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. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast does not constitute psychotherapy. It does, however, introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life. Having said that, let's get into the Headroom and begin today's conversation with Pam Davis, licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College. Welcome, Pam.

Hi, Jim. Glad to be here.

Good. Thanks for coming on. So I have this podcast kind of split up into three acts, if you will. One is just for us to get to know you a little bit and then a little bit about your college journey and then maybe some advice and ideas you have about how students and anyone in the community could benefit from learning how to improve their mental health and well being. So who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Okay. Well, I tend to, like a lot of people, define myself first with my career, which I'm a counselor here at LCC. But I also like to think of myself as a friend, a family member, someone who enjoys connecting with people and doing things from, I don't know, wine tasting to doing puzzles, playing cards, just real casual kind of person. And I just, I love my job. Been here 28 years, and counseling is a passion that I've had for a long time.

Wow. Okay. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And so how did you. Where are you at in life? How did you get here? Just a little bit about maybe where you came from, how you came to Lansing, something like that.

Sure. Well, I started by going to Lake Superior State, transferred to Michigan State my junior year and fell in love with the Lansing area. By the time I graduated with my master's, I had a lot of friends locally. I left town for a while, came back, worked for the state, ended up at LCC about eight years later and have been here, like I said, 28 years. And I would say I'm kind of like in the late stages of my career and kind of thinking about retirement options. But part of that will include counseling. I know the passion leave me for that, but I'm also kind of excited about exploring options of doing random things I've never done before, like volunteering for a garden club or working at a humane society or just any kind of thing like that. So just having more options, but still, I could still see myself helping people in some way.

Yeah, I hear from very few counselors who, when they retire, they want to fully retire. I think Most of us say we want to just work part time. Maybe.

Yes. Yes. At our own schedule. Mine would be between 10am and 2pm Probably.

You can sleep in, have your baby.

Yeah. And then have my afternoon and evenings

to get into the garden or whatever

you want to do. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I think a lot of us think the same way. We love what we do. I know you do. And you're passionate about it, so it makes a lot of sense. So anything in particular that you're working on that you want to accomplish in life?

You know, again, I think I feel like in some ways I'm in my wind down stages. No resume building for me anymore, I think. But I think it is just exploring what other kind of things I can do and how I can just access life from different perspectives. If money didn't count, I think I'd work in a coffee bookstore kind of place. I don't really know. Yes. I don't know if I have any more big challenges on my docket, but I just think a lot of ways I can still connect with people, do some traveling, experience life.

Yeah. It sounds like you're leaving this next chapter of your life open for exploration, adventure. We'll see.

Exactly.

We're so used to when we bump into each other asking this question, like, what are you planning on? What are you working on, what's new, what's coming up for you? And I think it's okay to say, I don't know, I'm gonna see, I'm gonna have a vacuum of time and space and we'll see how I fill it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And have some flexibility and not tie in like a 40 hour jobs a week job that you're tied into and responsible for. And you have to do parts of things that aren't your favorite part of your job, but it's the sacrifice you make for 90% of the job you love. So, yeah, that's how I look forward to retirement. Just more flexibility. Yeah.

Well, thanks for sharing that. Well, this question about what are you doing with your life and where are you going in life? That's something we ask high school seniors and college freshmen and college sophomores a lot of. And you had to wrestle with that as a young person when you decided to go off to college. And I'm sure a lot of people were putting that question to you as a young woman, like, so what are you gonna do with your life and where are you gonna go? And you shared earlier that you went to lssu, like Superior State University.

Yes.

Some people May not even know where that is, but tell us about how you decided to even go to college and how that fits in.

Well, in my family, it wasn't, are you going to college? It's where. Where do you want to go? And so I didn't even realize, I think, till I was done with college, that I might have had other options. And I'm like, I could have joined the Peace Corps. I could have taken a gap year. I. That was never an option in our family, so. But I'm grateful for that. And I honestly chose Lake Superior State because no one else in my class was going there. And I visited it with a friend, and I absolutely loved it up there. It was very small. I think they. At that time, they were a college, not a university, and I think they had 1500 students. It was very small. One cafeteria for the whole college, that kind of thing. I also knew I couldn't get a degree from there because I thought I wanted to teach the deaf hard of hearing. And they didn't even really have a regular ed program. So I transferred to Michigan State. And having been raised a Michigan fan, that was an interesting transition. But I chose it because of the curriculum they had that I decided I didn't want to be a teacher. And then I got talked into someone who was very excited about audiology, which is testing hearing. And during my master's level of audiology, I realized fitting hearing aids and telling people call me if they had a problem. I wanted to connect with the emotional feelings they might have had for their own loss or if they had a child who was deaf or whatever. So I realized then that I really wanted to get into counseling.

You didn't want to provide just technological support to our struggle. You wanted to get into the.

I wanted the emotional side. So my master's is in rehabilitation counseling, vocational rehabilitation, which is helping people with disabilities find employment. So it was a good transition. I still used my audiology background, but not many people change, you know, during their master's degree.

Many people don't change in graduate school. Yeah. No.

But it was worth it. I'm glad I did. Been a lot happier.

I'm curious. I wonder if even people can relate to this a little bit more. When you said, I went to lssu, which I think is in the Sioux. Is that right? It's in the Upper Peninsula Sioux summary. And was part of that. That looks like a great campus to go to. And I want to get out and spread my wings and be kind of independent from where I grew up. Was that Any of it at all.

Yeah, I just want to get away. I think so. I was the only daughter, the oldest, and I think that was part of it. Most of my class, I grew up in Greenville, small town west of here, north of Grand Rapids. Most of them were going to Central or Michigan State. And at the time, I didn't want to go to either of those schools. Ironically, I ended up Michigan State. But I love the campus up there. I love the smallness of it. And I just wanted. I love winter. I love it. Just. I don't know, it just was so appealing to me. I'm like, I'm going up there for a couple years and then I'll figure out what I'm going to do from there. So.

Yeah, you're reminding me of these new license plates we have in Michigan now that. The blue ones with the gold lettering. Sorry for the colors.

Oh, I know.

That's a water winter wonderland.

Oh, yeah. For Michigan.

I don't know if you've noticed that. Yeah, this is a great place to spend winter. You can do a lot of fun stuff outdoors.

It is until I discovered there's still snow piles in May.

But, yeah, it hangs around sometimes longer

than we want it to, especially in the up. But it was a great. I don't regret it at all.

I hear they have to truck the snow out of the towns up there in the winter, like out of the parking lot.

They probably do. Yeah. We walked through mazes that were like head high sometimes. Yeah. Because of the snow. It was great.

That's interesting. So I'm a little bit more curious, too, about your career, because I think people could relate to changing your major. You had a sense about education and then audiology and working with the deaf and hard of hearing. And there was something, though, that you became aware of inside of you about, I want to connect with people on an emotional level. Do you have a sense of where that started or how that kind of grew or where that came from or.

You know, I've studied personality styles. I think that's one of my primary personality styles, is kind of connecting with people, wanting to help people. I know a lot of people choose their careers and they say, I want to help people, but I. Friends would connect with me. I always felt in high school that I was a good listener. People would bring their problems to me, and I just think that I just wanted to help them through the best I could and that my parents tried to teach me that what we had was a good thing. It was middle class, but it was still Better than a lot of people experienced. And I wanted to be able to give back and just help people with their struggles, I guess.

And like you said, you've been doing that here for almost 30 years.

Yes.

And at the state of Michigan for almost a decade before that. So.

Right.

What about in your college journey? Was there something that you got to a point where you said, I don't know if I can go on, or something that nearly stopped you from graduating or that made it really difficult to press on?

I don't know about really difficult. I do remember when I watched from my bedroom window up at Lake Superior State, watched my parents drive down onto I75 with my 11 year old younger, he was 11 years younger than me, still is, but 7 year old waving to me and I'm like, what have I done? You know I'm gonna be three hours from home. I'm the only one from my class. I did know one other person was a year ahead of me, but. And then I shed some tears and I'm like, nope, you made this decision, you need to work with it. And then I did. I met one of my best friends, who's still a good friend now, within an hour after deciding I was going to make the best of it. But then when I transferred to Michigan State, it was overwhelming, the size. I went from 1500 students to however many they had back then. And I remember walking on campus once, I wasn't really happy, I didn't like my roommate. I hadn't really met anybody much yet. And I remember walking on campus going, I could disappear and no one would miss me for days and. And that was really hard and discouraging. But then I just decided to look for options and I was able, because I was a junior, able to transfer to a co ed floor. They put me on a freshman floor for some reason. And my roommate was a true acting freshman.

Like a freshman.

Yeah. And then I got a job at one of the cafeterias that was. It served the professors or anybody could come into it. So you had to be at least a junior work there. And I started connecting with people there, people more my age. And that became like my second family. And my dad was not happy I moved to a co ed floor. But when I told him they were like brothers and would walk me home from work when it was night, then he was a little bit okay with it. So yeah, he bought that line. He did, he bought it. So yeah, I mean I think just that feeling of overwhelm, but just trying to make choices, to make it the best of it is what helped me.

Yeah. I think even, you know, we think about us being LCC, being maybe a middle sized. We're, I think, kind of large for a community college.

Yeah.

But to come here from. I don't know what your graduating class was in Greenville. It was probably relatively small, 100, 200 people or something. To go to a campus of thousands. And our students experience that here when they come to our campus. This is huge.

Right.

Some of our schools surrounding here that where they come to college here from their graduating classes are 40 or 50 students for their whole senior class. And then they come here and we have, you know, 10,000 students here.

Right. And it's a big city.

It is a big city.

And one way roads now that are not. But, you know, lots of confusion and. Yeah, it's very overwhelming for them sometimes.

Yeah. All right, well, that's really helpful. I appreciate you sharing that. I think it helps people realize a little bit more about that not all of our journeys through college and into our professions where you've been very successful, you're educated and have had a long career, it's been very impressive to people to look at from the outside, like, wow, how do you get to that? And it's like, well, it wasn't a straight, easy path.

Right.

It took a lot of work and discernment and determination. I heard you say a couple of times that I just made up my mind to do this thing and did it.

Yeah.

That's a powerful quality to have. I don't know if that's something you've cultivated or always had or you've made it stronger.

Yeah. And it applies sometimes in my life and not so good in other areas. It's not a perfect trait of mine, but it has definitely helped in certain occasions over the time. Yeah.

Yeah, I can appreciate that. You're right. There's also this conception that counselors have all their stuff together and they're totally mentally, you know, clear all the time. It's like, no, we've got some chaos in our lives too.

Yep.

Okay, so the last section of the podcast, I like to talk about ideas, powerful ideas for students. And I call this podcast Headroom, because it seems like we'd all be a little better off if we had a little more head in our space to have more flexibility, emotional regulation, handle another crisis without it tipping us over the edge. And so what are some ideas that you have come across that you think could help people better manage the challenges that they have with their mental health?

When I read this Question. Earlier, I wrote down self care and share. I'm like, ah, that's kind of a little catchy phrase. And I think part of it is really taking care of ourselves to the best that we can. In my stress management class, I describe it as keeping the bath water tub low. So then when there's a crisis and other things get added to it, the water doesn't overflow. And we do that with self care. However, I teach stress management techniques, breathing, meditation, all of that. Or just taking time to go for a walk, draw, do whatever to lower our stress levels. And then we can manage those extra hits, the flat tire, the unexpected bill, or whatever comes our way. We have room in our emotional health to handle those things. And then I added share because I think it's really important. Obviously, I listen to people talk to me about it all the time, but to not keep things inside and actually share them with other people. And even if it's a few trusted friends or find a professional that can listen objectively, our friends are great, our family's great, but they often think they know better for us than we know for ourselves sometimes. And they're more inclined to give advice, I think, but to just not keep things bottled up. I think people find when they share, they find more people are experiencing the same things, then they're not, and they learn that they're not alone in what they're struggling with.

Yeah, Actually, I think that's huge. One of the techniques we sort of refer to in counseling is normalizing, which really, I would relabel that to commonizing, because we don't want to say people are normal or abnormal. Your experience is normal or abnormal. But we want to say it's common.

Yes.

And I know you've had the experience with students sit down in our offices, and they tell us something horrible that's going on, some difficulty, and you go, a lot of people have experienced that. And they go, really? I'm not the only one. And there's some kind of cathartic relief just knowing.

Yes, yes.

If they believe us, which I think they do, that this is really common and sometimes even expected for this stage of life that you're in.

Right.

Like to feel overwhelmed on a campus at msu, coming from a small school and a small college. Yeah, that's common. A lot of people actually feel overwhelmed when they come to a big campus.

Right? Yeah. But they don't share it with anyone. So we don't know that other people are going through what we're going through.

So self care. Yes. Let's hammer down on that for a minute.

Yeah.

For my own benefit and for anyone who's listening because I need to remind myself constantly about this too. And you're so right. The bathtub is a great image because I'm immediately picturing my kid throwing stuff into the bathroom and just other people coming to throw things into my bathtub and fill it up, you know?

Right.

I didn't ask for all this stuff to be in here. So what is self care? Is it like. It's part of it is the things I can do to keep the water level low, but then some of it is going through and cleaning out and getting rid of stuff that shouldn't be there. I know we're speaking metaphorically, but I don't know if you could say more about that. No.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's looking at what's priority right now. Everything has seasons to it. So with you having a son, you have priorities now that you might not have 20 years ago or had 20 years ago and have 20 years from now. And so we need to look at what can kind of go to the side a little bit or not be our primary focus and make choices and really kind of help sort through that and say what's important to me now? What is the next best thing that I can do right now? And then some of the other stuff will either go away. It's hard. I talk to a lot of students, as I'm sure you do, that have parents or family members, spouses, kids, partners, whatever, that put stresses on them. And sometimes we don't feel like we are totally in control of all of our choices in life. And sometimes we're not. But if we can look and say, okay, but this is for a time. And I talk to students a lot about things being temporary. You know, they so want to move out of their parents house, but it's how they afford school and not have to work so much. And so it's temporary. It might be two years temporary, but it's still temporary. And to try to sort through that and figure out what is a priority and what can be put aside. What can be put aside temporarily. Another thing along those lines is you'll say, well, whatever we do, we want to give 100%. Well, the truth is we can't totally give 100% to everything all the time. But if we're in that moment, maybe we can give 100% in that moment. Like if this is my time to study, it's 100% for two hours, but then an hour after that, I'll be playing with my child or spending time with my partner. Switch and switch and then try to be 100% or as close to that as possible in that moment. And that can sometimes help too.

Can I go with that a little bit further and say on a Saturday, sometimes I'll let myself do zero percent?

Yes.

Is that okay?

That's self care. Because I think doing nothing is self care. It's doing something. I saw a meme on Facebook, was like, if you ask me what I'm doing and I say nothing, don't ask me to do something because that's what I'm doing today. I'm doing nothing. And it's what I'm choosing to do. And that's okay.

I think there's some deep wisdom in this, the power of that. Nothing is something, and it's something really important.

It's allowing your body to heal and rest and it's giving your mind a break. And I think we all need that to some level. And people are wired differently. Some people need more of it, some need less. Some are energized by being around other people and being active and others get exhausted by that. And so I'm a kind of person. I love to go speak to a class, but then I don't mind going into my office with no noise for an hour afterwards, you know, because it just takes more energy out of me. Other people are like that fires them up and they want to do more

of the same thing.

So recognizing how we refuel is good.

This is a very important thing for people to learn as they grow up. Like, what takes energy from me and what gives it back. Yes, and again, energy, metaphorically here. But there are some things that are just draining and some of those things that are draining in life we have to attend to no matter what. For example, changing diapers at 2 o' clock in the morning or whatever the things are that you have to do. So find ways to make sure that battery gets recharged throughout the day as best as possible. And I would say, adding to your point, sharing, share the burden with others if you can and when you can, the 100%, if there's two of you, you each only have to give 50% to the effort to get it done. In fact, when I was in college, one of the ways I think I was successful is because I did study groups and I partnered with people to prepare for exams and to work on our papers together and our presentations together, even if we weren't co authoring them. I was Just like, why am I going to do this on my own? Or even when I was a student at LCC, I would use the tutoring department to do my math homework because I'd show up and a tutor would help me, wouldn't do it for me, but I was like, I'm going to sit and do the homework anyway. I might as well have a tutor here help me through it.

Great. Exactly.

So, yeah, share the burden, share the load, right?

Yes, yes. I talk a lot about that with students that are having families and they're in the nursing or some of our other health careers. I mean, not that all degrees aren't demanding, but those tend to be a little higher demands and engaging the kids into saying, hey, if mom or dad could study till 7 o' clock and I get good grade, you know, like short term goals, but then at the end of the semester we'll go to Chuck E. Cheese's or something or whatever the family place is, and enlisting people in the goals and encouraging them to help around the house, even if it's just putting dishes in the dishwasher if they're old enough and that kind of thing, to share the burden and not put all the responsibility on one person.

Yeah, yeah. That sense of community and sharing. Going through college together, I think we still walk into classrooms and we think I've got to sit at my desk and my papers and my exams, but I know we have really good faculty who put students into group work and you probably do this yourself as a teacher and have work on assignments together. And I think even in our professional work, you and I, we work together and we share the workload. We, we have something, a report that has to be done or a presentation that has to be done. We'll work on it together.

Yes. Yeah.

Record a podcast. We'll do that together, you know, whatever it is. Like, so even I think it's a life skill to learn how to share the workload. It might as well start doing it as a student. You're going to do it in the professional world.

Agreed. Yeah, definitely.

What about anything else you have notes for? Like essential to mental health, kinds of things that you've learned. Wow. These would be great if people thought, considered this idea or looked at things this way or that way.

Let me see. I think I've talked about a lot of them. One thing I think it's important to remember, especially with social media, is, and I wish I could quote where I heard this from or read because I think it's so valuable, but that most People, we tend to compare our insides with someone else's outsides. And I think that's only been exaggerated with social media. And everybody puts all their best selves on social media and so it's easy to look at them and see, think they have their lives together and we don't because we know our weaknesses, we know the things we don't like about ourselves and we assume that the other person is got all their ducks in the row, you know. And so I think when we can learn to stop comparing ourselves to others and we can learn from others and we can learn what we like about another person, whether this or that. I want to see how they do that or maybe become a little bit like that. So we can definitely learn from others, but be inspired. Be inspired by others. That's a good way to put it. But we don't have to be them. You know, like you're going on for your doctorate. I can be totally okay going, you know what, we're about both the same in life, almost 10 years difference. And I could be totally okay that that's not what yeah. Is in my plan and still be excited for you because it's in yours. And that we each have different paths and yeah. To not compare and hurt ourselves because

of it, it's a dangerous. It's a double edged sword kind of. Right. Because we look at other people for inspiration and as an example, as a mentor, a model.

Yes.

But we should not measure ourselves against them because we don't know the resources they started with. The happy accidents that came into their life that helped them along their journey that we didn't get or maybe sometimes we did get. And so.

Right.

Yeah. Comparing just doesn't make a lot of sense.

No.

But inspiring. You know, having an inspirational person out there. I think a lot of us might have pinned up pictures of athletes or, you know, people who inspired us in our bedrooms when we were kids or in our lockers. You know, remember hanging things inside your locker and stuff?

Yep. Those vision boards, things like that. Yes, yes. But just because we're not like them doesn't mean we're less than. And I think it's really important to realize what our true strengths are and what we bring.

Wow, that's good. Okay, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for coming on the podcast. If anyone's interested in one on one help with their mental health or well being, we have a counseling center on campus that currently enrolled students have access to. You can find out more at LCC.Edu/Counseling and thanks for listening and we'll see you next time in the headroom.