Nothing beats authenticity when it comes to creating a brand that many people resonate with. It is probably one of the best ways to get your message out. In this episode, Dr. Tracey Jones talks to Tara Rae Bradford—a personal brand expert, podcast host, and international speaker—about the price of leadership she has to pay and how she overcame it and, now, helping people to become their most authentic selves. She also shares with us her journey of going from being an ICU nurse to becoming an entrepreneur, imparting lessons about leadership, vision, and growth. Join Tara and Tracey in this conversation to know more.
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Becoming Your Most Authentic Self As A Leader With Tara Rae Bradford
Our guest is a former ICU nurse turned entrepreneur, Tara Rae Bradford. She's a personal brand expert, a podcast host, and an international speaker. You are going to love this interview where we unpack what it took Tara to pay the price of leadership.
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Our special guest is Tara Rae Bradford, and Tara is a personal branding expert. She's a podcast host and an international speaker. She combines her expertise in reputation risk management and certification in high performance to help thought leaders and authors show up as themselves for maximum impact. Tara continues to be an advocate for health and wellness after her long career as an ICU nurse and approaches it through the lens of the mind, body, and soul connection. Her podcast is titled Handle Everything and it's dedicated to sharing this message. Tara, thank you for agreeing to be my guest.
Thank you for having me on.
It’s exciting and for our guests out there reading, I connected with Tara. I love reading about how she's helping authors be their most authentic version of themselves. That's how I connected with Tara. She's working with one of our tremendous leadership authors now about branding and getting the message out. She got involved in the book production process and cover art. It’s been a wonderful working relationship thus far. I met her and I'm looking at her website, and all these things she's done and I’m like, “Tara’s got to be on the show.” Tara, we are here to talk about the tougher side of leadership.
A lot of our readers out there had been through their first rodeo and they know that leadership is a wonderful thing but it's also a trying and gut-wrenching thing. My father wrote this little booklet, it's from a speech called The Price of Leadership. It is one of his best-known speeches where he talks about if you are going to truly be defined as a leader and engage in leadership, there are four things that you're going to have to be willing to pay the price for. The first one of those that I'd like you to give us your thoughts and insights on is what he defines as loneliness. Nobody likes to be lonely, but yet a lot of people say it's lonely at the top. Can you share with me through your expertise and as a leader, an entrepreneur, even as a nurse, what does loneliness mean for you? Could share some words for any of our readers out there that might be in a season of loneliness now?
I have chills listening to you say that because I've experienced loneliness in every chapter of my life and career and many memories popped up. The one thing that stands out the most is being afraid of being lonely. I read some statistics that we're at an all-time 30 plus year high in loneliness across all people of all age groups and it's the first time in history that young people are feeling as lonely, if not lonelier than the elderly. Typically, when you study human development and the different stages that we go through as we age, it's generally people over 65 who are lonely because they're experiencing a lot of grief, loss, approaching the end of their life, and wondering what that is going to look like. It's interesting that younger people are experiencing that as well.
As an entrepreneur, the shift for me in that fear of loneliness, I was always afraid in the day-to-day life of going out to dinner by myself and having a table for one. I thought that was embarrassing and I never wanted to do it ever until I moved to New York City. When I moved to New York, I decided I was only going to be there for six months, which turned into four years. That's another story. It was the first time in my life that I gave myself permission to do whatever I wanted to do. I was 30 years old and I was like, “How come I've never asked myself what I wanted?” I moved to New York as my first little act of courage and bravery. I only knew two people in a city of over eight million and that felt lonely, even though you're surrounded by tons of people. I thought, “I don't have a support group, a community, or friends.” I started reaching out to people and going to networking events alone. That first night in New York City, I took myself out to dinner. I was tired that I didn't care so much that I was alone. I was tired and hungry.
You had a purpose. You were focused on that and not wondering what everybody else thought about you.
I was like, “I need to eat.” I drove from Maine to New York and I didn't have a plan for food. I found a restaurant and I went in. I asked for a table and they said, “How many?” I said, “One,” and it was no big deal. They didn't react, judge me, or make me feel guilty for taking up a whole table to myself when there's a line of people waiting outside. There is none of that. I didn't bring a book or any distractions. I sat there and enjoyed my food and was present.
I looked around the restaurant to see if anybody else was staring at me and nobody was looking at me. I thought, “This whole time, this fear of loneliness has been making me not do things that make me feel more connected to people. I had a great conversation with the server. I felt like I belonged there even though I was sitting by myself. For anyone reading who's feeling lonely and you're wondering, “Am I isolating myself? Am I preventing myself from getting out there and experiencing connecting with people?” I would say there's a difference between loneliness and solitude.
That’s powerful. Unpack that. What would you say is the difference?
If you can reframe it to, “Instead of being lonely, I'm enjoying my solitude and alone time.” For any parents reading, I'm not a parent but I talked to a lot of parents when I'm working with them and they say, “I don't remember the last time I showered with the door closed.” That's solitude. Taking a shower with the door closed where you aren't being disturbed. “I have a dog now. I can't go to the bathroom without the dog coming in with me.” We all need that alone time and that's a gift to have that time to yourself to reflect, to be with yourself. Quality time is one of the five love languages and in order to receive that from others, we also have to give it to ourselves. Spending that quality time alone is significant.
That's a beautiful take on loneliness, especially for entrepreneurs. I was in big companies and I remember we'd all go out and do these big parties and happy hour. It’s always tons of people and tons of fun. Work hard and play hard. You get on your own and it’s like the office. That's why we love the office because they're all together in this work-family type thing, but you get into this alone. I love that you talked about it. You got out, got to know yourself and take yourself out.
Solitude is a beautiful thing. That's one of the greatest things with all the shutdown and stuff. I have been able to take the time to engage in a lot more of that. I love the juxtaposition of loneliness versus solitude. If you are out there on your own, don't let it keep you from getting out because you don't know who you're going to bump into. When we get back out there and I'm already back out there. I’m supporting local businesses as best I can but people are hungry to get reconnected. This is a wonderful opportunity to get out if you're comfortable and maintain all the rules, but just enjoy.
It was eating out alone that turned me into an entrepreneur. I never would have started a company if I wasn't eating out alone. It opened up doors to opportunities to meet people and cross paths with people that I wouldn't have normally met. I met someone while I was sitting there alone. He was eating alone and having the best day of his life. I was having the worst day of my life. He sat down next to me beaming. It was like rays of sunshine coming out of his face. I was over there with the dark cloud over my head, the rain pouring down, and slumped over.
I was thinking, “Don't talk to me,” because I'm going to say something negative and I don't want to be negative. I don't want anyone to know about my bad day. I want to eat dinner and go home. He started talking to me and he asked me some interesting questions. In two weeks, I was supposed to be moving, leaving New York, and going to grad school. I was going to get another degree in Nursing. The word entrepreneur was not even in my vocabulary. I didn't even know it was an option. I didn't know what I would sell.
I had never sold anything in my life except for maybe in high school when I worked at the mall. He was asking me questions and he said, “What do you do?” I said, “I'm a nurse.” He asked me what I like to do. I lit up. The cloud went away, the rain stopped and suddenly, his light was shining on me and I was basking in it. It was like getting into a warm car. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I love getting into a warm car that's been sitting out in the sun and feeling the warmth. It's like a hug and that's how I felt at that moment when he asked me what I like to do.
At the time, I had a YouTube channel where I was doing videos for fun. It was a creative outlet and people were sending me messages saying that my videos were helping them feel confident and that felt good, but I wasn't making money on it. I didn't know that I could. He said, “You have something special when you speak and other people take notes. They're learning from you. People will pay for that. You have to figure out what it is that you're saying that other people don't know yet and they need to learn it from you.” I walked out of that bar and I was like, “I'm starting a company.”
Authentic Self: Quality time is one of the five love languages, and in order to receive that from others, we also have to give it to ourselves.
Isn't that wild? My book that came out, Spark, it's priceless. That conversation was that spark. You hadn't even considered that and yet his words when you said, “What is it that you're saying that other people need to hear?” I would go to Jim Collins’ Good to Great, and we'll pay to hear because we have bills to pay and I'm sure in New York City, you had plenty of bills to pay. I love that. People have probably said that to you before or maybe you weren't tuned into it. For whatever reason, at that moment, because you put yourself out there, you were open to receive that message. That’s exciting.
He was alone too. We were both eating dinner by ourselves.
Yes, because you can talk to other people. When you're with a group, or God forbid, a date and you go to talk to somebody else, it's like, “What?” I love that because when you are alone, you have complete latitude to work the room to converse, to not converse, and to do whatever you want. On loneliness, you have a beautiful perspective. My dad never meant loneliness to be a bad thing. He said, “You're going to experience it because you have to go off on your own and craft what you want your future to look like. Only you can do that.”
You can have all these great people in the world. This guy dripped out the possibility to you, but you have to be the one that then does that. The fact that you didn't talk about grad school is what led you to believe that grad school or nursing is not your number one passion. Explain to me the thought process when he asked what you like to do. Did you talk about your YouTube channel or did you talk about your current role?
I talked about my YouTube channel.
There you have it. Your passion popped out.
I loved being a nurse. I loved helping people but it's different. The thing that led me away from nursing was I was in trauma critical care so people in car accidents, who had been run over by tractors, stuck in avalanches. The worst things that could ever happen to someone that you wouldn't wish on anybody. I got to meet those people. It was interesting because I was in my early twenties and I thought my job was to save lives. I had so much purpose. I was like, “I'm going to save everyone. I'm going to save them when they're about to take their last breath and they're going to come back to life.” I thought, “That's my role.”
The more I did it, the more I thought, “I'm seeing patterns and behavior. I wonder if I'm meeting these people too late because not all of them are surviving.” I saw that as a reflection on myself. It’s like, “I'm not being successful if I'm meeting them too late.” I need to go meet these people when they're thriving because that's the thing that everyone remembers at the near-death experience. They're like, “This one decision, I should have done differently.”
It was always at the top of their game and I was like, “How can I meet people at the top of their game, and help them make the decisions that are in alignment with the path that's going to prevent the bad thing from happening, but still wake them up to, ‘The colors are more vibrant and I have all this purpose in life?’” I got thank you cards from people afterward even if they could never walk again. Even if they had lost their loved one and they wish that they had more time with that person. I still got thank you cards and that was the second thing that woke me up. I was like, “If I'm getting thank you cards for not doing my job as well as I thought I should be doing it, something's happening here.”
For our readers out there, what Tara has beautifully illustrated and I found this too, I used to always think, “I need to work on my weaknesses and whatever I'm not good at.” No. StrengthFinders is all about the stuff that comes naturally to you. You probably were not even aware that everybody else picked up on it. That's your innate great purpose that you should parlay into a bigger portion of your dreams.
Had you not been a nurse in something so critical, tender, and scary as dealing with people when they might cross over, you may not have seen the power of that. It may get lost in the noise. I've had five different careers. People go, “Did you not like it?” I loved them all but I walked away from them when there was a time where I went, “That season is ending. You get the call from and you get the call to.” It sounds like you had that and that gentleman was a voice above that spoke a little bit of prophecy into you and you followed.
It took six years to have that experience. It wasn't like I had these ideas of, “I'm getting thank you cards. That's interesting,” and I met this guy who put me on my path.
It’s like a movie. For our readers, this is critical too. The timing, not of time but of timing. The beauty is when you realize that even though it's frustrating, things get lined up exactly when they're supposed to get lined up. If you would have come to this awareness sooner, you wouldn't have had the resources, experience, confidence, or whatever else you needed to get there. Ideas sometimes take years to culminate and come to fruition before they even sprout. They’ve got to germinate.
We only got through loneliness. Thank you for explaining that because that fascinates people on your take on that and how out of your loneliness, this was born, this huge connection to humanity so that's beautiful. Next is weariness. It's tough. There are different kinds of weariness. When you're on the scent of something that you love, you're relentless and it's wonderful. We have to try a lot of things and a lot of things don't work. It's tiring and frustrating. You kick yourself for, “Why did I think this would work?” How do you stay refreshed, doing what you do and how do you handle weariness? Can you share with our readers something or maybe a time when you were wary and what you did about it?
Yes, I can. When I was a nurse, I was a type-A. In the ICU, there's tons of wires, cords, and everything, and I had them all. If I could have had tie wraps, they would have all been wrapped up and organized. They were all labeled, and they all had their spot. Everything had to be a certain way. I could hear a pin drop and I would be like, “What's that?” I could hear people breathing from the hallway. I was tuned in to things being a certain way. When I left nursing, it opened me up to being a little bit more laid back. For any type A people reading, it's possible to be laid back, I promise you.
When I started being a little more laid back, the first step for me was going a different way to work every day. I was still working as a temp nurse in New York. That was my first job there. I started walking to work and paying attention to which direction the lights were turning green, where I could walk. I went whichever way the lights turned on because when you're walking, you don't have to go the correct way on the road. If you're on the sidewalk, you can go whichever way you want. I started carrying my camera and taking pictures of the city, being present with my commute, leaving a little bit early, and enjoying the time and seeing new things. I let myself be guided. It was incredible.
I started my day instead of the old me driving to work mad at the red lights, hitting every red light, and trying to get there as fast as possible so I got the best parking spot and super stressed out, this started my day in a relaxing way in a way that lit me up. The weariness started when I started my company because I was still working a full-time job during the day. For part of it, I was working at night and trying to build my business during the day and wondering when I am going to sleep. That part was challenging, but it was still worth it. I didn't want to sleep because I was so excited about it.
I remember sleeping four hours a night and thinking, “This is awesome. I have such a purpose and reason to jump out of bed every morning. I'm so excited about my company.” That caught up to me and I thought something's got to give. I either have to give up on the company or I have to quit my job and I wasn't ready for either one of those things to happen. I ended up quitting my job with no savings account and 30 days of the runway. I was like, “I have 30 days. I can pay my bills, and I have to make money. I have to figure it out.”
Authentic Self: When you try to kink the hose and get things to happen faster, it will force you to slow down.
During that time, a lot of things happened but I ended up launching a program that sold out in 24 hours. At the eleventh hour, that's always how it happens. I rescued myself and pulled through. That program was a success for the next eighteen months. I kept launching it and growing the program and people were loving it but I remember that I didn't take a vacation during that time. I was focused on building and growing. I went on vacation while I was teaching this program and I remember I was at the Waldorf Astoria in Boca Raton, which sounds glamorous and it should be a nice vacation.
I was sitting in the hotel lobby teaching my two-hour class and I felt sick. Nobody in the class knew I was sick because I had put up this wall. I was like, “I have to show up. I have to teach this. I have to bring energy.” I taught the class on Zoom. As soon as I turned off the Zoom Room, I collapsed in the lobby. I had this sharp pain in my side. I'm a nurse, and I've never gone to the hospital. Things have happened and I'm like, “I should go to the hospital, but I'm fine.” This took me out. I couldn't stand up and my breathing hurt. I don't know what it was. I ended up having someone at the hotel call an ambulance. I went straight from teaching my class to the hospital.
I spent the rest of my vacation in the emergency room. It was a weekend. They told me that they didn't know what was going on. They couldn't figure out what was happening. They did a CAT scan and they found inflammation. Inflammation is related to stress and the stress hormones in your body release neurotransmitters and chemicals that cause inflammation and inflammation lead to chronic health problems, pain, and all of these things. I ended up flying back to New York and seeing a specialist and trying to figure out what was going on. That was the moment where I thought I needed to have a better balance. I was like, “Is it my diet?” There was inflammation in my colon. I was like, “Maybe it's nutrition,” I tried all of these things for a year and I realized that it was stress.
I can even remember my dad and like you, he'd sleep four hours. People would call the office at 2:00 AM from all over the world and he would answer. That's how he rode. I remember when I was in high school seeing him and he had chronic fatigue syndrome. He was relentless. We are human, it's important even if it's good, you have to take care of yourself. You, especially at that young age and me as I get older, I'm like, “I need more downtime.” Even at a younger age when you're building, take care of yourself. Tara, how long were you running the two jobs together? This is important for our entrepreneurs reading here too.
I've worked both jobs for 1.5 years. Before that, I was doing my YouTube channel and working a job for probably 1.5 years as well. That felt like the same amount of work as starting a company because I was learning to edit the videos, putting together the content, researching, and all of that but it didn't feel like work at the time because I wasn't getting paid. I was so excited.
My best features are ones for free, otherwise it's work.
It’s nice to get paid.
When it's free, you get to see it differently. That's good for our readers too. I did that too when I came back to run the company here. I was working in DC half the week as in defense contracting and half the week here. I did that for a year because I wanted to do both. God allowed me to do both and in the end, I had to pick one. I tell people, “If you're making a transition, if you can do the blend, do both because there are benefits, salary, and it's not all bad.” You're not doubting your entrepreneurial flame. It's a practical and tactical way to transition to the next career. I want to share that because there's a lot of people out there that probably think you’ve got to go all or nothing. You’ve got to leap and let your wings out. A lot of leadership materials don't do that. Don't you go off and do something else until you’re at least sure you have some means of something coming in.
For anyone reading who's in that transition, what I recommend, and what I did, was I negotiated with my employer to allow me to work half time. I worked twenty hours a week instead of 40 for a period of time until they could hire someone else. That gave me more time to work on my business. It wasn't cold turkey, quit your job. The other thing I would say about weariness for anybody who is feeling this if you have to think about your work as water coming out of a water hose. How you make the water come out faster? You kink the hose.
If you have to do something that kinks the hose, you're interfering with timing like we talked about but also when you let go of the kink in the hose, the water comes out slower than before. What I was doing was trying to kink the hose and get things to happen faster and it forced me to slow down. I spent that year trying to figure out what I did wrong so I could learn from it and not have it happen again and now that's something that I teach. I'm also a coach so I help people with that as well.
I love that you lived through it because now you know. When you hear other people talk about it, we're tough as nails, but then I've had some health issues and I'm like, “I get it. I'm not immortal. I'm not Wonder Woman.” I’ve got to take everything in stride so awesome, Tara. The next one that you talked about was abandonment. He would always say to people, “We need to stop thinking about what we like and want to think about in favor of what we all need to think about.”
He was diligent about, “You’ve got to put on a whole different mindset of focus when you get into a leadership role.” Talk to me about what abandonment means to you and you've talked about how you've re-honed your focus, which is what his point was about. Talk to me about some of the things you realize you had to abandon on your old plate so you could pick something up on the new plate.
A lot of it is mindset but even going back to childhood, and being afraid of abandonment. If you were hospitalized as a child, if you had any fear that your parents might not come home, or anything like that when you were younger, that plays out in your adult relationships as well. One of the things that I see holding people back is the fear of what everyone else is going to think, “Am I going to be kicked out of the tribe?” That is a primitive reflex in our brains back when we were cavemen. Being in a tribe was significant and being accepted in that tribe.
If you were kicked out of the tribe, your life was in danger. The part of our brain that fears that is still the same as it was when we were cavemen. It hasn't evolved past that reflex of, “I need to be in survival mode.” Staying in survival mode and reading to that part of your brain instead of using your higher-level thinking to work through those things and evaluate and ask questions about why am I afraid? Why am I not doing this? What is holding me back? Because most of us aren't being chased by a bear.
Unless you have a big dog. Unless you adopted one.
Exploring that question around abandonment and what it means to you is so important. When we start an entrepreneurial venture, our family or our friends, if they're not entrepreneurs, don't understand and they say things like, “Why would you leave that stable cushy job with the benefits and the retirement to go do something risky? That doesn't make any sense.” A lot of those things that people say they think they're helping, but they're planting seeds of doubt in your subconscious. You start doubting yourself and you fall into the isolation of, “I'm not going to tell anybody. I have to protect this. I can't tell anyone what I'm doing because nobody believes in me.”
You stop believing in yourself and it holds you back. That's when you start doing the things that cause the weariness. You create distractions. It’s like, “I need to be more credible, more of an expert, I need another degree, another certification, more media coverage, and that external validation to justify why I'm doing what I'm doing.” It's this vicious cycle, where you're afraid to put yourself out there and be yourself, which I know is the worst advice ever. It’s like, “Be yourself.” It's so hard to read your own label from inside the bottle.
Once you figure out how to be more self-aware, learn about yourself, validate your own ideas, and how to have that confidence, where you believe in what you're doing. That's when you can shift from worrying that everyone's going to abandon you to become a magnet for opportunities, people, and all of these things. It’s like me meeting that guy at the bar who changed my career trajectory. I had to make myself a magnet for that opportunity because if I was in a fear of abandonment, that wouldn't have shown up. I wouldn't have been open to it.
SPARK: 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within
I can't emphasize enough to our readers. Tara, you said it's beautiful. I know we have to let stuff go but when you finally do, it is freeing and liberating. It took me decades, and you finally go and open yourself up to the right things coming into your life. Before I was trying to come in but it couldn't get through all the stuff and it wasn't anybody else's fault. It's us. It’s reptilian brain versus frontal cortex. We're thinking like this. I love that you said we create these distractions.
I hear people say, “I can't do that. I need to get another certification.” Why? You're creating busier work because you don't want to do that. It’s like, “I’ve got to wait,” or somebody publishing a book. I’ve got to let somebody else review it one last time.” Why? Put it out there. I love how you brought that. That's brilliant, and validating your own ideas. Not that you're not going to have other people push back or ask you the tough questions or give you feedback but you'll be able to answer them because it's part of you. It's part of your conviction. You can't separate that. You can't be distracted, because it's you. You can't walk away from your own soul and spirit.
Your answers will be less defensive.
That's a great insight. If somebody does get defensive, they might not be ready. They might not be all in with themselves. That's beautiful advice. The last one is vision. My dad was pragmatic. Flunked out of school in the eighth-grade school of hard knocks, and was not this incredible. Sometimes I think of entrepreneurs and I'm like, “I didn't get that touch from the gods of that golden thing.” He’s like, “Vision is seeing what needs to be done and doing it.” How do you get clarity for your vision? How do you hone your vision?
This was another chance meeting. I didn't know I had vision until someone told me and this is another thing. You need to become a detective for who you are by listening to other people, and when you're defensive, you're not reading. I remember I met the CEO of a tech company in New York City. We met because we were both alumni of the same university. This was how I was trying to meet friends and people. I was finding all the groups that I could be affiliated with.
I don't even remember what I said. I casually threw something out there in conversation and he said, “That's what people like us do.” I was like, “People like us? You're this visionary CEO. I'm just a nurse.” That's how different my life was back then. Instead of getting defensive and being, “We're not the same,” I said, “That's interesting. What do you mean people like us?” He said, “Visionary entrepreneurs.” My head exploded.
I was like, “How do you define a visionary entrepreneur?” I couldn't see it in myself. He said, “People who find creative solutions to their problems.” I was like, “I do that. It is true.” Being visionary, you can have your big vision. For me, it’s wanting to save the world. You can be visionary as you’re problem-solving. Instead of being the problem solver, being the creative person who opens up opportunities for other people to see solutions because before he said that, and before when I was a nurse, I was the fixer. I would go in and do it myself. It’ll be like, “Let me do that for you.”
My mom couldn't figure out how to send an email back when email first started and I was like, “Let me do it for you. What do you want to say and I'll type it?” As I got older, I realized that that wasn't helping. It's not helping if you do it for people because they're not getting to experience the transformation. If you want to help transform the lives of others, and I bet everyone reading, this is a podcast about tremendous leadership, authors, and thought leadership. I bet you're writing your book, or you have your idea that you're going to transform the lives of other people. The way that you do that is by showing them the way instead of doing it for them, putting them in your car, and driving them the way that they need to go.
They need to see it for themselves and that's another point where timing is so critical because if you would have told me I'm a visionary entrepreneur five years earlier, I would have told you you're crazy and it would have set me back. All of these things show up when you're ready to hear them and they show up. They're meaningful. They mean something and the meaning is what you attach to it. How are you going to make this meaningful for you? I'm sure that person who said that to me doesn't even remember saying that, but it changed my whole life.
People were like, “What great advice have you got?” I'm like, “It was 1 or 2 people at certain times saying things.” I was like, “What?” I always listened to another gentleman who was on my show, who had interviewed the guy that wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul, Denis Waitley. He intersected with him 30 years older, and Denis Waitley looked at him and said something. It’s like what you said with this guy at the restaurant. My friend Eli never forgot it. Years later, he gets to interview on this show and he's like, “Denis, I'm sure you don't remember this, but you said this to me.” It was as real as if he had said it to him five seconds earlier. I love it. That's so beautiful.
I have an example of that as well. You said Chicken Soup for the Soul. I read all of the Chicken Soup books when I was a kid. They made me who I am. They gave me these ideas and it's so incredible. When I first started doing my videos, back before I started my business, someone reached out to me from a PR firm, a friend from middle school. He said, “You sound like Jack Canfield,” and I thought, “You think I'm copying Jack Canfield?” If you had told me this years prior, I wouldn't have believed you.
You would have shut down.
At that moment, I stopped doing the videos for a while because I thought, “People think I'm copying him.” If you hear it at the wrong time and you're defensive or you're not secure in who you are, that's what could happen. You stop doing what you're supposed to do, what lights you up, or something that's going to help other people. Having vision means that you're growing as a person, and you're being of service to others. You grow, share, and that's the ladder that I climb.
Before, I was climbing the ladder to get promoted at work and now it's, “How can I grow as a person and share that with others so they can grow with me and grow again?” Growth is not easy. Growth happens when it's the most painful moments like being in the emergency room in the hospital. I grew a lot from that experience. If you're willing to go through the difficulties, obstacles, and sometimes the pain of growing and letting things go from the past so you can take off. When you let go of that baggage, you get lighter.
People that always told me that and I’m like, “Maybe for you, lady, but I'm here to tell you I was the biggest naysayer.” When you say transform, if people truly want to transform, you can only do that by growing and no pain, no gain. It's a fact of life but it's good growth. It's growth with a purpose. It's not a pain to rip you apart and hurt you. It's constructive growth. It's deconstructive so you can get built into the next greater version, but people have to get their heads wrapped around it because change is difficult. We fight it like grim death, even though sometimes if we don't change, that's where we're facing. It’s death.
Looking back, sometimes those periods before I grew, were more painful than the growth itself. The reason I moved to New York was because I was getting out of a bad relationship.
That’s why I moved, whenever there was a breakup or there was a divorce. I moved to a whole other country sometimes. I'm like, “I'm done.” That’s funny. I'm with you.
People said, “That was so brave to go to New York. You've never lived in a city that big before. You had to figure out the subway and you ate dinner alone. How scary is that?” What I said to them at that moment was, “It was scarier to stay in the situation I was in than it was to not know what was next.” I knew something had to be better and I didn't know what that was. That's the thing when you're evaluating whether or not it's worth it to feel the pain and pressure of growth. Is it worse to stay committed to suffering in your situation or is it better to commit to something different? To commit to love, being more of yourself, to putting yourself out there and risking not being understood?
A good test for some people that will come in duress. People come to me in duress as probably do to you. They’re like, “I can't take this anymore.” I'm like, “What are we going to do about it?” They're still at the point of fixating on it. I'm like, “What if a year from now you're in exactly the same place?” They're like, “There's no way. I can't even be alive.” I’m like, “We’ve got to figure out a plan because I don't think you're going to be around either. You're going to get sick or something bad.”
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I also want to bring up a point that you hit on for the entrepreneurs out there, because I used to hear about this. It’s like, “You’ve got to lay this plan out and this goal. You pivot on purpose.” That's a beautiful thing. I was never, in the earlier years, mature enough. I move like you did if there's a pain threshold. I didn't fight or flight but I would say, “I need to get out of this. I need to start afresh.” That's healthy but I was pivoting on pain. I let people know, if you've done that, that's not entirely bad because a lot of times we poo-poo that. It’s like, “Don't run because you're going to run into the next bad thing.”
Sometimes a blank slate is not a bad thing. It’s cognitive dissonance. That pain is going to drive you to do something different and it may not be the most thought out, purposeful, goal-oriented, or leadership-approved thing but at least you're doing something. I want to share that with the readers. I like that you brought that up. Not every decision the entrepreneur makes is brilliantly thought out. Sometimes it's your gut, and you know that it's time to go. I'll work this out when I get there. Thank you for being transparent and sharing that.
That brings us full circle back to my nursing experience of what if I could meet these people when they're thriving? Those are the situations. When people were running away from something, they ended up taking that wrong turn that led them to the hospital bed. If we could go back to those moments and change what they did, I would have told them to run towards what they want instead of running away from what they don't want. Even though they ended up in the hospital and they said they wouldn't have changed anything because it woke them up.
That’s the beauty of it.
It's not that you should walk around being like, “Am I making the right decision? Am I going the right way?” Because no matter which path you go on, you're going to come back to the path that you're meant to be on. It depends on your pain tolerance, pretty much. If you can tolerate a lot of pain and keep kinking the hose and keep powering forward, you're going to end up with more pain because it's trying to get your attention.
The same thing in the hospital. People don't come to the emergency room until they're in pain but when you ask them, “When did the symptoms start?” they say, “A year ago, I started having this cough but I could tolerate the cough, or whatever it was.” If we start tuning into our bodies and noticing those first signs like when you're anxious, do you start pacing, and you don't notice your pacing? Maybe you're on the phone so you're distracted. Notice the next time you're on the phone and you start pacing and ask yourself, “Am I stressed out?”
We can start tuning into those earlier signs of when it's a little bit of pain. If you're pacing, your body is telling you that we need to walk away from this thing, but you can't get away from it because it's stress. Paying attention to what your body's doing, if you're on the edge of your seat, leaning forward, your body's telling you something. Either you're leaning in and you want to be closer, you want to listen more or you want to get up out of your seat because you want to get out of there, you're uncomfortable. Checking with your body because it's going to tell you when you're in pain before it gets so bad that you have to do something about it.
We have covered four huge chunks and you've given some unbelievable insights for the leaders out there that are faced with this. I love your perspective on all of this. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers that we haven't covered?
The other thing I like talking about and that I see all the time when people are starting something new is they put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect the first time. You probably see this with editing books and the first time they get their edits back. If there's something on every page, they're like, “I'm a horrible writer.” I would challenge you to think about starting something and being bad at it. It takes repetition to get good at something. It takes doing something 60 times to create a new neural pathway. Be committed to doing something at least 60 times before saying that you're bad at it.
I had heard sometimes it’s 40 days to get the new synapse wired in, but I love the 60 times so keep a list of that. The more you do it, then you can shorten that 40 days to maybe a two weeks thing.
Turn it into a game and prove yourself wrong. It’s like, “I'm going to do that 60 times and prove I'm good at it.”
Tara, how can people get in touch with you and connect with you? What's the best way?
The best way to connect is to go to my website TaraRaeBradford.com and you can get on my email list. I send emails every Wednesday and keep in touch that way.
Tara, thank you for being our guest.
Thank you so much for having me. This was such a fun conversation.
It was. I love that you let me go deep and understand when this happened because I love people's stories. That's fantastic. Thank you again, Tara. Be sure and hit the like and the subscribe button. Send us a comment. We love hearing from you. Please leave us a review too. We would be honored and also share with whoever you think might be interested in this so other people can learn how to pay the price of leadership. Thank you to our tremendous tribe for reading. Have a tremendous rest of the day.
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