There’s a big difference between being a leader and the act of leadership. On today’s show, Tracey Jones joins Dan Moore of The Action Catalyst Podcast to discuss what the differences are and shares her story and how she learned to lead tremendously. From the book she read at the age of eight, to the time she spent in the military and to now successfully handling and growing her father’s business, Tracey shares her lifelong journey of learning about the real meaning behind leadership. She also explains the creative continuum and reveals why influence is the key to moving your team and your business forward. Learn how to become a better leader and grow a better business by staying relevant and continually innovating.
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Listen to the podcast here:
How To Lead Tremendously With Tracey C. Jones: Episode 251 Of The Action Catalyst Podcast
I'm delighted to be connected through the miracle of the internet to Tracey Jones in Pennsylvania. Tracey is somebody that I've had a chance to know for many years. Among many other things which she'll share with us, she is in charge of TremendousLeadership.com. It is not only a resource of books and inspiration but also an entire attitude to help people move toward their goals in life. She is a well-known speaker, a leader in every regard and a published author several times. Her book has a wonderful title, A Message to Millennials: What Your Parents Didn't Tell You and Your Employer Needs You to Know. With her sense of humor and her real-world slant, I know it's going to be a fantastic book and I'm looking forward to picking it up myself.
Tracey served our country. She graduated from the US Air Force Academy and spent twelve years as an officer in the US Air Force in Europe as well as locally. She went from Roswell, the Gulf War, Germany, and England and has had, after that, great service in the civilian side of defending our country, working with the National Security Agency, as well as civilian contractors. Her father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, iconic in the motivational industry, ultimately passed away in 2009. It became obvious to everyone in the family and those that knew what Charlie had built that Tracey was the one to take the reins, build that, extend it and make it fantastic. She is a generous giver and always will be, and we're delighted that she's giving of her time for the show. Tracey C. Jones, welcome.
Thank you, Dan. It's tremendous to be speaking with you and your readers.
You've had such an interesting career with many stopping points but I would say if we were describing a career like a building, you've spent time on three floors in a very significant way. One is your experience in the Air Force. I know you also had some direct sales experience with the Southwestern company before that began. Can you share a little bit about those formative experiences, either selling books then what it was like at the academy serving our country in Europe, some of the lessons and the key learning and how you grew during that time?
We will talk a little bit about my father. He was very interesting growing up. He would travel, come back, and share these different organizations that he had spent time with and observed young people in them that he would consider being tremendous leaders. It's how he brought up Southwestern to me and it's also how I wound up going to the Air Force Academy. My coding as a child growing up is I was always open to new experiences. It's a personality trait. You can hone it. Some of us are more easygoing with risk and trying the unknown. Other times we prefer the more routine but I pulled that trait from him. Whatever the day brings, I'm going to try. If it doesn't work out, I got to experience it. If it does work out, I got success.
One of his laws of leadership was exposure to experience. I remember growing up, he would tell me, "Tracey, you need to go out and earn your own stripes." Probably as a little girl, I thought, “I'm going into the military.” My father loved the military. He tried to get in. He lied about his age, his skillset and graduating but he was not accepted. He was a patriot. I was in college a couple of years before I went into the military and I remember him talking to me about Southwestern.
My father had an interesting perspective on leisure time. He always thought that work should be more fun than fun. When you had downtime, you should still be growing or impacting people's lives. When I would be done with school for the summer, he was like, "What are you going to do?" He brought up Southwestern. I knew he was a life insurance salesman. He cut his teeth on cold call and commission. I knew that this was a huge factor in making him the tremendous person that he was.
I remember him telling me, "Tracey, if you can cold call, knock on a door and make a sale, that's one of the hardest things in life you're ever going to accomplish." I thought, "I'm eighteen. Let's get the hard stuff out of the way so then I can have fun the rest of my life." That's how I wound up going. He tells me funny stuff like, "Tracey, when you knock on the door, don't put your foot in the door. Put your head through the door. That way, when they go to shut it, you can still keep talking to them." I would just sit there. Every time I get that door closed, I think of my dad. I'm like, "That's life." I had two summers and they were remarkable. It taught me to learn how to authentically approach people.
I was in a couple of areas, Virginia and West Virginia. In some of the areas, I sold two sets of encyclopedias, the two books that came together. They were $60 and it was the equivalent of a condensed Encyclopedia Britannica. Those were great books. It was a wonderful environment because these were the people that could use something like that. It was wonderful to go out and connect with them. I had pen pals with a lot of the people that I met and sold books to for many years. I can remember once I bartered a kitten. I stumbled upon a moonshine distillery and had some wild turkeys. It was all Americana. It was a different culture but it was incredible to meet these people, real salt of the earth, dear people that appreciated those books.
I did two summers there. I can remember my father coming back and saying, "I went down and I spoke to an organization in Roswell, New Mexico." This was before all the aliens were down there. It was called New Mexico Military Institute, NMMI. I remember he laid the flyer on the table and he said, "Tracey, these kids that go there, they're going to make something out of their life." It's like a Southwestern pitch. "These kids would sell these books there. They're tough. They're building their leadership genes."
I applied to New Mexico Military Institute, which was an Army high school and junior college. It was a feeding school. They call them prep schools for typically West Point, Annapolis or the Air Force Academy. Being an East Coast girl, I knew about Annapolis and West Point. I did not know about the Air Force Academy. I go to Roswell, have an incredible year, got recognized with the Outstanding New Cadet Award and loved it. I loved the discipline and the structure.
I graduated after one year because I already had a year of college. They said, "What do you want to do next?" This is how I go through life. I'm like, "I'm not sure what I wanted but what's available?" I had an Air Officer Commander, Major John Shaper, who said, "Tracey, we've got West Point and Annapolis." I said, "I've heard of them." I fell in love with the West. When I went to New Mexico, I was like, "This is it." There are not many things in life I know but one of them is, “Someday, I'm living in New Mexico. The land of enchantment.” He said, "There's the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs." I said, "Let's give that a shot."
This gentleman was pivotal in getting me my nomination. Three months later, I showed up as a zoomie at Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was a phenomenal experience. I'm glad I had a couple of years under my belt before I went out there. Some kids came right out of high school and I just soaked it up. This is the most credible experience and I'm so honored to have this opportunity. I didn't know if I wanted to make this my life's work. All I knew was that for this season, I'm going to go in and give everything I can. I met some of the greatest friends and greatest people.
The military academy was all about learning leadership skills, discipline, conscientiousness, being open to new experiences, accountability, camaraderie, not passing the buck, and not making excuses. All these critical life lessons were drilled to you. You are only as strong as the weakest link and you never leave your wingman. Everything we do should be done with excellence from shining our boots to making our beds. Most importantly, the greatest thing in life is to give your life a living for the service of something greater than yourself, which was to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and our allies around the world.
It was a remarkable experience. I look back at it and I tell people, "If I wouldn't have that, I'd probably be living in a van down by the river." I grew up with a father who was very disciplined but self-discipline is different from growing up in a disciplined environment. When I got out on my own, I was thankful I had that opportunity in a very structured environment. I graduated and then off I was to live all over the world, the First Gulf War. I lived in England, Italy. I got to be part of the Bosnian War, Turkey, Germany. You name it. It was phenomenal.
You were in leadership roles supporting our troops and helping us survive in some incredibly difficult situations.
I had the joy of being an Aircraft Maintenance Officer on the fighter jets. It was so much fun. I am very much a hands-on leader so I loved walking the flight line, getting the jets ready, getting a call in the middle of the night, "We got to launch at 12:00. We don't know where we're going. We don't know how long we're staying." It was incredibly exciting and I loved it. I loved living in different cultures because you get to see the rest of the world. I love meeting people to see that we're not all that different. I especially love it because it always reminds me how incredibly blessed we are in this country, and to work with your allies and let them know, "We got your back." I worked with my enlisted troops, which was phenomenal. As an officer, they took incredible care of me.
Your followers, when you're a leader, can empower you or disempower you. I had the greatest enlisted folks that taught me well. I gave them the utmost respect and they always made me look good. It was very exciting as a young lady seeing all this stuff and having all this responsibility with an incredible cadre of fellow officers, higher officers, wing commanders, people like General Schwarzkopf and stuff like that to look up to and go, "This is what a leader should be."
Lead Tremendously: The more you know about different people, the more you know about what their particular piece of the entire project was.
What's significant to what you said is that the enlisted people taught you. There are some people who when they're put to an appointed position of leadership feel like, "I can't learn from these people. I'm supposed to teach them everything." How do you maintain an attitude of teachability when the rank system says you should be the one doing the telling and not the learning?
A rank system is a matter of a pay scale based on how many people you're responsible for. It doesn't necessarily mean you know more than anybody else. The biggest thing about that is there is a big difference between being a leader and the act of leadership. When you are a leader, it's all about improving your own individual skills. Leadership is no longer about you, but how well you get things done through your influence on other people. You can be an incredibly great leader and have horrible leadership skills. I had to learn this a lot. My ship is tight and my stuff is squared away, but if you're in a leadership role, it's not about you. It's about the people underneath you.
You see a lot of leaders, when there are crises or falls from grace, they'll blame it on their underlings. I'm like, "You were never engaging in leadership. It was always just about you." You have to realize, when you were in a role as an officer for leadership, people were not judging me for me. I was being evaluated on how well I got things done through the skills of the others. If you as a leader are not teachable and humble, you're never going to be able to make the step to leadership. You may be a leader but you won't engage in leadership.
That is a crucial distinction. I've never heard it delineated as clearly as you did.
Thank you. I read that in my doctoral studies. I work with a lot of people and they're trying so hard. It's a slight focus but it's one that you need to pay attention to. Hopefully, they'll start teaching emerging followers and leaders this distinction.
It's what we do through many other people that make leadership happen. That's fantastic. When you made the transition, you were leaving from military life into working with the NSA but also liaising with defense contractors as well. What were some of the attitude adjustments that you had to make as you made that shift?
I did twelve years, which was longer than I thought I do. I thought I’ll just do my five to pay back, but then I loved living all over the world. Right out of the military, I moved to Austin, Texas. I worked in high tech for a Fortune 100 semiconductor firm. I wanted to be in a creative space in a big public traded company, and then I went up to defense contracting and work for the NSA. The biggest thing I had to realize was in the civilian sector, you have to get things done through influence.
In the military, you should get things done through influence but you can still get them done by power. Although you should have a servant's heart, the bottom line is leadership in the military is very cut and dry because you have the rank system. If somebody sasses us back, don't want to show up or is insubordinate, it's not like in the civilian sector. It's very cut and dry. There are rules and what was done. You follow or you're evacuated kind of thing.
I was a project manager. For our readers that have been project managers, it's the most thankless job because you have all the responsibility but nobody works for you directly, yet everybody comes to you and yells at you if stuff goes wrong or right. I had to realize, "I have to get things done through influence and not power." I still try to do that in the military. In the military, if you had enough, you just say, “Because I'm your officer. That’s why,” end of discussion. You cannot do that in the civilian sector, especially when people are not in your direct chain.
That was the one thing I had to do. It was wonderful because the more you knew about different people, the more you knew about what their particular piece of the entire project was so you could understand how they fit into the grand scheme of things, how you would respond to them, show them respect, and treat them like a valuable piece of the entire process. That was very important. You had to communicate, follow up and then also escalate. The biggest thing I learned there was I can solve any problem in the world as long as I identify it early enough and call in the right resources.
That was an incredible project management lesson. Where most people fall apart and go off the rails in life is because they ignore the warning signs. They're not paying attention and then they wait until it's too late, and the train is already halfway off the rails. Civilian project management taught me to stay aware of all the moving pieces, to be very good at radial thinking and weaving them all together into a singular point of completion, so to speak.
On that subject, what would you say are some of the keys to truly influencing people? You're making an excellent point. In the military, it's command and control. If it gets too bad, you simply remove someone, which is not something you can generally do in the civilian world. What would be 1 or 2 key tips on how to be an effective influencer of others?
Realizing that we all hear and process words completely differently. I process things at a certain rate and way. When I'm working with somebody else in another division, they may not. The most important thing to realize when you're dealing with somebody else is that they're going to interpret things differently than you. Different is not bad. What it means is that you may have to get to know them a little better to understand. You've heard of the DISC personality style. Is this the type of person that when I go in and ask them for an update on where this particular part is coming in or where this engineering redesign is at, are they more of an influencer person where I need to come in and chat with them a little? Are they more relational or is it somebody that's more task-focused?
That's the first thing you need to realize. People fall throughout the entire spectrum. Some people, if you chitchat with them, they'll tell you to shut up. Other people, if you go in and demand something, they'll be crushed and never speak to you again. Somewhere in the continuum of tasks to relational focus, everybody is in there. It's taking time to get to know who are the people that you need something from. Get to know them. How would they like you to present? Do they want to call, email or go out to lunch? What do they want?
I read a book by Brant Hansen called Unoffendable and To Stop Jumping to Conclusions. I am not God. I can't know what's going on in the other person's heart or their motives. A lot of times, when we're dealing under pressure with things and we don't get what we want, we immediately assume the worst, "I know they did that because they want me to just…" When you go to the person and say, "What did I miss here? What can I make clear?" You can alleviate so much of the headaches and the absolute hassles when you go to talk to them.
The third thing for project management influence is you have to know how to do conflict resolution well. With conflict resolution, first and foremost, you go mano a mano, man to man, man to woman. You go right to the source and say, "I was expecting this and this didn't happen." You go to them calmly. You can say, "Did I miss something? What can I help you with?" Only do you start escalating. If they look at you and say, "I didn't feel like doing it," which probably is not going to happen. I have had it happened a couple of times and then I go to their boss. For the most part, we get so strong out and start raising the alarm.
If you'll be in a meeting and you'll say, "What happened with this? Why didn't this make it in?" Somebody says, "I heard." Whenever you hear that you should say, "It's hearsay." Go to the person, try and resolve the issue at the lowest level. Ninety-nine percent of our problems can get taken care of right at that level, and the other person will respect you so much more by coming to them. You can deconstruct and say, "Where did I miss it the first time? I didn't make something clear. How can I resolve that going forward?"
Once you do that, then people know that you are rationable, firm and fair. It doesn't mean you give people carte blanche to not do their job, but you respect them and you're going to try and work with them. That's when you get into this heightened sense of people know that you have their back. They're going to reciprocate and they're going to have yours.
Lead Tremendously: We can pivot on pain, or we can pivot on purpose.
Our chairman of the board, Henry Bedford, often says that the problems that emerge in a business or an organization can usually be solved within 6 feet of where you discover it.
I was doing some board training and I heard this quote that said, "There's no such thing as a board problem without a first and last name." Industries and religions don't have problems. Individuals have problems. You have to drill down to what it is exactly. Let's go to the source. Let's try and resolve this. We don't do very good about that. That is where real influence happens.
You probably met Spencer Hayes at one time or another in the past. Spencer was very famous for saying when asked, "How do you build companies?" He said, "You can't build companies. You can only build people and people build companies."
That's why people leave jobs. They don't leave companies, they leave bad bosses. I'd be happy scooping up elephant dung the rest of my life if I had a leader I admired. You want to use your innate skills but I've worked with plenty of jobs that should have been a perfect fit for me, but they've been miserable because of the culture, the lack of teamwork and the dysfunction. That stops you from doing anything.
I'm sure in the military, you're in different postings. You felt different cultures. You worked in the surveillance field, the tech field, military contracting, NSA, different cultures under different leaders. Tracey, it's amazing. Many people spend their entire careers in one general field of work. Here, you go from the military to the tech world. In October of 2008, at the age of 80, your father passed away. I haven't had the privilege of being at the remembrance service and hearing all the people talk about his influence, which he believed could best be extended through books.
As you well know better than I and with our readers, your dad had a resolution that he kept to give away 10,000 copies a year of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. He took it upon himself to give away so many books because he thought that was important. He built what was originally called Executive Books and then it became Tremendous Life Books. You've now called it Tremendous Leadership. Without revealing anything in confidence, what happened that caused you to leave what was a successful and exciting career, and doing what you're doing to decide to pick up the business that your dad had started? What was that all about?
To everything, there is a season. It's biblical and ecclesiastics. There are times where you feel like this is the greatest job in the whole world and then several years later, you realize, "It's ready for something else." I always tell people, there are two reasons that we can pivot on. We can pivot on pain or we can pivot on purpose. You should try and pivot because of purpose. A lot of times, when we pivot because of pain, we end up making things worse. That being said, when I left the job where I was before I came back with my father, I was not planning on leaving. However, there were some doors being closed. I tell the people, "With the organizational culture and your intrinsic values, there has to be value congruence." In other words, they must mesh.
Otherwise, just like in marriage, you can be unequally yoked. I call it in professional settings, you'll be unequally choked where you'll want to choke your boss or your boss will want to choke you. What's important to you and what's important in the organization are two different things. I tell people, "Remember, they're the ones who sign the checks so they get to make the final call. Not you. You can start your own company." It became clear towards the end that, not anything bad, I had taken this aspect, this project management, this defense contract. I had run this out as far as I could go. I'm all about continuing to evolve. If I can't evolve, I evacuate. I tell people, "In life, you got to be growing or you got to be going." There is no status quo and stagnation.
It became very clear in the last couple of months, my father was in hospice care, I came home every weekend to spend the weekend with him and share time with him. We haven't talked about any succession planning. I was doing my thing. He was doing his thing. I'm not a salesperson. I'm a left-brainer. I'm an engineer. I'm not a right-brain creative salesperson. I'm like, "This is not me." I went to the National Speakers Association event and represented him in New York City several months before he died. I had great respect for what my father did but I was offering my own stripes. I was off doing my own thing. It was completely divergent from what he did because I wanted to prove myself on my terms. That's what I did.
As I was at the National Speakers Association, so many people came up to me and share what he meant as you did before we had this conversation. I knew he was impactful but it was so good. That touched my heart and that's when I got the calling to. I tell people, "Whenever you make a change in life, you will have a calling to and you will have a calling from." Both of those need to be locked in before you should make any changes because otherwise, it's your ego wanting something different and not telling you, "This is the next chapter. It's time to turn the page."
I felt this call. I started talking to my father and things started to unfold, then when I got back to the place where I was working, it was the end of the contract, there were some things closing up, some different changes and things were happening. I thought, "It is time for me to leave here while I am at the top of my game." That's exactly what I did. All I thought was, "I don't know if this is going to work. I hadn't even seen the books. I didn't even know if they could afford to pay me."
I didn't know anything other than I took a leap of faith and I thought, "1 of 2 things is going to happen. I'm going to come back. I'm going to put a bow on this gorgeous present my father has left to the world and let it sit as a legacy piece or I'm going to come in, I'm going to work this baby, and I'm going to continue trying to do what he did with speaking, writing, publishing, distributing, giving away books, kissing babies."
I was open to God because it's not my business. I had the calling to and I was open to Him. I can easily go back to defense contracting. I can go back to doing a million and one other things, but once you get the entrepreneurial bug. After making the change, I realized all along that I truly was a lot more entrepreneurial than I gave myself credit for. That's why I constantly hitting these walls in the bureaucracies. There's a great quote that says, "Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the troublemaking individual."
I remember reading that and thinking, "Perhaps I finally found the coat that fits me best." Not that I have any regrets about the other things. I came back and by the grace of God, because the second generation businesses have a fairly high mortality rate, I'm still here. We're still going with the help of an incredible tribe of people. It's continuing to grow. All I did was pray, "God, give me double the blessing." Not to be "twice" as successful in worldly terms but to at least allow me to continue to reach and then some.
The most important lesson I learned over the years was that there is a difference between residual momentum and creative momentum. You have had to face it with Southwest. You've had to look at what you were and what you are now. You have to innovate or die. It all goes back to evolve or evacuate. The publishing industry, the speaking industry, how you purchase books have all radically changed in the last years. The important part that I always try to do is to keep the DNA, the love of books, the transformative power of books in your life, but then constantly be open to how do I get the message out in the most relevant way, and the next way is the construct. Everyday, that's what I wake up to.
You said residual momentum versus creative momentum. Is that the alternative?
Correct. The first eight years that I ran this business, I was in residual momentum because I'm an operations girl. I can grow revenue and cut costs like it is nobody's business. Eventually, though, you have to start creating something new or else you can only polish a stone so many times before everything is rubbed off. I remember one of the last things my father said to me, and this is the succession plan right here, three days before he died, I said, "I'm coming back to run the business." He squeezes my hand, had a little tear in his eyes and says, "I'm so happy." He whispered because he had lost his voice. He says, "I know you'll take it places I never could have." That was it in a nutshell.
After the eight-year point of constantly going back to the same wells, I realized those wells are running dry and all of a sudden, I remember that conversation my father said to me. I have to take this to places he never went. That's when I started saying, "I have to get into creative mode," which meant I have to start being innovative. I have to go to this whole new level of thinking versus critical and strategic thinking. It's this abductive thinking where you start creating a future that has not been developed yet. That is a whole different realm of thinking. That's what I've been trying to work on, study on, this mind plasticity that we are still reprogramming our minds and discovering. There's so much neuroscience behind it. I'm like, "This can be done."
Lead Tremendously: Whenever you make a change in life, you will have a calling to, and you will have a calling from.
I am a left-brain person. I need to research the data behind that says this can be done. I had the tenacity. I got to know that when you hit 50, 60, 70 or 80, every year can be created to be a more brilliant success than the last one. Just like everybody else, I have to see the value in it and then I have to believe that I can do it. Otherwise, I'm not some kind of mysterious thing that suddenly change and are different.
One of my most important mentors used to say, "In order for people to feel motivated, they have to have two conditions met. Number one, they have to know what's in it for them. Number two, they have to believe they can be successful."
When I'm working on my Doctorate in Leadership and writing on my researches on self-efficacy and followership, those are the two things, value and belief that you can do it. If you don't have those two things, nobody is changing and nobody is opening up their wallets to pick up what you got. You can have one or the other. A lot of people see the value but they don't believe they can. Other people believe they can but they don't see value in it. You got to get your head in that. You got to believe in yourself before you can sell anybody else in it.
Bring us to the present, Tracey. How would you describe the company, the activity, the business and the mission of Tremendous Leadership?
Thank you for asking that. Sometimes I tell people, "It's easy to talk about what we don't do than what we do because it sounds like we got a lot of stuff going on." There are main ways that we get it out there. We are a small for-profit business. I'll talk about the trust. Everything that we do is to generate income and revenue for what I like to call the righteous use of wealth to help other people live more tremendous lives.
We are a wholesale distributor so we work with large organizations. If they want to order a particular title for an upcoming group or for a team, we take care of their logistics, backend, get it out to meetings. We are a distributor so we do that. I also speak, coach, and do a lot of associations, chamber groups, institutes, organizational management, you name it. I also write my own stuff. I have my books. I'm about to release my fifth children's book with my rescue dogs, my best-smelling pawthors.
The only thing I love just about as much as books are dogs. They're tie. What’s better than having dogs write books for children to learn leadership principles? That's my zone. That's my Jim Collins' Hedgehog principle. I do a lot of speaking to children too. When your son hits life, it's tremendous at eight. When I was eight, I read The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale before I cracked open The Poky Little Puppy. I love teaching up. With that kind of stuff, all I remember as a child was getting exposed to Zig Ziglar, Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale.
I was sitting and listening to these men from the time I was two and thinking, "Life is all about transformation, becoming the next best version of yourself, meeting people and reading books." That was dripped into me into my lifeblood, Now, it’s part of my DNA. We do a lot of that. The other thing too is I publish. We probably have a new book coming out every month. I work with people from ghostwriting, children's books, illustrated books, to fantasy, you name it. I love that people see that they have a message inside them. We work with them to publish their book. All the way from backend, order fulfillment letter on Amazon, do your income fulfillment, to getting together gorgeous files of a top rate product that they can go out, use as a speaker and everything in between.
What we do then is our profits go towards the Tremendous Trust, which funds scholarships, homeless shelters, building leadership institutions and libraries in emerging third world countries, rescue groups. In the past years, we've given close to $1.6 million in our profits to do that because we want people to have more tremendous lives too. That's what drives the whole thing. We also do a ministry called Books Through Bars, which is where we go into several state corrections institutes here in Pennsylvania.
If anybody is listing in prison ministry and wants to do this, we'll get you the books. We have the Tremendous Leadership Book Club. We sit there and we read Norman Vincent Peale, Henry Cloud or Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning or Life is Tremendous. These gentlemen are learning life skills and finding that they still have value and meaning. Some of these guys are in for life but we talked about books. There is a school of psychology called Bibliotherapy. I like to say, "Read two books and call me."
My father was a bibliotherapist. He just wasn't licensed. He was a firm believer in anything that you know, you can find between the pages of a book. The question is, "Do you see value in that? Will you open up and take the time to digest it?" It's very exciting. Everywhere I turn, from preschoolers to men that have made mistakes that they've given up their freedom for life, we are seeing people transform and it's incredibly exciting.
It is so powerful to hear you say this. Particularly when you talk about not just making this a legacy business where you continue the momentum but in fact, it's the creative momentum, not residual momentum. Carrying this to the places that your dad said he could not even imagine going. You are doing that, Tracey Jones. It's fantastic.
Thank you, Dan. I appreciate that encouragement.
I'm delighted and feel so fortunate that we're having this conversation. In fact, I'm sitting here smiling because one of the things your dad used to say is, "It's true I have six children and they're all boys, except four of them." He was smiling proudly at his daughter.
The other ones he said is, "Life is tremendous as it is six printing. I say that's true but that's because the first five were blurred,” which is not true. It sold millions. He was always so humble. For our readers, two days before my father died, they iterated to me some things that happened in his early life. I didn't know much. All I knew is it wasn't too good but I knew that it didn't hold him back from anything. He shared with me that he had flunked out of school in the eighth grade because he was raised in poverty. His mother had left him, and he was staying with some relatives who by today’s standard would probably be in jail.
He was working every job he could. It was the Depression Era. He was so tired. He couldn't stay awake in school. He flunked eighth grade. He was so embarrassed and hurt that he did not go back to school. As he shared this with me, I could see that out of that place of pain came his love of meeting people. You know he loved the underdog. He loves the person that was a fighter and anybody that had been marginalized because he had been. That did not stop him from uncovering the innate, the God's seed within himself, the imago Dei, the greatness, getting into these books and people, my mother, the life insurance industry, finding Christ, finding books, finding mentors. That's where he was but that's not where he is now.
It’s this absolute resiliency and in leadership, they call that your adaptive capacity, your regenerative feature. It's called a self-writing feature. You're like a weeble. You wobble and you get knocked down but you self rise. You get right back up. It's to see him live that out. There's a spiritual component but there's also an evolutionary, intrinsic leadership component too. Every leader in the world is a leader because they have overcome things that other people could not. To watch him live this and then hear in his last breath how that still deeply affected him. It didn't hold him back but he still bore some shame because of that. Although he was larger than life, it showed me the human side of him. It was an incredibly endearing moment.
He was larger than life because, from the time that he was told he had six months to live, he lived nine more years. That was very exciting to realize. Tracey, I cannot believe how rapidly this whole time has gone. It's as if we just started talking. I want this to continue in the future. For our readers, can you share one final thought with them about what to do if they feel like they've hit a brick wall of discouragement in their organization and their personal life? What do you do when you feel like there's not a way out when you've hit that brick wall? Any insights you could share?
Lead Tremendously: You have to really innovate or die… Keep the DNA but constantly be open to how to get the message out in the most relevant way.
I would highly recommend prayer and be still. Even if you're not a believer, if you don't take time to unplug and recharge like your phone, you're going to deplete yourself. Sooner or later, you have to unplug and deconstruct from all the noise. I do recommend praying to whatever God that you want to pray to and search out what you want in life. Number three, you need to be incredibly intentional about what you allow to go into your mind. Turn off the news. I've been off the news for years. I cut the cord with cable. I got rid of the toxic people in my life. Be very intentional.
Trust me, they're there. You just are blocking them. Get rid of the negativity and the stink. Think and be very intentional. Find the friends and the people that want your success more than you want it. If you're like, “Tracey, I don't have those people in my life,” you get into those books and you read them. It's the one I'd wake up. If you have that feeling where you're not sure what to do next, Henry Cloud's The Power of the Other, you read that and you will begin to realize, "This is what I knew to break out of the spawn." It pulled me back from the brink years ago and I highly recommend it. You've got stuff in your life that needs to be cleaned off. You can't move forward until you prune away the dead, diseased or dying. You'll never have explosive growth until you get intentional about purging.
That is so powerful and it's all about being intentional. When we don't feel like we've got good role models, we have the beautiful thing called books. I know that from seeing it personally, your father had nearly 300 biographies of Abraham Lincoln and he had read all of them so we can learn so much from the leaders that have gone before. I can speak for all the readers on the show to say that I have learned, benefited and grown from your willingness to share. You are, in fact, moving into a new creative phase with Tremendous Leadership. I know your father. I know that he is smiling. The countless lives you're touching and will continue to touch, we can't measure, Tracey. You are tremendous. Thank you for being with us. Please give your mom a great hug from all of us as well.
I sure will, Dan. Thank you so much.
God bless you. We'll talk soon.
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What an incredible adventure to spend time with Tracey Jones, the CEO of Tremendous Leadership. What a career she's had from learning how to sell door-to-door to getting very interested in military service and serving our country for a dozen years as an officer in the Air Force, to then becoming a project manager in contracting for tech fields and military fields, also working with the National Security Agency and then finally due to the death of her father, feeling the call to move in and take on what he had started, to share the inspirational, motivational message that can be found in books, videos and audios with all of the world, to do it for the right reasons and the right purpose. Those are incredible lessons that we realized from her.
A couple of things that hit me strongly as we were talking. It was when she got out of the military and realized that the whole key to moving forward is influence, whereas, in the military, it's command and control. In other words, in the military, at some point, we run out of patience and we say, "You're out of here, disciplinary action, you're replaced, you're transferred," and the worst case is, "You're mustered out of the service." In most of real life, it is about influence.
I'm reminded of the things that Dr. Dacher Keltner shared with us about The Power Paradox that a leader only has power to the extent that the followers are willing to give that. Leaders that become people of influence that pull people together are an important thing. Tracey's observations about getting to know people's personalities, learning how to convey things according to what they most want, their preferences, make such a difference in conflict resolution and in pulling things together.
One of the powerful observations that she made is that when something is going wrong within a group of relationships, instead of talking about an individual, calmly go directly to that individual. In Southwestern Consulting, we often talk about avoiding the gossip triangle, where two people are talking incessantly about another person on the team but nobody ever goes to that third point and says, "These issues are going on." In her own forceful and yet adept style, Tracey learned how to go to that person and make such a difference in what goes on.
She’s telling how she made the transition into the business that was started by her father and then carrying it to all these new levels. As she said, it was a bit of a leap of faith that she had a choice. She could just say, "I want to put a bow on what's been done to make this a legacy company and continue the work that Charlie "Tremendous" Jones had started," or take it on, put her own heart, her own spirit, her own philosophies into it and carry it to the next level, which is fantastic. She's been entrepreneurial as she's changed it from simply a book distributor to a much bigger vision of how to change people's lives.
She spoke about something called the residual momentum and that is what carries an organization forward. Every organization has some level of residual momentum, but the organizations that thrive are the ones that have the second kind, that is the creative momentum. Keeping the core DNA and what the mission is but realizing that every aspect of making that into something new is going to change. We've got to be open to those changes, adapt to them, and adjust to them very quickly because it makes such a difference. Her challenge from her father days before he died was, "Tracey, you can take this to new levels that I never could." It meant something powerful to her and she made that difference so that she could do it.
When Tracey talked about moving into different directions throughout her career and life, she said, "You can pivot. You can shift your direction for two reasons. One is on pain and the other one is on purpose.” The pain is avoiding something that's awful. The challenge with that is that when we get into anything that's challenging and meaningful, we're eventually going to hit a point of pain. Unless we're making our pivots based on purposeful decisions about what's important in our lives, we're going to have a hard time with that. She spends a great deal of focus on self-assessment knowing what her own values are and then work to build an organization or find an organization that has congruence with that because that's such an important thing.
That's a powerful thing for all of us to remember. What are our values? What's the truth? What's that mean? When she spoke about how to deal with hitting a brick wall, she said, "First of all, you need to be still. You need to stop for a minute and work on your own regenerative capacity." That regenerative capacity is what enables people to bounce back from innumerable setbacks and move them forward in such a good way. I thought it was very powerful when she spoke about forging the future from the past but also the thoughts that she had about making things go further forward, the regenerative capacity that all of us truly have and whatever we decide that we're going to go for, but we don't always draw on it.
She spoke about being highly intentional about what she allows to go into the mind. We know that our minds are very receptive places. Whatever we put into it, if it's given a chance to take root, will flourish. If we put the right influences, the right people, the right thoughts, the right books, the right sayings and the right music even, it will flourish in our brain, but if we put the wrong in, it will also flourish. Unfortunately, it puts its hooks into us and redirects us in the wrong ways.
Tracey has gone to some rather extreme measures. She doesn't listen to the news. She has turned off her cable television. She's tried to eliminate the people that were toxic in her life and help herself stay very clear. As she does that clarity, she finds a greater capacity to give. Clearly, she's always growing, pursuing a Doctorate Degree in Leadership. She's writing, producing, publishing, speaking, leading an organization and she's being an awesome member of a family.
There's a great deal of true joy that we can detect in Tracey's voice as well. Joy is not the same as pleasure. It's interesting. In the Bible, Paul says, "Count it all joy when you are subject to diverse challenges, temptations, tribulations and problems." Most of us wouldn't think that problems are going to lead to joy. Problems don't lead to pleasure, that's for sure, but joy is that deeper sense of being fully alive and fully into something. That's what I detected from what Tracey had to say. It's worth a relisten. There are so many powerful points there. Tremendous Leadership is the website. This is Tracey Jones. I'm so grateful that we had time to have her on The Action Catalyst. Time goes quickly. Thank you all for reading and being a part of this. Until next time, this is Dan Moore. We’ll see you then.
Important Links:
A Message to Millennials: What Your Parents Didn't Tell You and Your Employer Needs You to Know
Dr. Dacher Keltner – past episode of The Action Catalyst Podcast