You can jump through many different career paths in your life and feel like you are not igniting the greatness within you. You've jumped so much, that the next job you take isn't going to be any different. Ask yourself, do you want to work for someone else or do you want to work for yourself? Dr. Tracey Jones joins David McGlennen of the In The Growth Space Podcast to talk about paving her own life after years of searching. She shares her story about her father and how she took up his business, Tremendous Leadership. Learn how to meld street-smart with book-smart. Discover how sitting back and doing nothing isn't the way to getting opportunities. You have to make those opportunities happen. You have to have the right connections and resources to make it work. Join in this episode to learn how to ignite your greatness and create your own momentum.
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Dr. Tracey C. Jones - Igniting The Greatness Within And Creating Your Own Momentum
I have the great privilege of having a conversation with Dr. Tracey Jones. She is the author of ten books and counting. She's the President of Tremendous Leadership. You may recognize the Tremendous Leadership from her father, the late Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. Charlie founded Executive Books in 1965, with the goal of changing the world, one book at a time. After growing her experience bag in every way and everywhere she could, she moved back home to Central Pennsylvania to carry on the Tremendous legacy in 2009 after her father's passing.
It was an easy choice for her. After all, she had grown up under the tutelage of the greats like Zig Ziglar, Og Mandino, and Norman Vincent Peale. She read personal development books and wrote book reports to earn spending money. The transformative power of learning through reading great books was instilled in her at a very early age. Her father's famous quote that you'll probably recognize is, "You will be the same five years from now, except for the people you meet and the books that you read." This is an amazing conversation and I'm so honored to have Dr. Tracey Jones on the show.
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Tracey, I'm excited to have you here on In The Growth Space. Ever since our initial conversation, I've been thinking about this conversation and the honor to have you on the show. As I told you before, I knew about your dad from a wee little lad. My grandfather and my dad were both in the insurance business. I was in the insurance business for a long time. I always heard about Charlie “Tremendous” Jones. I got to hear him speak one time as well. Welcome to the show and thank you for being on.
Thank you, David. It's a tremendous honor to be here. I am also excited about chatting with you, and the fact that you had already met my father and knew of him, and then we connected and the SPARK happened. Thank you so much for the chance to share with your audience and reconnect again with you.
It's my pleasure. One of the things we talk about here is growth journeys. Why don't we start with your growth journey? Tell us about what it was like growing up with Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.
For those of you who didn't know him, he was one of the top 25 legends of personal development. He immigrated to heaven in 2008. If he were still on this Earth, he was known as a dynamic individual. Growing up with a motivational speaker, life insurance salesman and bestselling author as a father was a cross between bootcamp and a sitcom. It was always fun and he meets people. He was so out there. If you go to the Tremendous Life Books YouTube channel, you’ll hear him. He was hysterical like a cross between Rodney Dangerfield who he loved but with tenderness. He would come up with these zany one-liners.
As an individual that came from difficult circumstances that found insurance, God and my mother, he was always very much, "This is where you start, but this is where you wind up.” Everything was very growth-oriented and there was a reason for everything, “You hurt yourself or somebody hurt you? Good. There's something to be learned from that. You had a success? Good. You're going to learn from that too.” There are two things growing up that he always told me, and this is in his book Life Is Tremendous. One is that we all are born with an empty key ring attached to our side. Every experience we go through in life, good, bad or ugly, whether you messed up bad, screwed the pooch as we used to say in the military or whatever, you got keys. The secret to a great life is the more keys you get, the more doors you're going to encounter in your growth trajectory. You're going to be able to figure it out.
The other thing he always told me was, "Tracey, you need to go out and earn your stripes." He was never in the military. He loved the military but I literally went into the military. His point was, "You can't live in anybody's shadow. You have to go out." Growing up, my earliest memories were listening to people like Zig Ziglar and Og Mandino. I read How To Win Friends and Influence People before The Poky Little Puppy.
One of the things I remembered about all these phenomenal men and women was that they had done it. They weren't just talking in theory or telling funny stories. They had built things and you could see it in them. People were wrapped in listening to their words because they were sharing how they could also become better individuals to make the world a better place. Growing up, I had a healthy relationship with failure, and I understood I had to go out and carve my own way. I had to own it, which were powerful lessons for a young person to learn because you have to learn them in life. The sooner you learn them, the better. It's a universal truth. That doesn't change. That's what it was like. It was wild.
I love hearing that story and the fact that no matter the good, bad, successes or failures, all of those contributed to your growth. It's so funny because even as you're saying that, I'm hearing my grandfather and my dad in my head, who were influenced by your dad. That is probably a part of who I am because of that growth process. You went into the military. What led you to the military?
I don't tell a lot of people this, but I was bouncing around from school to school, trying to figure out what I wanted to do and study. My father went down to Roswell, New Mexico. This is before the aliens were around back in the early '80s. I was a big X-Files fan. He went down there and he talked to a school called New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico, which was an Army high school and junior college. He came back and I was in upstate New York going to a private Wesleyan Liberal Arts School, doing my typical unfocused Tracey. That was the old Tracey. He came back and he laid this thing, NMMI, on the table and he said, "Tracey, these kids are going to do something with their life."
I was a middle child so I'm like, "Let me check that out." I went and applied, and got accepted. I got to get my Associate of Arts from there back in 1983, and then after you graduated from that, typically, people went into West Point because it was an Army junior college, and what they call a prep school like VMI, Norwich or Citadel. There are a lot of them out there. A lot of people want to go in the Army. Some people want to go to the Navy and I'm from Pennsylvania. I knew of Annapolis and West Point, but I fell in love with the West. When I was in New Mexico, I'm like, "Land of Enchantment." I can't even stand it. It's so beautiful.
They said, "There's this place that has been open to women for the past few years called the Air Force Academy and that's in Colorado." I had always wanted to be an astronaut. I love science fiction. I'm like, "Let's go there." By the grace of God, I had the wonderful AOC who believed in me and got me an appointment to the Air Force Academy. That's how it happened.
I love your comment about falling in love with the West. I was on a business trip to New Mexico and for the longest time, I still am enamored with the West. The lights and landscape are amazing, but that's a sidetrack.
It got me where I needed to go. Whatever your motivation is a good motivation. It was all to serve the country. I love my country. That was embedded in me from my father. We read a lot of biographies and autobiographies. I knew that this country didn't just happen. I had an appreciation for that and I would have served my country in any way.
One of the chapters in your dad's book talks about leaders being readers, and you even talked about that. How important have books had been in your own growth journey and as you've grown throughout your life?
There is a need to know and a need to grow. For twenty years when I was in the military in high-tech, defense and government contracting, I read because I had a need to know instructions, cost modelings, scopes of work, regulations, you name it, just enough to be capable and proficient at my job. When I left, I realized that you read because you have a need to grow. Dad said, "We read to get smart, not for showmanship but for growmanship." I would always look at these people who were reading, and you guys who are entrepreneurs out there, when you work for somebody, a bureaucracy, reading isn't high on their list. It's very bottom line. I get it. I'm not critiquing them, but they're not into personal development.
If you have a guaranteed paycheck, that's different than if you work in an organization where it's commission-based. I've worked in both where you have to stay motivated, a better communicator, and at the top of your game. Otherwise, you don't get to bring home money to eat. I studied Engineering. I'm very analytical and my dad's side was all this touchy-feely, emotional sales stuff. I never understood the science that went behind sales. I thought, "I'm not like that. I like processes and stuff." It wasn't until I left.
When I came back home to run Tremendous Leadership, I thought to myself, "These people love reading because of how it makes them grow." I've got to develop that hunger and I had a hunger for developing intellectual capacity. They call it cognitive efficacy like learning new things, but developing yourself is a different form of learning. I realized I got to dial this in because otherwise, they're going to look at me and go, "She's not one of us." That's when I fell in love with reading.
It's so cool to hear your path because there's a part of me that follows that same path as well. Seeing my own father and my grandfather in their journey, because they were a part of the insurance world and you were paid by commission, the things that you sold. I also knew that if I was going to continue to grow, I needed to learn to love to read. In my early adulthood, I used to listen to tapes a lot. It was back a number of years, but popping a cassette tape in of Brian Tracy or Zig Ziglar. Some of those were the ways that I "read" until I got a little bit older. I then learned that there's a wealth of knowledge and ways to learn through these books that I love now.
Igniting Greatness: Have a healthy relationship with failure. Carve your own way. These are universal truths that you need to learn in life. The sooner you learn them, the better.
Many leaders, especially emerging leaders, don't realize that we can learn from other people and we can learn from other people's experiences. It's one of the reasons why I love this environment where we can have a podcast. We can chat and talk about each other's growth paths. It helps to be able to allow people to look into our lives and look at that journey, and see where and how we've grown, and then apply it to our own lives.
To dovetail on what you were saying, you can learn through experience but you can also learn by reading and studying the other greats. When I went back for my PhD in leadership, I went there because I was like, "I'm still not hitting it." I was a leader but I'm not sure how well I engaged in the art and science of leadership. Coming to this realization at 53 years of age, I studied the science, the theory and the grounded research behind it. What I love is you can have the experiential side of it, the street-smarts, but when you blend the book and smarts together, that's when you understand why it happened, not just what happened. It was so enlightening to me to go, "That's why that went right and that's why that went wrong." It was a powerful thing.
Some people say, "I don't think you need college." You don't need anything but if I had to pick one, I'd pick experience because you go out and do stuff. You can't necessarily make a living studying unless somebody is funding you. Everybody can do both with online learning and online courses, podcasts, and eBooks. You can always be learning different things. When I went into the PhD program, that's where I discovered my internal researcher. That fascinates me hearing how other people are like, "You went through that too."
That's the other beautiful thing about learning and growing. You realize you're not alone. You find these advocates and resources that will come alongside you. Remember, they went through it so that they could then help people like you have the confidence that you can get through it. That's a beautiful thing too, to not sit there and go, "I got to figure this out." You do, but you figure that out through reading unbelievable books on people that have gone through it and connecting with people like who you have on your show. You're a tremendous connector. You don't have to go through these earning your stripes alone nor should you.
That's the other thing that's a real key for growth, and you even say this in your book. It’s having a tribe and being able to go through your life, your leadership and growth journey with other people around you, and advocates that give you the support that you need, plus the prodding and the encouragement that you need as well. I want to dive into something that I read in your book because part of your growth journey was coming back to run your dad's business. I would love to hear maybe you're learning in that process and what drew you back. It was a part of your father's life when he was transitioning to heaven. That was a painful component of your life as well. What was it that drew you back to the family business?
They always say that there are two ways that you can pivot, pivot on purpose or pivot on pain. We would love to think that we pivot with purpose. We get a calling too and it's admirable. We're anointed, but 99% of the time, we're going to pivot because of pain. I came back to run my family's business because I was so fed up, defeated and let down with bureaucracy after bureaucracy.
I came back with my tail between my legs, not that I didn't have anywhere else to go, but I couldn't stand it anymore. My soul was depleted. I knew there had to be a better reason. In the back of my mind was my father's voice as I would jump career fields every 3 to 4 years. You had the honeymoon period like, "This is it." After six months, you realize this is the same crap, just a different day because it's people and entities. It's not the industry because industries are made up of individuals. People are people ever since the dawn of mankind. Don't fool yourself. We're not evolving to something higher. It's human nature.
I remember him saying, "Tracey, you can either work for somebody else or you can work for yourself. As long as you keep working for somebody else, this is what's always going to happen." I thought to myself, "I have looked high and low for the leader that I love and want to be loyal to, let that person be me." I came back. I talk in the book that I had a real confirmation from God that this was what I was meant to do like the Blues Brothers, "We're on a mission from God."
I had this encounter where the Lord let me know, "Listen, this is the real thing. You come on back." At that point, I thought, "If this is a calling, I don't have to be him. I don't have to recreate him." All I know is if God says I'm supposed to come back and do this, there's nothing else to worry about. That was incredible for me because you know when you've worked in the bureaucracies, you're always worried about corporate, employees, HR or legal. It's nonstop and I wonder if I ever got anything done. Probably because I wasn't engaging in the great art of leadership. I wasn't perfect but I wasn't as bad as some people are.
The whole first year, God let me still do my defense contracting in DC, and then half the time, I was back here. God let me blend the two things that I loved until I was confident and I said, "I'm done with this chapter in my life, on to this one." If you can do that, do that. For me to abruptly come back and land in a little mom and pop publishing company after having worked in Fortune 100 companies would have been quite a shock for me. Even though I went to war, coming back and working in a family business is a different kind of warfare. That's what it was. God pruned everything off and let me know, “I'm not going to let you take another job, title or pay raise because you've tried that for twenty years.”
I looked back now at the timing of it and it was so providential. I came back three months after my father passed and there was a reason for that. We had danced around working together. Those of you that are talking about succession planning and I have known many people that have done succession planning brilliantly, where the two worked together and they handed it off, and then the elder retired and everything was hunky-dory. That doesn't always happen. In our case, we approach things differently. We were probably too similar. God knew the perfect timing and he waited until one was out of the picture before the other one came in. For that, that worked out well.
I'm curious then too, what was it like taking the reins of that business and molding it into your personality and your vision for the company? What was that like?
There are a couple of different things. I read up on second-generation businesses, what to do, what you do with the legacy brand, and I watched the special on Versace. I liked to watch those fashion documentaries because I love the creative processes about how the great buy different houses, Karl Lagerfeld or whoever, Tom Ford, and they come into different publishing houses. They take the DNA of the founder. Donatella Versace said when she came in after her brother passed, unfortunately in tragic situations, "What we needed to do was keep the DNA but evolve the brand into contemporary fashion sense." I remember thinking that that's it. You keep the DNA but you make it uniquely yours. That stuck in my mind.
Coming back, because I had earned my own stripes, I knew I had my earthly and my father's imprint. I knew I had different influences and I also knew that I had a different career background. As he had done a lot of sales and entrepreneurship, I had come from more brick and mortar, more traditional business industry. I thought, "This'll be nice. I'll be able to dovetail my sense or my perspective on with his." It was incredible. Once I realized that God told me, "I got this." I was free to realize, "If it lasts a week, a year, 10 years or 50 years, that's great. If it doesn’t, we'll put a bow on it, to God be the glory and I'll move on to something else. That was incredibly freeing, but also to keep what he started. I love the mission. It's my passion too. If it wasn't, I couldn't have come back to do it.
That's a real key there too, having the passion to be able to take it over. If you didn't, you would just be going through the motions and you probably wouldn't have been fulfilled.
Your heart wouldn't be in it. It was very much taking forward what he did. I realized there are three things he left us with. Number one, no debt. That’s hallelujah for all you business owners. Number two, an unbelievable reputation with connections all over the world. I still get calls from people he had cultivated. Number three, a way to make money.
I didn't come back and inherit this big nest egg or anything. I'm an operations girl. That's all I needed to know to come in and just be able to be free to create, pick up on his residual momentum that he had created, and then start with, "I have to create my own momentum." It has been a wonderful thing. There are days where I'm like, "Yes. I'm not sure this is going to go anywhere else," but he also told me there'd be days like that. The minute I want to quit like that, I get an email from somebody like you saying, "Hey." I'm like, "We live to fight another day."
Something you said about what your dad taught you are those relationships. I'm curious about those relationships that not only he built, but then you've been able to develop as well. How important are those? You talk about having advocates around you, not just advocates but also relationships for a business. How important is that in your growth journey and the growth of the company?
Igniting Greatness: You can have the street-smarts, but when you blend it with the book-smarts, that's when you understand why it happened, not just what happened.
It's 100% everything. A lot of people are like, "I'm a solopreneur. I'm sitting behind my computer." It's never going to work. I'm sorry, it's not going to work. You have to have the resources, advocates and connections. Whether you meet in person or not is immaterial. You and I, David, have never met in person, yet you are a tremendous advocate for me and I hope to be for you too.
I always tell people, you cannot get it right without the right people, processes and products. We're not coded either from an evolutionary or a theological standpoint to go through this alone. The devil loves to get us in our own little gilded cage, suck on our thumb and thinking, "We're the only ones here." The minute you start thinking that you need to snap out of it. Everybody is out there. There are so many people waiting to help you, but you have to go out there and do the work to find them, ask them, and authorize them to advocate on your behalf.
When I first came back, I was like, "Dad had all these people but I can do it alone. I've gone to war and launched jets that cost $44 million apiece. I've loaded nukes.” I didn't rely on them because with my own ego and probably my fear of failure, I thought I can do this. I've run big organizations and guess what? I couldn't do it.
About eight years into it, when I hit the wall, I finally realized I have not pulled in any of these unbelievable advocates. I reached out to them again with my tail between my legs and said, "Hey." They were so kind to me. They weren't like, "We were waiting. What took you so long?" They were like, "I can't believe you feel this way. What you're doing is great." I'm like, "It may look like that but I don't feel that way." They were like, "What can we do?" That's when I realized, "These people want my success more than even I want my success. How stupid, selfish and prideful of me not to let them share in the blessing.” That's what I'm all about now. The more I do that, the more I find joy in everything that I do.
Talk a little bit about the company and your organization.
Tremendous was Life Management Services. My dad started that back in 1965. He had been an insurance agent with Mutual New York. This was in the mid-'60s, so he would have been late 30s. By that time, he had grown a business of $100 million, which was back then unheard of. He left the insurance business. He wrote the book, Life is Tremendous and he started Life Management Services, Inc. where he was a publisher, speaker and distributor of books. Many of you may remember these power packs, where you can put together these great books. He was like Jeff Bezos ahead of his time and publishing using the book as a credit. He did so many things that were way ahead of his time.
He passed and it became Executive Books. He went to heaven in 2008, a world-renowned speaker, a wholesale distributor of books, because he wasn't just about, "Listen to me.” He like, "You have to listen but you have to read. If you have to pick one, read." He was always a big book pusher. He was a bibliotherapist, “Read a few books and call me in the morning, and all your problems will go away. Just read this book.” He flunked out of school in the eighth grade. He knew that even if you missed out on formal education, self-education is what will make your life worth living.
I came back and rebranded it to Tremendous Life Books at the one-year point, and then about five years ago, I started doing Tremendous Leadership because I wanted the focus to be on leadership. We still do speaking and online courses, virtual in-person keynotes or publishing. We publish probably about fifteen books a year and we still do the wholesale distribution for organizations that want to support their big events. A lot of direct sales and network marketers have these big fabulous events. A lot of real estate and financial planners, and anybody doing a big conference will order our material to hand out to their guests or potential clients as a thank you. We're still doing it.
You're still doing it after all these years.
It seems like a lifetime.
As you look into the future for your own organization and maybe even your own leadership, what's the next arrival point for your growth journey? What are you striving for?
As I talk about in SPARK, you're constantly honing your vision and clarity. What my singularity was when I came back, every day I get more clear and focused on what's the one thing that I want Tremendous Leadership to be known for. We do several things but there still has to be that overarching thing, which is recognizing and igniting the greatness in others. Whatever medium or form that takes everything must orient back to that.
The next real thing that I'm looking for is resources. I can't do it all myself and I have some wonderful people. As we're scaling up and growing, what I'm looking for and praying for, and it's all in God's timing, is the right people to come alongside me and help me take this to the next level, to grow the business and scale it. I know that will happen when it's meant to happen and I keep refining the purpose or maybe it stays like this, and this is a tremendous opportunity.
What's next is what is the desire of my heart? This is all in God's timing. Only God creates growth. One of my friends said, "You pray as if everything depends on God and you work as if everything depends on you." I am putting it all out there. I hope to grow but if not, I'm praying because, in the end, only God gives that growth. It's in His timing and it gives me peace. The main thing that's changed in me is I am a lot more peaceful about this. Before I'd say it, but then I go home and I'm like, "Why isn't this happening? Why haven't I sold as many books as so and so? Why is so-and-so getting booked?” Now I'm like, "I'm doing me. I'm going to do everything I can. I'm going to have peace in the journey and that's it."
It's amazing how when you rest in that, it's miraculous in many ways. God brings things into your path and opens things up. Sometimes this is a lesson for a lot of leaders. That is we can be striving and doing all the time, but we have to transform that doing into being. God created us as human beings and so we have to be it first, and then let that being inform our doing so that we can have what we want.
That striving so often is something I've been playing within my own head in my own growth journey because I'm an achiever. I've been programmed that way and my personality is that way. I think resting in, “I'm going to do what I can do and then leave the rest to God, and open the door for whatever comes, and not be attached to the outcome.” It is freeing in a lot of ways. Don't get me wrong. I'm still struggling with that a little bit. I'm still a work in process but that's a great component of growth, great awareness and realization that you've stumbled on there.
Remember, it took me a long time to realize that it's not about me, the business or the people I hire. The greatest leadership challenge you're ever going to have is you. The more you orient everything back to you and stop looking at everybody else will stop blocking the blessing pipeline. It's like the slingshot metaphor. Until we're lined up and the tension is perfect, all this striving is part of the process. Think about the Israelites. What takes your car four minutes to drive should have taken them an eleven-day journey. It took them 40 years. Why? They were grumbling and were discontent. I tell people I'll never be perfectly content because I want more. That's a beautiful God-given thing, more from God but I'm not discontent. There's a good restless and there's a bad restless. The more you dial this in, you'll know the difference between the two.
That is a good segue to even talk about your book. We've been dancing around it. I've got a copy of it here and thank you for sending this to me. It's a wonderful book called SPARK. I love all your acronyms. Nothing like the product of an insurance person to have acronyms all over the place. Tell us what the acronym SPARK is and what led you to write this book?
Igniting Greatness: There are two ways that you can pivot: to pivot on purpose or to pivot on pain.
SPARK is a result of my PhD. You don't write a PhD without then writing a book for the layperson because why go through? By the way, PhD stands for Piled High and Deep. There's only one thing in this world I know an awful lot about. Seriously, it was the greatest thing in my life. If anybody’s contemplating it, call me, we'll talk about it, and you have to do it. Even in your mid-50s, your brain still can do it. I studied in my PhD on crisis leadership and what I wanted to study is not what the leader did but followership
In other words, why did some people go through this crisis and think this was the worst thing in the world, and other people went through the exact same crisis and said, "It's not that big of a deal.” It’s just like COVID. There are some people that have probably died because of anxiety. Forget COVID. Anxiety is the biggest virus and killer of everybody. You're always going to have stress, but stress does not have to become anxiety.
I did this study and I found that there are certain things that I could spot within five seconds of the interview. I did a case study where I interviewed 5 leaders and 25 followers. I was like, "Did the leader do something to make you like Spartacus, gladiator or whatever?" Do you know what the answer was? “No. It's how I am.” Leaders realize you want to model it, but the real goal in leadership is finding those people with that intrinsic spark or that resiliency that's already in them. All I can do is ignite what's already there. If it's not there, no amount of money, coaching, threatening or whatever is going to get you motivated and off your butt, and into the game.
The book is about the five essentials that you're going to need. SPARK is an acronym. Singularity, you have to be all in and focused on that one mission. That's why if you have people in your organization who do not share your mission, this is not going to work. We see this all over now with the gig economy and people moonlighting. You got to be in. It's like being pregnant. You are or you're not. You're not halfway in. You're not pregnant during work, in or out.
P is persistence. You can't quit. You can want to quit and that's your tenacity. This is what you bring to the table. You're all in with the mission and you'll know it because you'll ask your employees. You don’t even have to ask them. You can tell. It's like telling your spouse, "Honey, how's it going?" You already know. By the way, they're interacting with you. You also already know if they checked out and even if they say, "Everything's fine," you know. I don't know with mine. I know it's still good. Thank God. Singularity and persistence are the things that you bring to the table. I can't make you love the job and I can't do work for you.
The other three things are the extrinsic things or the external points. Typically, where self-motivation fails is where people get all jazzed up about, "This is my mission." They get out there and people are like, "You're an idiot. Why would you do that?" I'm like, "Wait. This is you regardless of what anybody says. You must persist." A is for advocates. These are your angels on Earth, the door openers, the mentors, and the prefects.
Resources are the tools, the capital, the show, the website, and the people shipping my books. You still need things to execute the dream, hard products, contractors, subcontractors, business partners, and then K is knowledge. You have to constantly be in a state of learning because what worked for you last week will probably not going to work next week. As you keep unfolding yourself, you're going to need to learn different things. That's the external stuff that comes to you. Here's the internal stuff that you bring.
The book breaks it down. Typically, people are good in a couple of these, but there's one they're missing. Typically, it's the singularity. They're trying to do too many things or they’re trying to do what other people want them to do, or their focus is not honed enough. Two is resources. You don't have the right resources. That's incredibly frustrating. You can see it and taste it but you can't get there from here. We unpack in the book how you identify as an engineer. Let's troubleshoot what ails you. Let's get to the root of what the problem is because, otherwise, we're not going to fix this. We're going to gloss over it. That's what SPARK is about.
I love the fact that you take the internal component, the S and the P, and then the external, the A, R, and the K. There really are two parts of our growth and that singularity of our purpose, and the singularity of our vision and focus is so important. It's interesting because I coach a lot of leaders and that seems to be one of the pieces that tend to be missing. They want to say yes to all of the things and all of the opportunities, but they don't realize that when they're saying yes to everything, they're saying no to other things. They need to have that reverse. They need to be able to say no to a lot of things and yes to only those things that are that singular focus, and that thing that's going to move them forward. That was the part of the book that spoke to me the most because it's one of the areas that I struggle with the most. It is having that singularity of focus.
I struggle with it every day. That's why every day I have to write down, "This is my focus." Honestly, if I had a seatbelt from my chair and the little buggy blinders. The thing about leaders and people listening to your show, they're probably good at everything. Even on their worst day, they're still going to be more than 99% of the people. If you waste time and energy, you miss that great zone of genius that only you can do.
People are like, "Tracey, I couldn't be the best at anything.” Yes, you can because your experience is your expertise. Only you have done what you've done because there's only one of you. I'm glad you're helping people do that. With my groups, because we do online courses and go through this, this is the thing that most people struggle with. Typically, people in my courses are in their mid-50s and older. Some younger and a lot older. They've had great careers. They've done a lot of things but they're like, "Now I want to do what I was put on this earth to do." That's a beautiful thing to be in that space.
Talk about your courses because we talked about some of the things that you're doing. The course was one thing that's new for you. I'd love to have you tell the people about those courses, how they can get access to them, and what they're all about.
For our entrepreneurs out there that are honing on what they're going to do next, the book helped me get clear on my message. They always say the three things needed are your message, market and medium. The book is nothing like doing a PhD to help you focus on tiny little things. You can't write all about leadership. What's that one thing? They helped me hone in on the theory of motivation. That's what I love, live and breathe. I had that and that was my message, then it was dialing in on my market. Thank God, I have already integrated with my market because of all the work my father had done. Even though a lot of my work the previous twelve years may have been a little akimbo, it still landed and kept growing the base.
The next thing that working with somebody helped me realize is now we need a medium. We started doing Zoom calls and that was wonderful. We had seven live Zoom calls, but then we kept having more and more people sign up. There are only so many days in a week and two months and this and that. Every now and then, I went to go out to eat with my husband or go to a prayer meeting. It was wonderful, so we recorded some online courses. We still have interactive ones because people love the cohort. That's why I got my PhD online and then we met as a cohort. I love blended learning because I like studying on my own and then we get together. After that, everybody kept saying, what's next?
"We went through the book. You're not just going to leave us, right?" We started a singularity deep dive. We're about halfway through those eight modules, where we unpack what does singularity mean. We go into your fears, core values, and what do you need to prune off, then we get into your message, market, credibility, competitors, and then your product line. We're in singularity then onto a deep dive in persistence, advocates, resources and knowledge. After that is one-on-one working with me. Who knows what else? There's no telling.
It's an evolution. That's fantastic. That's part of the growth journey. It's to be able to evolve as time goes along, as you learn more, as you grow more and understand what you want to deliver. That's part of the journey. I love what you're doing, Tracey. Thank you for sharing your book and your dad's legacy with us here. If there's anything that you would like to leave our audience with, what would that be? What would you leave our audience with from your message or anything that we've talked about?
I'm so glad you said that. This would have saved me a lot of heartache in my life. The first thing was the difference between leader and leadership. Understand the nuance difference between them. The biggest thing I would say is if you're a leader and growing your organization, and you all are or growing yourself, or even if you don't have any full-time employees, you're still going to have people that you deal with or sign up for that work with marketing, branding, website development or whatever.
You want to make sure that you understand as a leader, what it is about that person that brings out the best in you. For instance, I tell people, “If I hire you and I have to follow up on you, that triggers the untremendous. It’s in the military. Just do it. I don't want to follow up on you.” Yet I hired people that were not intrinsically self-motivated. That was bad on my part because they needed to be in more of an atmosphere or work for an organization where it was more set in their ways. They had somebody working side by side with them.
Igniting Greatness: Being an entrepreneur while sitting behind your computer is never going to work. You have to have the resources, the advocates, and the connections.
The other thing is when you bring people on, ask them, "What are they looking for?" The follower is going to respond to certain leadership traits and characteristics. I look at hiring as much more like dating because you are yoked. I say to them, "What are the leaders that have brought out the best in you?" If I hear somebody that says, "They let me do whatever they want and they never corrected me,” that's probably not going to be a fit. I have heard stuff like that. I'm a big feedback person. If I do hear somebody say, “I need a leader that's going to tell me on a recurring basis what I'm doing wrong and give me a place to advance," this could be a mighty fine relationship.
I wish I would've known that. The old-school of thought is you hire people in, and then if you're a great leader, you can turn them into anything. That is so false. Leadership and followership is a dance. Sooner or later, they have to start dancing and following your lead. I would say, "Are they willing to grow? Are they all in for your mission? Are they adaptable and able to be developed?" If they are, you snap them up for however long you had the blessing of having them. If not, don't even go there because there are certain core traits you cannot imprint as a leader. After many years of doing it, trust me on this. This is the one thing I know.
Tracey, thank you for that wise advice and for sharing time with us here. It is a blessing to have you here. I'm grateful that our paths crossed and we're able to share this time together. Thank you so much. It means a lot to me. Your dad has meant a lot to me and a lot of our audience as well. In a previous episode, one of my guests referenced your dad and a book that he read as a kid. Your dad's impact is far and wide, and it's cool when things appear. Having this conversation has been tremendous.
Thank you, David. Thank you for all that you're doing and even connecting me with your people, reaching out to me, the honor of having me on your show, and encouraging so many.
It's been a blast and I appreciate the opportunity, Tracey. Thanks again and have a great rest of your day.
You as well.