Do you want to develop your leadership skills? You’ll want to check out Dr. Tracey Jones’ book entitled A Message to Millenials. It’s a guidebook for individuals who want to develop their leadership skills. In this episode, Dr. Tracey comes in as a guest in Sania Jamil’s podcast The Journey to Success. Dr. Tracey shares with Sania about how the books you read, the people you meet, and your positive emotionality, help to hone your leadership skills. If you want a glimpse of the abundant wisdom you’ll read in A Message to Millenials, then this episode’s for you. Remember, the only person that's responsible for your personal development is you. So tune in!
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A Message To Millennials By Tracey Jones
I will be with Tracey Jones. I'm so excited to introduce her. She has a new book out called A Message to Millennials, which is an amazing legacy piece. I cannot wait to dive into the topic of this book. As for the radio station, if you would like to learn more, you can add JourneyToSuccessRadio.com. Welcome, Tracey. How are you?
I'm tremendous, Sania. It's so nice to be interviewed by you. I'm thrilled.
It is so nice to get a chance to learn a little bit more about you and to get a chance to discuss this. One thing that resonated with me was you talk about being an author that discusses running a business as a second generation. That is 100% my experience as well, too. I own a couple of preschools that my family started. Where I'm at is taking what they have built and taking it to the next level. Tell me a little bit more about your background, what you do with your family and what your expertise is in.
Growing up, my father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones was a motivational speaker and salesman like you have never seen before. He has an incredible personality. He would take me to meetings when I was younger. I would sit and I would listen to people like Zig Ziglar, Ken Blanchard and Brian Tracy. At a very early age, I was exposed to great people and great books. He let me know that in life, I needed to go out. He used to say this word to me, "Tracey, you need to go earn your own stripes."
What he meant was that you can't be truly successful riding somebody else's coattails. You are a legacy lady, too. We built on what people have created for us but we also have to take it and make it our own. I was sitting here watching all these speakers even as a young girl and I thought, "These guys have gone out. They are not just talking about their lives but they have gone out and accomplish things." They have fulfilled their journey to success and sharing with others how they came to be successful.
I was always well aware of this. When I graduated from high school I said, "I'm going to go earn my own stripes." To me, I joined the Air Force. I went to the Air Force Academy. I lived all over the world for twelve years. It was incredible. I was part of the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian War and got to work on fighter jets. It was an amazing leadership and journey to success. After that, I went into the world of high tech.
I moved to Austin, Texas as a project manager working for a Fortune 100 company. I cut my teeth in the business world. I moved to St. Louis where I worked in several defense contracting jobs and working for the Federal government. I enjoyed further honing my operational skills. Dad said, "Grow your experience bag. The more experiences you can get, the better it is." I also in the back of my mind knew there would probably be a day that I would be able to come back and pick up what he had started after I had learned all these things on my own.
In 2008, he passed away. I went home. Three months later, that was the time that I decided, "I'm going to come on back and pick up this legacy piece." Sania, I wasn't sure to talk about a journey to success entails a lot of journey of uncertainty. I wasn't sure what I was going to be able to do. Our skillsets were very different. We both had a lot of rich experiences but we were gifted differently but I so respected what he did. I came back at the beginning of 2009 and here we are years later. Thanks to the support of incredible groups of people, fans and the grace of God. I'm continuing on what he's doing.
Tracey, it does sound like no matter what you did, what industry, what time you put, you are all into it. You sound extremely positive about every aspect of your journey. Sometimes you will talk to people. They will talk about a time in their life where they were like, "It was something that I did but I wasn't fully invested." It seems to me that no matter, which direction you ever win in your life, the first and foremost thing that I'm picking up is how invested you were in it.
I'm so glad you said that, Sania. The book talks about the two greatest things for anybody going out. For the Millennials reading, I'm a Baby Boomer. When I was in my twenties, this is what people told me. "No matter what it is, it doesn't matter if it's your dream job or it's not the job. It's what you put into the job." You make the job your dream job by bringing it to the table. I knew that I wasn't going to be in these jobs for a career but I knew as long as I was in them, I was going to give it my all, leave the organization better than when I came, try, and gain all the experiences I can, even if they were horrible.
As I said, the bad bosses teach you three times as much as the good ones. Just because you are in like, "This doesn’t exist." There are still seeds of greatness in there, especially in difficult situations. The second point is you talked about being adaptable. A psychologist will say that is the greatest personality trait that will guarantee you success in life. It's a term called extroversion. It doesn't mean that you are an extrovert because there are a lot of introverts that had it. Lincoln would be a prime example.
Extroversion means that you have a positive emotionality. It's not just fluff. It's not just positive thinkers, the secret or new age. It is a fact that psychologists are appointed. It’s called extroversion. What it means is that you can take the negatives in life and turn them into positive experiences. When I was young, in my twenties, life was one big pageant of wonderful successes.
You start going through life and you realize, "There are a lot of unexpected things that happened and probably 50% of what I went through in life, worked out how I wanted and the other 50% was not so good." They call it an adaptive capacity or a redemptive regenerative personality. You can take the things that beat you up. You can turn that and make them upbeat. That's why if you can master that, the younger you are, no matter what you go through in life, you are going to come out on top of things and a better, richer, more compassionate and smarter human being as a result of it.
A Message to Millennials: What Your Parents Didn't Tell You and Your Employer Needs You to Know
I have seen it in my own life at several points. For a lot of my life, I'm a glass-half-empty kind of personality. I do think so but it was when I started diving into self-development and personal development, reading and literature. That's when the view started changing. I will be very honest. Sometimes I fall back into it but I'm trying to flex that skill as a muscle. I'm curious. Do you think it's something a person is born with? Do you think that this is something a person can develop? If they go about developing it, how do you recommend or what would you recommend to build this muscle up?
I'm working on my Doctorate. We had a class in personality development. Three things make us who we are and the fullness of it. One is nature. Genetically, how we are coded. I was coded as an extroverted, positive person. I drew that DNA from my father. The next thing is nurture. It's how you are raised. You heard a little bit about the things that went into making me. I had my needs met. I was challenged. I was not coddled or doted on but I was told to work hard because something special was in store for me.
These things made me put the biggest factor psychologists are saying because otherwise, if you had a bad set of parents or you genetically did not have some challenges, then life would be not worth it but they are saying now that your environmental factors. You develop your leadership personality and your persona throughout your entire life well into your 60s and I have seen people doing it in their 70s and 80s.
It is about the books you read and the people that you meet. With your positive emotionality, you hit the nail on the head. That is like a muscle. Your mind and how you program it is a muscle just like any other muscle in our body. The more you infuse it with positivity and starve out the negative, the stinking thinking, the negative habits, they die off and you start programming in your mind these new lines of thinking. There are all kinds of neuroplasticity and mental regeneration. There are all kinds of science backing up that you can retrain your brain. I have changed in the past years since I have been back.
For the readers, it is within your realm and the one key thing is, do you want it? Everybody in the world needs personal development because we are people, humans, a work in progress. Science tells us, the Second Law of Thermodynamics that we are all decaying. The negativity creeps in. It is a constant nonstop day in and day out fight to keep great things in your mind because the more greatness it flows in, the more greatness pours out.
The trick is, Sania, not everybody wants it. Unless you want it, no matter what I do for you and tell you all the answers in the world there are in, if you would read this book, you have to want to take it, digest it, put it in your heart and live it out. Not just hear it and think somehow magically things are going to change. That's the main thing. For people that are reading and serious about it, I cannot tell you enough that you can make this transition. I am positive.
Sania, I was in two prisons, State Correctional Institutes, doing a book discussion. We read A Message to Millennials, Napoleon Hill and all kinds of personal development books. Some of these gentlemen are in there for life. Guess what they are doing. They are reading these books and transforming their personality. They are realizing that they still have self-worth and can be leaders within the community that they are in.
When you see that kind of redemption and regeneration, if they can get it, they would love to be able to be in the outside world and apply it. Maybe some will but most won't. Here, we have every opportunity in the world to continue to develop ourselves and pour it back out. Don't worry if you don't feel it. You will. It's like anything else. You start slowly, with little bits, 5 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day. Go to a meeting. Read this show and you are going to see it's going to start to take. It's like starting at the gym. It's hard at first but I'm sure you like it now. You can't go a day without it.
You are retraining your mind entirely. That's what began for me toward the end of college when I started diving into the world of personal development. I did not tell you how weekly things changed. Things fell into place and it was as if the universe was trying to tell me, "You are ready now." The worst thing happened that I could have ever imagined and then they turned out to be the best things that I could have ever hoped for.
I remember reading a quote. I'm maybe misquoting it but it says, "You have to realize that life is happening for you, not to you." When you start thinking that everything is designed to take you a step further in the direction that you choose and you can start to shift your view, that's when the magic happens. Going back to a few of the points you said, first off, congratulations. I know that you are getting your Honorary Doctorate. I wanted to take a moment to congratulate you on that.
Thank you. I'm so excited. As I said to the readers beforehand, my father got one from the same institution, Central Penn College, years ago. There's a leadership library there on the campus in his honor. I'm pretty hyped up.
I see the excitement in your voice. It's a huge and high honor. I know your father must be smiling down from heaven that his baby girl is following in his footsteps, has burned her own stripes and is carrying on his legacy, which is such an act of love. I can hear so much love in your voice when you talk to me about your father. Can you please tell me a little bit more about him? What was his story? Can you talk to us about how he became the man that he was, to get this library dedicated in his honor and everything he's built? Please talk to me a little bit about that.
I learned that redemptive capacity, not only because of my faith but because that is the root of what I believe. We are also broken but we are new creatures. I watched my father who grew up in the depression in Alabama to poverty and a broken family. He did reopen his relationship with his mother years later but it was difficult. They had no money. There were five kids born in five years. It was the Deep South back in the late '20s. Times were tough.
That did not mean anything to my father. He had this positive emotionality built-in. He had a drive that he was not going to let stop. Carnegie wrote about the Advantages of Poverty. When you don't have a lot and when you are young, number one, a lot of times you don't realize it but you understand the value in work. That's what my father had. He learned early on that any job, no matter what, no matter how much you’ve got paid was a privilege.
He developed that unbelievable push, drive and work ethic, and where he was is not out of jealousy or bitterness like, "How come these other kids have it and I don't have it?" He was aware of it but that didn't factor and it didn't make him angry, hostile, mad about anything or shame. He was just out there. He is in the eighth grade, working a couple of jobs. He was so tired. He didn't pass his classes. He flunked out of school in the eighth grade but he went on to become 1 of the 25 legends of personal development.
Message To Millennials: A journey to success entails a lot of uncertainty.
He was embarrassed but he worked hard. He worked a series of jobs. He wound up in Lancaster. He took a job in the insurance field with Mutual of New York. There, he found great men that discipled, taught and mentored him. He met my mother. He found a great professional experience. He found the love of his life partner, my mother in Lancaster and he found Christ. He had these wonderful Christian businessmen surrounding him.
It's all about your community edifying him and giving him opportunities. He took every opportunity to the health. He built this business. I talk a little bit about how big it got A Message to Millennials. He branched off in his early 40s to form a company called Life Management Services, where he shared with people on his own, the experiences that he learned through raising the six kids and the life insurance business.
He wrote Life is Tremendous years ago. That's sold over four million copies and people are still buying it. A Message to Millennials has a portion of Life is Tremendous in it. His tagline was, "Enthusiasm makes a difference." No matter what happens to you in life, you have God in your heart, you have value and you are worth something. Your response is what dictates the outcome, not the event itself. I learned that over and over again. Whenever I get upset I'm like, "Stop thumb sucking. Do something about it. This is meant to break you down to build you up." I had a healthy relationship with failure, risk and adversity. I was those punching bags that get punched but pops right back up. I learned that early on from him.
First of all, I wish I had gotten an opportunity to meet him. He sounds amazing. I cannot help but make the parallel to my own father who started to work in school but couldn't find a single job in his field. He too got into insurance with nothing. He had to make it work. That's how he started his business empire as well. For me, he said the same thing, "Positivity, enthusiasm and it does not matter how much you fail."
A little bit about my background with this is that I branched out for the first time away from my family business. I said, "I'm going to do something for myself." Phenomenal things began to happen in a year but one year later I realized, "This is not the path I want to continue. I have money. I have a lot of things going for me with this but it's not something that I feel is making me 100% happy and healthy."
I was talking to him about it. I was so scared to tell him because I thought he was going to tell me, "You failed with this initial idea." Mostly, I was going to be pivoting a little bit. Not shutting down this business totally, just a slight pivot. He said, "You are not failing. You are succeeding because you are fully clarifying what you want out of life in your quest for that."
He kept hitting it home about all the times that things hadn't worked out for him but what he extracted from those moments is what allowed him to do what he was doing in the future. You and I grew up with very similar backgrounds that I can appreciate that figure in your life so much through my personal experiences.
I tell people, "Here are the three steps." You have learned these years earlier than it took me but clarity and the crises in life embrace them. That means life is getting your attention or you are holding on to something that you need to let go of. Embrace the crisis and the chaos. Number two, sequence your action steps. If you get them out of order, you are going to have a lot of misfires and false starts. Number three, you make it second nature.
I love that you said it's a slight pivot. A lot of people in life are like, "If I go this, then I can't do this." I am all about the blend. I have dogs that write children's books and go into preschools. I do prison ministry. I write, speak, go to school. I'm in the township. I speak to that. Why do you have to segment your life? Why can't you blend the things that you love into what makes you uniquely you?
Everybody gets real hyper about, "If I do this, I can't do this." Why can't you do it? When I’ve first got back to run the business, people were trying to advise me, "What's your main focus? Do you want to write, speak or run a business?" I'm like, "I want to do them all." I understand what they are saying. I need to get clarity on what's going to take priority but I want to do them all. I am doing them all.
It's important to realize that sometimes we think we have to give up something to gain something. Perhaps, there's a way that you can blend them if they are congruent or there's a synergy type of thing going on. I love that. It's a thing. People act like with change, "It's going to be so radical." Change one little tiny thing at a time. It's like steering a ship. You are not going to yank it, drop anchor and reverse course, just start realigning. You are going to be there before you know it.
You have to be very clear about what your end goal is. For me, I never ever had been focused on money as the end goal. However, sometimes you get confused. This was my experience. I'm pretty young. I'm only 26. You start to see an associate of people who are high players with wealth or maybe even entrepreneurs who are preaching, "Hustle and grinds until you die." You start to feel like you need to be doing these things or you need to be after these things.
When you are creating your environment, you have to also be very careful that it is also a true reflection of what you want your outcome to look like. If not, then the environment can start to play against you. You might start to think that you have to be a certain way or do certain things. You start to live life trying to compare to others versus being true to yourself. All of these things are important. I want to hammer into your book A Message to Millennials because I am 100% your audience. Tell me. What are the central thesis and main takeaways from your book?
The central thesis is I wrote this because many tremendous motivated Millennials had said to me, "Tracey, I want to be a leader. How do I become a leader?" That's why I wrote this book. The road to becoming a tremendous leader is rooted in the years of you being a tremendous follower. That is the more you can help. It's trying to jump from elementary school to high school. Followership is not a dirty word. You learn so much.
Message To Millennials: Extroversion means you can take the negatives in life and turn them into positive experiences.
Even if you are such an entrepreneurial spirit, you need to learn how businesses are run and how you handle people. You need to get some seasoning to become more self-aware, self-discipline and self-regulate. That doesn't happen automatically. That's something that happens with age, wisdom and discernment. The book's main takeaway is leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. You are going to be coming new into an organization or starting they are what we call green behind the ears.
When I graduated from the Air Force Academy, I was a Second Lieutenant. Even though I was an officer, I knew for the next four years as a Lieutenant, I was at the lowest level. That meant I was to spend my time watching and learning so when I’ve got up to be a mid-level officer, I would have some experience. I would have done something that I could weigh in on and say, "In my experience."
It teaches the Millennials how no matter where they go, where they wind up, how to position themselves for greater things, how to support an authentic boss and how to stay motivated. Mainly, the only person that's responsible for your personal development is you. If you are blessed enough to have a superior or somebody in your life that looks to you and helps you, that's great but don't wait for that. That's what the core of it is.
No one else can get into your mind for you to shape your thoughts and that's what this comes down to. The central thesis of your book is one that I haven't heard before. I almost feel like an oxymoron that you would not have expected that what you are going to be talking about in a leadership book will be rooted in being a follower.
People think that might almost be a dirty word. "I don't want to follow anyone. I want to strike out on my own path." It's phenomenal to see the impact of not reinventing the wheel if it's already doing great. It's learning from others, what they have done and where they come from. Once you learn the rules, then you can break them. You can't quite break the rules if you don't know them yet. That's something that a lot of people know and not just Millennials. Anyone can truly benefit from it.
It's a message to Millennials but these are the life universals. I have my dad's input on that. I have my input. There's a 30-year spread there. The main thing is as I was working back in the business, I have had so many successful businessmen. They are 60, 70 and 80. They say to me when they were the Millennial age in their 20s and early 30s, somebody came into their life, told them something and pointed something out. They gave them some constructive feedback or gave them a book.
It takes somebody pouring into you to share these things with you because they are not intuitive. It sounds like a paradox. Leadership is all about paradoxes. The Bible even says for servant leadership, "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." I thought the top dog was the top dog. That's not it at all. We talk about leadership and I'm getting a doctorate in leadership. I'm like, "The only way we are going to get better leaders and more of them is to focus on growing exemplary followers because that's who become your leaders."
Once they have stored all the knowledge, all the skillsets and the mindsets that they need, then they can take it to the next level. For Millennials, this is important more than ever. I was having conversations with others that were experts studying Millennials. What they have truly found is that the hierarchies of the traditional world had been decompressed. Millennials have a seat at the table. A lot of it would be due to their expertise in handle on technology, which is shaping the modern world.
I haven't researched this. I have contemplated it a little bit but because we have decided to take a seat at the table so early, sometimes we forget to listen and to be patient. We want it now. We want the next startup that reaches that billion-dollar valuation without having worked and sweats that way through it. When I say we, I'm talking about fragmented Millennials. Everyone is very unique and different to themselves but it was a percentage of people that share the kind of view and mindset. What would be the ending words that you leave to Millennials who are so hungry but may not have that patience or desire to develop as a follower before a leader?
Patience is such a beautiful thing because it teaches you to be teachable and humble. There's so much of what happens that is up to outside of our hands. It's something that's learned. I was very impatient. I have a little blip on my YouTube channel where they say, "If I was a Millennial again, what was the one thing I tell myself?" It was to be patient, to not just be like a charging bull expecting everybody.
You are smart. You are savvy. You are going to think faster, quicker and process information more than 99% of the people at the table. Yes, you are. We are a community. Warren Bennis said, "None of us is as smart as all of us." It's so important to realize. I know it may be obvious to you but everybody brings to the table their own bucket of experiences and thoughts. In your patients, remember, you have your own biases and blind spots.
As you become more self-aware, I am more tuned into, "I see what I did there." Keep yourself humble and teachable. Remember, we’ve got one mouth in two ears, which means that we are supposed to listen twice as much as we speak. I'm with you. It's a challenge because you are wired to achieve and that's a beautiful thing. Listen with the quietness. Get as much counsel as you can. Remember, the timing of when you are going to tap on success is something we don't know.
I tell people, "You are going to get it but we don't know the three-letter word yet. When is that going to happen?" The more patience that you have and you are going to see these one-off kids that grow this company and sell it for $500 million. That is by and far not the norm. We still have to learn how to deal with people. The main thing in life is how we enrich the community of the human race. Not so much what we do but how we are touching other lives. Realize that patience can help. I'm much less about hitting sales goals and numbers. I'm more about focusing on how I impact other lives. That will teach you patience more than anything.
Sometimes it is a process where you had to set the groundwork for several years before anything happens but anytime one person's life is impacted, that makes all of it and the entire career worth it.
Message To Millennials: If you can listen with quietness, get as much counsel as you can.
I’ve got to tell you and some of the Millennials, I mean that. I have had one person show up for a speech. I thank God for that because that one person's life could be changed for that. You’ve got to mean it. If you are all about results, how much money, how much you are getting paid and how much revenue, then that is a fickle motivation. I know tons of rich people that are more miserable than the poor people I know. Money is not going to do it for you. That is not a truly authentic purpose in life. If you change that, you don't know when it's going to go. It will get you some things but that's not what the purpose of life is, the accumulation of stuff and wealth. It's about the righteous use of wealth and what you can do with your talents for the best people.
That is so relevant to where I'm at in my life. I'm honored to have shared this conversation with you. Tracey, we are wrapping up towards the end of the interview. I wanted to ask if anyone wants to go ahead and read your book, A Message to Millennials, where can they find it and where can they find out more about you?
It's on Amazon. We have the audio and the Kindle book on Amazon that they can download but they can get it either on Amazon or they can go to www.TremendousLeadership.com. You can type in the word Millennials and you will see all about it. We've got YouTube videos. Sania, we are building out seven online learning modules that will be released to take you through each of the chapters. Tremendous Leadership has all about what we do. My dogs write books. You can meet my dogs. We have free webinars on leadership for you to listen and enjoy. It's a tremendous community. Find us on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Thank you, Tracey, for sharing so much wisdom, positivity, energy and many gems in this interview. I'm completely honored to have applied this conversation. I cannot wait to dive in to see what your course looks like. Congratulations on that Honorary Doctorate. I know your father will be smiling down at you. Thank you so much.
Thank you, too.