In Part Two of my conversation with Dr. Ana Kelly, associate professor of nursing at Columbia University, we explore the transformative power of immersing oneself in different cultures and communities. Dr. Kelly has been instrumental in encouraging nursing students to study abroad, highlighting how these experiences not only broaden their understanding of diverse healthcare systems but also foster deep personal growth.

We continue our discussion on grit and resilience in healthcare professionals, focusing on the emotional toll of working in high-stakes, trauma-exposed environments. Dr. Kelly emphasizes the importance of building rapport with patients to establish trust while balancing the technical and humanistic aspects of patient care. This balance is best captured in the idea that healthcare providers must be both artists and scientists, mastering both the science of medicine and the art of compassionate care.

As an educator, Dr. Kelly shares the challenges of training future healthcare providers, particularly in honoring student diversity while ensuring that each practitioner embodies the qualities of excellent patient.

Welcome to Headroom, the podcast where we explore all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm Jim Owens, your host and licensed mental health counselor at Lansing Community College.

While you're about to hear from some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life, podcasts are no substitute for professional medical advice. So if you need help, Please call or text 988. Okay, having said that, let's get into the Headroom and begin today's conversation.

Okay, everybody, welcome Back to part two of my conversation with Dr. Ana Kelly, Associate professor of nursing at Columbia University and former supplemental instructor at Lansing Community College, too.

I want to add that to your CV here. I love it.

To let everybody know you were, we can't say born and raised here, but you spent a little time with us here at LCC, so I'm really proud of that.

Thank you.

So we were talking in part one about your path as a student, which I love for my guests to share, because students can relate to not having a linear path and have it all figured out. And you've ended up in a very deliberate, intentional place where I think you love working and you feel very useful in the work that you're doing.

You feel good about it.

Absolutely.

People can get there, can't they?

Yeah. Yes, I do believe that.

Figure it out along the way. But in your journey, if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to part one. You stepped outside your comfort zone to discover some of.

Or stepping outside your comfort zone at least helped you realize things about yourself. I mean, up here, I'm talking about going to the continent of Africa and a place where English isn't the native language, et cetera, et cetera.

And so that probably helped you learn a lot about how you could discover yourself differently, I guess, in a different place.

Yeah, I definitely encourage that for any student who's able. That's some of the work I'm doing. Now we have a global program where we do send students for six weeks abroad. So that's about a third of my work. Now.

My effort, professor effort is involved in that. So we have a chance to see students go abroad to a lot of different countries, and they work clinically for six weeks.

It's amazing to watch the transformation, some of the questions they have and the learning that they have, working alongside colleagues and other cultures. Yeah.

You must be so excited because when they're going off, you know, they're going to come back, you know, ooh, this is going to change them.

Yeah, yeah. And there's Difficulty, of course, too. Right.

So sometimes asking really difficult questions why they're seeing such injustice and inequity, but so much also the fire to want to make a difference in the world. And we see that with our colleagues in different countries as well. And they want to partner and work for betterment through that nursing connection.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I bet their eyes are just wide open as to what they can actually do as a nursing professional.

And your students you're training who are not undergrad students, right? You're training graduate students for. In a nurse practitioner program or what?

Well, yeah. So it's also a second degree program like I went to at msu, but they finish with a master's degree.

Wow.

Yeah. So it's like a 15 month program.

That's incredible.

Yeah. So to encourage them to sort of step into that next leadership role.

And it could be a nurse practitioner clinical focus, or it could be also education or research. Okay, okay.

So they walk out with a master's in nursing from your program.

That's correct.

And some experience working in another healthcare system in another part of the world.

Yeah. For those who choose that. Or they can work in New York, which almost offers similar experience.

The five boroughs, maybe six if we count Staten Island. Right. Okay. I don't know. Yeah, right. There's a great deal of diversity there.

Yeah.

Yeah. So let's go back then. We were talking at the end of episode one there about grit. That's the word that teachers seem to go to now, right?

Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah.

They're coming back from these travel abroad or study abroad programs probably with some more insight, but probably some character development too, along the way, some renewed sense of I want to make a difference in the world and they finding a strength inside to push into that or lean into that a little bit more, as we might say in my field. But I don't know, what is your experience of turning, and this is going to sound kind of authoritative, but turning a student into a nurse?

Because I have to do that. I have to turn students into counselors.

Right, right.

And a lot of times you can see that transition happening as they start to develop their critical thinking, higher level processing when they come into a patient's room and they think about what's happening from different angles. It's really exciting to see that.

I mean, I'm seeing it more in the classroom as opposed to at the bedside, but it's still very encouraging to see that happen. And they're doing a good job also bringing a lot of the Social factors that the patients are connecting with.

But I always in the back of my mind think, oh, this is like the best time for them where they're learning, they're going to have time to think about that. But I know the struggle they're going to have when they actually get out there.

Finding the time as a nurse to connect on that deeper level with patients because it moves fast. Yeah, yeah.

The expectations for them in the workforce, I mean, I don't know.

I have a friend who's a physician and he said he sees like 25 or 30 people a day, which he told me that 10 years ago, but my head is still spinning from that. I could never. If I see 30 people in a week, that's a miracle for a therapist. That's a herculean effort. But is that not right?

I mean, you're running around from patient to patient sometimes.

Definitely. For the providers, that's where they're at number wise.

With nurses, obviously we have less that we focus on for the day, but there's just so much to do for the patients in that 12 hour shift, let's say. So you're moving. So. Yeah.

And it's not just your brain and your intellect and your education that's getting you through the day. That's what we're talking about here. I picture what you're describing.

Like you want them to walk into a room and not make any assumptions about what's going on in the room. Let's really take a look at what's going on in this patient's room.

Well, I like that. I'm gonna have you come in and speak on that.

Yeah, me too. Right.

Like I don't care what I expect should have happened in the last two hours or four hours or what's written on the board or what's not in the chart. I know what I need to check and let me just start. Tabula rasa.

Right. Start neutral.

Yeah.

And that's something we have talked about. Like whenever nurses give report to each other, it's really important to keep it as neutral as possible.

You don't want to put any sort of negative connotation on a patient or a patient's family. And then you come in and you're dealing with the medicine medical piece and then you can expand as the day goes on into the social.

Yeah, but that's part of the job.

It's part of the job. Yeah.

That's actually a big part of the job. And I don't know about your program. Mine is the program. And as you know, I'm on sabbatical from teaching because I'm back in school myself.

That's right.

So.

But I still think like I'm an educator and as if I'm still in the classroom, but not quite, but I have a very strict curriculum and our university has a strict curriculum that we have to teach to that the state of Michigan here, for example, because we license in the state, has to follow. They must take this course, then this course and this course and this course must cover these 12 core learning ideas and so on and so forth.

So we're kind of running through a curriculum and it's pretty academic and left brained. And they got to pass a board exam and they have to pass internships and all these things and we prepare them for all that.

That's not exactly an analog to what the work is going to be, right?

Yeah, yeah, very similar, yeah. So they have to pass their, what's called the nclex, that's the nursing licensing exam.

And so a lot of our focus is getting them ready for that as well. So it's always sort of balancing because no teacher wants to be always teaching to a test.

Right.

So but we want to make sure that they do pass that because that's important for their career advancement and moving forward. But yeah, how do we get them connected with what they really see but also have that nice foundation of academic knowledge. Yeah, yeah.

I'd love to go on and on about this because trying to draw similarities between our work because there's I think more technical work in my training. But we teach very technical things is what I'm gonna say.

But then as soon as we in classroom do a session or a role play or I have to observe a session. I want them to be totally non clinical in a sense in their expression. They need to be humanistic.

They need to kind of show up organically and authentically and not going through a checklist in their head. That's not exactly how therapy works. In fact, I'll just say out front, the main thing we need to do with our client is build a rapport with them.

And that is an extremely non technical kind of thing to do. There are certain things you need to do to help that happen and there are things you need to refrain from doing to help that happen. For example.

Well, I don't need to get into all the details, but there's things.

But boy, it can't be like you going through a checklist on a white sheet of paper asking questions and get a biopsychosocial and then at the end of that examination of their medical history, you now have rapport. No way. That's not how that works. So I don't know.

That's gotta be part of it for your training as well, because you want them to have that rapport with the patient where they'll actually tell them what they're feeling and thinking and what's working and what's not. I don't know. I mean, tell me about that.

Yeah, that's interesting because we struggle with that a little bit because when they come in and we do the admission assessment, there's a lot of checklist with that. Yeah. And so you're going through a lot of questions and how much do you stop and make dialogue about things versus jump into the necessary tasks?

So I think it's sort of one of those learned moments. You know, they love to say it's both the art and a science.

Yes, it is. We all say that.

We all say that. So. And you feel that when you're there. But that's what you're always trying to get that sort of. I like to think of it as a light, friendly.

Like you're laughing together a little bit, trying to make the situation a little softer because nobody wants to be in a hospital. And so try to connect with anything that can lighten the moment a bit, I think can help make that human.

To human connection, that you're just in any way possible. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right about humor. I tell my patients or my clients, like, I'm laughing all the time in therapy.

There's tears, but we're laughing all the time through it too. It's just like. Yeah, we're kind of outside the pain a little bit in there. It's a similar for you, right?

Yeah.

This is ridiculous that we're here, but we have to do this.

Yeah.

That kind of stuff. Yeah. So that's tough. And I know you and me, we try to coach people.

I don't know how much you're doing the clinical bedside stuff anymore, but when we have the opportunity to do that, it's awesome to be able to say, hey, you did a good job connecting with that patient right there.

The way you leaned in on this question or that question or you followed up this way or that way, I could see their demeanor change, and they really opened up to you more, which is good. That's what you want them to be able to do things like that. So developing their.

But I don't know if there's anything on the NCLEX that tests for bedside manner.

I know, right? That's the thing. And we also think, like, how do you measure that when you're in school? You really can't, so.

And then you have to be careful as a professor, like, where's my own bias when I'm watching my students and connecting with patients? So it's a tricky thing.

It is tricky. And even as I'm kind of. You're right. I'm bringing my own bias out here about. Checklists are horrible. But you know what?

Some clients, they expect the checklist.

Sure.

They come into therapy and they're like, where's your checklist? You know, how come you're not taking notes? Isn't this important to you?

I don't take notes when I talk to clients, but there are expectations that, you know, we have our own bias. And I'll say my own journey as an educator, which is a lot longer than yours, even though we're about the same age.

But I've been teaching in the classroom for 20 years. When I first started training counselors, I'm not ashamed to admit it now, but it's a shameful thing.

I thought I knew what a good prototype counselor was, and I wanted everybody to fit into that. You know, it was a nice blend of some of the greats, but I was kind of trying to shoehorn everybody into that.

Roughly speaking, this mix of, you know, I don't need to give all the names, but you can just imagine, right.

And eventually, I just saw the beauty and the power of all these distinct personalities and typologies of students who were going to be great counselors for different types of people and different types of counselors. And I. I relaxed into that eventually, and I was like, I wouldn't do it that way, but it looks like it's working for you.

Actually, I love that point, because you do. You come in with this expectations, and you're like, I'm gonna make them great.

They're gonna be ready, and then they'll do something that you wouldn't have thought of. And you're like, man, that worked really nicely. And so it's a good learning moment.

And remember that that's, again, why we need such diverse student bodies, because they bring something unique to the table. And sometimes the way somebody's able to connect with a patient, a similarity of a cultural background, a racial background, it's so powerful.

And so just allowing your students to lean into what feels right for them. Yeah, it's exciting to watch, actually.

It is freeing, too. It takes Some of the responsibility off of us of having to produce. Because that's what I was.

I was like, we got to produce the greatest counselors the world's ever seen. That is still kind of my neurotic.

Sure.

Sometimes why I'm back in school, I can do better if I get more education, you know, which I do believe. And we'll see what happens. Right. Although I have to say, there's a little footnote here in my field.

The research shows that the higher the degree a therapist got, the less better their outcomes tend to be.

That's interesting.

Isn't that awful?

Well, if you get too academic, I could see that for sure.

That's the point. And it's probably. It's correlational. It's probably not necessarily causational.

It's probably some who are more clinically intellectual go on for that anyway. And they probably wouldn't have been. Yes, they would have got rated about the same as a master's level. But anyway, it's still something that I keep.

As I'm now working on a doctorate. I'm like, I gotta keep myself with my feet planted on the ground, you know, even though I have these great idea, these grand ideas.

Right.

Going back to the grit thing for students and helping them be willing to lean into difficult things. Now I'm curious about.

You have to deal with some really messy stuff, and you have to prepare your students to deal with some really messy stuff, not just. I mean, figuratively and literally, like they're gonna get their hands dirty.

And the social context that they have to work within, within the families and stuff. They're not all jovial. Everybody's getting along.

They have to be involved in some really highly conflicting situations with their patients and the families. And how do you prepare them for that in the classroom? Dr. Kelly?

Yeah, yeah. All right. Step one.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. We. We talk about this a lot. So we talk about structure, right? Like, how much do you hold students to a certain structure?

Because if they have that, when they start practicing, they can sort of jump from that, let's say, maybe discipline, and then. Then they can have the flexibility, be creative and things like that. So we're in this process right now.

We're trying to figure out how much do we push back on things like, say, a punctuality or different elements of. Do we offer second chances for issues with grades and things like that? Because I think that's a big part of grit, too.

Trying to figure out when do you allow a student extra time, a little bit of Room to work within a little room to be human and be a human. And. And then when is it good to push them a little more? And under this idea of resilience, we're really trying to balance that right now.

And also thinking about the landscape of accommodations and making sure that students have the accommodations they need.

But we need to also think, is there a point where we need to cap slightly to make sure that they can also be successful in a high paced nursing environment? This is where we're sitting right now. These are the questions we're working with.

That's really difficult, isn't it? I mean, these are the things that we've talked about most, I guess, over the years is like, man, yeah.

Even if I get into my feelings about it, it's like, this is the hardest part of our job as teachers. I know we both love the academic side of things. You love science, and I love my spreadsheets and my NIH articles.

And I'm reading them and I'm like, what was the Chromeback's alpha on that? Okay, I like the nerdy stuff too, but as an educator, I know what they're gonna get into. And you're going back to the messy thing.

They're gonna come into some situations that are gonna be really tough. Like, I'll just walk you through, I'll have a day here that could be very light, or it looks like it's gonna be light.

And then I can have stuff where I've had to have police involved and suicide interventions and various other things all in one day. And then you have to wrap that up and quick get to your next client. And, you know, you just get overworked, overwhelmed.

You can't have too many days of those in a row. But you have to be able to still show up for each person who needs your care that day.

And I have to bring a certain amount of energy, dare I say, enthusiasm to each of those times for my clients. You know, it's not as taxing to me now as it once was. I almost forgot how hard it was in the beginning for me to do that kind of work.

But I know it's gonna be hard for them in the beginning. And how do we prepare them for, like, as a counselor, you're gonna hear the stories of the worst things that have ever happened to people.

And sometimes you're gonna be the only person who's ever heard that. And I'm not gonna say any here to illustrate.

You can use your imagination, but it's certainly things that I've Heard from people that the producers of HBO couldn't even imagine to make a horror movie about. Like, I've heard stuff, I'm like, wow, that is the. I've never even could have imagined that.

But then you have to do that and then go to the next person, an hour to the next session and the next session and give them your.

Full energy and be there and not.

You're. You're still rocked by hearing these things, right? You're a human being and you're rocked by seeing things and hearing things and preparing.

So I know we're kind of swimming around two different things here. One, in our training programs, we want to hold them to a certain level of professionalism and rigor. Thank you.

Because they're going to need that out in the work. But then also we hold them to that. But how do we also prepare them and develop them to do that? Right. So that they can handle the rigor of the work.

That's what I was going a long ways around of saying. Like, the rigor of the work can be really hard some days.

And how do we prepare them for that developmentally when the class is over in 16 weeks and you know, anyway.

And then we toy with this idea, like, is there any way we can take grades off the table? I mean, I feel like all of us would love to just take it completely out the window, but how do you make sure that they're meeting those standards?

And maybe we all believe. We wish we could have smaller class sizes. That could make a massive difference if we could connect more with students, unfortunately.

So in my case, I have like 200 students in my class, so it's really hard to be able to know how each one is connecting with the material unless you have an objective measure.

There's no other way to do that.

There's really no other way.

You can't get to know them and do a subjective assessment.

I had a colleague of mine who didn't give grades actually, and at the end of the semester, he would, in the last class period, everybody have a five or ten minute meeting with him to discuss what their grades should be based on the work and contributions and participation. Right. Very liberal arts sort of style here. And he's a psych professor actually, so that's how he ran those classes.

And I was like, I don't have the guts to do that. But I love the idea in a sense. I love the idea. People are very focused on the grades, but it's one way we do have to assess.

We are gatekeepers to the Profession in some ways, too. We do want to make sure that they're ready to go.

Yeah. And with our situation at the hospital, I was thinking while you were talking about hearing hard stories.

Sometimes we do, but a lot of times it's more just seeing people maybe at their worst because they're so scared and maybe they're angry, and they definitely don't mean it against you, but you're the person who's next to them the most. And sometimes you're inflicting discomfort on them while you're caring for them so it can come back on you, those negative feelings.

And so trying to get the students ready so that they don't take it so personally.

And like you said, get ready to then leave that at the door there and then step into the next patient's room with full positivity and ready to be open. It's a bit heavy.

I think there's, like, two moves here. I'll say this clinically. There's two moves people can do with difficult feelings like that. They can leave it at the door, which is an impossibility.

Here's the humor. Right.

Yeah.

But I know what you mean by that. Compartmentalize it. Stuff it. You know, let's file that away. Let's file that away. We can come back to that later.

Yep.

And the other one is to, like, carry it with you into the next place. Those are your options. I guess the third option is to take time away to go process it with a colleague.

That's also an option, which is wonderful. When you have the moment.

If you have the moment. Sometimes you do. Sometimes I do. Sometimes you would. Yep. And sometimes you will.

But if we do the thing, which we kind of do in our culture, which is, I'm gonna put that away and deal with that later, and we just file that away because I need to go about the business of caring for the next person. That's actually prudent. I think that's probably, you know, if you can go process it with somebody, you have the time to do it.

That's probably option one. Option two. Here we are getting our checklist.

Option two is, you know, compartmentalize it, and then option and threes, bring it with you to the next room.

Yeah.

But we want students to come back or professionals to come back to that file cabinet and start going through it.

Right. That's the thing. When are they going to step back and then process that? Because unfortunately, we have tremendously high turnover in nursing.

Oh, really?

Very high turnover. Yeah. Even in that first year, it's like that first year, because you come in so excited after graduation.

That's why I would also say a good orientation program is important when they get hired and wherever they're being hired, it gives them time to acclimate a bit to the new institution. But then, yeah, you're about to get into the issues of everything we've just discussed and time management issues, which are very difficult.

And that's where you need to figure out, when do you step back and process everything? You had to sort of shove down during the day. Yeah. Because then they come to you.

Well, then actually they do. And I'll tell you, here's what happens. They show up. This is like the Pareto principle. 80, 20, right.

It's probably 80% of the case that by the time somebody gets to a therapist's office, their file cabinet's full. And the question they pose to us isn't, are you someone that can help me go through my file cabinet?

Their question basically is, can I get a bigger file cabinet? I don't have any room for these feelings. They're starting to come out in uncomfortable ways for me and everybody else.

So we need to figure out a way to do something with those things where we either need to stuff them in there harder or we need to make room for more. You know, 20% of them show up and they know the game. They're like, I can't. I know you're going to ask me hard stuff.

We're going to open the files, we're going to go through them, process, as you say. It's like, yeah, that's basically what we do in therapy. That's what we do. And I don't. I can't explain to you the magic of telling someone your pain.

We call it catharsis. It's a Greek term, means letting the pain out. I don't know why that is therapeutic.

I can't tell you why scientifically or clinically, but I can tell you from experience and from the literature. When someone talks about their pain, they're like. It becomes objective to them and they're kind of like, okay, I'm outside it a little bit.

I'm telling you a story that happened to me. It's less subjective and caught up inside them a little bit more.

If you can just share it, My nursing colleagues. Are you hearing this right now?

Yeah.

Make sure, please. Oh, that's wonderful to hear. Yeah.

And that's where I sort of. I don't know if you can even see my body language here.

I grimace a little when I do this and I kind of brace myself because I'm like, this is not going to be fun. We're going to laugh along the way. But going through that file cabinet, it's hard.

And then people get scared because you're like, I started going through some of these hard feelings and difficult memories, and I just. There's going to be so many more of these we're going to have to do. This is going to be so hard. And I'm like, just keep it tidy as you go. Right.

I'm sure this is a nursing skill to keep everything up to speed and your records up to speed. Don't do all your case notes at the end of the day, that kind of stuff. Deal with it as you go.

But I don't know how you do that with feelings throughout the day.

But I'm sure you guys are right. We're almost on the cusp of that. Yeah. So just while you're doing your charting, be like, okay, now here's my five minutes of feeling processing time.

Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, yeah.

I'd be happy to come and do a lecture on, like, articulating and expressing feelings.

There you go.

So that if you can just do those two things, if you can give a name to the feeling you're feeling and express it in one way or the even walking down the hallway, hey, how you doing? I feel worn out. And you just go to the next classroom or this classroom. Yeah, the next patient room. It can help those little things.

Yes.

So those of you who are listening to this, who are future healthcare providers, nurses, therapists, or any work you're gonna go into, I think this actually crosses over to being an engineer, too.

Like, whatever you're doing, because you're working with human beings and you can have really difficult conversations with people at work where egos get involved or just you take things personally that, like, you say they shouldn't necessarily take them personally. I know you can't train students to prepare, and I can't either prepare them for the real world. Exactly. But we at least tell them it's coming.

Is that the conversation that's going on in the classroom?

I believe so. I think that the best professors or students would say, are ones who share a lot of personal experiences because those stories really stay with you.

I mean, I know they did for me when I was a student.

So sharing a story that has some hardship, but a little bit of hope at the end as well, or maybe like a lesson on how you dealt with that can really make a difference. I think we're always trying to impart that.

Yeah. I mean, it's same for me. Right. I mean, hearing that from my professors, especially in my counseling program, hearing that they struggled with things.

Right. There you go, showing your vulnerability. Yes.

And there can be, especially as professionals and you are, you know, you've got a terminal degree or at an Ivy League school to show any vulnerability there academically.

I don't really know if it feels like academically here you won't speak about your institution, but does it feel like in academia at that level where you're swimming with sharks, where to show vulnerability is like you won't get tenure. You have to play a little bit of a game up there where it's, I don't know, you have to protect yourself more.

It's a very interesting question. What I found.

As much as you can make the authentic connection with students, they respond so much that it opens that door to feel safe to do that again. So I have led with that.

I know I keep coming back to it, but a lot of humor with that and just being able to laugh like here's some mistakes, but I was able to overcome it by doing this or I had this support. I think those moments sort of help with levity and realize it's okay.

I always tell students the same thing when we start the class, which is, you know, you're all high level achievers. You got into this program and I do want you to feel like you're doing your best work.

And so I know a lot of you are going to be reaching for that A grade. But I want to let you know, some of the most exceptional students I've ever had are B students.

And I always think about a student if I'm the person in the bed, or let's say someone I really love, like my mother is in the bed, who would I want to see stepping into that room? And I've had so many amazing students throughout the years. I would trust them completely to care for myself or loved ones.

And I'm just, I like to encourage students like be that person who's the well rounded student and do the best you can academically with that, that you know when you put your best foot forward. And that means in life as well, you have to take care of yourself outside of the classroom.

So find that balance and be okay with where you're at in that space. Yeah.

Tall order, actually. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a great message.

Yeah.

Because they need to hear like, nursing isn't just clinical work. It's your human. You gotta do your own work, as we say. That's true.

Yeah.

Wow.

But those students who come into the classroom and allow themselves to be a little bit more human with that and not focus always on that next point or that next grade, I think it's important for them to be able to also be that sort of person for their patients. Because you're going to find when you get into the, let's say, the hospital setting that things aren't always going to go right.

You're not something, maybe they'll react badly to a medication or something is going to be late. And you gotta be ready to be flexible in that moment as well.

So be flexible with yourself as well when you're a student and you'll translate that practice into your care.

Wow. That's a great message for them. I'm glad you're communicating that to them as a therapist here, I'm giving you my own assessment. But the good on you.

That's what they need to hear. That helps me do my work. Have you ever heard anybody say you should be emotionally agile, flexible with yourself and your perception of yourself?

Right.

Yeah.

Yes.

So we better leave it there. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I gotta wrap this up. Thank you so much for coming down and talking with me.

Yeah, thanks so much, Jim. This was fun.

Appreciate it.

Bye.

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Headroom. Remember, if you need mental health assistance, you can always call or text 988.

And if you're a current LCC student, free mental health counseling is available to you at the college. You can learn more at LCC.edu/Counseling.

I want to thank our producers here at LCC Connect and encourage you to explore other amazing podcasts at LCCconnect.com thanks again for listening. Take care and we'll see you next time in the Headroom.