May 1, 2026 – Manager Method Ashley Herd and Suffering Dr Suzan Song

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

Jim Beach 0:26
hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there riding the roller coaster life. It’s so hard. I’m here to motivate you and to keep you on the game, to keep you in the game, to keep you thinking that entrepreneurship is your path. I will help you do that and try to give you the love and the motivation you need to stay in the game. And I want to give you the tips and the tricks and the techniques to be successful, so that when you go out there and try you actually succeed. That is my very simple goal for you be two fantastic guests today. First up, we have Ashley Hurd. We are going to talk about her new book and her method of management called the manager method. It is great. I love it. And then we play on a game, but we go through every aspect of HR, recruiting, interviewing, proposals, job possibilities, announced, and then hiring and then firing. We went through the entire process, and so it is a great conversation. You will learn a lot by my conversation with Ashley after that. Dr Suzanne song is with us to talk about pain and suffering and endurance and resilience and all of these issues and how to get out of pain. It is such a prevalent issue. We talk about pain and loneliness in the men today, and just a lot of things going on, a lot of factors playing into this. And so we hope that you can reduce your pain and have a little bit more peace and sanity and comfort in your life. So Dr song will help us with that. She is amazing. So it’s a great show. Let’s go and get started right now. You we are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. You know, one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is that I’m good at this engineering thing, but this HR thing people, I don’t want to have to deal with people. Our next guest, our first guest, is going to help us with that. Please welcome Ashley Hurd to the show. She helps managers drive results without scaring everyone away. She is the founder of the manager method, which we will learn about here in just a minute, and she has a new book out that talks about it, called the manager method, a practical framework to lead support and get results. She’s had a sterling career. She started off as a lawyer, and then got some sense knocked into her and went into the HR space for two great Atlanta companies. One is yum brands, which owns a whole bunch of things here in Atlanta. I don’t remember what they started off as, and then, Mackenzie, you don’t get any more prestigious than that. Ashley, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Ashley Herd 3:35
I’m great. Thanks so much for having me. Jim,

Jim Beach 3:38
what? What is yum brands? Did they start off with Cinnabon.

Ashley Herd 3:42
No, that’s inspire or focus. There’s the competition. Young brands is out of my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and so they own companies including the trio of KFC Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.

Jim Beach 3:56
That’s right, yes. What a great trio that is.

Ashley Herd 4:01
It is a great trio. I will say there’s nothing like it’s a great companies. There’s nothing like coming off a meeting and being able to eat your feelings with a nachos, Bill grande or some original recipe in the middle of the day. So it was, it was a great place to work, and I learned quite a bit from

Jim Beach 4:18
it. Did they have cafeterias or stores right there on on campus or right by the office.

Ashley Herd 4:25
They did. They had the cafeteria that had their brands, also a salad bar. And fun fact, they did have a very world class gym to counteract some of the eating that people may do, and an experimental kitchen. So got to take back some of the experimental products to the family as well, which made me a very cool mom.

Jim Beach 4:44
That is, that does make you a cool mom. My daughter works at Chick fil A in their corporate headquarters, and I think she’s probably eaten so much chicken now that she needs to move to steak restaurant.

Ashley Herd 4:58
Gotta rotate around.

Jim Beach 5:00
Yes. All right, so what did you learn by leaving the legal field or being part of it and then doing HR? I think that that would just make it so much harder to do HR, because, you know, how screwed some of these people are for some of the stupid things that they’ve done that you hear about, you know, so interesting combination. Tell me about

Ashley Herd 5:23
it, and I like how you framed it as coming to my senses and going to HR. I think some people may listen that and think legal to HR, but we’re not lawyers here on the show, you know, and most, most people aren’t. I try to not be a regular lawyer. Always be a cool or approachable lawyer, or business minded one but, but I spent years in companies, again, from whether it’s KFC through McKinsey as an employment lawyer in in whatever the industry, whether I was working in house or I worked as a law firm lawyer. So I litigated, represented companies in a ton of industries, but I kept seeing the same thing over and over, often really smart people, really good intentions, but maybe had a hard time managing and made mistakes that you or I would say on paper and say, well, that doesn’t make any sense, but, but people weren’t solving it. And so for me, first it was being in corporate, moving from legal to HR was like going from being a situational janitor as a lawyer, so cleaning things up and fixing things and sometimes even fighting in court or otherwise. But going to HR, I actually saw that as a way to prevent things that happen. I took the lessons I saw and use those to proactively teach managers or team members things like, if you’re frustrated with someone, why it matters to ask questions rather than just make assumptions, and what to do to if someone’s not responding to your email, rather than just go and CC their boss. And so I took that internally as HR to do a lot of the preventative work before going and starting my own business manager method to do that, you know, with a whole lot of organizations now,

Jim Beach 6:59
excellent. I love it. It’s a two part problem, right? We need to teach the managers and the employees, no,

Ashley Herd 7:07
yes. And a lot of training. You see, if there’s training at all, first of all, most training that organizations offer is often the we have to training, so maybe a harassment compliance type seminar, things like that. And often it’s really check the box. It’s not necessarily done to think about how people act, but otherwise you may see a lot of manager training. And again, my business is manager method, and so I certainly have done that. Do that a lot. If you just are training managers, then you’re missing the other side of that equation, because employees can say, all day long, my manager needs training. But then when their manager needs training, people say, Okay, but what about me as well? And so when you train people to actually work together productively, it can make the results get a lot better and help people want to stay at the company as well.

Jim Beach 7:54
All right, that’s what we want to do. All right, can you slowly introduce us to the manager method. Walk us through this.

Ashley Herd 8:03
Yes, the manager method is something I created to be practical and break down everything I’ve put out there and learned for people, including entrepreneurs, that really need something to work. So not just a seminar that sounds great, but you move on with life. So broken down, the manager method is three steps, a three part framework. Pause, consider, act now. None of those sound revolutionary, but put together, it’s something that I’ve seen really help, especially people. Managers in any situation, really help to say, drive results without driving people out the door.

Jim Beach 8:41
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like a lot of the same advice you would get at marital counseling or a lot of places, right?

Ashley Herd 8:51
Yes, and I’ve had multiple people when I’ve done seminars, say, you know, I actually would like to use this with my kids. And I say same thing I totally do as a parent, as a wife, as a friend, but But overall, breaking it down, it’s sort of three steps of pause, consider Act. The one I often have found is hard. It’s hard for me, it’s hard for people, is the pause, but it’s also the one that can be the most valuable, because often we’re reacting rather than taking that pause to think about how we can respond to things in work and in life.

Jim Beach 9:25
It also could be the most off putting. Why that person talking back to me? Hey, I’m fighting with you. You better play along. We’re having a fight here, whether you want to or not.

Ashley Herd 9:35
It’s true, and it’s why I have consider and act as part of it, not just pause and not just to pause, have kind of an awkward silence and then say what you were going to say, otherwise, but to use that pause, which is not a stop, it is really a pause, but to take that opportunity to consider, consider things largely that other person’s perspective, and what that can look like in the moment is, you know. We’re fighting here, you may be so right, and you may actually be right, but if you walk out of a situation at work and all you’ve accomplished is jamming it down someone’s throat that you’re right, no matter whether you are or not, that’s likely going to impact the way that person works for the rest of the day, how they want to come tomorrow, and then how they want to come back to your company and talk about it to others. And so some of the considering really is to put yourself in their shoes, which can be hard to do, but to think what may be going on that I don’t know, or what would I want to have happen if it were me? And so one example I’ll give and turn back is, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have someone with a performance issue, what I would hear as a lawyer as HR, is, we got to make a change. We got to move on with this person, but pausing to consider, okay, do they know their jobs on the line? And if you’re that person, if it were you and your boss was saying, Yeah, this person’s Jim’s awful, Ashley’s awful. We need to make a change without conversations to have a sense of what has the training been. Are there other things getting in the way, other people delaying that I don’t know about that’s really not this person’s fault, but what’s that overall context? Pausing to consider those things can help you think, Okay, well, if it’s me, I probably won’t. Would want my boss to come and tell me I want this to work out, but right now, this is what’s going on. Give me your perspective and have that conversation at the end of the day that may end up in that person no longer working at your company, but having that pause and consider sometimes can change things a lot more effectively than a termination can that person can actually work out, but even when you get to the point of termination, having that sense of fairness can help you, and I saw that as a lawyer and as HR,

Jim Beach 11:47
okay, so when I pause, I’m supposed to take a deep breath and plan what I’m going to or that’s two where I consider right. So yes, go through my top three options that pop into my mind and pick number one.

Ashley Herd 12:02
Yes, think about those and and a way to think about those, I say, not to say any business owner doesn’t care about the employees that work there, but in the moment, you can get so caught up in emotion and so having that to think, Okay, how would I want to be treated? Or think about a loved one. I use Gigi, my late grandmother that lived 96 wonderful years, and I loved her very much. She lived a fantastic life that said, I am sure there are times that Gigi made mistakes, but if she made a mistake at work, how would I want her to be treated and with questions, with the conversation, at least with that, that calm tone and the consideration that she may have a perspective that her manager, whose initial reaction was just to come down hard on her, could probably use, rather than find that context after the fact.

Jim Beach 12:49
Yes, all right, can we go through the entire process, Ashley and talk about best practices for the whole thing, making the job known, getting resumes and selecting who to interview, interviewing, offering An offer, training and then firing. Okay, so

Ashley Herd 13:21
sure

Jim Beach 13:22
I have a job opening that I need to get out there. What are some of the best practices? What would the manager method suggest that I do to get started?

Ashley Herd 13:34
So what I suggest is the pause and consider is, rather than just doing the same old, same old, whatever you’ve done, okay, I’ve sent a message to people I know in an entrepreneur group. I’ve posted an ad here. Rather than doing the same old, same old, pause and consider, what am I even putting out there? Look at your job description. The job description, oftentimes is check the box thing. It basically tells what you’re looking for, but it’s often not telling the story of what it’s actually like to work with you, or make the job candidates on the other side say, Hey, that’s a place I’d want to work. And so one of the things I’ve done in working with organizations is to give templates on how to do that, how to describe the job, how to talk about the great things that there are to work at your organization. But So rethinking that at the outset. So what am I telling people proactively and thinking about the job description as a marketing tool? That’s one of my number one tips, in addition to rethinking, okay, how am I sourcing or things like that? But when you do that, you can stand out and have people that are going through and reading that description and thinking, Okay, this is somewhere that I’d actually want to work because that’s a step a lot of companies just skip all together.

Jim Beach 14:44
Yeah, that sounds like a great advice, and something that would have been obvious to put in there. What is your favorite platform for recruiting?

Ashley Herd 14:56
So I’ve found LinkedIn to be really helpful. I mean, can depend a lot by. Industry. And there are some industries you look at construction industry, you look at restaurant retail, there can be specific platforms really built for those, or you have may, may have other trade groups and things like that. But overall, looking across industry, I found LinkedIn to be one where a lot of job candidates are going to and that’s one thing to really consider, is, okay, what’s the best, best place to go? Where are the people that I want to work with or have come and work at my organization? Where are they looking and so in addition to me telling you, LinkedIn is a great place, one thing that a lot of business owners don’t do is ask their employees, hey, I’m posting for this job, especially people in that position. Where are places that people are looking you may have no idea of some of the new tools or sites or ideas or job fairs or things like that, and so your internal team that’s already there, they’re a great resource, both in writing that job description. So what are the things that you like about working here that really could make it compelling that I’m not thinking of. And also, where are job candidates looking for jobs? That’s internal market research that, as you say, it sounds obvious, that I have made now a career in a business of taking common sense and finding that it’s just not as common because people don’t pause and consider it

Jim Beach 16:22
that is very true. Yeah, common sense went out the door a long time ago. All right, I have five candidates that I think I might like. Is there anything on the resume that you look for to find someone who’s going to be more compatible than others with your manager method. How do I find resumes that look like they’re going to be good employees, considering what your framework is, a lot

Ashley Herd 16:53
of it is talking about their results, so plenty of resumes, people write it and it reads fairly generic thing. Back in the day as a lawyer, I definitely wrote a very generic resume, research cases on FMLA, Ada, things like that. But what I realized over time, especially as I moved into management and more into HR leadership, is the people that stand out, often the people that have things like initiative and how they communicate. And so when you have candidates that use Objective metrics, that can be easier in sales focus roles, but altogether, when people write a story, and it feels more like a conversation, and I don’t mean that in a narrative sense, but okay, now I have a picture of things that people added in there having that type of information and really having a sense, if that’s what you’re looking for, for communication, that’s one that absolutely stands out. Can I look at this and have a sense of what this person would actually bring and then learn to do here?

Jim Beach 17:55
But then you mentioned this for sales, you’re not in sales, you’re an HR position. So how do I get your resume to sing when I can’t say increased sales 79% How do you say I fired more people this year and they cried less? I mean, how do you HR people accomplish that?

Ashley Herd 18:15
I don’t love the word fire to start with. I say job centers are a bit squishier and that can look like things. That can look like HR, sometimes that can look like it. If you’re not in a call center. There’s a lot of ways you can find objective metrics, and it is one way right now that using things like AI can be helpful to say, what are things in my role that I can provide quantified metrics or freeze things in a way that really stand out to a hiring manager, because often people write their resume as very routine, but thinking about, what can that look like for things that stand out? And so if I’m writing mine as HR, I would talk about things like working with the CEO CFO, in the in the budgeting process, places that I found cost savings driving things like engagement, retention, all of those are real, quantifiable numbers when it comes down to financial cost, retraining, and so in virtually every position you can find those objective numbers, it can just be a little bit more non obvious when you’re starting with things that are working with people or helping People in it, for example, work together and not just turn on their computer, but using things that really send that message in a resume. Of I’m going to make the people I work with their lives easier and also help be mindful of the budget. Those are things that can stand out that people often don’t think about as being so valuable on a resume.

Jim Beach 19:38
All right. Interviews, we brought the five people in. How do I interview? And during the interview, Ashley, do I introduce this idea of the manager method? Let them know that this is our goal of how to operate. Do we make that known to both recruits and our existing employees?

Ashley Herd 20:01
Yeah, yes, I’m absolutely happy with anyone being told about the manager method, but But in all seriousness, in the policy and consider one thing that I often see business owners, entrepreneurs, even HR leaders, not think about is the candidates on the other side of it so much the process is fully on. What do we need to do to be 99.99% sure that this candidate is going to work out, which can mean having multiple, multiple rounds, long test projects, all of those things, without a consideration that some of the best people that would be employees will opt out of your process because it’s just unreasonable. And so really remembering that it’s a two way street. And so talking about things that are positive. I mean, I have, I have a whole list of things that I have found, hiring managers, recruiters, HR leaders, that you should bring up proactively, to give a real sense of what it’s like to work there, the great things. So things like, yeah, we have, we here. We invest in Manager Development. We have this program. It’s for managers. We have it for team members. It’s all about how you work well together. That’s something that so many candidates care about. But rarely are organizations proactively bringing up the same thing to talk about tough times like, hey, we all need to be all hands on deck the last week of every quarter, because that’s when we’re really working longer hours. It’s really aside from family, weddings or things like that, or emergencies. We really ask everybody to be here. One thing that people don’t do enough in that hiring position is think about what things would come as a surprise to people after they start the job, and not having that hires remorse, but making them really have a clear picture of what’s expected day to day. But also, what are the things that work? What are the working hours when people take an occasion? Are they taking their laptops, or are they able to check out that matters and can matter to people accepting the job more than people think?

Jim Beach 22:00
Oh yes, my first business that I ran in the 20s was a summertime business, and so one of our big considerations was, you ain’t going home in the summertime like during the summertime, you don’t get a single day off. And I get to decide where you’re sleeping that night for the entire summer. But on the other hand, you get all of December off, you know, so that was a fun conversation to have. People thought we were crazy.

Ashley Herd 22:27
But being

Ashley Herd 22:30
but being honest about that, and again, it’s the way you say it. But to say this is it. This is all in because this is where we make the money that being said, you are off in December. I mean, I I have this example that I’d started a company in August. My first office job out of college, I started in August. It was a sales job. I actually worked in sales of B to B, very hardcore sales for two years before I went to law school. So I can speak a bit more to the objectives about sales, and it definitely informed by my my legal and HR work. I started in August. It was about November, and someone said, What are you doing with with your time off over the holidays? I said, Oh, I don’t have that much PTO, so I don’t know. And they said, No, everybody gets off two weeks between, you know, Christmas, New Year’s. It’s off, and it doesn’t count against PTO. I said, What? They said, Well, yeah, but we do. We have in days. We work seven to seven the two weeks before that, and it’s pretty full on, but it’s great to have that time off. I had no idea. Nobody told me in interviewing, nobody told me working there, and I might feel different about that and working seven to seven. Now, I have kids, I have pickups, but at the time I was 22 I was absolutely happy to work seven to seven have free meals delivered to the office in exchange for getting two quote, unquote free weeks off. And so that type of information, it just really, really matters. And so, you know, I have all sorts of tips about how to think about the realities of your work and to paint that realistic picture.

Jim Beach 24:01
All right, we’ve hired somebody, and they are starting off. What do we do differently for training?

Ashley Herd 24:08
Well, one thing I’d say before that person actually starts that’s a gap that most managers, most leaders, will not do, is you give someone an offer. Maybe you, as the manager, call and let them know you’re going to get an offer. You’ll hear from HR, and everything is HR paperwork, but there’s something that you can do to make a huge difference, and that’s to tell that person what stood out about them in the hiring process and why they got the job. And I say that without it being, oh, you’re, you know, the nephew of my golf buddy, but having really objective things, because so many times, especially now, people going through the job search process, those candidates and they can have horror stories from applying to 200 jobs, not hearing back, getting told you’re getting an offer, getting ghosted. It really is a journey. But also when you get that offer, it can feel like. Reality show, but you’re not just winning a prize, you’re winning a job. And so you want that candidate to show up engaged. Want to stay really confident about their decision, telling that person the things about them that stood out when I’ve been giving giving talks at speaking events, and ask people, How many times have you gotten a job and someone’s told you, literally, what stood out about you. Maybe two or three hands go up in an audience of 100 200 or more. And so that’s something to do before you even think about the training. Is that piece of communication, whether you do it when you’re delivering the offer, or whether you do it on the first day, when you think about training and having that person come aboard. Oftentimes people have this idea of, I’m going to have this whole onboarding plan, great. And then the person starts and you realize, like everybody else, you had all the intentions and haven’t done anything. And so having for yourself a real model that you can use for onboarding that’s a mix of having people shadow, sit in on things. It’s a really quick way of having people see what your role is like, what others roles are like, without creating any additional time that’s needed, but have them do that as a big part of training. That’s one of the things that I’ve seen play out the best, because people can really learn in the moment, but creating that plan, and again, a way that I might recommend using AI to not just look better, but be better, is to say, Okay, this is my business. These are the roles I want to create realistic onboarding plans. What can that look like? And have some of those spit out? You’re going to adjust it, adjust it for the role. Put your own voice in there. But really thinking intentionally about onboarding, because so often it’s someone showing up, maybe their equipment’s ready. Often it’s not, but that person you want them to feel like you are prepared to have them, you’re excited to have them and have them learn, and then be ready to go on their own.

Jim Beach 26:54
And let’s get that. Okay, we just talked about that. So we’re done. Ashley, yeah, we did go through that was talking about getting fired, right? Yes, no, that was getting hired.

Ashley Herd 27:06
That was getting higher. Hopefully it’s not I mean,

Jim Beach 27:09
tell me how great they are. So let’s find this person now,

Ashley Herd 27:12
okay,

Jim Beach 27:13
get them out the door.

Ashley Herd 27:16
Well, my whole framework is to drive performance without driving people out the door. But I’m also a realist, having worked in legal, HR and sales, probably in particular, every job is not for every person, and it’s not going to work out. You’re going to have people that choose to leave. You’re going to have people that you choose for them to leave. The biggest gap I’ve seen is this idea of when someone’s not performing, saying, Okay, write them off completely. We need to make a change. This isn’t going to work out. So it’s really important to think before you take that step of ending someone’s employment, because it’s not just letting them go, it’s it really is an impact on again, their career, their livelihood, their their identity and so really recognizing that as a human is important, and sometimes you’re gonna have to make that, that decision, but is when you think about ending their job, thinking, do they know that that’s at stake? If, if their friends and family, we’re going to hear the story from them, how might they describe it? You and I and everyone listening can probably think of situations where you know things about a situation, and that employee would describe them very differently, and you would say, well, that’s not accurate, but driving to that fairness as much as possible, by telling someone their your performance, this is what’s going on, asking questions to really get at the heart of what’s going on, to figure out whether it’s will and skill, things like performance plans, whether it’s a performance plan or whether it’s a conversation to tell someone very clearly, this is what we expect from the role. This is where it is right now, if you are committed to this, I’m right there for you. But candidly, how are you feeling that? Because if this isn’t working out, I’d rather us have an honest conversation than one where you’re saying you’re in it, but really your heart’s not in it at all. So those honest conversations take a lot of trust to build before then. But for me, any termination of employment should not be a surprise, and it should not be one where that person says, Okay, well, XYZ, this was not fair at all, and they’re telling their family, their friends, glass door, potentially employment lawyer, things that all of a sudden make that decision look a lot messier than than you would have thought when you just said, Let’s make a change.

Jim Beach 29:31
Ashley, great stuff. How do we find out more? Follow you online all of that. Please.

Ashley Herd 29:37
You can go to manager method.com, and pretty much find everything I’m on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tiktok at manager method. And I do have the manager method book. If you go to my website, go to manager method.com/book, not only can you find all sorts of options to get the book, but also get free resources, Book Club guide and a reflection guide to bring it to life.

Jim Beach 29:57
Fantastic. Ashley. Thank you so very much. And we. Love to have you back. Thanks

Jim Beach 30:01
a lot.

Ashley Herd 30:01
Thanks so much, Jim

Jim Beach 30:03
and we will be right back to talk about suffering and how to heal better.

Intro 2 30:24
well, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question, actually, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim, wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for startups Radio!

Jim Beach 30:47
we are back and again. Thank you very much for being with us. You know all of us have hard times when we just don’t want to get out of bed and life seems absolutely unlivable. I’m excited to welcome to the show someone who can help us get through that time, please welcome Dr Suzanne song. She was trained at two little schools called Harvard and Stanford. You don’t get more impressive than that. And is a trained psychiatrist, a medical anthropologist. I’m not even sure what that means is you like trying to figure out ancient diseases, I guess. And a humanitarian Mental Health Advisor. She has worked all over the world, advising the United Nations and multiple federal agencies and ministries of health, shaping systems of care for children and families in crisis. She has a private practice in Washington, DC, and a professor of psychiatry at GW you and is a very sought after speaker. She has a brand new book out called Why We suffer and how we heal. Dr song, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Dr. Suzan Song 31:48
I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having

Jim Beach 31:51
me. It is our pleasure. Why do we suffer and how do we heal? Dr song, why is there pain out there?

Dr. Suzan Song 32:01
You know, I’ll tell you that I do work with people across the spectrum of distress. You know, from child soldiers to people CEOs and executives and a lot of times, we suffer not because of the experience itself, but because of the narratives that we have about what’s happening. And I think one of the problems with how we heal and we get through it is that we think that being resilient is actually endurance, and it’s not, and I think it’s doing people harm.

Jim Beach 32:31
Alright. Say that again. Make sure we resilience is harmful. Play the power line again.

Dr. Suzan Song 32:39
Yeah, when we think that just enduring is us being resilient. You know, there’s a conversation. I think most people think resilience is balancing or pushing through or even like optimizing our stress response, but that doesn’t tell people what to do with the parts of their experience that’s hard to name, you know? So I wrote this book for people who are succeeding on paper, like on paper, everything looks great, but underneath they’re quietly suffering.

Jim Beach 33:10
Okay, what percent of the world is that of America?

Dr. Suzan Song 33:16
I think it’s the majority. I mean the world, and also in the US in particular, so much of the way that we view stress and suffering and difficulty in this country is individual. So we tell someone, oh, you’re having a really hard time. You’re going through it. Go to an individual therapist, or go take time off of work and deal with it yourself. And actually, what we learn from cultures across the world is that people actually heal in relationship. So healing is not an individual process. It’s actually a community one,

Jim Beach 33:52
okay, but the community is not there to help you. Just said,

Dr. Suzan Song 33:57
so communities are what we can build. We’re all embedded in some kind of community. We can all think about, who is it that we matter to? Who do we engage with? Who do we want to engage with? Those can be your your people. We can find a sense of belonging with others.

Jim Beach 34:14
Okay, how much should I expect those other people to help me? Or should I try to heal myself individually?

Dr. Suzan Song 34:23
So it’s both, you know, I think there are lots, you know, the self help industry is a billions of dollar industry, but there’s nothing wrong with going to a therapist and there’s nothing wrong with self optimization and self regulation. I think we’ve got that message down pretty clear. What I’m trying to remind people is that equally important is finding others that you can rely on. So if someone’s going through a hard time like, how many people have you know a trusted confidant that they can go to? Do they have a community? That they can step into when they just don’t feel they don’t want to feel alone that day and we’re missing that. That’s what we’re talking about, this loneliness epidemic, which I think is actually a mattering epidemic. I don’t know how much we feel that we matter to other people,

Jim Beach 35:17
right? Is that different from loneliness, or is that just a subset of the loneliness feeling?

Dr. Suzan Song 35:26
Yeah, I think it’s a subset. You know? I think sometimes it’s just one is proximity, like we’re not actually bumping into people a lot outside in person anymore, not as much if we do. We’re busy, we’re rushed, we’re kind of focused in our own lives. And so I think we have to be a little intentional about just asking the question of, who do I matter to, and who do I want to matter to?

Jim Beach 35:53
Okay, how should someone respond if they realize that they are in depression, that they you know that they’re just miserable. They’re suffering. What should they do? Should you know, what are the first steps that they should do? Immediately, get help outside from an expensive psychiatrist?

Dr. Suzan Song 36:15
No, and that’s what I think you know, especially in this culture, in American culture, we’re very focused on, you know, if we don’t know how to help other people when they come to us, and so we say, oh, go to a therapist or a psychiatrist. But actually, we have a lot of tools just right at our fingertips. And it doesn’t have to be, you know, the I Am a psychiatrist, but I don’t talk so much about mental health, because I think people think that’s, you know, like severe depression or severe anxiety or PTSD, but most people are really suffering and struggling in silence. And for those people, and they might not feel comfortable talking one on one to share their deepest darkest, but there are three things they can do. So one is around narrative, ritual and purpose, and those are, in my book, it’s kind of the framework for how people kind of find a sense of grounding and agency during life’s ups and downs.

Jim Beach 37:15
Could you go through those three please?

Dr. Suzan Song 37:19
Yeah. So, so the first is narrative. So narratives are the stories and explanations that we have about the world, but it’s also our kind of our logic model. It’s a logic operating system that tells us what to think, how we decide, even what to feel. And that operating system is going on constantly. We just aren’t aware of it, and if we aren’t aware of it, then it has the capacity to take over. So I’ll give you an example. So when I when I was 15 years old, you know my family? I grew up outside of Baltimore. My family owned a liquor store. My father was assaulted and he was kidnapped into this attempted murder. He later passed away. Now I did what a lot of high achievers do, you know, I basically numb the pain, and I just kept on going. I still did well in school, college, medical school, all the things, and I thought it was okay. But it’s not until 15 years later, when I was in Burundi, I was working with former child soldiers in Burundi, and I had a death threat. I found myself in hiding from former child soldiers, and then I paused, and I was like, What is going on? Like, how did I get here? And I realized I had recreated another scene of danger, just like my father, but this time around, it was about me, and so this is what happens when we push through. We avoid our narratives. We keep moving, keep achieving and without realizing it. Now we’re in another chaotic situation.

Jim Beach 38:55
Okay? My goodness, what a story. Child Soldiers?

Jim Beach 39:06
Did I hear that right? 10 years?

Dr. Suzan Song 39:08
Yeah, with

Jim Beach 39:08
guns.

Dr. Suzan Song 39:11
That’s right. So many children are, you know, they’re joined or abducted into a rebel force, an armed group, and you know, they have different roles, so some are fighters, but some are also porters, cooks, messengers, sex slaves, and oftentimes, when they are taken into the rebel group, they’re forced to go back to their communities and steal from them or assault, so that the only place they could have a home is back in this armed force. And so when people then, you know, I work in, let’s say like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, these are all wars that lasted over a decade. So if you’re a child and you’re in this armed force starting at like 10 years old, that war is a death. Day long. So you’ve spent your whole childhood just about in an armed group. And so I was doing my work, this is my PhD, a while back, wondering, how do people heal from that kind of suffering? And that’s where I really learned. And this is the second point, the power of rituals. So narratives give you insight. You can understand what’s happened to you, the stories explanations you have, but insight alone doesn’t create change, and so our rituals can embody our values into behavior.

Jim Beach 40:39
What kind of rituals are you referring to brushing our teeth every morning or going to church every week?

Dr. Suzan Song 40:45
Yeah. I mean, so for this one child soldier, an example for her was when the village members came and they did the body purification ritual, and that allowed the community members to then absolve her of her sins, and then she was part of she’s now has a place of belonging in the village, but for all of us, we all have rituals that define our lives. Rituals are basically a set of behaviors that have meaning and they can connect us to people, to communities and to culture. So if you think about if anyone’s lost a loved one, there is some kind of ritual around grieving and loss, right? Like, what do you do with a funeral? Do you go and do you like, what do you wear? Do you go and bring food afterwards? Right? There’s certain prescriptions that we have, and that serves to, almost like, this emotional scaffolding to help us know what to do when we can’t think our way through it because our lives are so upended. And so that’s the power of rituals

Jim Beach 41:48
that does make sense. Yes, I have buried both of my parents in the last couple of years, and the ritual piece has helped knowing what we’re supposed to do. You know, mom wanted these songs so good we don’t have to worry about that gonna have amazing grace three times?

Dr. Suzan Song 42:07
Yeah, that’s right. And the ritual helps because it it tells people what to do, you know, especially when they’re grieving or they’re experiencing really difficult things. But they can also help us move into the next transition. So after, let’s say your your parents pass away, we lose a loved one, we have to return to a new normal, right, like life just isn’t quite the same when we’ve lost a loved one, and so people tend to need some sort of almost ritual to help them in that transition. So some people will say, you know, they’ll still talk to their loved one every morning when they wake up, they’ll just say they’ll have a little mini conversation with that person. That person’s not here, they’re not alive. But it’s the ritual of it that helps them feel connected. And still,

Jim Beach 42:58
yes, my parents were married 59 years and 11 months.

Dr. Suzan Song 43:04
Wow,

Jim Beach 43:05
yes. And the weirdest thing happened, mom, who was always concerned about everyone’s health, and dad who ate horribly. Dad outlived mom, you know, which supposed to happen? So we’ve talked a little bit about narrative and a little bit about rituals. What about rituals. What about purpose? How does purpose help us heal?

Dr. Suzan Song 43:27
So narratives are the insight, and then rituals embody that insight into behavior, and then purpose is what guides us. It’s it gives us direction, so it tells us what to do when we are really not sure what’s going on, we just don’t we feel kind of empty or dissatisfied. And I see a lot. So again, I work with a lot of CEOs and execs, and I see people in their top of their game career wise. So they have, you know, made senior partner, or they sold their company, or, you know, by all accounts, they have accomplished and achieved, and yet they come to me almost at that peak, because they say I’ve done all these things, but I feel dissatisfied all the time, or I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with my time or My resources. And that’s when we tap into purpose. And purpose is not something out there to be found, it’s something that’s already within. We just have to tune into it.

Jim Beach 44:29
What does purpose mean? I argued with Simon Sinek about this. I think that some people’s purpose is to make enough money to pay the bills that that’s enough for them, whereas Simon seems to think every business needs to solve every single global problem by itself. What is a realistic purpose? Look like I’m going to help the neighborhood kids, or I’m going to build a park, or I’m going to play golf every day until I drop dead on. A golf course.

Dr. Suzan Song 45:02
Yeah. So those, I would vary my definition a little bit from all of those definitions, and that purpose is something that has meaning that’s outside of oneself. So if you say, I want to, you know, run a marathon, or I want to make a lot of money, like whatever X number, that’s a goal. And I think so many, especially high achieving people, we fall into this goal habit, and so we set these goals, and we think that that’s actually purpose, but purpose is about something that’s larger than oneself. So it it carries us outside of ourselves into thinking about someone else, or maybe like a spiritual aspect of our lives or culture, like we want to improve something for someone else or a community of people around us, and that going back to the mattering, mattering is one Part of that that can help pull us through some of the darkest times, especially when we’re really confused. We’re drifting, not sure what to do. You might have all the resources we’ve we’ve attained, but we feel dissatisfied, right?

Jim Beach 46:17
Dr, Song switching a little bit. How do we solve these global catastrophes, these situations where children are fighting another group of children in a part of the world that no Americans could find on a map.

Dr. Suzan Song 46:30
Um,

Jim Beach 46:30
what are our responsibilities as Americans, and what should we be doing more or differently to help stop some of these horrible situations.

Dr. Suzan Song 46:42
What a lovely question. I mean, some of this is thinking about, what are we transmitting across generations? So it’s structural. Child soldiering, in itself, is a structural problem. Oftentimes, I think a lot of mental health issues are actually structural problems. So the problem is not that the child joined this armed group. The problem is that there were not enough there’s not enough social mobility, especially in the rural areas, there’s not enough social mobility so that kids have opportunities to then get educated and kind of pursue other jobs and careers. There’s just really no opportunities there, right? The problems are in failed governance. The problems are in land ownership. I mean, they’re so complex, I would say, for Americans who are interested in the problem of child soldiering, but also just it doesn’t have to be something so drastic. I think if people care or they’re concerned about humanity in general, find that one issue that you’re interested in that makes you really angry or makes you really sad, and use your personal agency and move it into the collective agency. So think about, okay, this is my skill set. This is what I can do. And then gather with others to talk, even just to talk about the issue. So like, bring people together talk about child soldier and watch a movie about child soldiering, like become more informed about it, and then allow the group together to move. And there’s a lot of power in numbers,

Jim Beach 48:32
where

Dr. Suzan Song 48:33
things happen.

Jim Beach 48:34
Where is this the worst in the world? Give me the top three hot spots.

Dr. Suzan Song 48:40
You know, I wouldn’t really know right now, child children, it’s hard to have numbers because, you know, it’s hard to have data, especially when there are all these moving parts, and there are wars all around the world right now, the majority of armed conflict, though, they have some conscription of children in the fighting forces, and so the numbers are going to be low, but we have them across, you know, Sub Saharan Africa, Asia, Middle East there. It’s widespread. It’s a global problem,

Jim Beach 49:19
all right, but is it mostly a southern Asia, Middle Africa,

Dr. Suzan Song 49:27
you know, I wouldn’t say, I would say, right now, probably Sub Saharan Africa, you know, Somalia, Nigeria, DRC, also, you know, Israel, opt occupied Palestinian territory there. There are lots, you know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying exactly, you know, the top three places, because I actually would have to look it up. But some, those are some of the regional kind of hot spots.

Jim Beach 49:58
What about child labor? And eight year olds making tennis shoes. Is that any different?

Dr. Suzan Song 50:07
Yeah, so that’s so child labor. These are, can be Forms of Child of human trafficking. So human trafficking is, and which child soldiering is a form of human trafficking. Human trafficking is we use force, fraud and coercion to use either children for commercial sex acts or labor or domestic servitude. So you see a lot of that too. So as an example, in the US, I work with survivors of human trafficking as well. So you’ll see you know kids or young people, or even like young adults, who will be told, Oh, come to the US, and you can be a nanny for me, let’s say. And so they’re a nanny in California for this suburban couple, but the couple won’t let once a nanny comes, they won’t let them leave the house, and they refuse to pay them, and they take away their passport, and they probably might have some physical assault there. And so that nanny is now forced to stay at home and take care of the two kids, and they’re not being paid well, and they’re not having the freedom to come and go as needed, and their passports and their papers are taken. So that’s a type of domestic servitude, which is a type of trafficking. It’s one that’s not spoken about as much labor and labor trafficking and domestic servitude are not spoken about as much as sex trafficking.

Jim Beach 51:36
You know, I live here in Atlanta, and supposedly, Atlanta is one of the hubs of or human trafficking, and there’s all sorts of signs all over the airport, you know, keep your eye out for human trafficking. I can’t imagine that I would ever figure out what it looks like. You know, I’ve been on a million airplanes, and I can’t ever think that I’ve seen it. You know, supposedly, I’m living at the epicenter of it, and I hard to put together, because if you would think that, if you were the epicenter of something, you would see it a lot. I’m paying attention, and I don’t, you know, I don’t know what’s going on.

Dr. Suzan Song 52:16
Yeah, it’s, it’s very, very hard to see. So, you know, there’s some kind of behavioral signs. If someone feels like looks like they can’t speak freely, maybe it’s someone who’s living with their employer. They have kind of excess hours, they move locations a lot, or, you know, physically, they might look a little malnourished, or they just look a little scared or anxious, bruises, injuries, but it’s very, very hard to see. But you’re right, it is here in the US, for sure,

Jim Beach 52:56
supposedly here in Atlanta. So Dr song, great information. Thank you so much for sharing this and writing the book. It is five star rated on that Amazon place, everyone so please go check it out. It’s Suzanne song. How do we find out more? Follow you online all that, please.

Dr. Suzan Song 53:16
Yeah, so head on over to my website. Suzanne song.com, it says, Susan with a Z, I have there a free newsletter. You can join book me as a speaker. Of course, order the book, leave a review, and also send, if you can, just send the book to two people who might be going through something right now, why we suffer, how we heal, how to function, find agency when the ground won’t stop moving.

Jim Beach 53:43
Fantastic. Dr song, thank you so very much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a

Dr. Suzan Song 53:48
lot.

Dr. Suzan Song 53:49
Thank you.

Jim Beach 53:51
We’re out of time. Have a great day. Everyone. Take care. Bye. Now