At my job I’m working in an organization called Odyssey House. It’s all male residents—people in substance use and addiction. So I don’t know—I don’t use drugs, you know, I drink here and there, I had smoked here and there. Anyway, I just needed a place for practicum—that’s before internship. Because they were short-handed, I already see clients. This is only my second semester. I’m in the middle of my second semester, and everything is new. My supervisor is younger than me, a Columbia graduate, Ivy League, licensed clinician in mental health and education. And I’m clueless. I don’t have a psychology background or social work background. But anyway, I’m meeting clients, and I already need to perform and provide services. Like, you know, like Suk—when you notice your student is not well, but she comes back to you and responds, “Thank you for noticing me.” So those are the beautiful moments. Yeah. That’s a powerful point that you made, Jeannie—about “Thank you for noticing me.” Because I think that most of society wants to be seen and heard. And you can live in a world with eight billion people and feel unseen. And everybody would love to have someone who sees them. That gets them. That understands the essence of who they are as a person. And when I meet a person, that’s my goal—is really to try to understand who they are and what they’re trying to do. Because I already know what I’m trying to do.

Even at this stage, I’m older, I don’t even know how to say no. I’m learning and I’m taking action to more than just say no—really what we call setting boundaries with ourselves and others. It’s a very interesting journey for myself to understand that it’s very deep-rooted. Even then, it’s interesting because I understand—you’re a professor, you teach them, that’s the primary role. At the same time, your personality—you want to accommodate, which is wonderful. People like that. You like to help, you like to contribute. At the same time, if it is affecting you, that’s where it becomes a gray area. They don’t know what you’re dealing with on your own. So that’s where we set those boundaries. So I learned at this time to understand what that means, because some of the things I’m involved in, in my own case, for example, affect me for days and weeks and months sometimes if we don’t set the boundaries correctly. So that’s where the key of understanding who we are and how we set boundaries is extremely important. That’s something I’ve recently explored in depth. Normally people would just say, “Oh, I do not know how to say no,” but expanding that subject, there’s a lot more to talk about.

I come from a big family, and in families there’s always things going on—typical family stuff. But being the oldest, there’s a sense of responsibility to get involved. And oftentimes when you approach people, when you ask them what’s going on, you can tell there’s something. Initially, they may not want to talk about it. Or if they do, they would tell you a story that they’ve rehearsed, and they’re accustomed to telling that story. And my father would listen for a little while. And he was famous in the family for saying, “I heard you—but what’s the real story?” He’s letting them know that he heard everything that they said. But let’s get down to the real story. And that’s when the conversations begin. That’s when they tell you what they’re really feeling and what they’re really going through. Now they know that you’re not just asking and you’re ready to go get yourself a cup of coffee. You’re asking because you really care, and you’re committed to hearing. So he was a good problem solver. He was known for that in the family. So one of the elder statesmen in a family—when something happens, you seek that person out. They may live in a different city or town or state, but you know that that person is important in the family, and you seek them out. And you know, pride being a factor, initially people don’t want to tell you what they’re really going through until they know that you really want to know and that you’re committed to helping them through it. Because many people, they don’t have anyone to talk to. They don’t have coping skills. When you don’t have those coping skills, your mind has to regulate these thoughts and has to do something with it. My mother used to have a shadow box that was about this big. It was made up of little tiny boxes. And she had these little figurines, and it was like a ten by ten. So there’s about a hundred little boxes, and it had twenty or thirty figurines in it. I don’t know how they made them so small—they were like half an inch. I remember seeing that when I was seven or eight years old. Our thought process is like that. We immediately profile things, we put a label on it, and we put it in a box. So once we put a label on it, we don’t have to devote further thought to it. But sometimes things come along that don’t fit in any of those boxes. That means they take time to really get involved. That’s kind of how I see people. I don’t like to put people into boxes, and I don’t like to be put in a box, because things aren’t always as they appear to be. But there is no substitute for time. I think mental health— a lot of people just don’t have the skills to deal with the things that come through. They don’t have any boxes to put them in, so that stuff just floats out there, and eventually it overwhelms them.

I teach pharmacology. Pharmacology is about like how to use drugs properly in the sense like a patient comes to a physician.

I teach, by the way, I teach pharmacist and physicians. When a patient comes to a physician or pharmacist and we usually based on the pathophysiology, whatever we figure out, we prescribe him a drug, right? So if you think about it like cardiovascular diseases, like for the same disease, there are many, many drugs in the market and all these drugs work differently.

I personally actually tell people that it’s a art to use right drug for the right person. So so to speak, like kind of personalized medication. So that’s what I tell them. Like, you know, you got to know all these different things.

They’re different patient have like condition of his kidney, lungs and other organs. Before you prescribe or even the mental health, you know, you have to because a lot of people they have so many problems.

You know, especially it happens in the old age like some people sadly every single day they are having a fistful of these tablets which we are taking all the day. It’s a very challenging thing which most of the time people they tell me even even nursing students, they say like pharmacology is the toughest 1, toughest one.

If you, it depends how you think, how you don’t the key for any physician or any pharmacist or any healthcare professional who’s even dentist. And when I stop teaching students, students meet me.

They tell me, Doctor Lachman, why you’re not teaching us this. So I tell them like I did my fair share of my job responsibilities. So the other people have to do their and that’s what I’m saying is like they personally feel that when the other person is teaching, they’re not making sense to them.

So The thing is, it’s about your style. You know, the way I said, like when you teach a pharmacist or a physician how to use drugs, if you teach them how to use properly, they will do a good job when they are at a job situation.

If we are doing a messy job, so they’re going to be a big mess, you know, later on they’re going to be just juggling with the drugs and all that stuff.

I enjoy, and it’s always very inspiring, you know, to be in this meeting, because you hear from people different perspectives. And what I really enjoy is people’s openness, you know, which is—you have created a very safe environment where people can allow themselves to be vulnerable. And I think that it has to be genuine.

And we don’t have that nowadays. You know, everybody has their mask. Everybody’s trying to fit in, and everybody’s trying to say and do the right thing to be politically correct. And we lose ourselves in all of that. And it’s just—it’s always very refreshing when you can hear people just being genuine.

You know, that’s when I… what I talk about authentic leadership—just being transparent and being sincere. I always get this question: what is being authentic? I say just be sincere.

You know, and being sincere also has some risk, meaning you’re taking chances, because you allow yourself to be vulnerable to something that can be used against you. But being able to create this safe environment where people feel valued, respected—I always say, for me, that is leadership, and that’s what is missing.

And that’s the basis for building trust. Whatever we want to build with that trust, we can go further. And that’s what has been eroded in our society. Parents don’t trust their children. Children don’t trust their parents. Students don’t trust their teachers. Teachers don’t trust their students.

I don’t even want to talk about people believing their government—we have no trust whatsoever in government. That’s why the whole idea of service citizenship is very powerful. It’s a very powerful tool. Hopefully, you know, you guys—I’m sure there’s a conversation around that—but it’s not something that’s nice to have.

It’s something that we need to have in our society, that everybody understands that service is our journey. As I said, we’re all servant leaders. We are here to serve, and to serve each other—to serve our family. And even when we want to serve God, or whatever we call it, our spirituality is through other people or animals, through other beings.

Service transcends—I would say to people—it transcends leadership. Service has different forms. The person that spends all night praying for the safety of humankind—that is service. You know, that love or display of compassion—empathy is service.