On this episode, the B2B team sits down with Jim Owens, a mental health counselor at Lansing Community College and host of Headroom, to discuss the importance of community, connection, and support for students. Together, they explore common misconceptions about mental health and highlight how reaching out for help can build resilience and improve well-being.

Related Podcast: Headroom with Jim Owens

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Website: Lansing Community College Center for Veteran and Family Support

Welcome to B2B, Boots 2 Books, the show where we explore the journeys of veterans and military connected students, as they navigate their paths from service to the classroom and beyond. I'm Dustin Abrego. And I'm Rebecca Allen, your hosts. Each week, we will dive into powerful stories of resilience, determination, and success. Whether you're a veteran yourself, a military family member, or simply inspired by the strength of those who serve, you're in the right place. Let's turn the page and start this incredible journey together.

Hello, and welcome back to an episode of B2B. I'm Dustin Abrego.

And I'm Rebecca Allen.

This week we are joined by

Jim Owens, mental health counselor here at Lansing. Community College and former host of another LCC Connect show.

Yep.

The Headroom with Jim Owens.

Okay. The crossover everyone's been asking about, the cinematic universe of the podcast is complete now at this point. Thanks for joining us, Jim. Of course.

We want to make sure that we're talking about not just the aspects of students and veterans and what that looks like, but your background. Could you provide a little bit of that for people that haven't listened to your show before?

Yeah. I've been a Counselor now for 25 years, working in mental health a variety of different ways. I've been at the college here, actually, for 34 years.

Came to college here as a peer advisor and helped students figure out what they wanted to do with their lives at freshman orientations, which had me switching my major from architecture to psychology life. But I really liked helping people figure out what to do with their lives.

And when you're doing that, they give you all these reasons for why their ideas seem kind of impossible. And so I was like, ooh, I like tearing those things down and, like, figuring out ways to get over those. So that's what I've been doing.

I've worked in addictions.

I've worked in substance abuse for a long time in courts, drug courts, veteran courts, and private practice and higher ed counseling, which you see everything at a community college. We have every type of student here. So couples counseling, grief counseling, you name it, all of it.

I also taught in the classroom for 20 years, teaching psychology and counseling.

Awesome.

So that's my background.

Yeah. Okay.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

I could go on, but we'll stop there.

When we see a lot of veterans and students in general, they're waiting until they reach their crisis point. Right. I feel like you can understand where people come from before they seek mental health support.

We.

When you meet with people who are not in crisis, what are they often seeking support for? Like, what does that look like? We understand what crisis looks like. Or people have seen someone that is having a bad day, really, really bad day.

Right. And they end up needing that support. But when they're not in crisis, what are they looking for? How does that come across?

Interesting. I'll use the word crisis again here. Because they're looking to avoid a crisis.

They have a hunch, kind of an intuition that something's off inside them. They aren't feeling like they used to feel. They aren't thinking about the things with the same kind of joy or hope that they might have in the past.

And they sort of have this premonition of like, I don't think things are right, my relationships aren't right, I'm not feeling right. And it hasn't come to a flashpoint for them yet. It hasn't come to a crisis.

But they're either they show up because they're in crisis, that for sure we know. Or they've avoided it for a long time.

And I think sometimes they're kind of secretly in crisis, but they don't display that on the outside because it's gotten to the point now there is sort of this mini crisis on the inside. Like if I don't do something about this now, it will explode. And by it I mean I, I will explode. I gotta address this now.

So that's usually what it looks like. That's what I'm listening for. That's what I'm looking for. When somebody comes in and sits down.

Oh, I just thought I would check this out, see what counseling is about, you know, that kind of stuff. Or I need a little help with X, Y or Z. I'm like, eh, we're probably gonna end up at A, B, C and go through the whole Alphabet. But that's fine.

We can start with X, Y and Z.

So it's not as preemptive, possibly for what you see, maybe. So I try to relate it to other things that maybe our listeners can tune into.

If I think of you hear your brakes grinding a little bit right when you're driving your car and you're like, I gotta get this done. They still work, right? But you're like, it's just. And like that initial inertia to push them over to be.

I need to go take this in today because otherwise I'll be on the side of the road.

Totally.

And people do qualify their need for mental health support or any kind of support because they're Functional enough, whether that's asking for help from their teacher or asking for help from a therapist like me. Usually people kind of look in the mirror, assess their life, and they go, you know what? Everything I'm doing right now is kind of working.

I don't really want to, like, get under the hood and start playing around with stuff because I could break something worse. Or they might ask me really difficult questions in the counseling office, which I don't want to get into.

Or if I go and ask my professor for help, then they'll know that I'm ignorant in all these other areas, and then that'll make me feel stupid, and then I won't ask all these other. So they kind of like to keep it running where it's at for the most part. That's what I found.

And our job, my job is to very gently encourage to open the hood, look underneath and start poking around a little bit. And, you know, very few people need a complete engine overhaul if we're going to stick with this metaphor here. It's true.

Like, most people are pretty functional. Like, we've all figured out how to be hurt and keep walking. You know, we have this phrase that's kind of overused now that we are walking wounded.

Everybody you see has been wounded in some way, shape or form, but we're still putting one foot in front of the other. That's partly our culture. It's partly just what it means to be a human being. We just keep pressing forward.

Our eyeballs are in the side of our head or in the front of our heads, not the side of our heads. I get my biology right here. You know, we're looking ahead. We're not looking for what's coming at us.

We're usually kind of aiming at a goal or a direction. So we're pretty good at keeping moving in the same direction. But I don't know. Does that answer your question?

We're just trying to help them figure out how to move forward.

When you. Again, we interact in the whole show premises talking about veterans and stuff.

So I don't know if you can cross over a little bit of what you've seen with it. Again, those are two very broad Venn diagram type things. What we're looking at. What do you see with the students like that that we work with?

I would say almost we talk about the Venn diagram.

There's two camps that I've noticed, having worked with veterans over the years, some who strongly identify with their veteran identity and some who want to leave it behind in Some sense, at least publicly, not privately, intimately, to their own identity or to maybe their close family and friends. But they don't want to be recognized first and foremost as a veteran. They want to be recognized first and foremost as Jim or Dustin or Rebecca.

But there's a whole other group that are very much wear their military service out in front, and they will say, you know, they might have been a Marine ten years ago, but they'll introduce themselves and it'll come up. I'm a Marine still. You know, I'm not in active duty serving Marine. But, you know, no one's a former Marine, really.

For most veterans, there's no such thing. So in that regard, their identity as a veteran is a unique characteristic that they'll always bring to therapy that is very. It's a varied background.

Everybody has a totally different experience here.

We could, you know, if we had military members in the room, they might very, you know, friendly, in a friendly way, sort of jostle each other about which branch is better, which one is more rigorous, which one's tougher. But it's true. The experience of someone who served in the Coast Guard versus the Air Force versus the Marines, navies, Army, they're all different.

And you make different assumptions, and they have different experiences.

So we can't say too many big, broad general things about military service, because the service of somebody who wears a blue uniform and works in an office every day for four or five years is not the same thing as somebody who's driving a transport truck across the desert of the Middle east, hoping there's no ied, right? Let alone somebody who's kicking down doors and looking for bad guys or bad girls.

So everybody's experience is different, but we have to recognize that. It's almost like when we counsel any. Any person who shows up with a quote, unquote, minority status, we have to talk about that status.

Like, what does it mean to you that you are a veteran? What does your military service mean for you? How did it inform your identity? I know it did, so I'm not going to pretend that it didn't.

How much they describe that on the outside and publicly and so on and so forth is up to the individual and what their experience was, what it meant to them, if it was good or bad, how it informs, how they think about the rest of their life. That's so unique to each person.

But it'd be a huge mistake for any counselor to get a veteran in their office and not talk about their military experience and how it affected their identity.

So I wanted to kind of double back to the walking wounded comment that you named. And this isn't on the list of questions, so I surprised you here.

So I used to work in the Resiliency Directorate for the army and you know, there was always this big push about resilience.

You know, we went through master resiliency training and under, under the Resilience Directorate is also suicide prevention and substance use prevention, things like that. And there is always that very big push, especially in suicide prevention for the military, of just be resilient.

You know, from a professional mental health standpoint, what does that look like when you have someone who maybe has gotten out relatively recently, so they've been through all the resiliency training and it's the death by PowerPoint that we have to go through.

What can that look like when you're meeting with someone and they're in the mindset of, well, I just need to be resilient and I just need to push through and figure it out on my own.

And that's a very important question. The idea of resiliency and how we frame what that actually looks like. It's true. Resiliency is a virtue and we all want it, we all value it.

I think we, we laud it in our society and we should. It's an, it's an incredible feature of being a human being to be resilient in the face of stress.

However, the way we've sort of warped what it means to be resilient is that we do it independently.

It's our own individual project to become resilient that is just flat out not in line with all of human history, with your biology, with how you make this like it's completely a non. Starter. The only way for people to be happily, completely happily. And this is from science, this isn't my opinion.

You can look at the Harvard studies on happiness if you want to find out more. The way that you will become truly resilient is in community. It's not going to happen on your own. And your community does not have to be big.

It can be a dog. Honestly, it doesn't even have to be human. It can be your family, it can be your friends, it can be a cadre of community members. Whatever.

I say dog because my uncle's a retired Navy chaplain, Marine, served with Marines. And his number one resource is Paraclete, his little yellow lab, right, who's a, you know, support animal for him.

But he doesn't do it on his own and he has a whole other group of people and it's the same. Resiliency is a community project. And yeah, we have to take the initiative. We are independent. We are individuals. But you know, this.

The military, it's all about the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the fraternity of supporting one another. That is, frankly, the key to success in life. It also makes life way more fun. It's fun to go to see a movie.

Way more fun to go see a movie with your friends. Fun to study, homework. I mean, it is for me. I'm a nerd. Way more fun. And nobody's going to agree with that.

Way more fun to study homework with your friends. Way more fun to do everything, pretty much with other people. Now, there's that rare one in a thousand person who just, like, is the lone wolf.

But that's the exception, not the rule. And that exception proves the rule because there's so few.

So the idea that resiliency is something that I need to muster on my own, within myself, and sort of live out of some really strong well of energy and valor to, you know, forge ahead, just throw that out. What you're looking for is other human beings in your life. That's your resiliency. And you get to be that for them. They get to be that for you.

It's a community affair. Does that sound.

Yes.

Right.

I 100% agree. And I would love it if you could go tell that to the Army. Great.

Well, the army knows this, too, because they don't send soldiers out alone much. It's mostly a platoon or various other. You know, how we break these team teams, however you want to call it. I mean, that's pretty much how it's done.

People have their own role in there and so on and so forth. But the military knows this. I don't know why even our culture knows this, but we haven't quite figured it out yet. We're too independent.

I like the way that you also were framing. I have a different conversation with students where I talk about motivation and, like, resilience. It's a thing that I do. No, it's not. It's a.

You're doing actions, and you are resilient because you are doing these other actions. Being in a group, you're being a part of stuff. You have a mission, you're committed to other things. And motivation. Well, I'm just not motivated.

Yeah, I was like, that's not a thing you pick off the shelf. Oh, I left my motivation on the ground. I got to go pick it up. You're doing it, and then you are motivated from the actions.

So again, that framing I appreciate because people go, well, just do this, or I won't do this other thing like that. You can't not do something. So the lexicon of how people say it, I think, confuses themselves, even of what actually ends up happening.

So I really appreciate that.

Let me add another footnote to that, if I can. Now you got an academic in the room. I'm keep talking. But you say motivation.

There's also this problem with not only internal resilience, but internal motivation. People think that's the real stuff you really want. No, no, no. The research shows external motivation works just fine.

If it goes away, then your motivation goes away. But if you can keep the external motivation in place, you'll get a ton done.

You'll feel great about it, you'll be satisfied, you'll be joyful, you'll be happy. So it's.

It's kind of like, yeah, we want kids to get up out of the bed on their own and go to class, but if mom's yelling at you to do it, and then later it's your wife or somebody else, hey, as long as somebody's there yelling at you to get up and go to work. Right, it works. And if you have those people in your life, great. So internal motivation is okay, but the science shows external motivation works too.

Just make sure you got the external motivators in your life.

Yeah, I think. Not judging the external motivator. Like, if you need the gold star sticker, just do it.

Sure.

Well, it seems childish. Does it work? You're a lot farther along than a lot of people. It doesn't matter.

This is a both and conversation. Find it inside, but also find it on the outside. That's kind of what I was saying earlier about community.

I'm 100% an external, motivated person. There's that candy bar waiting for me when I read a certain number of chapters.

We learned this in substance abuse counseling research. And what motivates people to stay sober. And it's often other people. They're motivated to stay sober for others.

And that works just as well as the ones who are like, I want to be clean for myself.

Totally makes sense. What is something that you think students tend to worry about that turns out to be very common? I think in general, there's this.

Not mass delusion, makes it sound like they're crazy, but more of a. I only feel this and other people don't. And I always personally think it's. People feel like they're behind, especially when we talk community. College, I feel like that's one.

And I'm like, everyone kind of feels like this or feeling out of place. I feel like that's pretty common. But are there other ones in the time that you've been here that you think students?

Yeah, the first one is that I'm the only one of the. That that idea is just. It just doesn't work. You're not the only one. Our human lives are just not that different from one another's. They're just not.

And one of the five core therapeutic techniques that a counselor can do, which you have to go to a lot of college to learn to do this, is to tell something called we call normalizing. Like, you know what, that's pretty normal. That you'd be nervous before a speech. You know what, that's pretty normal.

That you'd be worried about graduating. That's pretty like. And what's interesting about that particular technique, it's literally called normalizing. Anybody can do it.

You don't have to go to college to learn how to do it. It's therapeutic. It's measurably therapeutic when somebody goes, I'm not the only one. Big exhale. Cortisol starts to back off.

Adrenaline starts to back off. Peace starts to come in. They start to breathe out of their abdomen. Like, I'm not the only one. And what I hear from.

And I've heard this on this campus for 30 years, people walk into my office after the door's shut, sort of look over their shoulders like no one's listening. And they go, everybody else has it together here. And everybody else is happy.

They got their backpack slung over their shoulder, their shoulders back, and their eyes looking toward the future. And they've got a nice car that I'm sure is fully paid for sitting in the parking garage.

No, that's for sure not true. I know that.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, no, Everybody who comes in this office and shuts the door says that, you know, like, nobody feels like.

Not nobody, but look at the data. Over half of Americans feel lonely. It's 60 something percent feel lonely because they want to talk to each other about this and other things.

So that's the first thing is like, people just are, for whatever reason, embarrassed of their experience. And shame. Of the five major emotions that you can feel, four are unpleasant, one is pleasant.

But the worst of the negative, the worst of the four that are not fun is shame. Shame is what drives suicide. Shame is why people hide away into a hole. That's the worst. You can Be, you know, really mad, really sad.

That's unpleasant. Not as bad as shame. And people are so, like, the antidote to shame is so quick and easy.

You just speak about what you're embarrassed about, and then it kind of goes away. We know that. Like, I feel really stupid, but I haven't finished X. I'm sorry, Prof. And they're like, not a big deal. Just turn it in tomorrow.

Or they're like, shame on you. Do it better next time. It's over.

Yeah. What's the good emotion?

Joy.

Is it ice cream? Okay. Damn it. I was wrong. All right.

Enjoyment, which is kind of some parts pleasure, but some parts happiness. So, yeah. But joy, just feeling good about something, having a good moment.

What would be one misconception about just mental health? Now, this is a really very broad strokes, right?

Maybe even just mental health working in the time that you've worked with veterans and stuff that you would like to get rid of or like, at the door, they check that item, they check that, oh, this doesn't apply. Cool. And then they can move past that. What do you think? Is that Hang up that we can move past?

Well, I'm going to be very philosophical here. Sorry.

Love it.

The fact that we call it mental health because there's no such thing as a person who just has a mind. You also have a body, you also have relationships, and you also live in a place, and all of those things impact your health.

So you could have a really good mind, but if you're in a really bad place, it is not gonna work. Et cetera, et cetera. I could go through all these things, but there's four components that actually make up your health. Your mind is one of them.

Your mental health, your social health, your biological health, and your environmental health. Somebody could walk into my office and say, you know, I have this really stressful experience in college. It's totally terrible. Xyz.

There's nothing mentally wrong with them. They live in. They have maybe an abusive relationship, or they live in a place that's just not safe physically for them to be in.

Or they're physically sick. It has nothing to do with their mind. The architecture of their cognitions, their schemas, their way of looking at the world.

That can all be sound as a pound, but it's it. The problem really lies in other areas. And that's so true in mental health.

We're often talking to people about it doesn't sound like that relationship is really helping you. You want to switch that up for something else or try to Change it or, you know, sounds like you're not getting enough sleep.

And, I mean, that's a huge problem. Like, nothing will make you go psychotic faster after drugs than lack of sleep. Don't sleep and see what happens. You don't need drugs.

You know, just wait 72 hours and you'll have a trip. It's not good for you. You got to have sleep. So people who aren't sleeping.

So that's the biggest problem is that people think, oh, there's something wrong in my head. No, it's not. Sometimes, yeah, like, you need to adjust your schema. You need to adjust your perspective on life.

Sure, we can all benefit from doing that, but it's these four things all at once, which is. It's hard to find a catchy phrase like, what kind of counselor are you? Holistic counselor. What does that mean?

I don't know.

We kind of love crystals.

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Like the candles, like the incense.

So do you think that when people move through these motions and these thought processes of where they end up in your office or with other people, that it's spilling over into that and then they go, this is when. Now the brakes are squeaking. I need to see you. And that's where the crossover into mental health. And they're like, well, now it's a problem of this.

And it's like, it's maybe not that.

And it's probably all these other things that are all crossing over, which do affect, like you said, safety and all those other things that if you don't feel like that, you're going to have issues.

Yeah.

Ultimately it affects. Ultimately the mind. That's our last quiet place. That's our last sanctuary is our mind.

Like, if you can close your eyes and it's not pleasant inside, you're going to want some help. The reason why it's not fun inside by yourself, on your own, probably. Sometimes it's your own architecture of your mind.

Sometimes it's those relationships or your own biology is out of whack or the environment that you're in. So, yeah, I mean, it's like, I hate to beat the everybody's got to take care of themselves idea here, but you really do. You need sleep.

Everybody needs good. A lot of sleep. It's really good for your brain. Everybody needs one or two people. It could be a parrot. I don't care.

But you need somebody to talk to and who talks back. I say parrots because they can talk back. You need somebody, you know, even.

What was it that movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, which half of our audience won't know. But it's this guy who's stranded on an island and he makes, you know, his little volleyball into somebody. And we all get that.

We watch this movie and we're like, I totally understand. I would turn the volleyball into somebody to talk to too. I painted a face on it or whatever he did.

So you need somebody and you need to be someplace where you feel safe, where it's healthy for you. Put all that together. It's not too bad.

So you mentioned, you know, if, if you close your mind or close your eyes. Close your mind. If you close your eyes and your mind is not sound for you, that, that's, that's the sign.

What about students that maybe aren't certain if what could be classified as normal everyday stress? What if that does feel like a little too overwhelming? Like, at what point should they then say themselves, okay, maybe it's time for.

Me to, to step in to get some help. I mean, I answer this like a teacher, just like I would a counselor. Anytime you have a question, raise your hand.

Anytime you think you might need help, just go check it out. Like, for you listening to this, if you're a student at lcc, it costs you nothing to go see a mental health counselor.

Here.

It's free. If you go in the private industry, it's $165 an hour. So just come and we'll have a one off conversation and we'll send you on your way.

Or we'll say, maybe you might want to think about booking another session. We'll just let you know. Just like getting a tune up or a checkup.

Like, you know, I go get an annual physical for my doctor, not because anything's wrong, but just check it out. In fact, I do the same thing for mental health.

I only do it biannually, but I make an appointment to see a therapist every couple of years for about four to six sessions. Just kind of talk it through, have them check me out, just do a little mental check. And I'm usually okay, and they send me on my way.

One year it turned into 12 months of therapy. It was really productive, you know, so you never know.

So I want, I want to emphasize that part. The counselor is going to a counselor because sometimes we just need it.

And I feel like that's something that we come across in the military and veterans space a lot is, well, I'm fine, I'm strong, I can handle, I'm resilient, I can handle it on my own. And why do I need to go seek help.

And I had a first sergeant who approached me once and said, look, I want to bring in a counselor and I want them, I want my soldiers to see me walk into that counselor's office. I don't have a thing that I need to talk about with that counselor, but I want them to see me do it because then that's showing.

Hey, if Top can do it, yes, I can do it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it strikes me thinking about the military again for our veterans, whether they served active duty or guard or reserve or whatever, there's such a built in community relationships and a built in environment that when those are gone, you know, you have to replace those with something else. Yes. And you do have to replace them with something else, by the way.

And you know, often the despair that I find from veterans is it seems impossible to ever get that level of brotherhood back again. You know, when they've, when they've left their unit or their team or to have military culture which many love.

I know there's parts of it that people don't love, but there's parts of it that are just so safe they feel you can rely on people. There's a very structured, ordered system there that isn't here in the civilian world at all in any way. People use blue ink. Right?

There's, there's like rules that are being broken out here.

So is that a rule?

That is a rule. That's why I'm so upset that the pens that we ordered are blue.

I, I didn't even know. I love this show because I learned something. Every, every time we have it, I go, the what?

Okay, yeah, there's no such thing as blue ink. All right. So anyway. But that kind of thing needs to be replaced or supplanted. You know, I like my name James.

I've thought about it a lot because of, if you look up the etiology of my name, it means, the etymology, it means supplanter, which is what farmers would do. They would grow crop for four or five years. Then you got to put in a new crop because you can't keep growing the same one out.

And I think we have to do that in life. You don't just take stuff away, you got to replace it with something else.

And that's an important piece that people either have to do it on their own because the military can help, but you really are trying to replace that with something else out here. It's not going to be the same. You need to go into it open minded. It could be Richer. It could be better. Hopefully it can be.

But you have to aim for that.

I've definitely found that the veteran community, when you finally find the right people, you can still find that same camaraderie, like, even over here. The conversations that we have with our work study is. It's fun. I know that I'm supposed to be their boss, but it's comfortable.

Or I'm in a gaming community. And I had a really lengthy conversation in Discord today with a couple of people in my guild that I found out were veterans.

And you can find it everywhere. You just. You have to take that time to actually open up and have those conversations, and you might actually start finding those people.

So do you think that's the. The choice overwhelms because when you're in, you have to be here, you have to do these things. You have to be with these people.

All of the things of building the community, 100% agree. Because you didn't have a choice and it was happened.

And I would say that going away to college is probably the only time where, like, you live with people that you didn't know and it can be a little different. But also that's like choice stuff within that. Do you think it's choice that overwhelms people?

Maybe of like, well, I don't know what I should get involved with because there's just everything.

Yeah.

It's like when I say, what do you want to do? Which is never a good question that I ask, but it's just, there's everything.

This has been studied. I mean, choice creates. The more choice you have, the more paralysis you will experience and the less happy you'll be after you made your choice.

Because it's easy to imagine that any one of those other choices could have made you happy.

It's ice cream. Everything.

That's all I'm picking up.

As you can tell, I'm.

Forget about it. I went back to my favorite ice cream place this year, and they only have six flavors. And I'm like, thank you.

I love that.

This is so much easier. I absolutely find four of them disgusting. And I'm really only picking between two. And I just go with the same one.

But when you go to a place that's got 32 flavors, what am I missing?

What do you do?

You got to stand around now. You got to work. A lot of glucose has to get burned to figure out which one am I going to want.

And you go and you get it and you talk to each other about what did you get what did you get? Are you happy with your choice? Are you happy it's too much.

Yep.

It's too many choices. So that's for everybody. And yeah, probably in the military, there isn't as much liberty for sure. But you got to pick.

Here's where the mental health piece comes in. Like, honestly, people are always worried about change and going to do something new. I'm like, humans are incredibly resilient.

Go pick something, Live with it. If it's good, it'll be great. Just dig into it. It'll be fine.

I dare say I'm looking over my shoulder to make sure my wife's not in the room, but I'm happily married 20 years. Love. My wife's amazing. Is she my soulmate? Yes. Would I have been happy had I married somebody else?

Yep.

And most guys aren't willing to say that, but I know from the science. I'm just saying it as a scientist. Yeah, you know what? You're going to make it work with somebody else. It's going to be okay.

You know, this whole, like, you know, Disney idea and a fairy tale, I love that. And I kind of feel that way with my wife. It's magical how we came together. It's a beautiful, romantic story. And yet I'm not stupid.

Had I matched up with somebody else, we would have had a great life, too. It's just true. If I would have picked a different career, I would have been happy.

I would have found the pieces in it that were amazing and lean into those and so on and so forth. So this fear of, like, if I pick the wrong major, if I pick the wrong person to marry, you know, all this stuff, like, no, look at the science.

You'll be okay. You're going to adapt. That's what people do. We adapt. We all the time, do we not?

And that's what I've talked about with, like, a lot of our veterans before, of, like, oh, well, this and this. And I was like, you've done harder things than what I'm asking you to do right now. Go take the math placement test. I.

It was like, you had to do, like, really bad stuff, like, physically and other things that they put you through because, like, you signed up for that, right? Go take the test. It'll be okay. Because if you bomb it, like, let me know that's your level and that's okay.

And I think that that's great advice of just figuring. Just commit to it and if it doesn't work, go do something else. Like, it's okay. Cause you're not in the surface anymore.

So you have the choice and you can move on past that. So what would you say to wrap up any of our veterans or any of our other students, other things, mental health resources or other things?

What would be the one tidbit you want to pass on?

You know what? I would supplant the word resilience nowadays with flexibility or agility.

And there's more in the literature now about emotional agility and being in like cognitive agility, having the ability to adapt, that really is a key feature of resilience. But to allow yourself to feel your feelings, allow yourself to change your mind, allow yourself to lose and learn from it and win again.

Like just have flexibility and not rigidity about how you're going to live your life and what's going to make you happy and, you know, all these ideas about it must be a certain way for me to be, to experience what I, you know, throw all that out. Life is full of all kinds of amazing things that are going to happen to you and for you, with you and against you. Everybody's going through it.

Nobody's. This is, hey, P.S. This is everybody's first time being alive and we're all just figuring it out. And you can take this with some kind of levity.

There's really serious heavy duty things we have to deal with in this life. But if we deal with them together, many hands make light work.

And if you just bond up with some other people and go through life together and you are allowing yourself to be agile, open, flexible with your feelings, with your thoughts, just put them out there, you're gonna have a great time in life. It doesn't have to be this really rigid process for you. Just relax, everybody. It's gonna be okay.

Jim, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Take care.

You've been listening to B2B, Boots 2 Books. Thank you for joining us on this journey through the inspiring stories of veterans and military connected students. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with your community. We'd love to hear from you, so connect with us on social media or take a listen to previous episodes at LCCConnect.com or find us on your favorite streaming platform. Remember, every story is a step forward and together we can build a bridge from Boots 2 Books. Until next time, stay strong and keep moving forward.