Listen Up with Host Al Neely
Hi, I'm Al Neely. I've spent most of my life asking, " Why do people behave a certain way? Why don't people understand that most everyone wants basically the same thing? Most everyone wants their fundamental need for peace of mind, nourishment, shelter and safety."
What I have learned is that because of an unwillingness to open one's mind to see that some of the people you come in contact with may have those same desires as you do. We prejudge, isolate ourselves, and can be hesitant to interact, and sometimes we can be belligerent towards one another. This is caused by learned behavior that may have repeated itself for generations in our families.
What I hope to do with this podcast is to introduce as many people with as many various cultures, backgrounds, and practices as possible. The thought is that I can help to bring different perspectives by discussing various views from my guests that are willing to talk about their personal experiences.
Hopefully we all will learn something new. We may even learn that most of us share the same desire for our fundamental needs. We may just simply try to obtain it differently.
Sit back, learn, and enjoy!
Listen Up with Host Al Neely
Why Nobody Wants to Wait in Line Anymore
The invisible aftermath of the pandemic lingers in our collective psyche, manifesting as road rage, workplace tensions, and an unprecedented reluctance to wait in line for anything. Patricia Heard, with three decades of clinical social work experience, unpacks these phenomena through the lens of unresolved trauma and adaptation.
Patricia takes us on a remarkable journey from her days at Mount Holyoke College during the early women's movement to her groundbreaking work in mental health. Having navigated environments where she was "often the only woman and the only minority," her perspective on DEI initiatives and their recent backlash carries profound weight. She draws compelling parallels between her experiences breaking barriers in the 1970s and the challenges faced by today's young professionals who, despite earning their credentials, still battle skepticism about their qualifications.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn as Patricia examines the evolution of mental health acceptance in the Black community. "When I first started in mental health, I had very few Black patients," she reveals, explaining how the stigma—"nobody in my family is crazy"—kept many from seeking help. Today's recognition of Black Mental Health Month signals progress, but the journey toward destigmatizing therapy continues.
Perhaps most thought-provoking is Patricia's analysis of pandemic-era entrants to the workforce who missed crucial socialization experiences. Without organically developed workplace social skills, many struggle with professional interactions, contributing to a broader pattern of social disconnection. Combined with technology that reduces face-to-face communication practice, we're witnessing unprecedented levels of impatience and social friction.
Patricia leaves us with wisdom that feels especially vital today: "Be honest with yourself about what you can and cannot do" and "allow yourself to just experience life." In our productivity-obsessed culture, she reminds us that focusing solely on doing rather than experiencing means missing the richness life offers. When did we forget how to ask for help? Perhaps our renewed focus on mental health will remind us this fundamental human connection is strength, not weakness.
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Hello everyone. I'm Al Neely with Listen Up Podcast and today we have Patricia Hurd. She has 30 years experience in clinical social work and the mental health field. She has degrees master's degrees in social work and business administration. Say hello everyone to everyone.
Speaker 2:Hello.
Speaker 1:All right. So one of the things we wanted to talk about, we wanted to talk about the post-pandemic mental health conditions or challenges that we're seeing right now in society. But one of the first things I wanted to talk to you about was your background. So tell me about your background. You are from the Hampton Roads area, yes, and you grew up in a period where it was just coming out of segregation, isn't that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct. I was in high school when they started the school segregation.
Speaker 1:Oh, what was that like?
Speaker 2:It was really a non-event for me. I had a choice. My junior year I had a choice of staying at my current high school or switching to one of the other schools that had been historically white and, because of my class rank, I decided to stay where I was because I didn't want to. I knew I was going to be applying to some of the top tier schools for college and I didn't want to impact my rank because at that time it was very difficult for minorities to get into some of the Ivy League schools.
Speaker 1:Okay, so where'd you go to school?
Speaker 2:I ended up going to Mount Holyoke College, which is one of the seven sisters, which is there were originally seven female colleges that replicated what they were doing with the male schools for the Ivy League. This was prior to any of them being integrated. In fact, mount Holyoke is the only one of the Seven Sisters that's still single sex. The board and the alums keep voting to have it be an all-female institution and for me personally, I went because of a recommendation from one of my school counselors and I'm glad I did, because it was also at the beginning of the women's movement.
Speaker 1:Oh, really. So talk about that experience moving from here up to Mount Holyoke.
Speaker 2:It's in the western part of Massachusetts. So I was in the mountains and it was cold climate. And even though I'd been to the mountains before and even though I'd been as far northeast as Philadelphia to see relatives, I had never been in truly cold climate. So even though I took winter clothes with me, southern winter clothes are not equipped for the kind of snow and ice you get in the mountains of Massachusetts. But I adapted. I got some different clothes that first winter up there so they would be the appropriate weight. But I fell in love with the campus prior to going there and it's probably a four year experience that I will never forget. I go back to reunions. The group of friends that I formed my freshman year I'm still friends with. In fact, we take trips together every three or four years.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yes, so we have maintained that, and I think we were able to do that because of the environment that Mount Holyoke created for you to learn about yourself, but also to learn about other people. Yeah, actually, the beginning of me having that concept about working with people started with the YWCA, because I was very active with that and so I got to deal with people who were from different cultures, and because of that I did not have any problems adapting to the environment at Mount Holyoke. I have always been odd out in terms of age. I was always the oldest kid or the youngest kid.
Speaker 2:So I'm not used to being by myself. One of the problems that a lot of minorities had in adjusting to those environments was you spent a lot of time by yourself, and some people could not cope with that because they were worried about being alone. I had my studies because at the time I was pre-med, so I was taking a lot of science and math courses.
Speaker 2:So my focus was on studying and maintain a certain grade for an average, rather than how many friends I had. But in spite of that, as I said, I was able to form a really good friendship group that has helped me even today.
Speaker 1:Was that when you first got there as a freshman, you said right, so you were able to.
Speaker 2:I was able to meet people right away because of the dormitory situation, you know we had.
Speaker 2:Back then they still had house mothers and everyone had a breakfast, lunch and dinner in the dining hall, so you got to meet the people that you were living with. We had community rooms for studying so if you studied outside of your dorm room you got to meet people from different places. But I also am the kind of person that I'm very curious about other folks. I think growing up in Norfolk with all of the different military branches and all of the sail ships that would come through, I was always very curious about other cultures. So while at Mount Holyoke I made friends not with people, just with people from the South, because there are very few Southerners at that school, but I became friends with people from other countries as well as the people who were born in the US.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So what was it like Talk about? Were you primarily focused on your studies, so did you feel pressure to achieve because of societal expectations? Talk about that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good point, because during that time period, the focus was on educating as many black folks as possible so that we could show the world we could do what everybody else could do, even if they were from an affluent environment.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:While I was in college we also had the height of the black power movement and even on campus we had a protest to get an African American cultural center. Because by the time I was a junior year, the number of black students on campus had increased and a lot of the kids who were coming from urban communities felt isolated and they felt like the campus culture did not really provide them the environment that they could relate to and they wanted a place where they could feel safe expressing their culture. I was a part of the movement to get that done.
Speaker 2:Once that was done, I moved on to my next project because I always had some project I was working on, but I said that was probably the biggest thing that happened during that time period. Once that center was up, there were a lot of men from other colleges, african-american men, who came to participate in the center. Yeah, once that happened, the whole culture changed. One of the reasons, interestingly enough, I grew up in what I consider a patriarchal household, right, you know, when men were in charge. So that's why going to Mount Holyoke was such a breath of fresh air for me, because women got to do the kinds of things that at home only men got to do. And one of the reasons that I pulled back from some of that and move more toward the feminist movement, the things that was happening there, was that I in college I did not want to repeat those organs, involvement in organizations that were primarily male dominated. Wow, I felt like once I got into the work environment, that was going to be my life.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That I would end up being the minority female. In fact, that happened a number of times when I went to work, because I moved to Charlotte after I got married Well, not immediately, because my husband took a job there and as I became involved in community work, I was often the only woman and the only minority.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And, but there were even in work environments. Now, I worked very hard to get my education but I often would have people whisper oh, she only got that job because they needed a woman, or they only got that job because they needed a minority, because that was the environment in the 70s. The assumption was that if you were a minority or you're a woman, you weren't really qualified to do the job, that there was some kind of easement or allowance that was made so that you could get into the door.
Speaker 1:So right now it seems like there's a movement to get us back to that place. I mean, are you seeing that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I see that because, as a reaction to the DEI, no DEI push, and in fact there are a number of college presidents who have resigned, which I think is absolutely ridiculous because of the pressure of them having programs within the educational environment that encouraged involvement of people that are different, and I also think that people now have a very narrow view of what DEI is and that is contributing, I think, to the problem. Now, most of the folks who are getting out of colleges now have the aptitude.
Speaker 2:And they have the aptitude and they have the skills and they have the education to do pretty much whatever they want.
Speaker 2:What they don't have is what they called in the 70s the old boy neighborhood old boy network to help them get into jobs. Because at that time, in the 70s and early 80s, there was still a lot of nepotism and there was still a lot of old boy networks that were running the majority of the organizations. I remember when I was the director of a nonprofit organization we had a subgroup. There were over 200 organizations that were under the United Way at that time. Of those 200 organizations there were only 10 that were being led by women. So we formed our own support network so that we could share information, because we were not getting access to a lot of the grant information we needed. Because of the cultural environment at that time. They saw the women as doing those jobs on a temporary basis until they were going to go back home and take care of their families, whereas all of the women who were directors at that time were pretty serious about their career. They wanted to manage organizations, they wanted to be involved in the community.
Speaker 1:And how do you think the progress that? Because I feel like you're at the beginning of the corporate progress I feel like the social awareness probably started in the 50s, in the fifties and um I I think it may have um caught momentum and then generated itself into education and then um industry by the time we're in the seventies. So I feel like you were right there on the cusp of all of that taking place. From that time period to um, I would say the probably within the last year or so, it's been a push to to rid society of a lot of those different um. You've rid society of a lot of those different, a lot of different things that were put in place to help people that were either minorities or women to advance. How would you say it helped from that time period when you got started in the 70s up until recently? Has it been beneficial?
Speaker 2:or you feel like it's been more of a A hindrance, or was it positive? I don't think it was a hindrance from the people who, in the 50s and 60s, were going to Washington, who were lobbying for changes, who were looking at the culture and the need for people to improve themselves in general. When I was in college, there was also a push for minorities to not just represent their communities and their families but to try to do something proactive that was going to improve the opportunities for the minorities that were going to come behind them.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:That was also during that time period in which we changed what we called ourselves if you were African American, Because, if you think about it, when I was born I was colored, but over the years they've changed my identity and so there have been several points in my life in which I had to decide who am I? What is my real identity? Now I consider myself an African-American because I grew up in the top water Virginia area, where history is focused, and a lot of people were ignorant about the contributions of black people in Virginia. Now, because of that 1619 project, people have become more aware of it and what I find is like my son's generation are rediscovering our history and some of them are rewriting our history because they're saying why did they teach us this In a negative?
Speaker 1:way or in a positive way. Okay.
Speaker 2:Because they're discovering that there were all these inventions and writings um that happened, um that they were totally unaware of. When I was in college, you had to take, uh, a black history course in order to read folks like Baldwin or Ellison Right. There were lots of folks out there that, unless you were intentionally looking for those books, it was almost like there was a hidden section in the library that nobody told you about.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was like a treasure hunt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, told you about.
Speaker 2:So it was like a treasure hunt, and so people were swapping books, which I thought was a fantastic because it helped people rediscover it. What I find now with kids who are in college or who are recent college graduates that that's happening all over again. So I see it as the second awakening of cultural identity and that people realize that there was a foundation there already that got them to where they are today, that gave them these opportunities. When I look at the opportunities my children had when they got out of college that they are able to do things because of all the work that other folks did before, One of the things that I heard growing up is that previous generations made a lot of sacrifices so that my generation could have all of these opportunities. But I also heard that my generation was the spoiled generation.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:I didn't see myself as being spoiled. I saw myself as struggling to get to where I wanted to be. In spite of folks who may have said it wasn't my turn because I was young, or it wasn't my turn because I was a woman, or it wasn't my turn because there were, there are other people who've been waiting in line longer turn because there were. There are other people who've been waiting in line longer. One of the changes I see in the kids that are getting out of college now is they're not waiting a turn. They're deciding before they even go to college that this is what I want to do with my life and they're leapfrogging ahead of a lot of people who are waiting their turn to be recognized.
Speaker 1:Yes. So your work, your social work background, what have you had an opportunity to just study and take a look at why number one college enrollment is down with black men? Have you even looked at that? I have, okay, and what is it that you're discovering?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm very concerned about it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Because one of the reasons I got married was at that time they were pushing college educated women to get married so that they could disperse the culture and encourage the next generation Right.
Speaker 2:What I'm finding now is that we still have people who are encouraged to go to school, to get a higher education, to get certain kind of jobs, but I'm finding that the enrollment across the board, no matter what part of the state you live in or the country, black male enrollment is going down, and part of it is the cycle of what happens in high school.
Speaker 2:The counselors that usually help people, you know, like the social workers and the counselors that are assigned to the school, have had up and down employment in that some school systems have played games with the numbers. They'll decide to reduce the people that are going to be advising people and what I'm finding? That over the last 10 years, most folks are getting out of high school without any kind of encouragement about what they should be doing next and they're being left on their own. I really think that that's one of the reasons that the black enrollment for men has gone down. There was a time that the fraternities were a part of recruiting their future fraternity brothers. I don't see that same level of recruitment going on.
Speaker 1:And were they doing it from high schools? Yes, no, I had no idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I might. Yes, they were encouraging people to be involved. In fact, I had the unique experience of having sororities and fraternities in my high schools. In my high school that were a part of that recruitment process and part of it was to encourage folks to go to historically black colleges. That one of the reasons that the numbers have gone down is that, whereas before the majority of African-American men went to the historically black colleges, that some of the other colleges basically were luring them away by offering them bigger scholarships for the sports, but not only that, but just for academic scholarships. Well, if you look at, like, total number of enrollment, yes, that's up, but the percentages of men at the historically black colleges has gone down because the pool has not gotten that much bigger, the pool of men who go into those colleges. They're being dispersed across the country.
Speaker 2:Now, if you look at, I taught at a business school and when I look at when I first started at that school I taught there for 12 years the majority of my students were males who had not had the opportunity to get a college degree, and so they were coming back to school working during the day and coming to school at night to get a business degree.
Speaker 2:When I retired from that program, the majority of my students were female, and so that I mean that's the trend, and there again is because the men were having more opportunities, but not more men were choosing to do the traditional, go to high school, do the four-year college program. I also find that more people were taking side roads. They would go work for a while and then go back to school at a later age. If you look at guys who are coming out of the military now and guys who did that route I'm going to go work for a company for a few years and then I'll go to college they don't feel the same need to get it all done sequentially, and I think that's one of the statistics that people are not measuring, because if you look at enrollment in online schools, there are a lot of men who enrolled in those schools but, they're not counted in the traditional.
Speaker 2:Finish high school, go to a four year college and then go get a job.
Speaker 1:Oh, never thought about that Interesting. So do you think that men in general are just opting out to go to work for a wage, for the need for immediate income, or do you just think that men in general are not working?
Speaker 2:Men are working, but you need to put them into two categories. They're the guys who are very goal-oriented. They know what they want to do and they're going to push forward. They know what they want to do and they're going to push forward. But there are some men and women who have been catered to because their parents are middle class and they want their children to have opportunities they did not have. So you have an increase in the number of people who are graduating in four years and going back to live with their parents because they need a break, they're tired.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking they have a hard time affording things today.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a piece of it. But there's also that mentality of I need a break, I need to regroup and figure out what I'm going to do and there. But there are also parents who have the financial wherewithal to help support their kids during that one year of let me figure out what I'm going to do. There's some interesting things happen during that year. Some people figure it out and some get comfortable staying at home and helping their parents and I find that when that group of folks, when they do leave the nest, they don't necessarily leave for a career. They leave for a job that's going to give them the economic means for the lifestyle that they want.
Speaker 2:When you have people who are taking jobs for the economic incentives, you see a lot of job turnover. Now I remember when I got out of high school, you looked for a career, you look for a job and a lot of people go into government jobs because, oh, you can go work for the government 30 years and then retire. Now you are getting folks who will accept jobs and then quit after three or four months because they don't like it, or they don't like the people, or they don't like the way they're treated, or they feel like they haven't been progressed quickly enough. That's a totally different work mentality than existed back in the 90s why are you so impatient?
Speaker 1:If you look at our culture in general, I have my ideas, but I want to hear what you have to say.
Speaker 2:When you look at our culture in general and how progress something as simple as the phone has changed, or how computers have changed, how social media has changed. The commercials on social media are all about instant gratification. I remember when people got excited about instant oatmeal back in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or the little individual boxes of cereal that you can carry with you and you just open them up and pour your milk in it and that was wow.
Speaker 2:But now people want immediate gratification in all aspects of their lives. So they don't want the patience of let me do an internship or let me do an apprenticeship for two years and then I can consider myself a professional. They want to jump right out of college and start out at $100,000 a year, and there are kids who think $100,000 is not enough to pay them after they finish their four-year degree. So a lot of the switches that you're seeing in employment in those first two or three years out of college are because people think they're not paid enough. Another factor is they feel like they don't have enough time off, and I'm sure you've seen the studies about how much time off we get in the US in comparison to other countries. The other factor is that I'd say for anyone under 40, their mental health is important too and they want opportunities to be able to go somewhere on their weekends. They want opportunities to take a yoga class or to go to gym to the gym. Some jobs do not afford you the time to do that.
Speaker 1:Right, you brought up the mental health part, so what changes have you seen from when you got started to now, because it's a really big um. It's spotlighted that I need to have a mental health break or this is affecting me from a mental health standpoint, and I think it's good, but I don't think people from generations past quite understand it. What have you seen?
Speaker 2:and how do you think it's? Yeah Well, last month was Black Mental Health Month.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now why do we need a Black Mental Health Month? Now why do we need a Black Mental Health Month? And it's because folks have recognized that for many Black folks they have not accepted the fact that all families have problems, all individuals have problems and sometimes the only way to fix that problem is to have a therapist or to have medication. When I first started in mental health, I had very few black patients and that's because most families would say nobody in my family is crazy, because the perception was if you saw a mental health therapist you had to be crazy. And if I let my child get therapy for this behavior problem that keeps getting them kicked out of school, then my family and neighbors are going to look down on me and think I can't control my child.
Speaker 2:During that time period there was a lot of physical punishment done with children that was not considered illegal. There was also physical punishment of wives, because that was your prerogative of what happened in your household. Over the last 50 years all of that has changed so that now we accept that women can be in abusive situations. We accept that children can be in abusive situations, but we also accept that sometimes children have mental health illnesses that need to be treated with therapy, and one of the good things about that is that more black folks are accepting that their family problems can be fixed if they agree to therapy. There are a lot of couples that I've seen after their child started therapy because they recognize that the child was having behavior problems at school because of the problems mom and dad were having at home.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Or the problems that they were having with other relatives. There are a lot of grandmothers out there that think they're doing the right thing when they try to undermine the parents' authority over children, that really are interfering with the emotional and social development of their grandchildren.
Speaker 1:Okay, All right, I want to know give me an example of something that you've seen or you're talking about seen or you're talking about, in instances in which the husband or wife may have chosen to marry someone from a different cultural environment.
Speaker 2:There are families that do not want to accept someone from a different cultural environment. Now, in the 70s, that different cultural environment might be something like a Baptist wanting to marry a Catholic or a Catholic wanting to marry a Jew, but it has progressed now because of the movement within not just in the United States but internationally that now people have concerns about can I accept grandchildren that may be racially different from what I have? Can I accept grandchildren who have to go visit people who live on the other side of the tracks? So, even though we're in 2025, we still have a lot of grandparents that have very set views of how families should operate and they do everything they can to undermine the parents, to enforce their way of how a family should operate, Even things such as favoring one child over another. So if for birthdays, one child gets $500, another child gets $100. The other thing I've seen happen is, when there are stepchildren, the grandparents not accepting the children from the previous marriage and only paying attention to the biological children.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that happens a lot under the way of things. Families are put together now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Not realizing the impact it has on the children self-esteem, but also how they start to view family.
Speaker 1:Interesting, very interesting, yeah, so what we're just? I feel like we're just starting to get back into a rhythm from the pandemic. What have you seen? The challenges that families dealt with post pandemic issues that we hadn't seen before.
Speaker 2:I would use first of the word trauma. There are a lot of people who were traumatized during the pandemic because there were so many unpredictable things. Plus, life changed very quickly.
Speaker 1:What types of traumas have you seen?
Speaker 2:Well, I'd say emotional trauma, in terms of people being traumatized emotionally and socially.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:The basis of that is dealing with grief and the loss of individuals that they knew, because a lot of people had family members or friends die. A lot of people had family members or friends die. A lot of people lost jobs and if you define yourself by your job and your income and that disappears because of the pandemic, it takes a long time to recover. There were a lot of families that ended up getting divorced during the pandemic because suddenly you have all kinds of parameters that you didn't have to deal with before, all kinds of stressors that you did not have to deal with before, even though we say we're in the post-pandemic, I think in terms of the mental health of the families that survived the pandemic, because I feel like anyone who was still alive in 2024 survived the pandemic and there's something that's called survivor's guilt that we've talked about in other settings. But I think for the pandemic that happened to a lot of folks, because there are some people who still have the side effects of having COVID and their lives are still impacted in that they can't work at the same level they worked before, they can't work at the same kind of jobs, they don't have the same family support and friendship support that they had before, but they expect to be going back as though nothing can happen.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one of the things that, culturally, our country hasn't dealt with is that we expect people to go back to the way they were before 2020, when it's impossible to have lived through the pandemic years and all of those changes and go back.
Speaker 2:There was a period in which people were saying this is the new environment that we have to deal with, but most people are not socialized to deal with the number of changes that they had to adapt to. So I feel like that people who are alive today have adapted, but they still have underlying stressors that they don't know how to deal with. I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing more emphasis on meditation, things like yoga or Tai Chi or taking a mental health day or taking a sick day, because in the previous work environment, people were often encouraged to ignore physical ailments to get the job done. You know it was nothing to work a 60-hour week to finish a project. Now people understand that if you overwork, your health can be impacted and that you could unintentionally put yourself near death's door, should there be something like the pandemic again.
Speaker 1:Right. So I believe that the country is built on, whether you want to admit it or not, its capitalistic ideologies.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:And it's affected. Exactly what you're talking about has affected companies bottom line how they deal with people and I don't think we've made an adjustment. I think we got to a point now where we had people that wanted to come into the country to work, and now a lot of those people are being removed from the country. So I don't see how it gets better from an industry standpoint and from a social standpoint.
Speaker 1:I just think things are a lot more expensive oh, definitely Than they used to be, and I think people having a difficult time dealing with that. People are angry. They don't understand. Are you seeing that? People are angry. It's just anything sets people off right now.
Speaker 2:Not only are people angry, people have become rude, and part of it is that you know, I talked about how we have all these underlying stressors that we haven't dealt with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When you look at something as simple as some of the road rage that occurs. Oh, it's all the time yeah. When you look at something as simple as some of the road rage that occurs something as simple as two people approach the door of the grocery, of the grocery store at the same time and you have to open the door. There was a time when somebody would help you through the door.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you were a pregnant person or an elderly person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now you have folks who rush past you because you're taking too long, because they want to hurry up and get what they have to do, without thinking about the fact that there are other folks.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:There is sort of a let's hurry up and wait. People used to be fine with waiting in line for certain things. Nobody wants to wait in line anymore for anything. I personally am not a big person for waiting in line.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So one of the benefits of the last five years on the internet is that if I don't want to go stand in line, I can order stuff and have it come straight to my house.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Now, everybody can't do that because there are a lot of folks who do not have the same access to the Internet that I have, and I acknowledge that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But I also know that because we have this technology, it was survival for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:During those pandemic years.
Speaker 2:Right years, I think, what happens in the workplace, because folks who came out of school and into the work environment during the pandemic, they did not have an opportunity to learn the kind of social skills that are needed to work in a work environment, in an office environment or a school environment. Because we still have teachers going into a school setting and we have teachers being rude to each other's, teachers being rude to parents, teachers being rude to children, and I know the sort of one of our social norms is we don't say bad things about teachers, but I have frankly been shocked at the number of teachers who've ended up on the news because of the way they have treated children or the way they have treated parents.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There was a time that would not have happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I just think I don't know how we get back there. It back there. I I've come from the standpoint of just making a rash decision to stop and think what a person might be going through, so um, or what they might be focusing on. So they may not understand that they cut you off, or they may not. Something could be on their mind, they may not know that they closed the door on you. So it's just, people just react, but it takes, is going to take, a lot more of that. People have lost the ability to communicate through the pandemic and the phone, especially young people. I've noticed a lot of young men don't know how to go talk to a young lady or how they had that problem before.
Speaker 1:But that was the only way that you could do it, so you didn't really have a choice. Right, you know. You know when you were in grade school you could slip her a note, but at some point you had to go talk to her. Now you just everything's on the phone, so they don't know how to take rejection. I think that's a really big one. That's a part of life, right, rejection and then not being successful at everything. So you learn how to make adjustments.
Speaker 2:One of the pet peeves I had when my son first started was sports, because I was making mental transitions. You know you have the winners and you have the losers and you need to learn how to lose gracefully. You don't get mad and beat people up because you lost and you don't give everybody blue ribbons, because that's false hope, because everybody shouldn't get a blue ribbon. Everybody shouldn't get a blue ribbon. I think we have. We have this group of folks who grew up where everybody got a trophy, even if you just sat on the bench the whole time.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and they, they weren't even told that it was for participation. You just got it because you showed up. And so back in the nineties there were a lot of folks who were puffing up their resumes to make it sound like they were doing more than what they were capable of.
Speaker 2:So they would end up in jobs in which they were truly over their head. But because they had their confidence had been puffed up, they thought, well, I'll fake it till I make it. In fact, when I was teaching business class, every time somebody would use that phrase in class we'd have a little mini lecture of how that only works. For this first six months you're on a job. You have to spend some time reading that manual and figuring out what you're supposed to do if you expect to keep that job.
Speaker 2:And what I find is that we have a lot of folks who are in the work environment now who aren't even trying to fake that they don't know stuff. They assume because the words came out of their mouth or because they're in a position they are now an expert on whatever they're doing. I also find that we have a lot of folks who are not willing to say I'm sorry, and they're not willing to say I made a mistake and they're not willing to say I don't know what the heck I'm doing. Somebody please help me. When did it become not okay to ask for help? So I think one of the benefits of us focusing more on mental health is people understand that sometimes you need help in areas you didn't realize you needed help with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And one is your own mental stability.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Because if you can get your mind and your body in good shape, then you can deal with the stressors of the folks who are zipping in and out of traffic, who are folks who are pushing past you in the grocery store or people who are sending ugly messages on Facebook or TikTok or wherever. Because that's an area that we're talking about now, because parents are looking for one solution to the problem when there isn't one solution to the problem. When there isn't one solution to the problem, because the problems kids are having, the problems that families are having, have a Genesis from different areas of our lives.
Speaker 1:Right, all right. So any final thoughts or statements you want to leave us with.
Speaker 2:Number one be honest with yourself about what you can and cannot do on a day-to-day basis. Number two allow yourself to just experience life. Because so many of us are focused on doing rather than experiencing, they're missing out on opportunities to really enjoy what they have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay. Well, thank you for coming in and talking with us and that's it for today's episode. We'll see you and talk to you next time on Listen Up. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'm going to ask you to click on the links below follow, subscribe, become part of the conversation and remember, listen up.
