shouldn't either. I mean, I know you were asking about my time period of being a professor, but just talking to our faculty and being plugged into our profession or. One of the things I think is very encouraging is the extent to which institutions like LCC are really facing that kind of trauma head on. We're talking about basic students, basic needs. We're talking about housing insecurity, we're talking about food insecurity, and we're making sure that we do take students mental health seriously. Since I have this platform to thank you personally, I just want to thank you and your colleagues for doing that for our students. The numbers bear themselves out. Really what we need to do for our students.

Yeah. And I'll tell you, as the leader of the school, the students I hear from who tell me that they find the most support in their classrooms from their professors and for all the faculty listening, the students feel really, really safe when they hear the professor say, on day one, I know you got a lot of other things going on besides Learning writing. I know you got a lot of other things in life going on besides learning biology, whatever it is, and I want to appreciate that and respect that. And I'm not going to hold you to some inhuman, unrealistic standard. Yes, we have deadlines, there's assignments. We need to make progress through this discipline, and you only get 16 weeks to do it. But we. You know what I'm saying?

I know exactly what you're saying. And I also just want to lift up the voices of many of our faculty members who have said that this is not a dean saying you need to be more understanding with your students. We literally have academic senators, really outspoken academic leaders on this campus, who are saying exactly what you've said. I could name stuff. Several. You know, this whole culture of care thing with students didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of a need. And it is faculty driven, which I think is the only way it's going to work. The other thing I would say about that is, yeah, there are. There are various styles of pedagogy. There's a lot of different ways to handle and manage a classroom, but I hope it's really coming out of favor. That tough, like, you know, I don't care what else you got going on. This is. You know, I mean, I saw a lot of that when I was coming up. There's just not a. There is. There's not a space for that anymore. I hope we have faculty listening because I want them to hear me. I want them to hear me, like, legitimize and give them credit for what they're doing to help students. But also, if there's. If there are faculty who have hung onto this idea like, well, the world is a harsh place, and you're going to have to get used to my rules here in these 16 weeks to prepare you. That's. That's really a fallacious pedagogical argument. It doesn't work that way. In fact, it's one of our faculty leaders, Jeff Janowick, who said, look, you know, what kind of boss in your job wouldn't understand if you said, I know the big project is due on Thursday, but my grandmother is in hospice and she's probably gonna die tomorrow. And, you know, can we work out a different arrangement for the big quarterly report? Guess what? I've spent enough time around corporate America. Corporate America would find a way to work. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're making me think of the horses. I took that.

Well, I mean, and I stole that right from Professor Janet.

Well, good Great. Yeah. Share it. The opposite of that was I never took this guy, but I had friends who did. He taught and he locked his classroom when the class started.

Oh, yeah.

And if you weren't literally. He locked the classroom door and you had to sit out there for 50 minutes till the class break. When he unlocked it on the minute to let Everybody have their 9 minute and 59 second break.

He was teaching you how the world works. Exactly.

He was teaching how the world works. Yeah, exactly. But it's true. And I actually, as a teacher myself, I do have that ethic of I want to. I want your experience in the classroom to be as like the experience you'll have in the real world as possible. That means I want you to do group work because guess what, you're going to work with groups in the public.

That's why I did that.

Et cetera, et cetera. You know, all the things, all the pedagogical things.

And it doesn't mean you're not holding students accountable. That's the other thing. I mean, when I used to do group work, I was pretty blunt with students. I said, look, you can't do an amazing job on your individual assignments and blow off the group stuff because on the group, on group activities, you have a responsibility to yourself and everybody else. Right. And that is how teams work in the work world.

It's absolutely true. Yeah. Well, good. We see eye to eye on a lot of stuff.

I knew this was going to be great.

Isn't that convenient?

Yeah.

Well, I want to talk a little bit more about teaching.

Yeah.

My wife's a K12 teacher and she's ready for sainthood. Right, Exactly. She's nearly Canada. And I've always said, and we have a lot of friends course now who are K12 teachers. And I always have said their job as I see it from the outside, looks to be about 50% teacher, 50% social worker. And they all nod their heads. Yep, that's what we're doing. We're trying to develop good human beings.

Right.

Oh, and teach chemistry. Oh, and teach math.

Right. You know, sounds right.

And as a college professor myself, I feel like, yeah, my numbers aren't 50 50, but it's definitely matches what the, the CDC, the National center for Education Statistics, the National alliance on Mental Illness. The data they show me about who's in my classroom, it's about 25, 75, 25% of my students are struggling with a significant mental health condition at some point during the semester or this year, really. But it doesn't surprise Me at all. And in my own experience, I go, yeah, that's about right. I got classes of like 15 students, it's three or four pretty much every semester, who have a major life crisis going on. And I think it's easy for me as a counseling professor to say, oh, that's part of my job. But I think it's part of our job as professors to lean into that a little bit. And I don't know what your experience was like the percentage. I'm sure you didn't keep track and, you know, gather data and so on. But what was the percentage? I mean, I think some people think, oh, it's one out of 300 or one out of 200 or one out of 100.

No, no, it wasn't. So you're right. I didn't keep statistics, and I also didn't have that clinical background that you had. But one of the great things about teaching writing all those years is unlike teaching other content, what I got was pieces of language with students writing from their own perspective. And most of my assignments were personal, a lot of times academic and research writing. But I learned a lot about my students as people by what they wrote. And actually I learned about the significant mental health crises of my students, often through their writing, often had to go to my colleagues like you. So I'm a faculty member and I get a really troubling piece of writing that makes me think a student might be a danger to themselves or others. That's a tough position to be in as a faculty member, reaching out to your own colleagues or in counseling. While I didn't keep numbers on it, certainly anecdotally, that makes complete sense to me.

Yeah. Our campus does actually do a very good job of reporting when they find that stuff in students writings, which they do.

Yeah.

Whether it's a psychology paper or a writing paper or whatever it is. And then because I think very few people will verbalize it and there's just not always space in a classroom or feel safe to do that, but it comes out in people's writing.

It does. So that's one thing that it's like, well, I didn't have this. Not my research background, not my training, but I think I had a little bit more of a window into that than somebody who was teaching chemistry, like you said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's part of our job is. I guess that's an opportunity for me to say a little bit more about that, just myself. Like, you know, we're educators and I don't Think the people that I work with here at this school and the other people I've worked with and taught with, they don't see their role just as educator. It's developer of human being. Who's going to help make the world a better place.

Exactly. No, I agree. And I think you can apply that to all teaching. Right now, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about music education. I got a senior who's finishing a music performance degree. There's a mental component to that, but there's also a physical component. These students spend so much time in the practice room that they injure themselves. And so in just in any discipline, you know, whether it's the trades, the same thing happens with our folks going through, you know, police academy or going, you know, becoming an electrical, all that stuff.

Oh, you'll love this metaphor I use. I have a little daily planner that I write.

Okay.

My schedule for the day, every day, but at the top of it, it says tuning the instrument.

Oh, that's nice. That's again, you. You are the instrument.

I'm the instrument. You are as a counselor, I am the instrument. That's it.

You are.

If I show up and I'm not in a good headline space or emotionally, or I'm just physically tired, if I didn't get enough sleep, the quality of counseling is going to suffer. And so will it in any job, really, frankly. It's not just that, but I don't have any other tools in my hand except you. This thing right here. My body language, the faces I give, and the words that come out. Exactly right. And so I have to tune my instrument, and I do that in a variety of different ways. You know, hydration, exercise, nutrition, sleep. Those are my four pillars of health. Very important, and I pay attention to those. But. But I know you can probably appreciate that tuning the instrument and an instrument will not make music if it's out of tune. It just.

Well, it'll make music. But actually, so in my last lesson, we were just talking about that, like, you know, why is it important to tune the instrument at the beginning of a practice session? Right. You develop all kinds of bad habits. Bad listening. Right. By playing an out of tune instrument.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. In bad listening. Exactly. If we're not. If we don't show up to work fully, you know, no instruments perfectly in tune all the time. Weather, humidity, all of these things affect. And if the other musicians are not quite in tune or the recording that you're playing along with, they weren't quite tuned, you know, all These things. So we have to adjust our tuning, but I think that's a big part of it. So that's some perspectives you had as a professor. And I want to talk to you a little bit about your role as a leader.

Okay.

Obviously, president of the college here, president of previous college and other administrative roles you've held, where you made the leap from being in the classroom to helping support what's happening in the classroom in lots of different ways. So I'm curious. Let me give you my perspective a little bit. When I walked onto campus, I'd love to hear it.

I'd love to hear it and then

hear what you think about it. When I first took this job as a mental health counselor at LCC, I walked onto campus for about the first week looking at all the big buildings

we do, and I went to full

of students and I think we got 10,000 students. There's four mental health counselors that. It's about 2,500 a piece. Now. My caseload is not 2,500 and it will never be here. We don't have that great a need.

Right.

But I feel the weight of that. And I love that though. I really love that responsibility. I feel good about it. That is not a burdensome responsibility for me. This is my life. This is what I went to school for. This is my passion, you know, that I do. So I feel good about that. But you don't have 2,500. You have 10,000, and you have another 1500 or 2000 employees. So do you ever think, and I know you do, but what do you think about their well being when you step onto campus?

Every day. Yeah, every day. It's an awesome responsibility. And the good thing is it's not one that you shoulder alone. As you know, we've got a really great team that includes, you know, hundreds and hundreds of us, you know, more. More than a thousand of us who work here and have this important stewardship role over the students and their families and the. And the community. This institution, not unlike a lot of comprehensive community colleges that function at a high level like we do. We serve a lot more than just our students.

Yes.

I mean, this, this place is very important to all kinds of people who never enroll here.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's an awesome responsibility, but we've been sharpening this saw over time. You know, this is a. This institution didn't become an anchor institution for mid Michigan by mistake. We have really, really thoughtful people who get up every day wondering, how can we help students? How can we move the community forward. But yeah, I think about it a lot and I've thought about it since the pivot point of our conversation is mental health well being. I've thought about it acutely since we came out of the pandemic lockdown. I don't say we came out of the pandemic because we still, I mean Covid, I just had my booster the other day. Covid's still here, but the lockdown is gone. And like I've told everybody, you know, the pandemic changed us forever.

Yeah, absolutely it did.

You know, it didn't change us into a predatory online only institution, but we will do business differently, permanently, forever. And I also think, and there's a plus side and a down there, the plus is I think we are more comfortable talking about some of the things that you and I have been talking about about mental health struggles, wellness, prioritizing your own well being. And that's been very much on my mind. There are a bunch of different things I could think about that. But I did mention the article that I just published this last month where I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about preserving my teammates bandwidth. I'll give you an example. Last night I didn't do a great job. I mean I was getting all kinds of information from the community. It seemed really important. So I'm bothering vice presidents at dinner last night and I'm like, do I really need to do this? And the good thing is when I text somebody on our team at dinner time or on the weekend, they're like, this must be important because he doesn't usually do that.

That's good.

And so my article is about some tools and skills that we can use to avoid. One whole half of the article is about, you know, just something as simple as a delayed send feature in Outlook or your drafts folder. Like just because I wrote this email at 1:30 in the morning doesn't mean I need to interrupt your headspace at 1:30 in the morning. Because here's what you know. When you become a college president, an email from the college president gets somebody's attention whenever they send it. And this is the pull quote in my article. I learned too late that this can wait until tomorrow, but doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work when the email comes from the president. You pulled somebody out. You pulled somebody out. So I think being mindful of that and finding the right balance between urgency and seriousness, like we got really important mission here. We got students who really count on us. Right. But you also don't have to burn people out to achieve it. That's one thought.

That's actually what makes me think of a term, another counseling concept we have called boundaries.

Boundaries are important.

And that's what you're describing. Right. Like I have. I'm going to set boundaries for myself so I don't get outside of my boundaries and into other people's places.

Exactly. Well, I mean, you know, I talked about how important my stepmom was, one of my best friends, and she's got a great phrase that sounds pretty selfish, but when you think about it, it's not. I always lift this up. It's a great experience. She, like us all pulled in a lot of different directions. She's a high powered person. She wants to say yes to everything. But she learned that some things she just has to say, that doesn't work for me. Right. It sounds like a hard no, but think about it. Just parse it out. No, that will not work for me. Is really important. And I think, like you pointed out, boundaries go both ways. Right. I can say don't come into my space, but one of the things that my article is about, and you know, what I talked about with the anecdote of bothering people at dinner is do you really need to go into somebody else's space? And in my job, sometimes you have to. Right.

You know, there are emergencies.

Yeah. Gas leaks, power outage. I mean, there are times when, you know, you gotta pull the fire alarm and it's all hands on deck. I'm sorry that it's Sunday morning, but we gotta work on this. But that means that you should be all the more protective of not taking a non urgent thing and pulling somebody out of their boundaries for it. In my mind, I would go so far to say that that's lazy and disrespectful.

Yeah.

It's like just because I want to work on it now is not good enough to pull you out of what you're doing.

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. That's not going to work for me. I like that.

Yeah, I love it.

The one that I use and that I teach is how to say no. And I'll share this with everyone.

Oh, I want to hear it.

It's three parts.

Three parts.

The first part is. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yep. Thanks. So can you do this for me? Hey, can you do it? Hey, Dr. Robinson, would you mind coming on my podcast? Thank you for asking me. And then the second part is no. Period. No explanation, just no. And then you offer an alternative. I could come on it next week. I could have one of my vice presidents come on in a week. So it's a thank you, a no without an explanation, and then you offer an alternative.

I like it. And I love algorithms. I can remember.

Yeah. Try it on. It's polite and it's helpful and it's fair. And if you get into the reasons, I find if you give people the reasons why you can't do something, if you start explaining why it's not going to work for you, then people think you're laying out options for them to help you problem solve that.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm trying to remember the book. There's a guy from the D school at Stanford, wrote a book on design thinking and he used a swear word about this. There's a chapter there called All Reasons are bs.

Oh, yeah, right.

And meaning that just say no.

Just say no.

Yeah. You don't need to provide a reason.

Yep. You don't. And I agree. I totally agree. And people are being so helpful. Oh, well, no. Because of this. Well, we could, you know, so they'll get into negotiations. You don't. You want to avoid negotiations?

Yeah, I hear you. Okay.

Yeah. So that. Yeah. But that doesn't work for me. It could be. Thanks for asking me. That doesn't work for me.

Yeah. Yeah.

Why don't you ask somebody else?

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. So let's even expand the scope further.

Perfect.

Because as a community college president of, I must say, an amazing community college,

and I'm one of the best in the world. Yeah.

I gotta say. And I say this to my students. Students a lot. There are so many people here that love to be here to help you. And I say this with humility, not hubris. We are. All the staff here are so qualified, we could do other things if we didn't want to do this.

This is true.

There are other things that we are qualified to do. I, for example, I could be a mental health counselor virtually anywhere. Doesn't have to be Lansing. Doesn't have to be LCC. Doesn't have to be Michigan. Probably has to be the U.S. but.

Yeah. Well.

And it's true of many of ours.

It is true.

And they're here because they want to be here. They believe the mission of this school and they want to help our students. So we're all focused on that. You're focused on that. But you also have a voice on the national stage. And I'm curious, what are you hearing about mental health when you're out on the national stage? Talking to other community college presidents and other thought leaders. Oh, and I want to get that link to the article. Where can students find that article or listeners find that article?

We'll have to put a link in the show notes. But yeah, to the Community College Journal. It's a publication of the aacc, the American association of Community Colleges. But so what I'm hearing is what you're saying.

Okay.

And so I want to lift up. I mean, and you're one of those national voices, I think I travel around the country all the time. Was just in Albuquerque for the Community College Leadership Network. I was in Las Vegas for the Trustees association. Go to conferences and panel sessions all the time. And students, mental health, basic needs and security is dominating the conversation right now. Rightfully. Yeah. So that's what I'm hearing. And what I'll say is while people are saying authoritative, smart, research filled things about that, you're actually saying at an even higher level. You have the NAMI statistics right in front of me here on the table. You teach this stuff. You're leading conversations, you have a podcast about it. That's at an even higher level than what I see. So I would say your engagement of this topic is one of these great examples of LCC leading the nation in these. But there is a collective understanding that this is where we are in this moment of the community college movement. Is that. And I'll tell you what keeps me up. I'm really worried about the students who come here, the 20, 40% that you're talking about, that are experiencing mental health struggles. I'm almost more worried about the ones who don't get here. Those things keep people away from here. And where are these students that we could be helping?

We could change their lives.

Absolutely.

And we do. I think that's a good place to end it. All right.

Well, I love this conversation. I learned so much. And, you know, I'm going to go out there and make sure that we commonize.

Yes.

Talking about mental health. Thank you. Yeah, I. I love learning stuff and I've got smart colleagues like you to teach me.

We have an amazing staff here at the school. And that's probably half the reason we're here, is just because of the amazing people we work with too. So, again, thank you for coming on the show, Dr. Robinson. Thank you everyone for listening and tuning in. I'd like to always thank the production team here at LCC Connect.

They're the best.

If you want to learn more about the shows they're producing like this and get other episodes and show notes. Go to LCC.edu/connect, and if you're struggling with mental health and you're a current LCC student, come see us. We got mental health counselors here. If you don't like me, there's three others you can pick from. And if you need help, you know, there's help lines and crisis lines available. So please reach out, ask for help. If you're not sure how to do that, ask for help for how to get help. Okay, so we'll leave it there. And thanks everyone for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the headroom.