ForCollegeForLife Podcast

Jasmine C. Williams: Mental Health Action Plan

• ForCollegeForLife • Season 3 • Episode 1

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Casey J. Cornelius (00:04):

We're back. It's been a minute, folks. I understand. Thank you for coming back. Season three, I think it's three of the four College For Life Podcast starts right now. My name is Casey Cornelius. I'm the founder and president for College for Life, otherwise known as America's leading college speaking agency. And in these podcast interviews, I get the opportunity to chat with some of our speakers and facilitators and consultants, the people who truly make sure we earn that reputation each and every day. And today I have the honor, the privilege of chatting with the 2023 Speaker of the Year, none other than Jasmine Williams. We're going to be talking about some stuff that at this time of year is particularly important. So I'm not going to give you a long, long buildup. I'm going to go ahead and bring her to the mic. Please welcome none other than Jasmine c Williams.

Jasmine C. Williams (01:06):

What's up, Casey J?

Casey J. Cornelius (01:08):

You're one of the only people who calls me that. I appreciate it. I believe it. Team middle initial. If you're a middle initial person, you understand how important it is to have people acknowledge that middle initial C stands for what? Jasmine?

Jasmine C. Williams (01:23):

I'll never say

Casey J. Cornelius (01:25):

All guesses are welcome. My guess is chant. I thought I was going to be able to trick Jasmine into divulging that information on this podcast, but clearly not. So that's not what we're talking about today. Jasmine, I know that a lot of your work centers around planning and planning, especially as it relates to mental health, personal habits and ensuring that we're in the right space to be successful. And if you had the opportunity to chat with students who are back on campus, either they've been on campus for three hours, three days, three weeks, no matter what it is, what's the top line message that you would give them?

Jasmine C. Williams (02:07):

Oh, man. I remember even just thinking back whether it was my first year on campus or even my senior year on campus, and that first month of a new school year feels a lot like the start of a new calendar year. There's so much fresh energy and you're coming off of an exciting summer and you may be excited about new classes or maybe it's recruitment, but just the excitement and all the opportunity of the things that are going on. And those first few weeks, there's so much that you're looking forward to and you're getting to see your friends again. And then inevitably, I feel like for me, it was always somewhere around the six week or the eight week mark where you just kind of hit a wall and it's like, okay, a lot going on. My calendar's overflowing, starting to feel a little bit overwhelmed, and I feel like that is the perfect time of year for students to kind of take a look back at their mental health plan. That's something that I've helped many campuses build for some of their students and sort of reevaluate what are your priorities for this school year and where does your mental health fit into that lineup?

Casey J. Cornelius (03:20):

When you talk about mental health plan, for those who might not be familiar, that idea seems almost counterintuitive. A lot of people think about their mental health when something goes wrong, but I know that you advocate a different line of thinking.

Jasmine C. Williams (03:35):

So the way that we approach it when I work with campuses is we look at it the same way that we would look at a fire drill. So I want you to imagine in the year of 2024 if we were like, well, let's just wait until there's a fire to figure out what we're going to do. That sounds ridiculous. And unfortunately, that's the way that many of us look at our mental health. We're like, well, I'll figure it out when I get there. Or even more often, we don't give any thought to it. We just always say, well, I'm not going to need those resources, or I can't imagine a world where I would be in that type of place in my life and things like that. So we really try to take a more proactive approach and we kind of go through this fire drill practice when I come to campuses and we make this plan together to say, what is the equivalent of stop, drop and roll when it comes to your mental health? And it needs to be so common that all of us are on the same page about what those non-negotiables are for ourselves, so that if we happen to be in a situation where we're not doing well, or even if someone around us isn't doing well, we kind of have those steps laid out for us already.

Casey J. Cornelius (04:49):

We're going to dig more deeply into that. I think that there's not just for first year students or students, a lot of professionals probably want to hear that conversation around non-negotiables as well. I'm putting myself in the mindset of that new student or that returning student who's decided to get heavily involved in campus. They go to the organizational fair and they sign up for everything. They're going to be in the chess club and the anime club. And I heard about a school recently who had a hot chocolate club, and I kind of wanted to sign up for that too. It's like they just meet

Jasmine C. Williams (05:20):

Me too.

Casey J. Cornelius (05:22):

Sample hot chocolate sounds kind of cool, right?

Jasmine C. Williams (05:24):

Brilliant.

Casey J. Cornelius (05:26):

They did say, by the way, that it was their most popular club, and that makes complete sense, obviously. But there are those who jump headfirst into every opportunity and then all of a sudden they realize, wow, my plate is abundantly full. I have meetings every night of the week and I have stuff to do, and then all of a sudden going to class and studying and those things kind of fall down the wayside. So I'm putting myself in the framework of that. What's your big takeaway for them also?

Jasmine C. Williams (06:03):

Well, first of all, I was that student. So I have a lot of empathy for my fellow perfectionist overachievers. I was that student who as if I wasn't already taking a full course load working while I was a college student and already in a host of clubs and activities, there were clubs that I helped found at my campus. They were brand new and my plate was just overflowing at all times. And I think the biggest thing that we talk about during my mental health programming when we kind of build out this action plan together is there really has to be this degree of self-awareness, right? So Casey, you are one of the people. I would say, you know me better than a lot of people, and I don't think it will come as a surprise to you when I say that I am not an early morning person, right?

(06:55):

Nope. So there are some people that, fellow speakers, friends of ours, colleagues of ours who y'all can get on that 6:00 AM 7:00 AM flight first thing in the morning and get up at 3 30, 4 o'clock. And I have to be self-aware enough to know that that is not going to work for me very well. And I am someone who, my sleep is very, very important to me. If I don't get enough sleep, I am a menace to society. And so I have to know that about my myself and shift things around in my schedule accordingly. So if you are a student who knows that you have a lot on your plate, but you have an 8:00 AM test the next day, and you're someone that doesn't do well and doesn't academically perform well, when you don't have enough sleep, you've got to move some of those puzzle pieces around in order to make that happen for yourself.

(07:54):

But there are also students who could get four hours of sleep at night and function perfectly fine. And so it's just a matter of knowing what are those non-negotiables for you personally. And unfortunately, I think the kind of trap that I see a lot of college students fall into is they're trying to mirror everyone around them. So maybe your roommates are people that can stay up really late and go out the night before finals and be perfectly fine, but that might not be the case for you. And you might be someone who you're like me, you need that seven hours, or you can't even find your way out of the door in the morning. And so it's just kind of about taking inventory of what are those non-negotiables for you, and finding ways to draw the boundary lines around those things to protect them.

Casey J. Cornelius (08:47):

First of all, what Jasmine says is not hyperbole. I've actually, every once in a while will say things like, make sure you take the first flight of the day. It looks like it leaves at 6 0 5, and you hear her laughing. That's actually her response. When I make that suggestion, I'm like

Jasmine C. Williams (09:06):

Six in the morning. I don't function at that hour.

Casey J. Cornelius (09:11):

I think what you're identifying is knowing yourself, and you referenced that in your answer too. And we learn to know ourselves through trials and tribulations and struggles and so forth. The other thing that occurs to me, Jasmine, and I hope you could talk about this for just a second too, is I think sometimes is students as humans as just people inhabiting this planet together, we assume everybody else has it figured out. We can look at everybody else and just like, well, they must have it perfect right now, and they must know their schedule. They must, and we're always comparing ourselves to that. Then therefore, we don't talk about some of our challenges or fears or so forth. I bet you have a message to that student who thinks that everybody else is doing it perfectly.

Jasmine C. Williams (10:02):

I think the biggest accidental loophole that we've created is by me not saying anything, I am further creating a space where other people feel like they can't say anything. So maybe I have to be the first person to be like, Hey, not doing so great. Hey, I'm having a rough week. Hey, I just need a little bit of support. One of the funny things that we talk about in one of my programs is sometimes all you need is you just need one of your friends to send you a couple really good Instagram reels, really funny ones, and that's enough to just break yourself out of a little bit of a rough afternoon. But sometimes it's something more serious than that. So I think too, it kind of goes back to knowing yourself and knowing when you need to ask for a little bit more support.

(10:57):

And I think it also really comes down to sometimes not asking for support might mean that you are not surrounded by the right group of people for you to feel safe enough to ask for that. And that's definitely something that I've experienced and I really appreciate now in this stage of my life that I know I can be like, dude, I'm in the trenches right now to pretty much anyone that I'm close to and there's a space for me to do that. But I think if you feel like you don't have that space, start being the person who starts that in your friend group because maybe someone else is just waiting for someone to open that door and also give them permission to ask for those things or talk about those things.

Casey J. Cornelius (11:48):

I like that a lot, folks. By the way, just a quick plug, if you're not yet familiar with Jasmine's, first of all, how dare you, but please make sure that you check out for college for life.com/jasmine. That's J-A-S-M-I-N-E. There's probably going to be a link to these show notes somewhere that you could just click on as well. Please make sure that you check those out. Jasmine, I have kind of a final big question for you. Question for, I have heard you talk before about a New Year's Eve mindset, and I'm going to raise my head, no one can see it, but I'm going to raise my hand that I have fallen into this trap at various stages of my life as well. So if you would please discuss not only the trap of the New Year's Eve mindsets, but also how to fix it.

Jasmine C. Williams (12:38):

So I kind of think that the new school year is very similar to January 1st. It's a clean slate, and we just see it as this opportunity to start fresh start over, which can be a really positive thing, but it can also be very tempting to use that as an opportunity to overhaul your entire life. I am going to change everything. I want to be unrecognizable. I want to be a different person. And when you really look at a college student's schedule and you start to kind of just block out, for example, your classes, enough time for you to eat a meal, enough time for you to get however much sleep you personally need a night, that free time you can see starts to dwindle very quickly. You're adding in study hours, you're adding in fraternity and sorority life commitments. You're adding in other organizations you're a part of. I mean, the time, it just gets very short.

Casey J. Cornelius (13:42):

You may want to have a social life.

Jasmine C. Williams (13:44):

Yeah, that too. You may just want to lay in bed and watch Grey's Anatomy every now and then too. And you have to kind of allocate a little bit of extra time for those things. You kind of have to almost pad your schedule a little bit to leave space for that stuff. And if you don't, you're just constantly running from thing to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing. And there's really just no space for you to breathe for a second, let alone kind of give yourself a little bit of grace or a little bit of downtime. And the trap that I see so many students fall into is now that it's in new school year, I am going to get straight A's and I am going to wake up at 5:00 AM every day, right? I'm in the 5:00 AM club, I'm going to work out six times a week.

(14:33):

I am going to take 20 credits. I am going to be president of my sorority or fraternity. I'm going to start this new club. Not to mention, I work on campus and I'm trying to do a summer internship, so I've got to start applying for that. And it's like when you start to add all these things up, it's just not a reasonable amount of time for one human being to be committed to so many things. And unfortunately, kind of around that six to eight week mark that I talked about earlier, you see students hit this wall where they just have nothing left. And unfortunately, it's usually because they've just overcommitted. They just have too much on their plate, and chances are they probably just need to scale back a little bit and prioritize what are the most important things to me this semester, something that my therapist, my own therapist has even started to say to me recently is I'll say like, oh, I'm just trying to focus on this week. Or, oh, I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. And she'll say, why don't we just focus on one hour at a time?

(15:41):

And I think that's such a good message for students because sometimes you just look at that to-do list and it feels impossible. So it's like, how do we break that down? What do I need to do for the next 15 minutes? And then after that, I can worry about everything that comes next. But we can't overcommit ourselves to so many different things because then when inevitably we start to drop the ball because we're human and there's only so many hours in a day, we start to beat ourselves up or feel like we're a failure because we couldn't possibly manage a 700 hour week when the time just doesn't add up. So I try to really challenge students to just be more realistic about what you can take on in a single semester. So if you know that you are president of your sorority or fraternity this semester, that might not be the semester that you join the 4:00 AM club, or that might not be the semester where you decide you're going to start juicing all of these trends. And you just have to be realistic about what you can expect from yourself. And then I think when you accomplish those things, you'll be much prouder that you didn't overcommit and take too much on.

Casey J. Cornelius (17:04):

I love this, by the way, for those of you who are wondering, Jasmine's talking about juicing fruits and vegetables, not anything else. That's a whole other conversation. Love that. It seems like the big takeaways, Jasmine, are plan before something bad happens, not to commit, to set your non-negotiables, especially around time, and to not treat the start of the academic year like it's New Year's Day, and that you have to accomplish everything at this moment. Am I hearing this correctly?

Jasmine C. Williams (17:40):

Absolutely. And not for nothing, but we are recording this in suicide prevention month. So I think such a good point around that is if you do start to hit that wall where you feel like you're feeling lost, you're feeling like you need additional resources, and it's not something as simple as just scaling back your schedule or getting more sleep. Every college campus has a counseling center. The majority of those campuses that I've spoken on have free counseling services to some degree for students. And I think this is such a good time to just kind of remind people that that's available to them. I am a huge proponent of that. I went to grief counseling on my own college campus and it was tremendously helpful for me. So just being mindful of all of the things that are available to you. And I always say to students, you might not be the student that needs these resources, but how just rewarding would it be if you were able to offer that to a peer or to a friend or to a roommate who might not know? So lots of fantastic resources and ways that you can make the best of the school year. Don't treat it like your New Year's resolutions, but really still look at it as a clean slate and a good opportunity for you to have a great year.

Casey J. Cornelius (18:57):

I can't think of a better message. Everybody. Thank you so much for joining. If you know someone who might benefit from this podcast, this episode, make sure that you get it in their hands. Send it to 'em, make sure it gets into their ear. Find out more about Jasmine for College for life.com/jasmine, or she's a fantastic Instagram follower at Miss ms. Jasmine c Williams. Please make sure you add the C in one of these days. We'll get her to tell us what it stands for. Until then, thank you everybody. Be well, and we look forward to next time.