The Buena Vida Podcast

Susan Combs: Resilience, Ranching and Public Service

• Lacy Wolff • Season 4 • Episode 5

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Susan Combs shares how her upbringing on a remote West Texas ranch shaped her leadership philosophy and approach to public service, highlighting resilience and optimism as essential qualities for navigating challenges. 

• Growing up in Brewster County taught self-reliance and community support through experiences with limited water, unreliable electricity, and geographical isolation
• As Agriculture Commissioner, transferred school nutrition programs from education to agriculture, prioritizing healthier food options for students
• Developed "early bird" habits from ranch life, viewing punctuality as a sign of respect and efficiency 
• Advocates breaking large tasks into "sprints" to maintain energy and focus
• Recommends four principles for government service: know your purpose, find daily joy, focus externally on those you serve, and maintain calm
• Practices "no negative cha-cha" philosophy to avoid unproductive negativity
• Dedicates retirement to ranch sustainability, water conservation projects, and staying informed about current events
• Defines good life as choosing happiness, connecting positively with others, and having beneficial impact on others


Susan Combs:

If you take on this role, know why you're doing it. Truly, be clear Always look external to you. It's not about you, you, you. It's about them, them, them, people who are, in particular, in ranching. We are inveterate optimists. We can't control the weather. We can't control the market. We control our responses to it.

Lacy Wolff:

Hi everyone and welcome to the Buena Vida podcast, where we explore what it means to live a good life through health, purpose and connection. I'm your host, lacey Wolfe. Today I have the honor of speaking with someone whose legacy in public service runs deep Susan Combs. She is a former Texas Ag Commissioner, former Texas Comptroller, and she also served two terms in the Texas State Legislature. She's also a proud ERS retiree who brings her energy, voice and insight to issues that impact our future. This conversation was a real privilege for me. Susan brings sharp wit, incredible energy and a down-to-earth perspective that's both refreshing and wise. She also shares some great tips for all of us about staying engaged, finding joy in our day-to-day life and protecting the things that matter most to us.

Lacy Wolff:

You may notice that the audio sounds a little bit different. That's because Susan joined us from her ranch in Brewster County, texas, and if you're not familiar with Brewster County, it is way out west. It is the largest county and it's one of the most beautiful counties in our state, home to the Big Bend National Park and Big Bend State Park. We talked quite a bit about that in this episode and you're going to hear how much she treasures this place and the peace and purpose she finds there, from the Texas capital to her own backyard. Susan Combs is someone who believes in putting her values to work, and she is not done yet, so I hope you enjoy our episode and this conversation I had with Susan Combs. Officially welcome to the Buena Vida podcast, susan. Thank you so much for being a guest. It is a huge honor for me to get to spend some time with you and I look forward to our conversation.

Susan Combs:

Well, so do I, and I think it's a wonderful idea that ERS is doing this.

Lacy Wolff:

Thank you so much. Yes, we've tried to be very innovative with the way we're trying to reach people through all the different communication platforms, so I'm very lucky I get to do this part. I wanted to start with talking to you about your childhood. I know that your family has a ranch in Brewster County and I'm wondering if you could paint a picture of what that looked like for you growing up. In going out to Brewster County.

Susan Combs:

Well, my great-grandfather got to Brewster County in 1882, and they had come from San Marcos, and he later moved to San Antonio in 1900, which is where I was raised and went to school. But you always came out to the ranch and my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father all only made a living from cattle A couple of years was sheep, but mainly cattle, and so I was raised that the ranch was, of course, the only source of income that we had, and so it was important that I learned as much as I could about what was important to that, what was different about being out in the country? Well, a couple of things Water. My kids today, in their 40s, still understand that you have to check if you have water for the house, and so as a kid we were always looking at the windmill. Did the windmill turn? If it didn't turn, there was no water being pumped, and water was major electricity. But I was a kid. We didn't have any electrical power, except provided by a generator. My father would go out and turn that off at night, and so I was used to having no power. And, of course, from a rural perspective, health care was a long way away, education was a long way. We were 15 miles south of town, but there were people who were 20 and 30 miles south of town, and to go into town every day was simply not going to happen. My mother wanted to have us at home in San Antonio, but I was the kid out of the two of us that wanted to be on the ranch, and so it was. You know, the water, the power of health, education.

Susan Combs:

But I would say something else that was really impressed upon me, which was that you had to be self-sufficient, and whether your horse broke down or whether your vehicle broke down, you were walking, and it might be miles, and my father and I he was in his early 70s at the time he and I broke down and we had about a five mile walk back in to the headquarters. We had run over some barbed wire and had gotten wrapped around the axle. You've heard the phrase wrapped around the axle. It pulled us to a stop, and so that resilience, that self-reliance. But again, one other thing is that people help each other. You have the best sort of group of people who will lend a hand. You know, dig you out of the proverbial ditch out in the country. And it is still true today. So I would say the things that I thought of when I was eight and 10, I would say, you know, obviously, decades later, it's still what I view as important characteristics of rural Texas.

Lacy Wolff:

Absolutely. I love that part of Texas. It's such a unique place. I think it was interesting. I don't remember where I read this, but it would take you less time to get from New York to Paris than to get from New York to Marfa. So just think about how challenging it is even to get out there, and I mean talk about rural. It is a very special and very unique place in our state.

Susan Combs:

One of the other things is is that if you pay any attention to sort of the dark skies effort, marathon Brewster County is one of the darkest places in the United States and we get people here who really don't know what they've missed, literally, and you turn the lights off in the house and all of a sudden there's this smashing you know ribbon of stuff in the sky and I had somebody from Austin Seville well, you got a big fog up there. I said no, that's the Milky Way. I mean, it truly is. It changes your experience with the world and the skies to be out this far.

Lacy Wolff:

Wow, that is incredible. All of us that live in the city we don't get to experience that. I mean, it is something I think that many kids have probably never actually seen the Milky Way because they don't have that opportunity. So super special place, yes.

Susan Combs:

And the phrase light pollution. It applies all across the hill country revolution. It applies all across the hill country. You're at night in Fredericksburg or you're out of Johnson City, you can see the glow of Marble Falls, or if you look east, you can see the glow of Austin.

Lacy Wolff:

You don't get the same unfiltered, unimpeded view of the stars that you do when you're out in the real dark skies it is a gorgeous place, but I know it definitely comes with its challenges as well, and it sounds like the way you grew up and those things that you experienced, with just lack of resources and getting back to town when your truck breaks down, really does build resilience that has carried you through your life and through your experience in state government, I think people who are, in particular, in ranching.

Susan Combs:

we are inveterate optimists. We can't control the weather, we can't control the market. We can control our responses to it. I mean, I'm still in ranching. I don't have any cattle right now, but I'm paying attention to all the waters, all the roads, all the electrical. I'm trying to work, you know, improve my hunting operation. But the point is is that my father's one of his famous phrases was tomorrow we're one day closer to rain. Those are words to live by and that's how you keep going. It's a kind of a creates a sort of tireless optimism and fuels your ability to stay upright.

Susan Combs:

I was talking to a friend of mine from our fund. He was talking about the drought and we're all, we're all bemoaning the drought, and he's got some things he does. And so if he pastures cattle for somebody, well, he ships them off to somebody else, you know, 200 miles away, because that's where the rain is. And so you become very tactical. This will work. That will work by golly. I've got to go do that. You don't have any real resources except you. You don't have any real resources except you.

Lacy Wolff:

Absolutely, yeah, just constantly looking for what's good. People that come from that part of Texas have to stay optimist. I mean, it's the only way you're going to survive. I know that you started your career in law and you worked in several different roles. What was it that led you to transition from law school into service in state government? Was there a defining moment or a mentor? What guided that decision?

Susan Combs:

There were two things. One was I was actually working in New York at the time and I watched a TV show called Maud, which probably nobody's seen, but it was a defining moment for me. I was 28, and Maude I was expecting a friend of hers from the high school class to fly, you know, coming in and Maude was supposed to be you know, miss everything, and she was, in her own view, sort of you know 40 and fading and not doing anything. Well, bunny, who had been not viewed as a dynamo, she flies in her own airplane and she is rocking and I'm thinking what the heck am I doing here? I'm doing a job that if they buried all my stuff in a time capsule they would think it was nonsense. So I signed up for the LSAT the next day. So this is step number one. I signed up for the LSAT and I said I'm going to change my life and I scrammed for two weeks for the LSAT, the law school admissions test, and then, when I got to law school and then I got out, I ended up being an assistant district attorney in Dallas in the juvenile division.

Susan Combs:

I had it between two categories juvenile delinquents and then the child abuse side, and child abuse was civil and the juvenile delinquents was criminal, and that, about nearly four years, really made me think about, I want to take a look at kids and their education and what happens to them. And when you look at some of these kids who were, you know, juvenile delinquents, their prior history was terrible, their education was awful, they had this childhood that was, by any rational observer, was pretty bleak, and so their future didn't look too shiny. And you, you know, it occurred to me also that basically, most policies are created by a governmental entity, whether it's a school or whether it's a city or a county or a state. Unless you're in some kind of group, there's people making, making things happen, and so I thought, maybe, maybe I could help make things happen for kids and for education. And so that was those two things even deciding to go to law school and then deciding what to do, those are the two things that got me thinking about government role.

Lacy Wolff:

Wow, it's so interesting to me to hear your story and the things that influenced you and really shaped so much of what you did, shaped a lot of things that are happening today, role in shaping the health of Texans, and I don't think we always connect the dots between the Department of Agriculture and Health and you know, in my role at ERS, I'm very concerned about health and well-being. But how do you view that connection between ag and the health of our children and the health of our state?

Susan Combs:

So when I was handling some of these neglect cases, what I had cases was called failure to thrive Children were being neglected, they weren't being fed and so they were failing to thrive. Well, I was seeing at the department that we were in fact in some cases feeding the kids such garbage in schools that we were overfeeding them. Well, at the time, the Department of Agriculture had nothing to do with it. It was in fact being managed. The school lunch program, which is federal, was being managed by the Texas Education Agency and the governor, rick Perry, and I had multiple chats about this. He was very interested and so we decided together we would see if the folks in Washington would allow us, they would help us transfer the child nutrition program from the education folks to the ag folks. And that was me, and I felt that I had the intestinal fortitude to withstand slings and arrows. And so that happened in July of 2003. And that was like the shot heard around the world. I mean, it was. You know, I didn't really know about emails until I got a thousand of them. Wow, not 20, 22 years ago.

Susan Combs:

But what we did was we tried really hard to make a concerted effort If these kids were in our I say our meaning the state or you know care, custody control during the daytime for meals. Let's give them good stuff to eat and let's minimize the junk food and let's stop having schools use the kids as ATMs. Basically, they were selling candy all during the day in order to make money. So what I did was I had we had a great marketing head. She was putting out materials on how you could raise money for your schools and not buy food. I mean, it was. It's so ingrained and Lacey. I'm not sure it's changed much, but I will tell you we made an effort and I heard from the candy people they were not happy. The pizza people were great. They changed their pizza makeup to make it healthier because Texas was such a big market that if they made Texas happy they would be successful in other states. So that was that's a long time ago. That was 22 years ago.

Lacy Wolff:

It's incredible. You're really on the forefront of a lot of the things we're still working on improving the health of our students. It's an ongoing battle for sure, but you made some great inroads there, it sounds like. But anytime we make a change like that, it's going to upset some people also it.

Susan Combs:

I also in a parallel track, lacy, I said let's take a look at where your food comes from. I wanted to you clearly delineate the link between the men and women on the land, whether they were farming or ranching. They were producing something that we were eating, and so there was a connection. It wasn't the grocery store. Kids, you know kids sometimes in big cities thought that milk came from chickens. That sounds nutty. But one little kid did say that it'd be used in a livestock show some years ago. And so educate them where their food came from, because if you become an interested consumer, you're going to pay attention to what you eat.

Lacy Wolff:

Absolutely. Yeah, I grew up on a dairy farm. I think a lot of people have no idea and I hear all kinds of crazy things about dairy farming, like there's antibiotics in the milk. I can guarantee you there's not All my kids are tall.

Susan Combs:

I raised them with lots and lots of milk and in fact I would be bringing so many gallons of milk home. It was actually kind of a kind of hard work to unload the car. But the point is, every parent you struggle to feed your kid right? Sometimes it's a matter of you know, give a food desert. That's a phrase you've probably heard. Can you get good food? Well, you may not be able to. It may be really tough in the child abuse arena. Able to. It may be really tough in the child abuse arena. It was really shocking to me to see how hard it was for these families in Dallas to get food that was healthy, and they did try.

Lacy Wolff:

Yeah, people want to be healthy. I truly believe that everybody wants to give their kids good food. There is a lack of education, sometimes there's a lack of resources, funding, and it's just not in the stores that are in front of your face.

Susan Combs:

A lot of sugar.

Lacy Wolff:

A lot of sugar, absolutely Well, the food companies know what sells and I think that's the challenge we face is it tastes good and you know we get early addicted to those foods and it's hard to unwire what has been wired into our brain.

Susan Combs:

Well, it's very hard. As a parent, and my kids certainly knew, I did not have junk food at home, I did not have soft drinks, so therefore they didn't get it hardwired and I didn't buy sugar pops and that stuff. I didn't buy any of that. I didn't want to give them a sugar craving because they could develop it later. But at 18 or 20 or 15, that's their problem, right? But two and five and seven, it's mine.

Lacy Wolff:

Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny. I have a 16 year old and I buy three gallons of milk. He just drinks huge glasses of milk because that's what we have. We got milk, you got water. What do you want? Well, it has been said that you are known for being the always early person. I've talked to a few people who know you from your time in state government. How did you develop that habit? Why is that important and how did that impact your life, your career?

Susan Combs:

Well, ok, if you it started on the ranch. I mean, you're always doing stuff before daylight and if you're getting ready to ship cattle, you've got to get to the pens early so that you're not causing a disturbance as they bring them in. You don't want to be running around arriving late, so you want to be there and you want to be quiet. So I mean, I remember lots of times I was way there before daylight, so if I wasn't in the pasture with them I was in the pens waiting, and so that was one that just taught me early. Plus, I'm also an early riser and my energy level is super high. An early riser and my energy level is super high.

Susan Combs:

And the third thing is, I think if you're not early or late, it's a matter of respect. I know of a couple of people who were so notoriously late for meetings that it became kind of a sour joke a will give him or her a different time. You don't want to do that to people. It's a sign of, it's a sign of discourtesy if you're not there on time. Also, everybody's got a compressed time schedule and so if you start your meeting on time, if you're on time, you're letting them know you want to, everybody wants to hear from everybody, and you don't want to make a wait for some somebody. So I think it's a it's a matter of efficiency and courtesy and I think I I do it now. I mean people left. Hey, she's. She wasn't the first one here. I beat her by two minutes. Good, let's start that content.

Lacy Wolff:

I love that. That's so great. Yeah, I. I had a friend that several years ago was actually a boss of mine that she said if you are late, you're, if you are late you're telling me my time doesn't matter. And that really stuck.

Susan Combs:

That's the discourtesy part. Plus, it's also inefficient.

Lacy Wolff:

That makes so much sense and I'm sure that has served you well, it sounds like through your career. Are you a morning person? Do you get up early?

Susan Combs:

Oh yeah, I mean this morning I was up at about 3.15 reading the newspapers.

Lacy Wolff:

Wow, and so you go to bed early.

Susan Combs:

I'm going to guess as well, I also find that my energy level is so high. So I was when I was sworn in as agriculture commissioner. The governor swore me in and he read a line that I guess his speechwriter had written for me. It said Susan Combs is a woman of high energy. She even makes coffee nervous. So people beg me not to have you get little mugsugs. Please don't give her any more coffee. No more coffee. So but I'm. But I feel charged, I feel positive, I feel alert. It's a very good sort of biofeedback that's great.

Lacy Wolff:

yeah, and knowing your energy levels, I think, is really important. So many people, I think we're trying to just fit things in where it works. But if you're for me, if I don't do some sort of exercise in the morning, I'm not going to do it Like I just know that my that's the way my biology works as well.

Susan Combs:

So I also find that people get bummed out if they think, oh my goodness, this task is going to take forever. I was when I was in DC working. I had to try to figure out a way to improve some HR policies, and it's a big task and we had over about a thousand and five of these things and it was like it was such a big hill oh my gosh, how can we take a look at it? And so I said let's not work on this for longer than 45 days. I call these things sprints. So this group of about 12 people, 14 people they came back in 35 days. Instead of giving me a 15% reduction in policies, they gave me 52%. Wow, their energy was high, their focus was high, the end was in sight Wasn't going to go on into eternity. And so I now. I hate cleaning the garage. I give myself 20 minute sprints to work on the garage.

Lacy Wolff:

That's a great strategy, yeah, one drawer at a time, one section at a time.

Susan Combs:

Or in the pantry. The pantry gets out of control. So 20 minutes.

Lacy Wolff:

Yeah, that is great strategy. I love that. And yeah, because if you put too much pressure and you make it too big, it just gets overwhelming.

Susan Combs:

Yes, it is, and it's discouraging For sure.

Lacy Wolff:

Well, there's a lot going on right now, as you are fully aware, with state government and just generally. I think things can be really challenging for folks that are working in government. Challenging for folks that are working in government. Curious. If you could go back and give your younger self, maybe starting out in state government, or folks that are working starting out a career in service, what would you tell them? What would you tell yourself?

Susan Combs:

I would say a couple of things. Let's see if you take on this role. Know why you're doing it. Truly, be clear and keep, if you have to, you know, put a piece of paper on your computer screen, keep yourself focused. Secondly, try to find something fun every day. I used to I had when I was in the legislature I had all of Jack Handy's books, just because they were such good jokes, and if I was getting a little fatigued or a little well, I'd go look at a Jack Handy thing. So, know what you're doing, know why you're doing it. Why do you think? And then the thirdly is I would say always look external to you. It's not about you, you, you, it's about them. Them them external to you. It's not about you, you, you, it's about them. Them them and keep the person you're trying to help or the process you're trying to improve, keep the prospective beneficiaries in your horizon. And then last, try to be calm.

Susan Combs:

I think that social media has a way of just revving everybody up and it's not good for you health-wise, your blood pressure, whatever, to be revved up all the time. And I had a cousin who had a great phrase that she told me about 10 or 12 years ago. She was fighting a very serious, serious illness, but her phrase was no negative cha-cha and what that meant was no negative garbage, no negative nothing. Just don't listen to it. So I wrote N-N-C-C no negative cha-cha. I could put that on a pad of paper in a meeting, and NNCC meant I wasn't going to engage in negativity, I wasn't going to listen to it, and it has. It enabled me to sail into calmer waters.

Lacy Wolff:

So that is amazing advice Remember your why, have fun like have humor, Remember who you serve I love that and keep the negativity out. I took social media off my phone a couple of weeks ago. I just took it off and I tell you what that's been a great decision. I'm so much happier. I'm so much happier.

Susan Combs:

I'm lucky enough to be in a little group of five of us and they send these really stupid things around in the morning. El Arroyo, it has some great signs, so they'll send those out, and one of them is a diehard Aggie and he's got access to this. You know great group of people. He's one of eight kids, but great people and it just it brightens our day. And so, whatever your task is, make the task your focus, not you, but also keep your blood pressure down, keep the temperature down, chill out. You'll be more effective.

Lacy Wolff:

Yes, that's it. I think you are 100% correct and there's probably it is an art to be able to do that. Do you have any suggestions on how to keep our blood pressure down?

Susan Combs:

So I do, and this, this sounds really dumb. I learned to do this about seven or eight years ago and I used it recently out at a meeting in Marfa. So we would have these soon-to-be contentious meetings on Friday afternoon and I had I was, I would be seated along with others at a conference table and you'd have group A not liking what group B was doing and group B was bowing up, as we would say, on the ranch, kind of like an old bull bowing up, and group C, and so I ended up buying a whole bunch. This is not advisable if you don't like candy. But anyway, I got these Kit Kats and I would slide them down the table and it was like I had dropped a bomb at the table. People would stop, they would start laughing because they knew it meant I was saying hey guys, you're getting out of control. Tiny little Kit Kats I'm not shilling for the Kit Kat people, but tiny little Kit Kats, anything to break catch anything to break the tension.

Lacy Wolff:

That's great. I love that, yeah, and humor, I mean, it's such a great resiliency skill just to be able to. You know, sometimes we got to just pause and, like you said, find the jack handy.

Susan Combs:

Well, one thing that I did find useful was the. Well, one thing that I did find useful was the. I don't have much of a Southern accent. I have some, but not much, and when.

Lacy Wolff:

I would go to DC.

Susan Combs:

If there was somebody just being a turkey, real turkey I would develop this Dolly Parton style accent. One sentence would do it. They would all back up as though I turned into some creature from the black lagoon or something, and it was hilarious. They knew what I mean. Cut it out, stop it. Whatever you're doing, stop it. And that was a form of humor, because we people in the south are real smart and we people in Texas are real smart. But when we use that thick accent, it sends a signal.

Lacy Wolff:

Being authentic in who you are.

Susan Combs:

Yes, but everybody can, everybody can.

Lacy Wolff:

We're definitely happier when we are who we are at work, and I think sometimes we have to have a little bit of a filter and having a filter can be authentic.

Susan Combs:

That's true.

Lacy Wolff:

That is true. Since you have retired, it sounds like you stay very busy. How do you fill your days now and what drives you to continue staying so active in your retirement?

Susan Combs:

Well, I'm spending a lot of time focusing on the ranch. By that I mean, I go back to the water. We just yesterday had to have some folks from Fort Stockton down because we didn't have water someplace and we have electricity. So the things that were a problem 50 years ago, or my father 80 years ago, are still a problem. I'm trying to make those better. I'm trying to make the water distribution good.

Susan Combs:

It's very hot, very dry, the humidity is terrible and the two creeks that I'm near I have kind of dried up, and so you take a look at what do I do? So that's thinking about that environment and thinking about you know how can I leave my kids to not have things in a complete mess? So that's something I'll worry about. I've also been helping to talk to some people about a living shoreline project along the coast. You can't get much further from the Big Bend in the coast but there's some really interesting projects going along sort of all up and down outside Harris County living shorelines where you can use oyster sediment it stores a lot of carbon but oyster shells and you can end up with being able to combat storm surges. So you don't lose beaches, you don't lose land. That's interesting to me, some stuff related to energy.

Susan Combs:

How do we get energy everywhere? How do we get water everywhere? I mean, water issue is big and the legislature right now is spending a lot of time thinking about water. Water is the essential thing for life, along with air, and you've got people. If they become water short, that's huge and I would urge everybody to pay attention to your sources of water. Do you conserve water? Are you able to sort of, you know, manage your water? We ended up putting in a fake grass out here on the ranch because I I can't waste water I mean, this is the desert, can't do it.

Susan Combs:

And and if I lose my windmill, I'm up. I'm not up the creek because the creek doesn't have any water, I'm out of water, I have no creek and the creek. So we pay a lot of attention to that. But I try to do things that are interesting and stimulating and so I read a lot. I mean, you know, I read the Wall Street Journal, I read the New York Times, I scan the LA Times, washington Post, I read Apple News. I want to know what's going on, and I think that I will have more interesting conversations and learn more from other people if I also know a little something.

Lacy Wolff:

Yes, absolutely. That's fun. That's amazing. I aspire to be like you as a retiree. I love how you're spending your time and energy on things that matter it's really important things that impact our future.

Susan Combs:

And there's my kids and grandkids. They're all in Austin and I'm trying to figure out how I can be woven into their summer plans, and so I'm, you know, being sure that my husband and I will be available to do stuff and see them, and I prefer to do it in, you know, like a weekend. I think you get more good contact than in a couple of hour visit, but I'll take what I can get and so it's just, it's just part of that. I want them to have a good sense of their, their privilege to be able to come out to a place with vast skies and and great stars. They're, they're lucky, and I urge everybody in a town drive out 40 miles, 50 miles, just go someplace or go look online, but the world around you is so, so exciting and so stimulating.

Lacy Wolff:

Yeah, just experience it. Yep, Yep. I just love when I get out of the Austin area. Just, you know, 45 minutes out, like you said, texas becomes just open and it's. It's so lovely just to get out and get away from the traffic and to and right now, to see the blue bonnets.

Susan Combs:

It's a beautiful thing the flowers and the pastures. We'll when drive back to australia, we'll come across 290 and I will tell you. You start from i-10 and you get to harper and then you get into, which is beautiful the flowers. If they've had enough rain, they haven't had it yet, but sometimes it is breathtaking, uh, and all the way in, and so it's just, it's ever changing. Just keep going out and refreshing your memory bank.

Lacy Wolff:

That's a great tip. Absolutely Well, susan. I always like to ask this question to wrap up the podcast and the name of our podcast, the name of our well-being program, is Buena Vida, which means the good life, and we believe at ERS that a good life can be very different for everyone. What is a good life to you? How do you define it? Personally, professionally, what does it mean?

Susan Combs:

I think about three or four things. One is you need to try to choose happiness. I think it's got to be a choice. If you're happy, you're going to be leaning towards a good life. I think you know. Try to connect in a positive way with people and be a positive effect in their lives. Face outwards, I think if you are externally faced you'll have a better life. And you know, come back to the no negative cha-cha, but I would say I like to believe at least once a week, at least once a week, I somehow have a positive effect on somebody. And it may be that a friend of mine was having an issue with some health insurance and I gave her some advice on what she should do and she solved it and so she called the thing. I mean that's, I was thrilled. But every, every day and as often as we can, try to do something that helps you leave somebody better off.

Lacy Wolff:

Well, susan, you have lived an incredible life of service and I love what you're doing in retirement and just everything you said today has been just full of. You've said so many things, so many nuggets of wisdom that I think we can all take with us and that may support other people living a good life. So thank you so much for your time, for your service in the state. All you did to you know, improve the health and well-being of Texans everywhere.

Susan Combs:

Well, thank you, and I'm so glad that ERS does this. I think any helpful tools that we can give people about you know their life journey, their health journey I just think it's great, and so thank you all for doing life journey, their health journey. I just think it's great, and so thank you all for doing it.

Lacy Wolff:

Absolutely All right. Thank you so much for tuning in for this special episode of the Buena Vida podcast. It was a true honor to sit down with Susan Combs, a bold voice in Texas history and a vibrant advocate for public service and purpose. I hope her stories and wisdom from Brewster County and beyond inspired you as much as they did me. Stay tuned for our next episode that's going to be dropping in mid-May, featuring Dr Toprani, a pelvic floor therapist with Hinge Health. This is going to be a part of our special series in celebration of Women's Health Month, and you will not want to miss that one. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, share and subscribe and help us spread the good life, one conversation at a time. Take care everyone.