In this episode, Angie Austin chats with Jim Stovall about a unique NASA experiment that underscores the high price of procrastination. How do trivial delays ripple into insurmountable challenges? With humor and insight, Jim illustrates the power of acting at the right moment. Angie also talks with author Katie Millar-Weirig about the mental health struggles teenagers face in today’s digital landscape. They discuss practical strategies for fostering a safe and supportive environment, ensuring that teens can navigate the complexities of modern life with confidence and resilience.
welcome to the good news with angie austin now with the good news here’s angie hey friend angie austin here along with jim stovall we’re talking about his winner’s wisdom column the price of procrastination he has a weekly column he’s an author speaker and movie maker and he joins us weekly all right jim the price of procrastination what’s this all about i kind of have an idea
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you know, it’s interesting, and it speaks for itself, but recently NASA did an experiment, and there was this giant asteroid as big as an NFL stadium. And it was heading toward us. Now, let me say right now, it wasn’t going to hit us. It was going to miss us by a considerable amount, but it was heading our direction. And so they were curious, and they said, this is when we could do an experiment. Can we fire a rocket and hit that thing? and move it enough to where it wouldn’t hit us. So they tried this, and it actually worked. But here is the thing. It was 7 million miles away, and they had to fire the rocket 10 months before it got to us. Well, had they procrastinated even more, A few weeks, they wouldn’t have been able to move it because this rocket we sent that hit this thing, it moved it just a fraction of a centimeter is all it did. But over 7 million miles, that fraction of a centimeter expands out and it becomes many, many hundreds and hundreds of miles. So, you know, had they procrastinated any at all, it wouldn’t have worked. And that’s the way many things are in our life. Things that seem impossible today, had we dealt with them sooner, would have been a slam dunk. They’re easy to deal with. So many things are easy to deal with then, and they become hard to deal with later. And we all worry about what to do, how to do it, who to do it with, where to do it. So many times, Angie, the question is, when should we do it? A farmer can know exactly when. you know, how to plant and when to fertilize and when to plow and when to harvest and all this. But if he doesn’t do it at the right time. All of that knowledge is wasted because if you plant too soon, the frost gets it. If you plant too late, you don’t get a harvest before the end of the season. And so, so many times, you know, when we’re trying to decide what to do, the real question is when do we need to act and what’s the best time? And the best time to act is when we have all of our options. You don’t want to act too soon until you’ve looked at all over and we know all of our options. But on the other hand… We don’t want to wait too late until some of the options have been exhausted and are no longer available to us.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I think about now as well, you talk about the farmer and the knowledge. And so many years ago, you couldn’t just go, hey, I’m sick of being a TV news person or a radio host and I’m going to be a farmer. It’s like it was generation after generation, you know, parents teaching their kids how to do it or maybe working for a farmer. But what’s interesting to me now is you can become an expert and get all that knowledge so much easier now because of YouTube and other things. Like my husband and my son have learned how to do so many things through YouTube. I mean one thing, this light comes on in my car, and they Googled it, and I needed a new gas cap to make this light turn off. I mean who would have known that, right? And then there was – like he learned how to change the oil. But I think about this NFL football player. He quit the NFL, and he’s become a sweet potato farmer, and he donates just tons of sweet potatoes to homeless shelters and to the needy, et cetera. It’s a really good source of nutrition. Anyway, so Steve Hartman, one of the cool reporters on CBS that does all those good news stories said, so how did you learn how to be a sweet potato farmer? And he said, YouTube. YouTube.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, and, you know, that is an amazing thing. You know, when we look at this shared knowledge, Wikipedia, and anybody can get on YouTube or Wikipedia and anything and say virtually anything they want to, but it’s amazing how often it’s right. And, you know, there’s a wonderful book out there I did not write called The Wisdom of the Crowd. And it’s a tremendous book because, you know, the average people, by and large, are right. Several years ago there was a show called Regis Philbin hosted, who wants to be a millionaire. And a lot of people remember watching that. And if you got stumped, you could phone a friend. You could phone the smartest person you know and ask them what they think. Or you could poll the studio audience. And I’ll leave it to your imagination, the relative IQ of people that stand in line to go to see Regis’ show and sit in the studio audience. But what they found out, amazingly enough, is the studio audience… The average of them, the poll of them, was right more often than the friend who was the best expert you know on anything. Really? People are right. I’m so amazed at how good the information is out there on the Internet. And you have to be careful. There’s a lot of garbage out there and a lot of misinformation. But as you said, you can find anything. How to change a muffler in a 52 Buick. Right. Well, Andy, it’s one thing, you know, I realize there’s people out there that know how to do it. The amazing thing is they put together a video to help you and me and show us how to do it. Yes. And I think that’s amazing.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes, my son now has a Lexus GX470 2003. It’s the same car we took him home from the hospital in, and now he’s driving it. And so… He Googled that model and then that particular light. And then this guy had a video and he showed the different things to troubleshoot. And you’re right. It’s like not only are there people out there who have the knowledge, but there are people out there who have the knowledge and will make a 10-minute video for you. And then now when you’re talking about procrastination and gathering all the information and once you have all the information to make a decision and to get to work, don’t delay too much or you could miss your window of opportunity. It’s much easier now to gather that information than it was in the past. I mean, we had the Encyclopedia Britannica, like that whole set, which was not cheap back in the 70s. We had that in our living room if you wanted to look up anything. You could find so much information in there. I was fascinated by those things. But it’s nothing like now the information we can find on the Internet.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right, and you can find the information, and there’s no excuse these days for being ignorant of anything. There is so much information. We have to fine-tune our critical thinking and determine, is this valid or not? But there’s so many ways to check multiple sources. So, you know, decisions become easy when we get enough information. But then at that point, we need to wait until we have the information. But once we have it, we’ve got to be willing to pull the trigger. You can’t wait for all the lights to be green before you leave home. And, you know, it’s never perfect. But there’s a point at which if I don’t decide now, some of the doors are going to start closing on me. And I’m going to start losing options. And that’s the time you pull the trigger.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yes, and I like to tell myself to focus on excellence rather than perfection because that’s why I’d often put off doing my demo tape when I was in TV, and then all of a sudden you need the demo tape and you haven’t done it because, oh, my hair wasn’t right that day, my outfit wasn’t right. That was one thing I procrastinated on a lot, and that definitely hurt me. So in the case of NASA, that’s a great example. If they delayed several months to launch the rocket, they wouldn’t have been able to divert the asteroid enough to miss the planet Earth. So what made you think of writing this column about procrastination? Was it that NASA example, or did you just find that example after you thought of writing this column? Like how did you come up with this one?
SPEAKER 03 :
No, I am so fascinated when we can do things like that. I mean we can’t fix the potholes in the street on my block. We don’t seem to be able to get that done, but we can collectively figure out how to shoot this rocket. off of a revolving ball that we live on, and 10 months away, 7 million miles, we hit this thing and move it enough to miss us. And that’s really, really amazing. And I think, okay, there’s got to be a lesson in that somewhere. And so I looked at it. I actually called the guy that was in charge of doing this, and I said, what was your number one priority? He said, well, the number one priority, we picked an asteroid that was going to miss us by several hundred thousand miles, which is fairly close in this kind of thing. But he said, my first priority was don’t hit it and move it so that it now strikes the Earth. We don’t want to mess that up. That would be bad. And I said, well, on behalf of all of us that live here, I want to thank you for establishing that priority. That’s important. But it is important to realize that at some point in the future, if one of these is coming our direction, If we don’t procrastinate, we can do something about it, and that is amazing stuff. So you think about that, and then you think about how does this apply to you and me, and there are so many things. They’re easy to fix today, but if you wait too long, it becomes a crisis.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wait, did I miss that? You wanted to know about this. You talked to someone at NASA?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I called a guy over there. Yeah, I actually did. Did you know them? No. No, I’m on the board of a deal, and there’s a guy retired from NASA, and I said, can you call this guy and give me, you know, I had a five-minute conversation with him, but yeah, whenever I’m writing or speaking or putting someone in a book or movie, I always, always try to actually have spoken with them or talk to them. Yeah, that’s one of my biggest things.
SPEAKER 06 :
That’s one of the cool things about being Jim Stovall, that you can talk to all the famous people or well-known people or genius people or whatever. If you need to get into them, you probably know someone that can get you a call.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah, I get to talk to Angie Austin every week. It doesn’t get much better than that.
SPEAKER 06 :
You’re so funny. When I’m like a minute late for calling you for our interview, I always worry like, oh, my goodness, he’s so busy. And then I remember you said once that you’re so charming. You’re like, well, Angie Austin, you’re worth waiting for. So, you know, you’re not supposed to be late, but I’ll go ahead and wait for you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, well, we were joking about your husband, you know, you being high maintenance or not high maintenance. But the key is not being high maintenance. The key is to be worth maintaining. And I would presume you are. So that’s my theory on that.
SPEAKER 06 :
You crack me up. We’re all on vacation right now for spring break. As I interview you, I brought all my gear with me, so I’m trying out some of my new traveling studio gear that I set up in a closet at some house or a bedroom or wherever where I can get some quiet space to be and just the joy of traveling. I don’t think I’m too high maintenance, but I know I travel differently than I did before. When I was a teenager, I remember taking a train through Mexico down to spring break. And I’m like, okay, this is something I will never do again. This experience, a train in Mexico is nothing like a train in the U.S. It is not a clean experience, shall we say. So I’ve definitely traveled. And I remember my girlfriend joked with me the other day. She goes, remember we rented that car that you could stand up in the back seat because I’m five feet tall. It was some old, old car that we rented from like Rent-A-Wreck and that broke down half Halfway to spring break, halfway to the border because we were going to catch the train in Nogales right south of Nogales, Arizona in Nogales, Mexico. And it broke down and some guy in a pickup truck offered to take four of us, one guy and three girls. We were like 18 down to Mexico in the back of his pickup. Like one or two people were in front and two stayed in the back. And she said, where were our parents? Like the fact that we were lying down in the back of a pickup truck and it was very cold and we drove like – I’d say like 10 hours in the back of a pickup truck. She said the fact that we’re not like buried in a desert right now and that we survived this – that travel experience and the train in Mexico, which I’m sorry to say like 20 years ago, the train in Mexico was one of the most – filthy experiences I’d ever had. It was just like the dirtiest train. It wasn’t even, I felt like it was more for animals than that, you know. So I definitely have changed from that kind of, you know, travel, but I wouldn’t say I’m too high maintenance.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I certainly hope your children do not listen to this. You’ll never be able to get them to not do anything after that.
SPEAKER 06 :
I can’t. My girlfriend just wrote to me. It was just like a week ago. She found me and she said, where were our parents? Absolutely.
SPEAKER 05 :
All right, Jim, such a pleasure. Oh, by the way, when is your ninth movie coming out?
SPEAKER 03 :
It will probably be sometime in the mid to late 24. They’re still working on some of the elements of it in the casting and a few things like that and hoping to shoot late this spring or summer to catch the weather right for the Will to Win film. And I hope to be able to announce a… an A-list actor very soon that we’ve got an offer out to, so we hope to be able to do that in the near future.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, my goodness. All right, jimstovall.com. Can’t wait to hear who that A-list actor is. I have a feeling I know who it is. If you get him, won’t that be huge? Thank you, Jim. Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
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SPEAKER 06 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin with the good news. Joined by author Katie Millar-Weirig. And she is the author of Becoming a Mean Teen Parenting Machine. Welcome, Katie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you so much for having me, Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
All right. So let’s just start off with a little bit about you and how you got into becoming an author. Give us a little about your background, Katie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, you bet. So I actually am a parent of five children. I have five kids in seven years. I know that sounds crazy, and it was crazy, but I had some health issues that factored into us safely bringing kids into the world. And so once we were given the green light, we didn’t know how long that green light would stay. And so we got our family and we got them fast. But it has been fun because now I’m kind of drinking out of a fire hose of parenting. Everything is just hypersped. And that’s really fun. So before I actually had my children, I earned my bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and psychology, so the study of the brain and then the study of the psyche. And then I went on to get a master’s in psychology. And my focus started out being more neuroscience and cognitive, but then it shifted over to family relations. And since then, I have professionally… worked as a coach and a consultant for mental health crises, specifically for teenagers. It was never fully my plan to go with teenagers. I actually was more interested initially with things like autism and ADHD and children that were not neurotypical. And as it evolved, I found this incredible need for our teens to have better support and better mental health resources and parents to have better resources. And so Over the last 10 years, it’s just evolved, and now I would say probably 90% to 95% of what I do is directed towards children, teens, parents, and improving the relationship at home and improving the mental health within the home.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I read an article once just about the teen brain. And so I explain it when my kids kind of lose their marbles. And I try to explain to my husband because he wants them to be so sensible and not get angry and be able to have a conversation without kind of, you know, being, I don’t know, just off. off their rocker sometimes you know and i said honey i said it’s like they have fireworks in their brain i said it’s like fireworks going off it’s hard for us to relate and so we have to give them some kind of like empathy that their brain isn’t functioning quite like ours yet
SPEAKER 04 :
Exactly. And I think the beautiful thing about teenagehood and childhood is that we have this time to learn and to grow and to become. And so as we see these things that our youth are dealing with, whether it’s a stressful situation, like you’re saying, where they seem like they’re off their rocker, maybe it’s a bad score on a quiz at school, and all of a sudden the reaction is just astronomical to the trigger. Yeah, meltdown. And we sit there and wonder what is going on. And we have to remind ourselves they’re learning how to deal with new things and they’re learning how to walk and learn how to manage their own emotions. And sometimes that’s really messy, and it looks like a beautiful disaster when it’s just the only way their brain knows how to fortify those connections. And I think the danger is that as parents, as we don’t allow them that space to be irrational and allow them the space to make those decisions that maybe aren’t the best decisions and make them feel like something’s wrong with them for learning and growing, then it creates an environment of shame. where they end up retreating back into themselves without actually learning the skills that they need to learn how to handle bigger stressors in life. So when they do have a problem like a boss or when they do have a job loss or something like that, they’ve learned baby steps by their parents’ example and by their parents’ love and kind of like a safety net, just like we would put… put safety features around the house when our toddlers were learning to walk. We put safety features in our house to make sure that our youth are given a safe place to learn how to manage their emotions. And so as they grow into adulthood, they’ll feel more confident with their ability to handle hard situations. And you’re right though, Angie, it is very ugly for many of us parents as we stand back and say, what has happened to my child? It looks like a monster in their body.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, and the overreactions sometimes are a little bit shocking, you know, but I think, you know, talking them through it and trying to remain the one that’s a little more level-headed, I guess, in the discussion or argument. What about, how do you think technology is affecting teens’ ability to communicate?
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, this is huge, and I’d say, you know, it’s hard for us parents to fully understand what our children are going through because parents, we didn’t grow up with social media, the internet. I mean, I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was a freshman in college. And even then my text messages cost like a quarter each. And so I didn’t even text. We still called each other and it was very minimal use. And so I can’t, I have to remind myself. I really, even though I say, I understand what you’re going through. I understand the emotions of being a teenager. I understand all those things, but I don’t understand what it’s like to grow up in this, in this digital world, and because of it, our children, one of the biggest downsides I’ve seen is the lack of connection. Because they seemingly are so connected through their digital footprint, It would seem, oh, they have lots of friends, but they’re not truly connecting. And because of that, their self-worth is severely suffering. And they wonder where they belong and who really cares about them and who their true friends are because it’s so hard to know when everything is superficial and online. And that’s why I believe that the relationship between parents and their youth can act as that strong foundation for giving them a place of belonging, for fostering, positive self-use because I can say from personal and professional experience that our phones and social media and the way that it is designed is not to improve self-worth. It’s in fact destroying it.
SPEAKER 06 :
So how do we minimize that impact on the kids? I mean, most of them have phones. I do have a Christian author friend that they have one family phone for the kids that they take if they’re going to like an amusement park or something like that so they can contact their parents.
SPEAKER 04 :
I love that idea. I think that’s a phenomenal idea because it also takes away the child having their personal autonomy with the phone where, you know, they could get into trouble believing that they have full privacy with their device. One of the greatest resources I found out there is ironically an Instagram page, but it’s called Wait Until Eight. And it educates parents on when the brain is ready for these types of of devices like a personal device. And it’s hard because we don’t have longitudinal data to know how this is going to affect our kids. So we’re all still guessing. But one thing they recommend is waiting for a personal device until the child is at least 14 or in eighth grade, maybe even later if they’re not showing the signs. holding off social media until at least 16. And our family, we decided, and kids included, they ran on this decision that we would not have any personal social media accounts until after high school graduation. And then there’s some really important rules you can put in the home of, you know, family charging stations, don’t let them take their phones to their rooms, have a limited amount of screen time, and just as a family being very aware of what it is. And I think it becomes overwhelming for us parents because it feels like it’s overtaking our lives and it requires a lot of active parenting and babysitting them. But I do believe that if we are going to put our energy somewhere, this is a place where it needs to be spent. And if we do not make an intentional decision about how we will treat technology within our homes, the decision will be made for us by others. And I believe that it will take over our lives and your youth’s life. And so I think when you choose to get your child a personal device, it’s a personal decision within your family. But I would encourage parents to read the data, really educate themselves. And if you’ve already given your child a device and you want to pull back, it’s hard, but it is worth it. And this may be a place that is worth the fight and the struggle.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, I think you’re right. You mentioned that one in five teens, you say, are depressed. What is causing this? I mean, it does make sense that the technology makes them not have the same types of connections that kids who grew up without this kind of technology had with each other. I mean, I would just hang out at my friend’s house.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and you didn’t know if someone else was hanging out at someone else’s house doing something fun. You might have heard about it after the weekend. There was an event going on that you were invited to, but it wasn’t thrown in your face with the pictures and all of the talk about it, where now we have this fear of missing out that was already innate in a teenager who already has a, severe lack of belonging now they’re seeing all of the other things that other people are doing and feeling like what’s wrong with me why don’t I have these close friendships why not I’m invited or why can’t I afford to go on these types of vacations we as adults we even get caught up in that type of fallacy but I do believe that that the reason the teenagers are depressed is so multifaceted that it’s hard to pinpoint it and so I I do agree that like our technology is a contributing factor. We also need to recognize that our environment has changed. Our diets have changed. Our genetics even have evolved. And now we have. so much better understanding of genetic factors that contribute to depression. But then there’s also a social aspect of it. We have better words for it. And so often kids know how to say they’re depressed. And, you know, 20 years ago, we didn’t know what to say except for my kid’s just down. And so in some ways that can be a double-edged sword because I do think that because we see so much teen suicide and self-harm, that parents are so worried about their child being depressed that sometimes we as parents think, jump to a conclusion when our child’s just going through a rough patch or a hard day and we we worry you know is this clinical depression and that can be hard to know but i think the biggest thing that i i feel like helps our parents and our youth is starting from as young as you can to just teach tools to handle manage stress low moods disappointment all of those things because We don’t know which of our child, if any, will develop these types of mental crises. And so if we’re starting early on saying, hey, this might happen to you, you might feel this way. When this happens, don’t let it fester. Don’t sit in it. Instead, talk about it. Here’s some tools you can use to work yourself through it. And some of those tools are mentioned in the book. There’s also wonderful, great resources online or a family therapist can help you to equip them with these tools before it becomes necessary. a serious problem. And I think just like anything, whether it’s cancer, autoimmune illnesses, a virus, the earlier you can get in there and intervene, the less effect it will have on the body. And that’s the same for depression and anxiety. So I like to teach my clients not necessarily to assume the worst, like your child’s going to deal with this, but assume that your child at some point in their life will deal with complex feelings. And so if you can start at a young age to warn them, these kind of things are going to happen. And when it does, here’s how you manage stress, whether it’s mindfulness or CBT or DBT, then they have those tools immediately, just like getting an antibiotic in their system within the first 24 hours of strep, how it’s going to prevent any type of, you know, more advanced fever or illness. That’s what we’re hoping to do is just prevent it from becoming serious.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I told my son that’s like a dartboard. He was feeling down during COVID and they weren’t in school and he wasn’t meeting people in high school. And I said, well, your depression, to me, it’s like a dartboard. And I’m just going to keep throwing darts at it until we hit the middle where, you know, you feel better. And whatever it is, you know, your diet, a therapist, medication, talking to people, you know, doing things that you find fun, like all these different things we’re going to try until we come up with the proper, you know, solution.
SPEAKER 04 :
I love that. And I think that that is so wise what you did, especially because it showed your son that you took his health, his mental health, his physical health and his happiness seriously. And it was important to you. And when we do that and we don’t brush under the rug or say, you know, cowboy up, everyone deals with hard things. then they feel like my parent is a safe place for me to come to and say, hey, this isn’t working. What other dart do you have? And so I think what you did there, just like you said, is you created a very safe environment for your son to say, I will do whatever it takes to make sure you’re happy. And you also taught him that there are
SPEAKER 06 :
solutions there is hope and there’s a way out of it if you haven’t found it it’s just because we haven’t found it yet but there is there is a way out right yes there are solutions and it might be a combination of things i want to make sure katie that people know how to find you and to find your book becoming a mean and mean is crossed out becoming a mean teen parenting machine a step-by-step guide to transform your relationship with your teenager
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, so you can follow me on Instagram at The Balanced Mind Project, and that’s just focused on parenting, mental health issues, and more happiness in the home and in our individual lives. And then also my book is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can order it there. It’s actually on Audible, eBook, paperback, and hardback.
SPEAKER 06 :
Got it always. All right, Katie, I can’t wait to have you back. Thank you so much. What a blessing to have you on The Good News.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you, Angie, and God bless you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
