How to Find Agency in Times of Instability | Suzan Song | 717

How do you turn a deeply personal search for meaning into ideas that help others navigate their hardest moments? For Susan Song, that journey began long before her book, shaped by personal loss, global work in conflict zones, and a lifelong effort to understand how people move through instability. What started for her as a personal question—how do we survive and make sense of suffering—has evolved into a body of work that spans individuals, systems, and cultures. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Suzanne. Thanks so much for having me.

So I want to begin with this question.

There are many places where you could focus your time, energy, and effort, right? You have an MD-PhD. You work with people who need help. And you've also decided to write a book. How does the book fit into the work that you do? Why a book and why now?

It's a great question. So I'll break it down. My work as a clinician is really to help people who are struggling in silence. They're going through major life changes, transitions. From the CEO to the refugee. My work at the systems level, um, working with multilateral agencies and federal governments, those are working with systems that are managing through major transformations and change. The book comes in as a vehicle to manage and help all at the individual and at the systems level. Because the through line to all of my work is helping people navigate instability. So what happens when we all want a certain baseline of stability, right? We want control, we like feeling mastery, but then life happens either at the individual level, maybe a family member gets a diagnosis, a medical diagnosis, or at the institutional level, maybe there's a large merger that happens. But on all levels, how do we manage the upending of our lives? And it's pretty messy. So I like to help people tease it apart and make more sense of it. So we do find a sense of groundedness within it.

So instability as a concept. Let's start there. How do you— and there's almost an irony in this question, but I'll ask it anyway. How do you define instability? How do you operationalize it? And is— because I could see a lot of people saying, yes, I feel it. But how do you define it? How do you see it from an expert eye?

Yeah. So we have internal and external sources. So the external are the things we might think about, the event that actually happens, the, the painful event normally. So whether it's, um, a divorce or a job loss, right? That there is an event that happens that shifts our instability. Maybe it's because we wanted it, we created it. Maybe it just happened to us. We have no control over it. But it shakes our sense of self. It disrupts our daily life. And then the internal part is the suffering that can come from that. So if there is, let's say, a job loss, that's just the event, but it's the meaning that we put onto that job loss. It's the things, it's that ticker tape of thoughts that go through our mind of, oh my gosh, there are 300 applicants for this one job, no one's gonna want me, I don't have this experience in this XYZ. And all of those thoughts then lead to our internal suffering. That's another source of instability. So there are two parts to it, the external and the internal.

And one can be short time period or ongoing, the external, right? And then the internal is much more likely to be longitudinal if you carry it, right? Yeah. So of all the topics in the world, why does this one call to you and how does it resonate with you? And I guess I'm asking here as much your origin story to the degree that you're comfortable sharing with that? Because I think that informs very much on a foundational level why this work matters to you, at least from what I've heard.

Sure. I mean, if you were to ask me a couple of decades ago, you know, why I do this work, I would have said it's something around how it's intellectually challenging and gratifying. Right? And, um, and I have a lot of fancy degrees from fancy schools, and so I would have had a very canned approach to that, to answering that question. But I think it actually comes down to, you know, of course, as many things do, our childhood. So I was raised outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and my family had a liquor store. My parents immigrated from South Korea back in the 1970s, um, and many people came and opened up. They're very entrepreneurial, so they had liquor stores, flower shops, grocery stores, um, and so one of the robberies outside of our store, um, went out of control and my father was assaulted and he later died from his injuries. Now, I was 15 years old at the time, and I didn't really have a narrative of what had happened. This was both in my family culture, my community, and just the times. People didn't really talk about these things. Um, I didn't go to therapy. There weren't— there wasn't a lot of discussion around what had happened. So I continued to just do very well in school. I did start working 3 jobs in high school, and But I went to college, medical school, residency, all my post-grad work. And it wasn't until I was in Burundi, which is a small country in, um, in Africa. I was working with former child soldiers on intergenerational stress. This is for my PhD research. And during my third year, one of the former child soldiers I was working with turned on me. And he targeted me for money. And so I had to go into hiding and I eventually left the country. But it was there in hiding where I thought, what is going on? Like, I am an Asian American woman from Baltimore. Why am I now here in hiding for my life from former child soldiers?

Yeah.

And the first thought that landed was, oh my gosh, this is dad. So I had recreated a similar scene of violence that my father had experienced when he had— there, it was an attempted murder for him. And now, you know, almost two decades later, now I was the one who was in a very similar situation, but I would have control over it this time. And when I put all of that together, something clicked about at least the spark, not fueling all of my work, but at least the spark, the initial spark, which has been wondering how do people get through really hard things regardless of the, the experience, the event itself, you know, traumatic ones or not as traumatic, but how do people find a sense of self again? And how do they continue to move forward? And my way was just to over-function and keep working, keep doing. And that tends to work until a certain point, and then that way of coping tends to not work anymore. I think that's how I came to this.

Thank you for sharing that story. It really lays a parallel track to something that we've seen many times in people who practice thought leadership is, and you referred to it as an echo of childhood, but it also can be the piece that you've tried to figure out for yourself because you're like, what is this? What am I experiencing? And you consume, you think, you study, and find everything that you can to understand internal, and then realize at some point, oh, there's value to others as well. And I sometimes think that thought leadership, when you use the word suffering, her pain. You look at books on a shelf, you're looking at a library of people's struggles and challenges on that. What have they tried to understand? And a book is not an easy thing to write. A dissertation is not an easy thing to write. You have to be present. You have to be vulnerable. So you're operating on multiple levels, taking this knowledge. You could have chosen one lane. You could be working at a systems level. You could be writing. You could be speaking. You could be practicing. What calls you to work at multiple levels on this?

Yeah, part of it is, I think it's fun to work on multiple levels. I get a little stir crazy if I'm just at one level. But also, I see the need to this kind of vertical and horizontal spanning, because if I'm working with an individual, well, that individual is shaped by the systems and the culture and the practices around that person. And the same way, if I'm working in the systems level, so let's say, you know, I work for various UN agencies, those one, the agencies themselves are made of people, right? We're all individuals. They're all systems are made of individuals, but also they're the ones who are creating the guidelines, the policies, the structures for large communities and individuals so that they can actually shape people's experience of suffering. So I find the need to work at all levels, um, just because they inform each other. To me, it seems we can't just work at one level.

So let me ask this question. You're working at multiple levels. Can you share a story of impact where the work that you've done at the individual, the organizational level, the global level, people have leaned into an idea and found it useful for them, that they can use it either for themselves or to help others. So I'll leave that open-ended as to which level. But I'd love to hear a story or two.

Yeah. I mean, the one that's just coming to mind, and I have to think more about US-based systems, but this is one that was most recent. A donor came and said they wanted to do something to help children in Ukraine because there's a war going on. So they say, said, great. My concern. In all of my work tends to be the most extreme. Um, and so for children, it's who are the kids that need the most support? And I found in talking to my other colleagues on the ground and different agencies, it's children in occupied— in enemy-occupied territories, oblasts in Ukraine. So if you have children in an occupied territory, they have no access to anything. So humanitarian aid can't get in there. So while a humanitarian organization in of itself can't get in, I, because of my contacts and the people I know, I was able to bring together people from other, all different aspects. So from multilateral agencies to UN to UNICEF to then local community organizations to to all work together and get kind of on-the-ground intel to be able to go in and train up frontline workers who were having a really hard time with children who were, who they were seeing inside these areas. So then we developed this training program for frontline workers that gets then absorbed into the government. Now the government takes it at a systems level And they say, okay, we're gonna span this out. And it starts to shape how people think about children in wartime situations, which tends to be they're victims and, you know, essentially they have no agency and we can't access them. Well, now it's, oh, actually we can access them and we, they don't have to be a generation of traumatized kids. There are actually things we can do. And they don't have to all have a therapist or psychiatrist. These are frontline workers. These are civilian military and fire and police. There's a lot that they can do. And so it starts to shape the way the community thinks about it, but also at the systems level, the way the Ukrainian government starts to think about it. And that changes then what they invest in and the time. And so now they're absorbing this program to go across 5+ oblasts of Ukraine., across Ukraine. So I guess that's one going from kind of individual out to the systems level where it's adopted in, at a larger scale.

And what I hear recurring through that example is also you touched on agency when you were talking about your story in Burundi and finding moments of agency. I hear that of the The same for the first responders, the firefighters, the people who are there. Rather than say, I don't know what to do, equipping them so that they do. Yeah. And they can do good.

Right.

And go ahead. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I, and it's so appropriate for right now in these times because I'm working with a lot of You know, a lot of, um, executive directors of nonprofits and different, you know, CEOs of different institutions who are really struggling with just the constant barrage of changes in workplace and policies and the funding constraints that people are having. And so there's this level of just cognitive fatigue because they're so, you know, our brains can only tolerate so much instability and there's just constant on our social media and our news. We just It's permeating our brains at all times. And I think people get really tired and there's a sense of despair that can start to settle in. And when we feel that, we want to just shut down, like stop listening to the news. We stop hanging out with some people cuz we don't wanna talk about what's going on in the world. But the antidote to despair is not being happy. It's having agency. And when I work in, in countries of political protest or violence, you see people out there, they're not in despair, they're not happy, but they're out there and they're protesting and they're, but they're using their agency to develop and organize. And that to me, I think is, is important for people to recognize that Even though when we're feeling overwhelmed, you know, with all these decisions we have to make, we want to just isolate, shut down, hunker down. It actually makes us feel worse. And the more we can step into, okay, what are the small steps we can do right now to feel our sense of agency? Actually, the better we feel.

And if I step back, you talked about countries dealing with unrest. Certainly. I think about how agency can be both individual and collective in that sense. So my mind went to the Color Revolutions where it's not just one person showing up in the square, it's many. I think about the Yellow Umbrella protest as well, where the Everyday device of an umbrella becomes a signal of shielding identity and also agency. And so what I love about this work, not only for its benefit to the world, but it focuses on agency because I think a lot of ideas and thought leadership are presented as should-dos or must-dos. And not to call BuzzFeed listicle thought leadership, but the one weird trick or the 10 tips. Instead, it's beginning with the agency of the individual. What can I do? And you're serving that agency if I understand what you're explaining. Yeah.

Yeah. And I, I appreciate that because I mean, the book is really a response to this American way of getting through life, which is really focused on our insight and our narrative. Mm-hmm. You know, we're obsessed with our minds and our thoughts, but not everyone needs to go to a therapist when we're going through a hard time. And of course I'm, I'm a therapist. It's very helpful. That's fine. But the book was really to remind people that there are things we can all do, we have accessible to us right now, regardless of one's culture, background, context, we have things that we can lean on, which are these narrative rituals and purpose that we do have agency over.

So you talk narrative rituals, purpose, which from my external ear, makes me think of culture, liminal, liminal spaces, transition. I'm thinking Victor Turner and Van Gennep going back to some of the original sociological work on culture and everybody's practices and culture different, right? We can't approach comparatively. But we can ask questions of what gives you meaning, right? And we can listen.

That's right. And that's across cultures and contexts. When people feel heard and they feel that they matter, um, I think at the end of the day, that's, that's all people want. We heal truly when we have a sense of belonging. And when we feel like we're part of something that's beyond just us, so the relational aspect is the way most communities and people heal around the world. Um, in the US we're going through, of course everyone knows we're going through this loneliness epidemic, but I think it's a paradox of connection. Like we, we all know it's good for us, we all know we need like, but we don't know how to do it. We don't know how to connect.

We're sitting there on our phone scrolling, you know, getting a digital fix rather than going out and going to the park and interacting with people. Yeah. Yeah.

And the social media, it's this false sense of intimacy cuz I can go on there and I see these people and I, it's like I know them, you know, I, it's a parasocial relationship.

Right. And it's one directional. Yeah.

And then we're just left feeling empty. A time.

Let me ask a question, and I'm going to present a couple options, and I'm not gonna say that I'm creating a false dilemma because it's probably a trilemma or more that I'm going to present. Play with the question how you would like. Do you see yourself as a physician first? Researcher and a practitioner who's applying research into the world, when you think about identity and how you approach the work, how do you approach it? And which lens or lenses are you using most?

Hmm. It's a hard one. I would say My identity right now in this moment has changed over time, of course. I would say as an educator, even though I'm not actively— I, I do a professorship, um, and I recently left Harvard a few months ago, but I am not teaching a class or anything right now. But in my work, I'm trying to educate, and I— and that's part of what the book is, that's trying to to educate, to help people find ways of just finding a sense of grounding again. I do a lot of speaking as well, and through the Speaker's Bureau, I do— that feels to me like I'm educating and I'm of service, essentially. And even in my work with patients in clinical care, I think there's a level of education, but that's separate because I'm not teaching them anything. It's more them helping to be interested and curious about themselves.

And this leads— you used the word service. You and I have talked earlier and we had a conversation around, do you see yourself practicing thought leadership? Can you share your initial response on that? Because I remember how you characterized it. So let's start with the initial and then today.

I mean, I— and I don't remember in our conversation, but I do not think of myself as a thought leader. Um, in part, I think everybody is in some ways. We all have thoughts and we are all leaders of our thoughts. But also, I— all of my work has been around service. That's how I'm trained. That's how I'm groomed, especially in healthcare and medicine. It really is around putting other people's needs first, for better or worse, right? We care for and are in service of others. And so I haven't really used the lens of thought leadership. And I spoke to someone maybe 10 years ago around thought leadership And I said, I think I wanna be a thought leader. I'm not really sure what that is, but I think I wanna do it. And she said, you already are. And then I was lost. Then I said, well, I don't know what that is. I don't know what I'm doing. But yeah, but most of my work is, feels when I can be of service, then I know it's resonant for me.

And there's a difference between, you know, it's easy to change your LinkedIn profile and say, Thought later, done, right? The service, the humility, the generosity, the commitment to advocate for an idea, much harder and is an ongoing practice where it takes a lot of work and it has to be something that gives you energy in the morning to do rather than drain you. Because if you're like, oh, from 3 to 5, I'm going to be a thought leader today, that's ridiculous, right? It's got to be wired deeply inside of you that you're willing to explain ideas that you think matter to strangers. And that's a weird calling.

It is. And I think, and I hadn't realized it, that's that's how I would characterize my— I mean, this whole book would've happened whether or not I had a publisher. This was a book that I, I just had to write. So I was writing, this was during the pandemic. I was writing from 11:00 PM after my kids went to bed, and I'd get up at 5:00 AM and write before they woke up. Right. It was just the thing that had to get out there. So yeah, I do think I've had that drive for a while.

Well, and You talked earlier about how one of our responses is to instability is to push hard, right? And that road can lead to burnout. I think about physician burnout, especially in service. I would define thought leadership as a practice of when it's done well from a grounded place of service. However, you've got to balance the same level of energy because if you phone it in, you serve no one, right? And you talk about writing after the kids go to bed and before they get up. When I was writing our book, I'm caregiving for my two parents who are in their 80s, right? Both with memory issues at this point. And so I'm writing evening, or I've been writing evenings and weekends. And trying to juggle that, you know, when Mom stepped over, you know, and needed something, didn't matter where I was in my writing or thoughts, my attention focuses on her, right? And there was a little part of me that said, no, no, no, I'm busy writing. That can wait. I'm fixing the remote batteries till later. Mm-hmm. And you have to step back, right? So you said the book would have happened regardless of a publisher or not. I want to poke there for a minute. Why? Why this book?

Yeah, I, you know, after, after the incident in Burundi where I found myself in hiding, I came back to US and I couldn't continue the work. I thought I would just stop all this humanitarian work and I wanted to write a book then about my experiences, but it was too close and I, I had all these other things I was doing. Um, and so then, you know, 10, 15 years later, now it's during the pandemic and I had young kids. My kids were 3 and 4 during the pandemic. Um, and I'm on a lot of physician women's groups, and before the pandemic came to the US, I was seeing a lot of messages from physicians in Italy and in China talking about this new syndrome. These, and we actually, they put up a Google Doc. I wish I could find it somewhere, but it was a crowdsourcing of these are the vent settings, these are how long you pronate, the kind of the clinical management of this new syndrome. And so I knew early on that it was coming. And, um, and I lost a couple of physician colleagues in the very early days of the pandemic before we had the PPE protective gear. Um, and so I thought, I can't go out like this with my kids. They, they know me just as a mom. They don't know anything about my past work. And I wanted them to learn from all the people that I had met, but also maybe I'm just not a good mom, but it doesn't— my goal is not for my kids to be happy. What I really want for my kids to know is that life's hard. It just is. And that's okay. That's the, the framework is that life is hard, but there are things we can do to get through it and find joy and not lose ourselves. And so the book was really written for them. And there's something about, like you were talking about caretaking and also finding time to write the book. I found it actually is very helpful to have these small moments of time, not hours on end, but this finite period where you have to get something done. It helps the creative process in some ways cuz it forces you to just get it done. Mm-hmm. And so for me it was. That. I was working full-time, taking care of the kids full-time, and also writing the book when they were sleeping. But it fueled me because I thought, I just got to get this out there for them in case something happens to me.

And that's a remarkable motivation. How do my experiences carry on? My story carry on so that others will know and can learn from what I have learned, right? And you talk about something for your kids. You don't want them to be happy. You want them to be ready and equipped for the world, right? And I have a question. May or may not be on point, but as you said, you have Korean heritage, Korean American. Does the concept of Han come into this? And if— I see you smiling. If you could explain that, because you'll probably do better than I would for the listener, and then connect it, I'd love to hear.

Oh, I'm so impressed you know these concepts. Yeah. So Han is a is this word that doesn't really have a definition in the English language, but is essentially that there is pain and suffering in the world, pain and suffering in our communities that we all collectively experience. And it is a deep pain that includes like anguish and anger and despair. And a lot of it came through the Korean War. When many families were put into like concentration camps or prisoners of war. And so there is this sense of helplessness and this deep anger and despair. And so we call it han. But han is almost always, if han is on one side of the hand, on the other side of the hand is zheng. So zheng is this concept of, it's a collective type of healing, actually, where people really— and again, there's not a similar definition, but people take care of each other. So we experience han, the pain and suffering collectively, but also we take care of each other, and we can intuit and just experience each other and understand that we're suffering and also we're there for each other. And so it's Han and Jung go very hand in hand with each other. But it is this premise that we collectively experience suffering and we collectively experience healing and togetherness.

And so I looked at the title of your book. It's a why we suffer, not will we suffer, not if we suffer. But why? And in your explanation of han, as well as, hey, I don't want my kids to strive for happiness necessarily. I want them to be prepared. The suffering in life, and it's hard to compare anyone's suffering laterally to different people. It's just— that's— and maybe you'll disagree— suffering exists, and it's how we respond to it as individuals or communities that make us what we are.

Yes, that's exactly it. That suffering, even though we don't want— it to happen, and we don't, of course, it's hard to embrace it, but suffering is a part of life. And there's, you know, it's an invitation to us all to learn more about ourselves and about others and to connect more with our community, right? This goes back to the agency. We, there are things we can do to use suffering when we're experiencing it.

And as you said, not letting others suffer alone.

Susan, we just, that was one of the biggest things that I had learned because in the, in the US, so many of us think that when we're going through a hard time, we have to deal with it individually. And what I've seen across the world is that healing really happens in relationship.

I think that's a fantastic place to leave the conversation, Suzanne. We could probably talk for hours. I want to thank you for joining us today and wish the best for you and the work that you're doing because the world most definitely needs it.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode. And that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.