August 5, 2026 – STAT Wellness Kristin Oja and Mostly Gentle Mom Kimberly

00:0 Intro 1: In the AM, radio network, broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, while we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy who believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion: Jim Beach.

00:20 JIM BEACH: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Thank you so much for being with us. This is one of those shows where both guests are simply amazing and blow me away. First off, we have Kristen Oja. She has built a company called STAT Wellness that looks at all of your medical issues together, including stress, sleep levels, and medicines, in a way that our other doctors often do not. It is an amazing company, what she has grown, and I am so impressed with it. It’s just absolutely amazing what Kristen has done. After that, we have Kimberly Sturgis, who is equally amazing in the mom space.

00:59 JIM BEACH: She has a blog, The Mostly Gentle Mom, and what she is doing with colleges is equally amazing, going out and giving speeches on college campuses. She’s developed a niche that I’d never heard of. I don’t know if ‘developed’ is the right word. She is utilized and made an amazing career doing it and is now helping other people do it. So it blows me away. Two things that I didn’t know anything about and I love that because that’s a great show for you. You know, I frequently get asked. Why are some guests first and some guests second and the, when I tell people the answer, they don’t almost never believe me, but I’ll tell you the 100% answer.

01:41 JIM BEACH: I almost 99% of the time unless the times don’t line up, you know, like one is 28 minutes, and the other is 22 minutes, and I have to have 29 minutes, you know, unless there’s a time consideration, which I usually don’t have, I put them in order. In other words, I air them in the order or I put them out in the order that I record them. And people look at me and go, no, you don’t. And I go, yes, I do. And I pointed out that maybe one of the biggest guest I’ve ever had came on second. And that’s just the way I do it. [Unclear phrase.] and also, I’m going to buy from both of these guests.

02:24 JIM BEACH: I don’t know if ‘buy’ is the right word. I’m going to go through Kimberly’s initiative with college speaking, and I’m going to go to Kristen Oja’s store and try to get healthier because I think she could make me healthier when the nine other doctors I see can’t. And great show. Thanks for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second. Please go buy the book The Real Environmentalists and give it a five-star review. It is now an award finalist. It didn’t win, but it was a finalist in its category. It needs some more reviews. Help me out please.

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04:29 JIM BEACH: Thank you. We are back again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to welcome to the show someone who’s going to help us understand our health a little better and tell us how to run a health-based business. Please welcome Kristen Oja to the show. She is the CEO and founder of STAT Wellness. They are redefining healthcare through functional medicine and movement. She has helped over 10,000 patients and is scaling now to multi-site clinics. She won an entrepreneurial award from EY. And you know that I’ve talked about them being the best awards out there in our space. She won the Entrepreneurial Winning Women Award, and she’s host of the Little By podcast.

05:12 JIM BEACH: Kristen Oja, welcome to the show. How you doing?

05:15 KRISTEN OJA: Thank you so much for having me on here, Jim.

05:19 JIM BEACH: Thank you for being with us. So what is functional medicine? What does that mean?

05:24 KRISTEN OJA: Yes, I love that question. So functional medicine. We describe it as just root cause medicine. So we’re really looking root cause. So how the body works as one. So if you think about conventional medicine, we’re trying to figure out the right treatment for a condition or a symptom. And functional medicine, we’re asking ourselves, well, why are you having that symptom or disease in the first place? And so I always give an example like high blood pressure, for example. If you come in, I want to understand why is your blood pressure high? Do you have undiagnosed sleep apnea? Do you have magnesium deficiencies? How are we managing stress?

06:02 KRISTEN OJA: So we’re trying to understand the root cause so that we’re not putting a bandaid on it and that we’re having really lasting healing and being the best versions of ourselves. But it’s really this physiological driven approach. So understanding how our body works on a cellular level and how our body works together as one unit versus becoming very siloed. So, you know, like only treating our mental health and not looking at our physical health or only checking our gut function and not looking at how that’s correlated to nutrition or our hormones.

06:33 KRISTEN OJA: We have become very siloed in conventional medicine and there’s a specialist for everything, which is really great when you need a specialist, but sometimes we just need to know how our body’s working as one and what’s going on. We need that knowledge. We need that root cause approach. And our patients are craving it right now. We are seeing a huge shift where patients are wanting to take ownership of their health. They’re wanting to understand what is happening. They’re not wanting a treatment for their hair loss. They want to know why their hair is falling out in the first place. Does that make sense?

07:09 JIM BEACH: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Getting upsetting. Getting rude now. Why is hair fallout?

07:17 KRISTEN OJA: I mean, it can be a number of things. It could be inflammatory. It can be hormonal, it can be nutritional. And so one of the things we do in functional medicine that’s so important to us is take a very detailed health timeline. And so we go back to our patients’ mom’s health when they were pregnant. And we want to know about the birth. Was it a vaginal or a C-section? Were they breastfed? We want to know if they felt cared for and safe growing up. Were they playing outside? Were they getting dirty? We want to know what their stress levels were like. All of these things to us are so important.

07:57 KRISTEN OJA: And I always tell my team when I train them and they go through our STAT Wellness residency: I’m like, I hope you never want to go back to conventional medicine because once you go functional medicine, you can’t go back. You have a person that comes in with a third sinus infection. Your mind’s gonna be like, well, why are you having a sinus infection? You can’t unthink the curiosity of functional medicine. And, you know, our model, if you think about it, you know, if you are a very healthy person in quotes.

08:28 KRISTEN OJA: I always say the absence of disease does not mean health, but let’s say you are in, quote, a healthy person and you go to your annual physical one time a year. And you spend 10 minutes with your healthcare provider. They do labs and they tell you everything looks good. You think you’re like in the clear, but you’re like, well, I don’t know. I’m a little tired, but they tell me everybody’s tired or my joints hurt in the morning, but it’s just aging. And my hair’s thinning, but, you know, I see this dermatologist for that, right? We walk away thinking that we’re okay, but we’re not optimal and we don’t feel our best.

09:07 KRISTEN OJA: And that used to be normal and appropriate and people left it at that appointment. But they’re not anymore. We now have wearables. We have WHOOP bands and Oura Rings. We have ChatGPT. We have OpenEvidence. We have Google. We have all of these tools and resources. And, um, just being told everything is normal and we’ll see you next year is not enough anymore.

09:30 JIM BEACH: So what is your goal, Christian? Before we started recording, you and I were talking about this Bryan Johnson guy, the biohacker who was going to try to live to be 150 or 200, or live forever, and he had every single part of his body tested every day. He had a machine to measure if he had any erections during the night, that kind of stuff. And he’s now announced that he has a bio or an incurable disease. And I hate, I wish him the best, but it’s just so ironic that he now has some sort of incurable disease. Should we live past a hundred? What are your thoughts?

10:07 JIM BEACH: Are you trying to make life longer or improve the quality as we get there? What your thoughts on Brian? I’m giving you 12 questions there. Go wherever you want.

10:17 KRISTEN OJA: Yeah, yeah. So I think number one, if you watch what he was doing, I think a lot of us feel our stress levels going up. I know for me, I don’t want to be taking 20 pills 3 times per day. I don’t want my morning routine to be a 3 hour process. I think you have to match quality of life with joy and fun and playfulness and all of these things that are just as important for our health. And, you know, at the end of the day, no matter what we do, there are things like genetics, environmental triggers, and what’s called nutrigenomics.

10:52 KRISTEN OJA: You know, there’s so much, we want to control what we can control, but there’s a lot with, that’s outside of our control. And so at the end of the day, my goal with my patients is to focus on their health span, not their lifespan. And that is exactly what you ask. Like, is it the quality of life or is it how long we live? And to us, it’s really the quality. So, if you look at the U.S., we are actually living longer than we were 20, 30, or 40 years ago, but we’re sicker. We’re making medical advancements to keep us alive. And so some people would argue, well, that’s great.

11:31 KRISTEN OJA: But to us, we’re like, well, your health is your greatest wealth. And once you stop being able to walk or once you stop being able to think or recognize people and know their name, like that’s not, uh, the life mini people want. And so what we focus on with our patients is really that health span. How do we give you the highest quality, best life in the years that you have. And so to us, that is looking at all aspects. And you may know this, but Harvard did one of the largest studies on humankind. It was a 100 year old study and they looked at all these different variables that impacted longevity.

12:10 KRISTEN OJA: And do you know what they found was actually the most meaningful in longevity? Whether you’re married or not. Happy marriage. Happiness. Happiness and connection. You’re right. It’s that connection. It doesn’t have to be a married spouse, but it’s people that were happy and connected with others lived longer. So if anything we’re doing for our health has taken away our joy, it’s taken away our social life, you know, if we’re starting to obsess over our wearables and striving for perfection, and it dictates how we feel about ourselves every day, that is not health either. And so, at STAT, you were asking me what our goal is. And my favorite quote is little by little, a little becomes a lot.

12:51 KRISTEN OJA: Its consistency and progress, not perfection. Some of the healthiest people I know have built consistency into their day while still maintaining balance in life. They’ve been able to go out and not beat themselves up for having pizza with a friend and laugh and enjoy that time. But they also are waking up and they’re getting exercise and they’re hydrating and they’re managing their stress. They have figured out how to strike a balance of whether you want to call it 8020 or 9010. Those are some of the healthiest people because they can do it long term. Anything that you cannot do long term is not going to serve you in the long run, right?

13:29 KRISTEN OJA: If you’re doing something extreme, you are going to be unhappy and it’s going to be unsustainable. And so when we think about those lifestyle variables that we really focus on, we want to think about those 8090 rules, 80 to 90% rule, but how are you eating? Are you eating real, whole simple foods? You know 80, 90% of the time. Are you moving in ways that feel good? Are you prioritizing good sleep? Are you managing your stress? And are you connecting with your community and living a life of meaning for you, whatever that looks like? Those five things are such important pillars, and they’re the foundation of our care at STAT Wellness.

14:08 KRISTEN OJA: And then after we know your whole health history and we get to know you, we do dig deeper into labs and we figure out where there’s an imbalances or where is there room to optimize. We don’t just look at that reference range. And so we start to dabble in, okay, do you need some supplements? Is there any, you know, peptides or the craze right now? We do utilize them. But they’re the cherry on top when a lot of these lifestyle foundations are happening and we have the capacity and space for those things. We also do hormone replacement therapy, but you don’t want to just do hormones and not exercise or strength train or sleep, right?

14:47 KRISTEN OJA: So I hope that answers your question, but our goal is to meet our patients where they’re at, to do small, simple changes over time that are going to help them feel better than they ever thought possible while thinking about those 5 variables and leaving room for fun, joy, connection, and meaning. In this world. so hopefully, does that answer your question, Jim?

15:08 JIM BEACH: Little by what?

15:10 KRISTEN OJA: Little by little.

15:11 JIM BEACH: Little by.

15:12 KRISTEN OJA: Yes, little by little a little becomes a lot.

15:15 JIM BEACH: Little by little, a little becomes a lot. And little by is the name of your podcast. The connection right there? Did I just magically connect that?

15:24 KRISTEN OJA: You magically connected it.

15:26 JIM BEACH: Exactly. You are a genius. I would love for you to look at my health history. It’s two and a half pages, single-spaced, typed. things. So patient comes in. They pay what? And get what? And then you are building out other clinics as well? You have one in Nashville, I think I saw. Tell me about the the way it operates for a patient.

15:50 KRISTEN OJA: Yes, absolutely. So our bread and butter is a membership based model. We offer all of our services a la carte too. So if you are interested in just like one off services, you can look at our website, you can go to our individual pricing, you can see everything. But our bread and butter is really this membership based model. And we were the first in the nation to blend functional medicine with functional training. So we, when you walk into our facilities, we have barbells in every single location. We put a lot of emphasis on muscle and strength training because we believe your muscle is your greatest asset as you age.

16:27 KRISTEN OJA: And so in the membership based model, we have a few different options you can do, but I’ll talk about our medicine membership. That’s our most popular because what we have found is people will drive or fly far to be a member of STAT. but they’re not going to be able to drive as far for movement, something they’re going to do 3 times a week. So when we think about our medicine and movement membership, they kind of live in the community, they walk over, they work out with us. They’re part of the whole thing. but the medicine membership is really where um, we have the most patience.

17:04 KRISTEN OJA: And so in our medicine membership, it’s $185 a month and you get unlimited health coaching. You get unlimited dietitian consultations. You get 5 functional medicine visits per year. You get 3 physical therapy appointments. Make sure you’re moving well. There’s no injuries, no issues that are hindering you from being able to lift weights. You get monthly educational events. You get to save 10% on any of our other services, supplements, merchandise, anything you need. And you really get to be part of a community with like-minded people. And, um, we do take HSAs, health savings accounts.

17:38 KRISTEN OJA: And some of our patients, they pay for full for the entire year at that 185 a month and then they save 10% on that and they just use their HSA and then they’re part of our kind of ecosystem, um, for that entire year. And the reason we’ve made some tweaks to our memberships over the years, but the reason we really have this unlimited health coaching and unlimited dietitian access, is that we put so much emphasis on the importance of those lifestyle variables, right? The sleep, the nutrition, all these things we’re talking about.

18:09 KRISTEN OJA: And a lot of us in our mind conceptually know, okay, like, I probably should eat a little bit better and, oh, I should probably go to bed a little bit earlier, right? Like we kind of know some of these things we should be doing, but it’s actually applying it and doing it consistently that is hard. There was this article in The Washington Post several years ago about sleep procrastination. And I know so many of my patients can relate to this. You know, you finally finish your day of all your responsibilities and then you have time to do the fun things that you want to do. You start binging on Netflix or whatever it may be.

18:48 KRISTEN OJA: And before you know it, you’re going to bed too late, right? And I use that as a silly example, but that’s what our health coaches can meet with our patients and do. They can walk through their day in a lot of detail and figure out, okay, let’s set up a guardrail. So, you know, at 1030. Let’s have an alarm on our phone go off to remind us it’s time to get ready for bed. Let’s see if we can start to build some consistency around our bedtime and let’s meet next week and see what we can tweak from there.

19:22 KRISTEN OJA: So they can take those little baby steps every appointment to move our health forward without it feeling like this massive overhaul, right? Like you start on one area, one goal, and make sure that you achieve it. And so we didn’t want our patients to feel like they had to do these things on their own. And so when I worked in some other functional medicine practices, I would see my patients, you know, two, 3 times a year. And they’d be so excited and motivated. They’d meet with me. We’d go through their labs and then life just happens, right? And they get busy. They don’t have that accountability partner.

20:00 KRISTEN OJA: They start taking maybe their supplements and making the dietary change in the first week, they don’t feel different, so they just drop off. And what we talk about with functional medicine is it takes time. It’s a journey. It’s a process. It’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And so I wanted to see my patients in between my appointments. I want to see you in the gym lifting weights. I want to see you meeting with the health coach and talking about your lifestyle. I want to see you meeting with the dietitian and, you know, really tackling blood sugar balance.

20:34 KRISTEN OJA: And then, when we get to meet again, I know how you’re doing along the way versus meeting and starting over because that excitement died down because life was very full, as I like to say, versus busy. So that’s our membership based model. And one of the things that we get great feedback about how transparent we are about our pricing on our website. It’s really important to me that people know what they’re going to pay, what the expectations are, that we’re very transparent, we’re not sneaky. And so when people call and they book a free 15 minute with our providers to hear about our practice, they already know what the price looks like. They already know what they’re gonna get.

21:15 KRISTEN OJA: and that has been very, very helpful for our business.

21:19 JIM BEACH: All right, I’m on the site now. You have 5 locations, 3 in Atlanta and one Nashville and one Charlotte. And you’re just opening up Sandy Springs, which is where I live. Is that a 6th location or is that what you call your Atlanta location? So we actually have 8 locations. So, yeah, you might be looking at the website where it says Metro Atlanta, which combines all of our Metro Atlanta locations into one. So we have an Atlanta midtown location. We have a Roswell location. Peachtree City coming in Sandy Springs. So we have 5 in the Metro Atlanta area. And then we have Charleston, in North Charleston’s Park Circle.

21:57 JIM BEACH: We have Nashville, and then, on Monday, Charlotte is opening, which is our newest one. And so we have about 100 people coming through the doors next week for free fitness classes and body composition scans and tours of the space. Fantastic. Let’s talk entrepreneurship now, Kristen. How’d you get the idea to do this? And have you raised money to do it or you own 100% still?

22:20 KRISTEN OJA: Yeah. So we’ll chapter it out. For sure. so I think people that are entrepreneurs like me, we’re kind of crazy. We’re born that way. So whenever people hear my story or they get to know me, like there’s definitely this personality piece that I always like to start with. I was born in a storm. I’m a go getter. I like am a very big visionary person. So I could be like running and buildings could be falling down behind me and I’m just going to keep going, eye on the prize. so I have a very balanced team that is, as people would say, more of the integrators and the operators.

22:59 KRISTEN OJA: So entrepreneurship for me has been very constantly trying to solve an issue I see. And so I started my career actually as a personal trainer and thought I didn’t want to go to college. I loved personal training. I loved seeing people get stronger, do things they never thought possible. Basic things. I’d love, I, people would come in. I can never do a pushup on my toes. Oh yeah, we can. We can get you to do a push-up on your toes. They would do a push-up on their toes and just the high-fives, the congratulations, the seeing them light up when they did things they didn’t think were possible. And everybody feels better after a workout.

23:40 KRISTEN OJA: Like every single person leaves the gym feeling better than when they walked in the door. And so I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. My parents were like, get a college degree. We don’t care what you do. Just get a college degree, keep training on the side. And so I was talking to mentors and they all told me to go nursing because I could fall back on it. You could always find a job in nursing. You could work in a school, you could work in a hospital. You could do all these different things. And first rotation, dialysis unit for 4 hours, people’s blood are getting filtered, fluorescent lights, or them completely dark turned off.

24:20 KRISTEN OJA: It was just a very sick space and I looked at our healthcare system. And I was like, you know what? I’m very I’m very thankful to be here if I had cancer, if I needed open heart surgery, if I had my kidneys failed and I needed dialysis, I am incredibly honored to live in the United States with where our sick care is, we have a lot of medical advancements. But I looked at this and I was like, man, we could do a much better job on the healthcare side, on the preventative side, on being proactive.

24:53 KRISTEN OJA: And so I went and got my masters, um, because I wanted to become a nurse practitioner so that I could sit with my patients and make those lifestyle changes. And then I wanted to keep learning and I got offered a scholarship and they paid for me to go to leadership training. So I got my doctorate and I started really researching the gut health. And I started looking at how, wow, the gut plays such a role in our immune system. It plays such a role in our serotonin production. It absorbs our nutrients. Like there is so much more to the way our body works than what I was taught in school. So I started getting curious.

25:32 KRISTEN OJA: So then I went through the Institute for Functional Medicine training and A4M training and just kept learning and learning. And then I started working in functional medicine. And then I started seeing some of the issues in functional medicine that I mentioned earlier that it’s expensive. It’s a lot of testing, a lot of supplements. I was like, I want to do this differently too. So then I started going back to my background as a personal trainer and was like, you know what? I want to create the nation’s first functional medicine and movement practice. And so I think in my mind, this is a fantastic idea. I’m an entrepreneur. Like, everybody’s going to love this idea. This is going to be awesome.

26:14 KRISTEN OJA: I’m just going to walk into a bank and get a loan. Like this isn’t great. It doesn’t really go that way. So I walked into the bank. I’m like asking them for a loan. They go through, of course, a ton of information. They’re like, well, what is the, where is the proof of concept? Like, who else is doing this? We, if we’re going to invest in you, we want to know that we’re going to be able to get our money back and all this stuff. And I was like, well nobody’s doing it. This is a new concept, but here’s boutique gyms that exist and here’s functional medicine practices that exist. I just want to put it together under one roof.

26:56 KRISTEN OJA: Oh, well, we don’t get the practice to work and then come back and then we’re happy to invest. I got told no about a 100 times from VCs in Atlanta, they’re very big into technology, so they were definitely not interested. Private equity was like, ‘Do you have three million dollars in EBITDA?’ I’m like, no, I don’t even have a first patient. I don’t have three million dollars in EBITDA. I didn’t even know what EBITDA was at the time. and so every PE, every VC, every angel investor, every bank, everybody told me no.

27:29 KRISTEN OJA: And so I went to my parents and I was like, hey, will you give me like a very small loan. So I can just buy furniture for this space. And so they gave me a $50,000 loan that I have since paid off, um, to allow me to get furniture. And I signed an $8000 per month lease. My husband almost had a stroke. I signed a personal guarantee. I had no business plan. I just had this mission and purpose to change the way healthcare was done. And so most entrepreneurs, you figure out a way to make it work. So I hired one employee. It was me and Sarah Rose, who’s still with me today, who started in early 2019.

28:11 KRISTEN OJA: She’s my right hand, couldn’t do it without her. Me and her just like kept, we answered the phones. I taught 15 fitness classes. I did every blood draw. I saw the functional medicine patients. and every time that we could pay our bills and pay myself instead of paying myself, I hired someone else. So for 3 years, I just worked and kept showing up. I called my husband every time a new patient booked. I was like, someone else believes in our model. Someone else believes in our model. And I did that over and over and over again. And now that was from 2019. Now we have our 8th location opening. We have almost 100 employees.

28:52 KRISTEN OJA: By the end of the year, we have over 12,000 patients in our network. and we’re just expanding and we’re growing and we’re just staying true on what is best for the patient and how we optimize um, our model. And I always say like in the entrepreneurial world. We’re in the messy middle. So if any of the listeners, you guys are like, okay, I’m in the messy middle too, or I’m an entrepreneur. I’m hoping I get on the other side and I can come back on the show and chat about it. it’s not glamorous. It’s hard.

29:26 KRISTEN OJA: It’s, but if you know your why, in life and in business, it’s just so much easier, and I see the impact, I see, um, it feels so purposeful, and I just am humbled every day that people are coming and paying cash to hear what we have to say. And, um, so that’s just like a very, you know, long winded, but also short when you think about since 2019, 7 years of business and entrepreneurship, but hopefully that answers a question.

29:53 JIM BEACH: Very well, great answer, Kristen. And inspirational as well. It’s amazing how well you’ve done and what you’ve been through and congratulations. Oh, you deserve this. Must be… And… it’s an amazing job, Kristen, you did great. It is…

30:09 KRISTEN OJA: Thank you.

30:09 JIM BEACH: It is great.

30:11 KRISTEN OJA: Thank you.

30:11 JIM BEACH: I can’t wait to become a client. You’re gonna have to charge me double because again, my list of conditions is 2.5 pages long. Do you know what we call you and those patients with two-and-a-half-page lists? You not alone. We have some patients with, like, 15 pages. We love those patients. We call you our whole-list-ic patients. Your whole list. Whole-list-ic patients. Holistic patients. We love them. So come on in. We’d love to have you. I will. I will. It’ll be interesting to see what you do with me. Yep. Anyway, great job on the business and I love your price point.

30:52 JIM BEACH: I think that’s a very good price point and very, very fair. And congratulations on owning it now at all. Going to end up being a billionaire.

31:01 KRISTEN OJA: Oh, thank you so much.

31:03 JIM BEACH: I didn’t even finish the question.

31:05 KRISTEN OJA: So last year, in July, we ended up bringing on our first like very small minority investors. So until 2025, we were 100% owned. Now we have some minority investors. I didn’t get to finish that story, but, um, institutional or individuals? So it’s a special purpose vehicle. A private equity firm put together a few people. The company is called Fulcrum, but they put a special purpose vehicle together. So it’s more like individuals investing versus like the typical private equity. And so it’s been nice because they’re very…

31:36 JIM BEACH: What? That inside the firm, they disagreed vehemently, and at one point, one of the partners said, screw it, I’m going to do it myself, and the other partner said, fine. But it’s not part of the fund. And so the partners went outside the fund because they had so much faith in you and somewhere there has the exact opposite, a huge hatred for you.

31:57 KRISTEN OJA: Well, they they knew. Well, it could be, and they also know that I didn’t want to give up like very much as far as the company. And so they typically do more like closer to majority deals and I was not willing to do that. And so hopefully it could definitely be that they disagreed or it could be that we just didn’t hit, like we didn’t match their profile of what they’d typically invest in, but they were still willing to. because I was like, hey, I haven’t taken on money before and it is going to be a, like, it’s going to, um, have to make sense and I do not want to give up any control.

32:37 KRISTEN OJA: And so they made it make sense.

32:39 JIM BEACH: So, we’ll see. Created a special hole for you. How do we put that how to follow online, get some STAT Wellness.

32:47 KRISTEN OJA: Yes. So it’s STAT Wellness. It’s www.statwellness.com. You can also call or text our office at 404-254-5905. A lot of our patients love to text us. It’s HIPAA-compliant as well. And then my personal page is KristenOja.com, and I’m Kristen Oja, DNP, on Instagram, and I’m also on LinkedIn.

33:06 JIM BEACH: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us and we would love to have you back in a year when you’re out of your messy middle and great job.

33:16 KRISTEN OJA: Thank you. Thank you. All right, I appreciate it, Jim.

33:20 JIM BEACH: We will be right back.

33:21 Intro 2: Well, that’s, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question. Oh, my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. That’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

33:53 JIM BEACH: We are back again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great guest. You all know that I have a whole bunch of kids and I’m very fascinated by all of the parenting methods and teaching kids to sleep well, teaching kids to be polite. And I’m also very critical of some of our younger generations. And so I’m excited to speak with our next guest. Her name is Kimberly Sturgis. She is the founder of a website called TheMostlyGentleMom.com. She has a fascinating career with this website. She is a speaker, a coach also. And I’m excited to welcome Kimberly to the show. How you doing, Kimberly, how you doing?

34:32 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Hey, I am doing absolutely wonderful. Thank you. About yourself?

34:35 JIM BEACH: I am well. So you help moms and dads talk to teens. Is that correct?

34:41 KIMBERLY STURGIS: That is the shortened kind of bullet point answer. So yes, that is what I do, but an extra little bit to that is I help the teens and the young adults know how do they communicate with their grownups? So you work with both sides.

34:55 JIM BEACH: I do.

34:56 KIMBERLY STURGIS: It’s a 2 way street, right? Communication kind of goes both ways. And so some of the times you’ll see that somebody will say something because it’s just from their frame of reference or from their point of view or their own tunnel vision that this is what I need to accomplish. And they don’t really hear what the other side is looking to convey. And a lot of times when you have young people. It is thought or they experience often that because they are young, they are too naive or too ignorant or too unlearned, that their opinions are irrelevant.

35:28 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And so, a lot of the time, the things they do say aren’t taken, like my granddaddy used to say, with a grain of salt. And that’s not necessarily very fair to that young person. And so I work with them on how do they? View, well, while you’re grown up may say this, have you thought about this might be why? And how can they reframe or approach it in a different way to ensure or have a better shot of getting their point heard at least? It doesn’t mean that it’s going to stick or that what they want to do is going to happen, but it does allow for the communication between 2 different generations and 2 thought processes to actually begin.

36:07 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And so that’s very important, I think.

36:09 JIM BEACH: Absolutely fascinating. So you will agree with me, though, that the younger generation, the kids are the broken ones, and thus adults are correct. You’ll agree with me on that, right? Right? Right? Right? Right?

36:22 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Oh, no, you’re backing me in a quarter here. Oh, no. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m gonna okay, can I peek out from behind the bush? Just really quick. I am going to say. Both of them are.

36:35 JIM BEACH: Oh, I know. Oh, I know. I don’t think the adults or me or whatever are perfect, right? So obviously both sides are to blame. So let’s talk about the ratio. Kim, but I’m going to, are you Kimberly or Kim? Is it okay if we call you Kim? Kimberly, please. Kimberly. Okay, thank you for making that distinction. Kimberly, surely you will agree that it’s 1090 or 595 or something like that.

36:59 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I will say that… I will say that I have noticed because I do a lot with this age group. I will say that a big part of the issues comes from the way young people aren’t able to see more sides of things than maybe one, and if they’re articulate and cultured, maybe two. So I do see that that, that natural tendency for teams to just kind of want to do their own thing and it’s viewed as well they’re being selfish. Well, are they really? Are they being malicious when they’re thinking about themselves or are they just kind of hyper focused on what teenagers are focused on?

37:34 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I think from the adult perspective, the piece that I would like to see them do a little bit differently or be maybe a little bit more conscious of is not instantly wanting to shut their young person down without hearing what they have to say in education and from this age group while there’s a lot that they do not know. Some of them couldn’t get out of a box with the top off and half the sides missing, and you and I can probably, for sure, agree on that. But they do have some interesting perspectives that may change our minds, may not, but they’re still interesting to hear.

38:08 KIMBERLY STURGIS: So I think if the adult generation would at least be willing to entertain some of their ideas, does that mean take them all? I think that that would be a, A bigger help. I think things would go a little less chaotic if kind of everybody was willing to do a little bit more give and take on that.

38:27 JIM BEACH: I always agree with that. That’s true. And I do think that the younger generations are right in some of their thinking, you know, the fact that they want not constant, but very frequent feedback. Right? That’s best practices for any generation. The more feedback you can give the better. And so in that situation, I think they’re 100% right. I was just seconds before Kimberly called watching a video where a woman was complaining that she had been there a month and she was already facing burnout and wanted extra days off. She’d been there a month, you know? I, uh, I have problems with that.

39:02 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Yeah, um, I, I will agree on, on that respect. This generation, they… And there’s so many different things that you could probably put a pin in and say, well, it’s because of this. It’s because of this. It’s because of this. And to be fair, every generation has their pins that they can put into things about why we have turned out the way that we have, to be fair. But I think, for this generation, their lack of willingness to be uncomfortable with things they don’t know or don’t like until they can learn a new process, idea, thought, or concept, or challenge their brain in a different way, is a little unnerving for me. That’s a little unnerving for me.

39:41 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And my generation, we were fine to say, we’re stupid. We don’t know. Like, we were okay with, we were okay with that, but I think this generation is very, very focused on instant everything, and that is a problem. To be burnt out in a month, like, come on, are we serious? Like, you don’t even know how to work the copier in a month?

40:02 JIM BEACH: And taking a step further, I, my biggest grief or gripe is that they have 0 ability to apologize.

40:08 KIMBERLY STURGIS: That would be true. I messed up. I am sorry. And they will they’ll they’d rather do anything than apologize. You said, you agree with that? I do. The accountability factor for this generation is a big deal. And that kind of leans more into the, well, who is responsible for teaching them that. Clearly people who have fully formed brains, right? We say, okay, well, in this age, they have all these holes and their brains aren’t, you know, connected in the synapses and all of the neurological things about why teenagers do what they do.

40:40 KIMBERLY STURGIS: But then when you have a fully formed whole grown up person, adult person whose responsibility it is to teach and guide and lead and instruct and help and assist in all of those other things, if they are not doing that, is it the teenager’s fault, because nobody gets here knowing how to do these soft skills of how do you apologize and apologize. Correctly. It’s different to say, well, I’m sorry, you upset. That’s not an apology. That’s right. I’m sorry. Right. That’s not that, that is not it in any respect at all, but it’s a different thing to say, I did this. I understand that it made you feel this way.

41:17 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And this is what I’m going to do to correct it in the future if you allow me that opportunity. That’s a whole different situation. That’s gonna bring communication. I think the children are being done a disservice because they’re not being taught how to do that. So, in that, the grown-ups ahead of them in the generation are doing them a disservice.

41:37 JIM BEACH: I would agree. Kimberly, let’s talk about you and your career. You’re fascinating in addition to talking about the next generations and what you’re doing and walk us through the beginning and how that turned into The Mostly Gentle Mom site. Sure.

41:51 KIMBERLY STURGIS: So I have been in education now almost 10 years and I’ve taught all ages from the little sweet cuties that love to hug your leg and play with crayons all the way up to the big giant tall 6 feet and up that can’t remember their pencil to save their lives. And I’m also a mother of a teenage child myself. So it, It stemmed from how I wanted to approach raising my own kid. Taking bits and pieces from my childhood experiences and growing up and then making some tweaks and modifications based on how I saw my child’s personality was and certain things that worked for me when I was a kid, they didn’t work for him.

42:28 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And so I didn’t try to put him into this one mold of this is how I was raised. This is exactly what I’m going to do for you because he is his own individual, independent person and needed to be raised and reared in a way that kind of aligned with what worked best for him. And one of the helpful parts is being in education, getting to see all these individual kids and all their individual needs and personalities and how do you, how do you figure out what works best for each one so that you can get the best out of each one of them. So The Mostly Gentle Mom is really a compilation of so many different things.

43:06 KIMBERLY STURGIS: But I want to stress the conscious effort that is, if I am attempting to raise my own child in this way, I will take that out and put that out into the world for other people’s kids because I would want my son to come into contact with somebody like me out in his world that could hopefully be a benefit into the way that he grows up to be a man.

43:28 JIM BEACH: What do you do if someone, if your communication styles are Venus and Mars, you know, we just, we’re totally not there, Kimberly. They seem like they’re from the 60s or, you know, or whatever. Yeah, but we do the stops just don’t mesh.

43:42 KIMBERLY STURGIS: That’s a really good question. That’s a stupid good question. I like to. Try what I think. Is going to work and then when that doesn’t. I am very direct. I will just ask. What do you need? How would you like me to talk to you? And I’ve learned this with my own kid. Because the way that I talk. He doesn’t want all of that. He wants. This or maybe a bullet point here or something like that. And I’m much more of an explainer, like give all the details of all the things, and he doesn’t necessarily need all of that. And so I will say to him, okay, well kid. That didn’t work. You’re, You’re experiencing either some upset or frustration.

44:23 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I notice you’re upset or you’re frustrated about that. How else could I have said that to you for for this to for this to work? And I kid you not, when you ask people what they need, they will tell you what they need. Now, it’s up to you to decide if giving them what they need in terms of communication is completely grating to you, or if it’s really something where, well, I can’t do it 100 percent that way, but I could maybe try this. And then do it more than once to see, does that, does that work? Is that helping our communication get better? And then sometimes that doesn’t work.

45:00 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And there is nothing wrong, no shame, no shade, no issue with saying to someone, this conversation isn’t working right now. I’m going to take a pause. We’ll try this later. And just walk away. Just walk away. And that saves a lot of relationships better than continuing to just hit a brick wall and get nowhere. A pause. There is so much power in pause and conversations.

45:22 JIM BEACH: How do you discipline a teenager?

45:24 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I take away the Wi-Fi. that’s just me being silly. But I mean, I don’t know. Sometimes you might want to take the Wi-Fi. It really depends that. That is not a really general sort of thing. That’s a very nuanced kind of kind of response. When I was growing up, it was some really crazy kind of old school things. You know, I did something, and I remember one time my mom took away the electricity, which was crazy, and I had to be Amish for a couple of weeks, which was a really wild thing. Whatever I did, I don’t remember now. I never did it again because she never took my electricity from me. But I think.

46:04 KIMBERLY STURGIS: It’s not that I’m not. For discipline because I am. But sometimes is punishment, the answer, is it because they didn’t do it your way? Or is it because they had all these other variables and behind why they responded or answered you the way that they did? Is it something that you need to discipline or take something from them as opposed to firm boundary? You don’t get to talk to me like that. You can be upset, but you don’t get to behave this way. It just depends. I don’t want to answer it straight on and say, take this, do this, do this because I don’t have like extra nuance about the situations, but I would, I would say.

46:43 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Have some boundaries in the way that your teenager talks to you because if you wouldn’t let an adult talk to you in that way, why would you let your teenager do that? You would not let me come and yell at you and say, you’re so stupid. Oh, why this and yell at you at the top? No, you would not let any grown-up do that. They don’t get to do that either because we are teaching them on how to be high functioning adults in society. So if we let them run amok in our house without any boundaries. Then again, they’re doing them a disservice and you’re setting them up for failure. Set the boundaries.

47:20 JIM BEACH: And what do you do when they’re 22 and defy you?

47:24 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Well, they’re 22. So in the eyes of most people, they’re an adult, so I don’t really think it’s a whole lot about defiance at 22 as it is. They’ve had a really nice, healthy dose and taste of what they believe adulthood looks like. And it is our job to help them navigate that next five to seven years. And I don’t think that the best relationships at that age are going to come from you continuing to try to micromanage or control or completely tell them what to do as much as it is, like when I ask my kid. So this happened, how do you think you could have handled this differently?

48:00 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Let them critically think about what did or didn’t happen because then that teaches them alternate ways to do something, the next time, or the third time, the 35th time that they are, getting confidence in their toolkit about how do they respond to different situations? 22? It’s not defiance. It’s not your job to raise them like that. It’s it’s your job to help them navigate a new set of challenges as an adult person.

48:24 JIM BEACH: You’ve worked a lot of colleges and given a lot of college talks. Tell me about that a little bit. That’s really cool.

48:31 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Thank you for kind of touching on that. It’s really, really great. And so I’m a part of an organization that does campus programming and it allows me to have a platform where I get to speak to students from all across the country. So I have spoken to kids in California. I’ve spoken to kids in Florida. I spoken to kids in the Midwest and all the way up through New England and while I may not have been at their colleges when they come to the conferences, I do get to interact with them and I do get to talk to them and just hear some of the things that they’re struggling with or the things that they’re hopeful about.

49:09 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I don’t always like to focus on what they don’t like. I like to ask them questions. So you’re in college. What are you, what are you hoping to, to learn so that you can change in, in the future? Why is that interesting to you and just let them talk about the things that are hopeful for them and the things that light them up because in that you find other answers to things that might worry them or that might give them pause or give them a little bit of a struggle. So I really enjoy that aspect of what I do with The Mostly Gentle Mom by being able to talk to that age group at least a few times a year.

49:48 JIM BEACH: Yes, that would be a great thing. Tell me about your bucket list item of going shark diving. Oh my gosh.

49:55 KIMBERLY STURGIS: I am absolutely fascinated by sharks, and I have been forever. I watch Shark Week, every single summer without fail, and I have wanted to cage, dive, um, cage dive with sharks, particularly great white sharks for as long as I can remember. And it was always something that my family was like, no, you can’t do that. What if they get in the cage? They’re not going to get in a cage. They are a great wide. Not get in the cage. And then when I had my kid, they told me, they said, we forbid you. You absolutely cannot ever, ever do something like that ever.

50:30 KIMBERLY STURGIS: And I said, oh, okay, but secretly in the back of my mind, it’s still very front and center on my bucket list.

50:37 JIM BEACH: So when I graduated college, my brother graduated high school the same week and my parents gave us a trip. We went to Australia and went diving and we went on a week long dive boat where we were on the boat for a solid week and you’d get out and they’d cook lunch and it was very nice. They arranged a shark dive. They took us down to 40 feet, stuck us on the bottom, and then went back to the boat and started chumming. They started a shark-feeding frenzy above us, with us sitting on the bottom in about 40 feet of water, and the sharks didn’t pay any attention to us.

51:13 JIM BEACH: They wanted the chum. They chummed for about 10 minutes, and then, 10 minutes later, the sharks went away and they came back down and got us. How excellent.

51:22 KIMBERLY STURGIS: What an experience. They could do something like that. Maybe I’ll try that angle and see if my family is a little bit more receptive to me being on the bottom and just watching, watching from above. But yeah, it’s, it’s, I don’t know. I just I love sharks. Are you a diver already?

51:40 JIM BEACH: I am not.

51:41 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Go figure. I am not, but give me a rebreather in a tank and just stick me in the cage. I watched Jaws. It’s my favorite movie. I know all the, all the, the script and everything. Just, just, just let me add it. I can do it. No problem.

51:58 JIM BEACH: Is your birthday right around Thanksgiving? Is your birthday November 25th? Isn’t it amazing how good our research is on you?

52:05 KIMBERLY STURGIS: It’s excellent. That is my birthday. I am a almost Thanksgiving, not quite Thanksgiving on some years Thanksgiving baby. So some days like some years I get turkey and cupcakes at other years I don’t.

52:16 JIM BEACH: That is my birthday as well. You’re kidding. I am not kidding. It is true. No, about that. Yes. And so it was great for me when I was a kid because we always, you know, went somewhere for Thanksgiving. It took a long trip, you know, the time, and we did a lot of that, and my siblings were ticked off that I got to travel for my birthday, and they never got to go anywhere through their birthday. Oh well, it’s okay.

52:44 KIMBERLY STURGIS: That’s excellent. Wow, wonderful.

52:45 JIM BEACH: Kimberly, how do we find out more? Follow you online, get in touch, hire you for some coaching.

52:51 KIMBERLY STURGIS: Super great question, and I appreciate you for putting that out there. You can schedule time with me if you go to TheMostlyGentleMom.com, all one word, and there are some links there. You can schedule time. There’s a free guide on there called Beyond the Eye Roll, which we all know, if you’ve got teenagers, is what they like to do because they’re looking for answers back there. You can download that. It’s totally free to you. It’s got some great tips and things that I actually do with my students, some things I do with my own kid. And, um, yeah, you can find me there and I’m also on Instagram under the same handle. And the ‘The’ is required.

53:30 KIMBERLY STURGIS: The Mostly Gentle Mom. It’s The Mostly Gentle Mom. The ‘The’ is required. It is. It is not leave that out. Correct.

53:38 JIM BEACH: Great. Kimberly, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot. Great job.

53:47 KIMBERLY STURGIS: All right, thanks so much. Thank you. That was great.

53:50 JIM BEACH: We are out of time, but back, you know, when. Tomorrow, be safe. Take care. Go make a million dollars. Bye now.