Dr. Tracey Jones: What Am I Supposed To Do With The Rest Of My Life?
Many of us don’t know what we want from life. We drift through without direction. Find direction and the beauty of the journey and find what you want. In this special episode, Dr. Tracey Jones is interviewed by the host of Your Partner In Success Radio, Denise Griffitts as they discuss finding your inspiration. Tune in and figure your way with Dr. Tracey and Denise.
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Dr. Tracey Jones: What Am I Supposed To Do With The Rest Of My Life?
My guest is Dr. Tracey Jones. She is an author, speaker, veteran, publisher, podcaster and an international leadership expert who currently serves as President of Tremendous Leadership. She picked up the reins from her father, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones in 2008. Tracey is also a long-time friend and colleague and I'm excited to have her here again. She is a passionate lifelong learner whose career spans top positions in four major industries from the military to high-tech to defense contracting and publishing.
She is the author of eleven titles, five of which are children's books that use her rescue pets to teach character development to our next generation of emerging leaders. Her latest book SPARK: 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within was an Amazon number one new release. It contains her research on the energy between leaders and followers and the power of resiliency and intrinsic motivation. Just so you know, her company has donated over $1.8 million to local homeless shelters, recovery outreach, mission groups, disaster recovery organizations and scholarships to local colleges in the past years. Tracey, welcome to the show. It has been way too long since you were here last. I don't even know how long it's been, to be honest.
Thank you, Denise. It has been too long, at least several years. I'm honored to be reconnected with you and share with your readers.
You have been so busy since we last had an in-depth conversation. We stay in touch on social media. We commiserate when our pets die. We're both rescue people. We both have cats and dogs and we cry together when we lose one. I just lost my Abby Rose not too long ago and it broke my heart. You have been somebody that I have great respect for. I'm so glad you're here. I'm not going to wax eloquent all over you any more than I just did, but thank you for coming.
Thank you for your words of encouragement. The readers will know no matter how much we think we're doing, having other people pour into us with words and expectations or input is what keeps us going and focused.
We get caught in our male strength if you will. We're always busy. We're always thinking. There's always something going on and it's easy to lose sight of how important our messaging can be to other people. I'll be frank with you. Why I do this show is because my guests are quite my mentors. I've said this time and time again. I learn from my guests. I learned from the books that you all sent me. I do this twice a week and I wouldn't miss it for the world.
You hit the nail on the head. You can't say to yourself, “I've achieved success. I have a strong sense of self-esteem. I know who I am,” and it's done. It's a lifelong journey. Every day you have to get up. There's a biblical principle about dying daily to sell. We are our own worst enemy. You couple all the nonsense that comes to us from the world and the other sources and people we thought were in our corner.
You name it. We're our own worst enemy, so it's so important on a daily basis, stay around people that have their head in the game and have your back and stay in those books because the minute you gravitate away from them, the world starts to swallow you up. We stay in the zone of greatness to stay great because there's a lot of stuff swirling around us that looks to knock us off course.
This is why I don't watch television. I've never been a TV watcher. I cut cable years ago. It’s one of the hardest things I ever did. Find those people who you can appreciate. You don't have to agree with any of us all the time. That's ridiculous. Find those people who raise your water level. You don't want to be on the icky side of the pond. Avoid people who are going to bring you down or tell you things that don't resonate with you. Find people who are your people. That's the best I can say.
The other person said to me on one of the shows, “Stop trying to make not your people, your people.” We have this need to please people and be like, “You don't get me.” They're probably never going to get you, so move on. Denise, somebody gave me a little mental hook when I was talking to them. They said, “We are like a beautiful bottle of fine wine, but we can't read our label.
We can only see from the inside out. When you have these wonderful vintners who can look at us and read our label from the outside in, they can tell us, “I know this is what you may think, but this is how people see you. This is your aroma. This is how you're maturing.” It's important to have those who will look at us from the outside in because no matter how self-aware we are, we can still only see what we can see. I'm always baffled when people like, “You were so gracious when we dialed in.”
That's so great for me to hear because, again, I get caught up in my label about, “Is any of this making a difference?” I know that may shock your followers. I'm being completely honest with you. It's important. I love the fact that we want people in our lives to tell us what we want and need to hear and not what we like and feel like we want to hear. The people that speak truth and love, you got to have them.
That's why I make it a point to be in Mastermind. One of my best masterminds, honestly, is one other person and me. We get brutal with one another, but we don't sugarcoat anything. I had a migraine coming and I got a bit cranky. I didn't get cranky with her, but I was short with her. Later I went, “Aw.” I sent her a text that said, “I didn't mean to be so short with you.” She said, “You weren't. I understood.” I feel like I was not particularly gracious. I had a headache. I was cranky. I wanted to bite. If I'd been in my car, Tracey, I would have bitten my steering wheel.
That's okay, Denise. For the readers out there, you're going to have days like that. You're going to have days when you're not feeling particularly igniting greatness or tremendous. The people that you have in your life are going to be able to give you grace. That's the important thing. I have some people who vilify me if I make a mistake and keep sending me email or text after text about how I've let them down. You don't need that stuff. We're not perfect, but you want to have people in your life that when we do say something. We're still human.
We're still going to say things that are completely and utterly selfish and uncool, but we check ourselves. When you have people that are like, “It's okay.” I'm so thankful to people who give me grace because that enables me to give other people grace. If you want to have those people in there that get, “I've gone too far.” Not with the people that care about you. You're never going to go too far because they're always going to be there with the spirit of forgiveness and grace.
You are a kinder, gentler, much more tolerant person than I am because if somebody gets nasty with me, I go over, “Really?” You don't want that to happen.
Life Direction: We are like a beautiful bottle of fine wine, but we can't read our own label. We can only see from the inside out.
This has been a real work in progress. When you're at work, your professional love language is either task-oriented or relationship-oriented. I'm very much task-oriented, probably to a fault. Just get it done. When you’re dealing with people and people’s shortcomings, you are either more justice-oriented or more mercy-oriented. I skewed towards the justice side, not just you.
We’re a lot alike.
Focus on that and say, “Come on now. You need to see it from somebody else's perspective. You need to be the first to apologize. It is more important at times to be more relational than right.” This is something in the last years of my life. I've read a great book called on Unoffendable by Brant Hansen. It unpacked the root of our righteous indignation and how that's nonsense.
You don't know what's going on in the other person's life. Thank God you don't watch the media, but every now and then, I'll see the comments and the root of all this divisiveness is everybody thinks they're right. Guess what? You have no idea what's going through that other person's mind or heart. His book unpacked that. I had to take a long hard look at myself and say, “This is an area you need to work on.”
I've had to do the same thing. I'm goal-oriented. I'm going to say it's leadership, but it's bossy. I'm the oldest of a bunch of kids, “Do this and don't do that again.” I've had to train myself to back it down and say, “What's going on? How can I help you? Is there a problem that we can solve?” Sometimes there isn't, but you have to go down that path. Tracey, you went back to college. Walk us through the last few years because you decided to go down a different route.
They say pain is a portal. For our readers out there, if you're reading this and you're in a time of pain, understand that like it or not, this is how we grow. This is how we're chiseled down. This is how we're refined. This is how we're purified. If you're in a time of pain and I'm not talking about self-induced pain. If you're engaging in something that is not productive, healthy, unethical, illegal or immoral, you need to stop that because that's self-inflicted pain. Sometimes in life, no matter how hard we try, it's like a slingshot. You want to release, but you keep getting pulled back. Years ago, I went through a series of events. I kept striking out.
I was so defeated in my mind and so broken spiritually, personally, financially and health-wise that I said, “I'm done. I want to put all my game pieces on the board. I want to put it on the shelf and I'm done with this. I'm going to go back to school to work on my PhD. I'm going to play with my dogs.” I almost became like a modern-day reckless. I didn't know what else to do but to turn to books. One of the beauties of being a publisher is you get a lot of review copies of stuff. Somebody had sent me a copy of Dr. Henry Cloud, one of my all-time favorite authors, called The Power of the Other.
In it, he unpacked, you think you have great people and things in your life, but you need to be intentional because a lot of them are absorbing bandwidth and all different other kinds of things. We need to go ahead and deal with that. I decided to go back and go to school because I thought, “I don't know what else to do. All my bag of tricks for business had failed. The people that I thought were going to be there have not been there. How can I sit here and talk about leadership when I can't even lead my own business to success and myself to success?”
My health was failing. I had put on weight. My adrenal vein was shot. I was done. They always say, “You should pivot with purpose and not pain.” Sometimes pain can be a tremendous motivator too. I thought, “I'm going to go back to school. I'm going to get my PhD in Leadership. I'm going to try and study the grounded literature in why the things that I've tried did or did not work. Try and understand from an academic standpoint and not what Tracey did or didn't do right.” That's what I did. That was an unbelievable time of getting away from the day-to-day grind.
Although I was still running the business, to fall in love with the act of leading myself, the joy of leading people because, trust me, I had lost that joy. I'm putting together my dissertation on the theory of intrinsic motivation, which is what life is all about. If you don't have your accountability and intrinsic motivation, nothing else launches. I was a little burnt out with the whole leadership genre about telling me as a leader. It wasn't going right. That was all on me. Denise, I will tell you that I can write a book on everything I've done wrong, but it's not all on me. Leadership is a shared journey.
Henry Cloud's book is about getting clear on, you've got to have the right people in the right spaces and you can't turn them into that. They've got to come to you ready, willing and able to buy into your mission, not just want to draw a paycheck. Otherwise, it's going to be a very transactional relationship. Fast forward years later, I completed my dissertation on a crisis event. Does a leader do anything in the crisis that made the follower say, “Let's go back into the burning building,” or “I'm out of here? I'm jumping this ship.”
It was fascinating to watch and it reaffirmed a lot of my hunches and personal experiences throughout the year. It was validating. It brought me to the whole field of followership. The importance of understanding who will resonate best with your leadership style, who you identify with best as a follower before you go forth and build your team, your close friends, your mentors, all that stuff. That's what I wind up doing during my reckless days.
I remember right about that time, we were talking about the issues you were having with the business. I had a distinct impression that you were ready to sell or close it and that worried me a lot.
For our readers out there, the business is never anything tangible. Although you may have products, facilities and people, the business is your legacy. It's your mission. It's your purpose. The devil did his best to convince me that I had put a stake in the heart of the business. The business can't be killed because the business is hope, truth, the transformational power of books and the legacy of meeting wonderful people who advocate for you. That's a time with the truth. That's immutable. That's God. I can't kill it no matter how many mistakes I made.
I had to look at myself and say, “Step away from your ego. There are things you did good and things you did poorly, so what?” If your heart's in the right place, this will always resurrect itself and the time and place. Frankly, Denise, a lot of that stuff needed to be purged off as a second-generation business owner because I was holding onto some things and God was trying to tell me, “No. I'm going to take you in this direction,” but I kept holding on to what I knew. God's beautiful and that he'll try and get you to let go but if you don't let go, he'll purge it from you.
It's scary, but in the end, I knew in my heart, I had been avoiding this death for quite a few years and it was time to let it go. Once I did that, I could get ready to rebuild, open my hands out, and re-look at the landscape in a creative versus a residual aspect. For readers out there, anybody going through this time where you're losing something, remember, all creation starts with the death of something old. That's scary and that's hard, but that's reality.
Life Direction: You're going to have days when you're not feeling particularly like igniting greatness, but the people that you have in your life are going to be able to give you grace, and that's the important thing.
I don't care. You're going to be like, “Tracey, you understand. I screwed this up.” You understand what predicated this was I made a horrific business decision. Understand that even in the worst, all things work together for good to those that love God and if your missional heart is in the right place. It will always get turned into something tremendous.
I'm glad you said tremendous because I remember this conversation as clear as if it happened. We were chatting. You're the daughter of Charlie “Tremendous” Jones. That's something big around your shoulders. You hung around with Zig Ziglar. Some of the people that were wandering in and out of your house had me going, “Holy crap." Those were really interesting people. I remember we were talking and I was saying to you, “You're not your dad. He's gone.”
For the readers out there, you compare yourself to what are other people are doing, what are the business doing? It's natural. It was also very humbling for me because I am like my father, I cut my teeth in Fortune 100 organizations and military, where I had a lot of success. Operationally running big teams, budgets, organization, a lot of leadership success. When I get to this small independent niche company and I'm like, “Why can’t I solve this riddle?” That was very humbling and very difficult for me. I needed that because I was in a whole different space and world.
I'm so glad that you were able to figure it out. I had the sense that you were thinking about throwing up your hands and saying, “This is not for me.” I remember thinking, “Where am I going to get my books?” I was completely selfish.
That's why we're here. It's never about me. The problem where I wanted to quit was I made it about me. I said to God, “If you want me to continue, send me the resources to continue going.” We get so caught up and this is for our readers. I struggle with this every day. This was the proverbial thorn in the side. I am so obsessed because I'm an operations person and a bottom line, not a cutter. I am so obsessed with outcomes and results. We have to step away from that. “Am I might being useful?” Stop. I try to make that about me. We have to look at the beauty.
Are you making the world a more beautiful place? Are you touching one life? Are you able to pay your bills and continue to move? Stop with the other angst of how useful I am being. You’ll be as useful if God determined you to be as useful as you get out of your way to being. People like you and I are so coated and the world is like, “I can do this for you. I can make you bigger, better, stronger, more hits, more this, more that.” You got to look and say, “Is that what's going to be driving my decisions?” We're still business people. I get that we have to look at the bottom line and the results.
One of my favorite quotes is, “However beautiful the strategy, you have to occasionally look at the results.” We can't only look at the results. We have to lift our heads up and look at the broader perspective and look at, “Am I blessing people? Am I making a difference to people?” That has to be our source of greatest joy and then we can track and tweak the backend people processes, bottom-line costs and all that other stuff. A lot of times, we let that drive the upper level of our purpose versus the other way around.
I have found out to my deep chagrin and I find it out daily. It's like, “I noticed this yesterday. Here it is again, crud.” I am my bottleneck. The truth is most of us have no idea what we want in life. Every day, I hit that thinking bottleneck. I'll say, “You were here yesterday. What the heck?” Sometimes I'll figure it out. Sometimes I have to shelve it and turn it over to my subconscious for review, but at least I'm aware of it.
I keep hearing this again and again and for people like us, I'm a multi-tasker. I could do 30 things in a day. Honestly, I could write twenty books at a time. That's a blessing, but that's my own worst curse. I call it the gift of complication. The bottleneck is right. People have kept telling me, “Tracey, you're a radio thinker. Your brain operates like the spokes of a wheel. It's everywhere and it's churning.” That's great, but you're never going to get forward momentum until you dial in your linear thinking. They would say to me, “The most successful people in life land on one thing and do that exceptionally well.” That doesn't mean we can't have other manifestations of it like publishing.
It’s a manifestation of the Tremendous Life because my father believed in changing people's lives through books. Frankly, I don't know what I do without my books. I'm an all-in book evangelist. It's very important that we dial in what we want because when we get very focused and singular about what we want, we are able to cut out all the other noise, look for the right people, have the most important conversations and spend our money on things because other people come up and go, “Have you thought this?”
You can say, “That's not what I'm focused on right now.” When we get that real hyper focus, the most important thing we can do for our success is to continue to hone exactly the best and highest use of our time. We talked about what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I saw my mother-in-law. I'm barely hitting the back nine of my life. What is it? That means every day, we get to get very clear. The beauty of it is the older you get, it's a more beautiful thing because the kids are gone.
You're not in the scrappy years of, “I got to make ends meet. Am I supposed to stay married with this person?” By this stage in life, a lot of that stuff has shaken out and it's fallen out where it is. This is primarily where our market Tremendous Leadership is, it's 60 to 85 where people are like, “I am now free to serve, what is the best and highest use of my time?” It'll keep you awake at night.
Not in a fearful standpoint, whereas when you're younger, you're like, “Is this marriage going to last? Are my kids going to make it? How am I going to make ends meet?” This is more of a yearning stage of your life where you're looking at, “I'm here in this job or I'm transitioning out of this job. What do I go to next that’s the highest use of my time?”
Tracey, I've read this a couple of times. I wish I had bookmarked it as I need to get back to it, but it's popped up, so there must be something in it. Articles are saying that the best time to become an entrepreneur is between the ages of 60 and 70. Have you seen that?
Absolutely. We’ll put something on Facebook about that. I'm giving a speech to some young entrepreneurs in Mercer County, New Jersey that your ages from 20 to 40 are your learning years. Take every job you can and learn as much as you can. Your ages from 40 to 60 are your earning years. This is where you capitalize on your expertise and yearn more. Your ages from 60 to 80 are your yearning years where you yearn for something more. You've done it. You've learned. You've transacted. You've saved your experience.
You get to be the Jedi master and cheer the world the greatest. I've got Mitzi Perdue, Frank Perdue’s widow who just turned 80 and we're publishing her book. I'm working with people on coaching one on one that is in their 80s because they're like, “I already have retired five times, but I still got more in life.” That is the best time to do it because you get to live life on your terms.
Life Direction: Look to those people that have the wisdom of the ages, because they're the ones that are really going to have the most resources and insights, the most life experience, because everything that you're going through, they went through 20 times more than you did.
My dad would always tell me, “Tracey, you have two choices in life. You can work for somebody else or you can work for yourself.” You heard about the Great Reset for the younger kids. There's a Great Reset for us pushing 60 and up while we're like, “Now, I get to live life in a constant getting back and on my terms.” That's the space I'm in and it is very exciting.
One of my guests, he's known as the godfather of the cell phone. He created the Motorola cell phone that you could walk outside with. You didn't have to be attached to your car. He's in his 90s. He wants to be the oldest person that goes out into space. He's going to do it. I promise you. He is a fascinating guy. He's known as a tremendous inventor. He’s everywhere. He's doing what he wants to do. He will tell you he's living his best years.
That's how life is done. If not, that's not on the world. That's on you. You can reclaim your health and purpose. You can take all the things you've been through and weave them into the next chapter. It's exciting that many people who are doing that read the books about the people who had done that. That Facebook meme we both saw was that most people in their 70s to 80s are the most important time you land into your own. You are seasoning. My dad told me that growing up, “Tracey, you're wet behind the ears until you're 55.” I always knew I was in this constant learning state.
That is the truth. Remember folks, when you're looking for people to mentor, hire or bring on as a resource, I have nothing against the youth, but they're still in their learning years. Everybody will say, “This and that.” Make sure that when you're bringing somebody on to work with, for examples like digital marketing or ClickFunnel. I know we all think, “This is the one person who does it best.” It's like real estate or something, not to belittle anything, but there are so many people out there doing that. You want to get with people that have seasoning and expertise. We had this weird thing, “They're older. They don't know how to do it anymore.”
Trust me. They know how to do it. They're still relevant in their 90s. They know more. They forget a day more than we'll probably ever know. Look to those people that have that wisdom of the ages because they're the ones that are going to have the most resources, insights and life experience because everything that you're going through, they went through twenty times more than you did.
We somehow think that we evolved into something new that no one's ever experienced before in the past years. How long has mankind been around? It is what it is. Learn from the greats again. Why I went back to school is I wanted to learn from the seminal thinkers about the foundation of literature leadership and why certain things work and do not work. Get back to the basics.
That's one of your takeaways. Can you give us maybe 1 or 2 case studies about what happened when you did this? When you said, “I'm handing over the reins a bit of my company. I'm going to go take care of me for a while.” What happened? Are there some stories that you can share that help us?
The first thing was I picked an area of study that I was passionately involved in is leadership and motivation. Even though I was burned out on a company about leadership and motivation, getting into leadership and motivation on a daily intellectual, cognitive way gave me great fodder, motivation and content. It taught me how to read the research that cites sources better. In the end, it got me back into the field because it started pouring more into me about what I was trying to teach other people. I thought, “I'm going to go away.”
Everything you study has to find an outlet. People would say about my dad is he always like that and I'm like, “Yeah.” When you're getting poured into, you're going to spontaneously humanly implode if you dam that up. You want to go ahead and have an outlet. All the things that I was doing were beautiful things for me as I was still doing the business. The other thing is with the business. We're not launching nuclear warheads. Much of our business is not on a timeline where if you don't get it done now, the world is going to end tomorrow.
I gave myself the grace to go, “Do I need to push e-blasts out three times a week? Do I need to be doing social media?” I got clear about the non-immediate value-added stuff. Everything has value, but there's also a cost. I got clear on what do I need to focus on? One was, I'm getting this PhD and I'm going to complete it as soon as I can and I'm not going to be one of those ABD or the dissertation people. This is what haunted me at night that I would get started and not finish. I'm like, “We're not going to have that happen again.”
I got clear. It also gave me the opportunity to pull back from a lot of the things that I was doing from a business standpoint as far as socially but were draining me. They weren't pushing the business forward. I’m just going through the motions. All the events I paid to be part of. All the things I showed up I did. In the end, it's like, “Stop. There's nothing being accomplished by doing this.” I don't mean to say that I didn't get anything out of it, but what I’d say was I did not feel like I was able to pour in the vessels that were wanting what I was pouring out.
Don't cast your pearls before swine. Go focus on where you need to pour your resources. For people, when you go through this, it's beautiful because you get quiet and clear with yourself. It gives you an opportunity. I used my PhD. I was like, “I can't do any of this stuff anymore. I have to come off these boards.” People were like, “It's okay.” It was wonderful because it gave me a wonderful reason to say, “I have to separate from this.” Hope springs eternal for me, Denise. I kept thinking, “If I do this another month or another year or I pay the bureau fee one more year.” It's like, “No. Stop it. Cut it.” Past precedent, is there a proven track record?
Part of it was me because I did not spend enough time figuring out where I wanted to strategically take the business. The time where I was quiet gave me time to go, “What do I get passionate about? What's going to fund the business?” No matter how much I love it, it's not a business if I can't make money doing it. It's a hobby. Number three, I needed to step aside and not keep looking for solutions to my problems and said, “Is this a problem that I need to fix right now? Do I need to bring somebody on right now to take care of this? Do I?” Most of the time, it was no. The more you try and fix problems before you understand what it is you need, you're going to be putting patches on it.
You're going to end up spending a lot of resources and money. A year from now, you're still going to have that gaping hole. That's what I would say to readers out there. Take time to get clear. Take a sabbatical. From November to December 2021, I am pulling back from everything. I have two little projects that I've been waiting to get done and everything else that I'm pulling back from. I need to take some time and get clear if I see 2022 as becoming the year that I want it to be.
I'm so glad you said that. Tracey, you say that you can clearly articulate what you want until you can clearly and simply articulate what you want. You'll keep drifting. I've been doing that and it's driving me crazy. It's annoying. As with you, I have been working like an insane person to get all of my client work done for the rest of the year. I've got three clients who want to come on board and I'm refusing them until next year because I need November and December 2021 to get my head out of the clouds and get something done.
One of the guys on my show said, “Leadership is not about what you say yes to. It's about what you say no to.” You and I are both in the same spot. I have to tell people with books, I'm like, “I'm going to have to put this in the parking lot for now. I'll get back to you in six months.” Now that's not where my focus is. It's important for people to take the time because otherwise, you do keep spinning. I am clear on my two-word purpose. Kevin McCarthy helped me with this. We have his little book called Tough Shift. It should be a verb and it should be a noun.
Life Direction: Once you understand that this is just the ebb and flow of life, then you're not so rattled when it happens.
I am on this planet Earth to serve humanity by liberating greatness in others. My dad had the same thing. He'd shake people up and say, “Don't talk to stupids.” They'd be like, “I am great." I get that but now, that's not enough. Now I have to put skin on this framework of, “From a tactical point of view, where am I going to focus my resources so I can help the most amount of people liberate their greatness?”
Even when you identify your purpose, it does not all click into place for the readers out there. You get click into place, but now you have to work out the mission. That takes a lot of input, research, due diligence and people pouring into you. I love that you have your one mastermind person because that's all you need, somebody who sits there. The act of talking to one person, you cannot believe the power in that. I would also recommend for the people, if you do take that sabbatical, you need to get alone, but also have at least that one other person that you can pour this into a say, “What are your thoughts on this?”
When you're deciding that you are making a shift, whatever it's going to be, whether you need to take 2, 3 months off or a year off, it's not a bullet-point list. Once you start thinking this, you've got it. You can see it in your head, the beauty and journey. All of a sudden, you are bombarded. You bought a silver SUV and you thought you were the only one in town. Your grandmother's got one. You'll see the same article or thought process popping into your view like an arrow is pointing at you, going, “Denise, wouldn’t you say this,” in the chest. You're going to find that once you start to articulate what you want and you're no longer drifting, you've created a whole new job.
I talk about this a lot. I probably should invest in bathtub crayons and have them in my garage because I keep them in my shower. The moment I get in the shower, you relax. There's nothing to go, “Answer the phone. Look at the email. They’re canceling it.” You can relax. Instinct takes over. Ideas knock into my head and I will never remember them by the time I get dry enough to go across the house. I have bathtub crayons in there and I will scribble all of these fantastic ideas that are coming to me because I've opened up to something new or wonderful. I have to get out, take a picture of my walls and then wash the walls, but it works.
I love that you said that when you take a sabbatical. That means be quiet. Upon this, now I have my list of what to do on the sabbatical. It's like, “That's not what it's about. Stop.” You got a lot of the space to be.
Once I started with this new project that I've got going on and it's not new, it's been on my board forever. I finally decided it's coming off that board and it's getting done. I had a very stern talk with myself. I said, “Don't take on any more clients.” It's difficult to turn away money. It's difficult to turn away people that you find fascinating, but you need to take care of yourself for a while. Take care of yourself. Take that sabbatical. Tell people no. My mother used to say that my very first word was not mom or dad or dog. It was no. She said I loved it. She said I said it was a great word.
I can't believe that, Denise.
It’s like you don't know me. I like the word no. I use it a lot. I don't even bother with no and thank you. It's just no. That's all there is.
That’s a beautiful thing. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes you have to do it and you have to do it with yourself, which is my point. We need to get to the point where we can tell ourselves, “No, I'm drifting. I'm not in faith with what it is that I need, want or should do.”
That includes saying no to the self-doubts and baggage. Just no. Capture it. It's going to land. We're human. Somebody's going to say something and our eyes are going to go someplace or we're going to say no. Out. Done. I'm evolving. You have to evacuate all the stuff that's working to keep you from evolving to the next level.
That's a daily process. Sometimes each hour, you're going, “No.” I talk to myself a lot and tell myself no. I have to. You're talking about the spokes in your brain. I've got a squirrel cage going on in mine and it wears me out. I will have to say, “Stop. Slow down.”
The other thing is life has ups and downs, peaks and valleys. For the readers out there, there are going to be times when you're going to list this show and go, “I got it dialed in.” You're going to be so dialed in, but then there are going to be times when you're not dialed in and that's completely normal. I want you to know that some people are coming through 2021 as one of the best years of their life. Other people are coming through 2021 as one of the worst years of their life but be advised that the pendulum always swings. If you're not there, that's okay. Keep on keeping on because the beauty of the valley is it's not a bottomless pit.
You hit that and then there'll be another valley in the future. Once you understand this is the ebb and flow of life, you're not so rattled when it happens. It's not fun. Every time stuff's going good, I'm like, “This is great, but I know what's coming next.” That's how we learn and keep humble and real. It's one of those things that you're going to go through it and may 2022 be the year for both of us that we feel incredibly focused and dialed in.
I'm already there. I fully intend not to get in my way and not be my bottleneck. That's very empowering now that I've recognized where I'm making those silly bottlenecks. Some of them are because, “I'll go do this myself instead of having somebody in my team do it.” You were talking earlier about people. I learned a long time ago that when I hire somebody to be on my team, they may be working on Infusionsoft or Keap or whatever it's called.
They may be an expert on social media. Whatever it is, they're an expert on it and they're better at it than I am. I can do it. I don't ask my team to do anything that I can't already do myself, but I can’t stay on top of everything. I can't be constantly be keeping up with all the different changes, so I make sure I hire people who are better at something than I am.
Life Direction: You want good people in all aspects of your life, not just in some.
You understand what they're doing. It's just a matter of time because I think as entrepreneurs, we tend to just go on. This person said that, “Do your homework and due diligence because you're going to end up on the other side of this if you don't know what you expect them to do.” It is like when you hire somebody and don't make it clear what the roles and responsibilities are. It's too ad hoc. Even as entrepreneurs, we think, “We'll figure it out.” That's never a good way.
You have to have a clear idea of what it is you're asking them to do. Even if you don't know the technology, you need to know something about it so you can say, “I asked you to do this, but what you produced doesn't look quite right to me. Let's talk about this.” You can spend an awful lot of time backing and forthing if you aren't clear on your expectations and they're not clear on what they can provide you. Be careful who you're hiring and be careful how you're hiring. Find somebody who's better than you are. It's pretty simple. If you find self-starters, even better.
That's what I found out in my doctoral research. It was a crisis. It was a merger that went south. My question was interviewing the leaders and followers from the merging organization as well as the one that was absorbed. Is there anything that the leader said that made you go in? Do you know what I found out? That there wasn't. These people were either intrinsically motivated well before the merger and they stayed motivated in the fire. It's like in the military. If you're not brave before the combat starts, you're not going to be brave when the combat starts. This is something I suspected.
The capability is nice when we hire people, but that intrinsic, robust, resiliency, can-do spirit, “I'll figure it out,” is priceless. That’s what we need to hire for. Before I'd interview people, I could tell within fifteen seconds of them talking which side of the fence they were on. I could tell by their persona. It has nothing to do with the leader because they were promised their jobs and all this stuff, yet somewhere, the sky is falling.
You need to make sure that you bring people on that have an adaptive capacity that, “I'll figure it out.” Their clear because nobody knows how to do everything. If they don't believe in themselves, there's nothing as a leader I can do for you. I can't lead you. My dad would always say, “I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it drink. I can put salt in your oats and make you thirsty, but you still have to come to the organizational well and drink.” No amount of threat, money, cajoling or whatever can make you do that.
Let's steer off a bit because we're talking about leadership, but this is also how I allow friends into my life. Your friends and your colleagues probably are pretty much the same type of people if you're paying attention.
You want good people in all aspects of your life not just in some.
Anybody who reads this show knows that I'm a highly committed introvert. I'm not shy. I don't have any filters, so that I can get dangerous every once in a while. I'm not at all shy with people, but being around people can wear me out. I like people just fine, but I need to be alone. I'm in my head and thoughts all the time. I don't want somebody talking to me until I'm ready to have a conversation.
Thank goodness, my tribe, if you will, are largely like me and they get it. They're not offended if I don't talk to them for 3 weeks or 1 year. I got a wonderful sympathy card from a friend of mine who honestly lives probably 30 minutes away. We are very good friends. We haven't seen each other in many years. We finally figured that out, but we're in touch all the time. We don't live that far away from each other. She's an introvert. I'm an introvert. This is how we operate.
When you bring people to your organization, if you operate like that and hire people whose professional love language is a constant affirmation, there will be an issue. You're going to need from you as a leader that constant pat on the back and we are like, “You should know if you're doing a good job. Don't you know if you’re doing a good job?” It's good to understand who does it for you. One of the other things I learned in leadership is don't tell me to be all things to all people
I understand verse when Paul said that, but my most authentic leadership style and your most authentic leadership style and every leadership reader out there resonates with a unique follower. Find them. Otherwise, you're going to be untrue. What happened to me is that people kept telling me, “You need to do this.” I'm like, “Dear Lord.” I finally left my leadership voice. I kept trying to get people again, trying to make not my people, my people and not my followers, my followers by doing all this leadership whatever, the latest thing.
I can't do it. I can't make you engage any more than I can make my husband love me. This is something that comes out of people and is shared. Get clear on knowing who does it for you. You know who does it for you romantically but who does it for you professionally? Get clear on that. When you bring somebody on, I need you to think, “I've got to have this person.” People told me, “When you want it bad, that's how you get it.” I go, “I got to have this person.” That's not something that just happened here. I did that many times throughout my career. Wait for the right fit to happen because the wrong fit will cost you 100 times more than no fit will.
I tell people in service-based industries like me, "Do not take the clients that show up just because you need the honey or to create a portfolio." If you're a web developer as I am, wait for those people who get you and they are a perfect client. I have clients that have been with me for many years. We keep working together. We keep rebuilding their websites as needed. When social media came along, I was like, “Have you heard about Twitter?" "No, I hate Twitter.” Always be looking for ways to find the people you need in your business and make sure that you are what they need because they're in your business. It’s not that they are supposed to do it.
It’s not going to be everybody. You're not a bad business leader or a bad leader if it's not everybody. I'm watching The Chosen. I'm obsessed with it. The Chosen is about Dallas Jenkins, whose father did the Left Behind series. It's all about how Jesus called each of his disciples. He was very intentional about it. He didn't say, “Everybody who wants to come on, come on.” That's not how it went down. It’s fascinating leadership. Why wouldn't God be the greatest leadership example of all the time since he created leadership? It's fascinating. You want to wait for the people that resonate with your message.
Jesus did speak to a lot of people. There's a part where he said to Nicodemus and Nicodemus knew exactly who he was. He was the son of man and the son of God. Nicodemus couldn't leave his life. Therefore there was that non-value congruence. Jesus said, “Come on along. I'll work with you. I'll try and let you still be as a Pharisee.” You're all in or you're not. With leaders, we need to find people for our entity where they are all in with our mission and what we're doing. That's a tough thing in this world because everybody's all about, “Me, me, me and what am I getting out of it?”
The world's going to fly apart because we cannot operate like that. Remember the 20 to 40 years of your earning years. You get in there and you build somebody else's dream because the goal is eventually you will go be able to build your dream. We're doing people a disservice to let them know and to think just when you enter. Even me growing up with Zig Ziglar and all these guys as a child, I still didn't know from 20 to 40 what I was supposed to be doing.
Life Direction: Stop and learn and hone your skillset. Hopefully, we'll get that messaging out there for people, but don't bring anybody onto your team that isn’t willing to be taught and learn and molded either.
“Just go out and do it on your own. They're an idiot. You can't learn anything from them.” We're doing a huge disservice to people that we can learn something even from the biggest idiot out there. Stop and learn. Hone your skillset. Hopefully, we'll get that messaging out there for people. Don't bring anybody onto your team who isn't willing to be taught, learn, and molded.
That means business and your personal life. These days, many of us work from home or as solopreneurs and entrepreneurs. We can't make the distinction between business and personal. It's pretty much all the same. If you're going to treat business differently than you treat your personal people, see a doctor. You’re schizophrenic.
You can also read a tremendous book. That's cheaper.
Speaking of books, tell us about your newest book.
SPARK came out in 2020 and that was the 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within. That was a construct because I still am an analytic and engineer at heart. You can tell me everything in the world that you think I should be doing, but if you don't give me a construct or tools to make it happen, I'm going to look at you and say, “This is way too esoteric and nebulous. How do I put it to work in my life?” SPARK is an acronym. S is Singularity and P is Persistence. This is what you bring to the table. I don't know why God has you here on this Earth and I can't do the work for you. The government can't pay you to sit there and do no work either.
This is what you bring to the table. A-R-K are your Advocates. The people that will be the prefects and mentors that want your success more than you want. The Resources, which is the tools, website and branding. Knowledge, which is constantly being a state of learning. That's the externals that come in. Everything in life is this duality. You can give me all the resources in the world, but if I'm not clear in my head, space and work ethic, it'll fall flat. By the same token, I can have the greatest calling in the world and never quit. I'll die before I quit.
If I don't have the right resources, money, people, opening doors for me or knowledge, it's going to fall flat. That's what SPARK is about. The duality, intrinsic motivation and external things we need. My latest book is one little light-changing classics. That's called Burnett or Bridgette: A Tale of Two Employees. In life, you're going to have people that are going to rock you or shock you. You want the people that rock your world. It's a modern-day, Who Moved My Cheese, about staying away from toxic personalities, people that are self-oriented and people that are dismissive of your feelings. I liken it to the cancel culture going on.
People that are wise in their own eyes and don't have time for you. A large amount of that is going on in the workforce. We, as leaders, need to be aware. Is this person teachable? If not, it's not on you as the leader. We’re responsible to people, but not for people and those lines have blurred. We're doing the good people a disservice by tolerating the bad.
You and I have seen what happens with any organization. You've got that one rotten apple, the one that shows up late, who's dismissive with everybody. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to be in the lunchroom with him, but he's tolerated and that infects everybody else. Whether you recognize it or not, after a while, you're like, “He doesn't have to be a decent human being. Why should I show up on time?” Cut where you need to cut and add where you need to add. Tracey, this has been wonderful. Where can people find you?
If you go over to TremendousLeadership.com or TraceyJones.com, you can find the blogs speaking to free weeks, eBooks all our social media. If you click on the Contact Us, that'll go to our global world headquarters in South Central, PA and I will answer you directly.
You also have a podcast called Leaders on Leadership.
It’s where we talk with seasoned leaders about what it takes to pay the price of leadership. It's not all that easy and there's going to be a price you're going to have to pay, but it is well worth it.
Tracey, thank you so much for coming back. I know it's been a long time, but we're still friends. We've been talking about that. You don't have to talk every other week. I wouldn't. It’s not in me but thank you so much for coming back. It's been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you for all of the terrific tips and advice you've shared with our readers. Before we say goodbye, I would like to remind our readers to be sure to look for us on iTunes and anywhere else you consume your business show. You can't throw a stick on the internet without hitting our show. Go find us and take us along on your success journey. Tracey, thank you.
Thank you, Denise. Thanks to the readers out there.