Tracey C. Jones - Engaging Employees in the Age of Millennials - Pt 1
The world has changed a lot but bridging the gap between meaningful work and employer expectations is a skill that stays as relevant as ever. As a leader, engaging employees should be one of the things on top of your mind. Dr. Tracey joins Denise Griffitts on the Your Partner in Success podcast to have a conversation about engaging employees in the age of millennials. They talk about what they consider success rituals for business growth. Learn more about exceptional leadership and the traits we need for the path to success as the workforce becomes more competitive than ever.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Tracey C. Jones - Engaging Employees in the Age of Millennials - Pt 1
In this episode, Tracey C. Jones, also known as Tremendous Tracey, shares tips and advice about working with Millennials. This is such a hot-button topic that we will also be broadcasting live with Millennial expert Brad Szollose. Originally, I had planned to have both Tracey and Brad on but the topic is too big so this is going to be a two-part interview. This, being part one. I am your host, Denise Griffitts. In each episode, I am honored to be with the most interesting business leaders. These are people who have wonderful stories to share and they're excited to freely share their journeys, stories, business wisdom, tips and actionable advice. In short, they're willing to help us shorten our learning curve as we navigate the know, like and trust economy.
In fact, my guests are so compelling and insightful that this episode was written up on Inc.com as one of the best business podcasts you need to be following and was also featured on MSNBC. Our topic is A Message to Millennials. With twelve years in the Air Force, another ten in corporate boardrooms plus an MBA in Global Management, Tracey has built an impressive career as a corporate fixer.
Her father, the late Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, founded Executive Books in 1965 with the goal of changing the world one book at a time. After amassing an exceptional leadership background on her own, Tracey took the company's reins in 2009 after Charlie had passed away and carries on her father's tremendous legacy. Be sure to visit TremendousLeadership.com at some point. They have phenomenal resources and a lot of great books. You should see my bookcases. I’ve got a lot of them already.
Tracey says that all organizations have a personality and it's critical that employees learn how their leadership and fellowship traits set them on the path to success. In an era when the workforce is more competitive than ever, a message to Millennials is a timely and practical resource for young people navigating the workplace, utilizing a common-sense science-based approach. Tracey seeks to bridge the gap between meaningful work and employer expectations of strength, grace and a healthy dose of humor.
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Tracey, welcome back to the show.
Thanks so much. For the readers, Denise and I have a long history going back with loving personal development, loving all things cats and dogs. I have enjoyed her services running my social media so I'm delighted and honored to be on the show, Denise.
You have been a guest in the past several times. I'm so glad you're here. I always love chatting with you. I have got the book in front of me. I have a lot of your books. They are in my entrepreneurial bookcase in my office but this was a bit of a departure for you and I'm fascinated with it. What I want to know is what led you to write this book?
I had so many young people coming out of college or maybe they've had 1 or 2 years in the workforce. Every time I would intersect with them at different events that I was speaking at, they would seek me out and come up to me at the end and ask how can they further develop their leadership skills. I was fascinated and joyous hearing this because you hear a lot of things about negativity but that has not been my experience. I have seen these young people come up and say, “What do I need to do to get to the next level?”
I'm a Baby Boomer. I'm tailing Baby Boomer and Gen X so I walk in both of those worlds. I can remember as a young woman growing up in the workplace, all the different people that were older than me that poured their life into me. Even when I didn't ask for it, these young people are coming to me are hungry for it. I don't even know if I was hungry for it because back then, we all think we know it all. I had so many people at the right time stop me from making a fool of myself, give me a word of encouragement or give me some insights that I hadn't even considered.
A lot of times, people are like, “They don't want to hear it.” They do want to hear it. The bottom line is, they need to hear it because you don't know what you don't know. I was so encouraged by the young people coming forward and saying, “How do we do this?” I thought, “I'm going to create this book and what it does is it's a hybrid book. There's a chapter on leadership and followership.” All this is going on in my mind and I'm meeting these young people. I was two years into working on my Doctorate in Leadership, I'm reading all this stuff on leadership and that's great. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that leaders are nothing without effective followers.
I started to go into the realm of how your followership skills are what will define you as a future leader. I don't think that's taught a lot and I wanted to work with young people to know that leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. In order to hone your leadership skills, you have to first build a solid foundation as a follower. The book takes the wisdom of my father from his book Life is Tremendous, which is over 50 years old but has sold millions of copies and is still in print and what it takes is his seven laws of leadership. I have them in the book updated slightly because it's timeless truth so it pretty much stands on its own and I have a chapter behind that.
For every chapter on leadership are the seven functions of followership. You'll see how it intertwines at any given moment, at any given point in your job. You can be asked to step up to be a leader or you may have to be faced with an ethical decision or you may be part of a team where your boss is expecting you to act more in the role of a follower. The book covers when you get to be a leader or this is the view the leader has. The leader is looking for you to step up and be an incredible follower. You can, as a young person, step up into a leadership role until you've proven yourself. At the back of the book, I have the ABCs Millennials.
The one I really like goes through letters of the alphabet, The Grunge Before The Glamour for the letter G. I hope that people realize that it does take time. You and I know it takes decades until you dial into what life has for you to do on this planet. Encourage them that, “It's going to take time. You're not going to get it right in the beginning. You're going to make failures and that's great because that exposes you to new experiences and your attitude about enthusiasm in doing even the most menial tasks.”
Sometimes we think, “This isn't my dream job,” or, “I'm not going to be here forever.” That doesn't matter. Everything you do with excellence, even the most minuscule job is how you build your leadership and continue your leadership reputation by being a good follower. I can tell you as a leader and I've run many businesses and supervised hundreds of people. I look for those followers that are always going to step up as an exemplary follower and help me co-lead. When you get the experience, the seasoning and I'm moving on to the next level, you're the one I'm going to tap to come into that leadership role.
It's pragmatic but yet it's the truth in love so it's encouraging. I don't want to lie to you and say, “It's a different world. You go in and you call the shots to your boss,” because that's not reality. It's teaching them to come in, put their best foot forward and not shy away from something that may not be what they thought they wanted to do. Can carry the seeds of greatness within it and to get their head in the game that they've got a lot to learn and it's going to be joyous. You're going to cry. You're going to laugh. You're going to succeed. You're going to fail but the things that you experience in life going on are going to mature you and season you into the leader you're going to be going forward. That's why I wrote the book.
I am so glad that these kids are coming to you because somewhere along the line that they've been smacked around enough that they're like, “Maybe I'm not as cool as I thought I was.” It doesn't occur to me that they would show up and go, “Teach me.” A lot of them are cocky.
We weren't. We were growing up and told we didn't know anything and be quiet. Until I can provide value, nobody is going to listen to me. I don’t think It’s bad. They were taught at a young age they were so great that now you get into the workplace, this isn't your social media and these aren't your parents. You have to prove yourself. You were hired not to be entertained or happy but to do a job, find solutions or create opportunities. If you can't do that, you're a drain on the system.
It's psychology to me. It's cognitive dissonance. They call it the Pleasure or Pain Principle. Either something gets us so much pain or so much pleasure that we start to go, “I need to start tweaking my leadership personality.” You're right. They are getting out there and realizing, “The good news is you and I probably learned that before we hit the one psychological gate of young adulthood.”
They may be hitting it later but the beauty of the human mind is, no matter where you are in life, you can always become self-aware and start working on this trait because some people are like, “They grew up this way and they're never going to learn.” False. If you want to learn, you can change. I have radically changed my personality and my leadership persona. Every three years, I morph into something different and I grew up hearing this stuff. It's when you're ready to have it not get in your head but get in your heart and you start letting this become a living breathing part of you then you're going to start to see the development.
I’m with you. I'm constantly undergoing what I would call Sea Changes. Like you, every couple of three years, I'm like, “Now I'm doing something different,” because I've learned new things and things that maybe should have sunk in earlier but didn't. We all have to ask. I should have already known this. The truth is we were always learning, breathing or at least that's the hope. That’s brilliant. Is there an age range that you're seeing typically that comes up to you and says, “Teach us. What do we need to know? We're being smacked around in the workforce. What's going on here?”
I get it from everybody, the 30 somethings and then I get hit with a lot of people, the 50 somethings, that feel like they had missed calling because there's a leadership portion in this booked too. How do I dial into, “Now I'm at a stage where I've been doing this and I still have this inner drive or compulsion?” You said the word create. Life is all about reinventing yourself every day to something newer and better. Although it says in A Message to Millennials, this book is for anybody that wants to get clarity on their drive, what excites them and their self-motivation. I tell the Millennials this. Psychologically, our bodies, minds and motivation hit low points a couple of times a month where we want to quit and give up. People are like, “What? You?” You know it, Denise.
I’m having that day. To be honest with you, as soon as we're done, I front-loaded my work for the week because I knew it was coming. I could feel it. As soon as we're done and I call you to say, “Thank you. I love chatting with you,” I’m done for the day. I have taken the rest of the day off. I never do that. I don't but sometimes, you have to.
That is not an age thing. Hitting these highs and lows in life and all of a sudden realizing, “My previous boss was good. I don't like this boss. I discovered that I'm better at something else.” Everything around us is constantly changing. I get all ages where people all of a sudden will say, “This is now making sense to me and I'm able to hear it. Now, what do I do?” It doesn't matter what industry. Somebody said, “I'm a sole proprietor and I run my own company.” Even if you are alone like me at certain times of my life alone, entrepreneurial, creative type, this book is for you because it'll teach you about leading and motivating yourself. The greatest thing I've learned is to stop looking at trying to do stuff for everybody else. The only thing that you can truly work on is yourself. Once you do that, you watch the stuff happen.
Engaging Employees: Extroversion is the trait of positivity. It's the trait of being able to take a negative and turn it into something positive.
I'm listening and I'm reading because this is fascinating this key point that you're talking about and it is a short paragraph. It says, “You are the only one who can rob your life of character. How? By refusing to make the hard choices. By rejecting the extra time and effort, it takes to do the right thing. By accepting less than your best.” That's a big one.
We will always work against obstacles. There is simply no other way to get more of what you need to do a job well and to use what you have and to do what you can. It's highlighted. This poor book, I'm going to have to get you to send me another one. I have two and this one is in pieces. It's got stickies and different color highlights. It's a pathetic-looking thing but that means it's loved, right?
It is and that is the greatest honor. I do book discussions with men incarcerated in prison and some for life. When I see them come and bring those books all marked up, I'm like, “You get it. You love it. It means that you’re not doing a cursory top-level like watching the show, you dig into it and you're digesting it.” That means the world to me, Denise. Thank you.
I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it. You know me better than that. I am not known for tact or diplomacy. One of the things that I'm taking away from this conversation with you is that leadership is excellent but you can't be a leader unless you're also a follower, which is what you’ve said. Let's take them a little bit deeper. This is why people will go to Tony Robbins events and your events. This is why they will seek out gurus. I hate the word guru but Tony Robbins uses it in I'm Not Your Guru. Have you seen that on Netflix?
No. I need to check it out though.
Watch it. I have to warn you because I was warned by two people who worked with Tony for well over a decade. Once, my business partner, the other one is a client a friend and they both said, “Denise, he drops a lot of F-bombs so be prepared.” It took me 2 or 3 times because I went, “Oh geez,” but then I realized that it was NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He was doing it deliberately. Sometimes it was gratuitous. It's part of his speech patterns.
When you see him say some of these things that you're like, “Holy cow,” and you see the reactions, you’re like, “I get it.” Watch that when you get a chance and call me. I would love to compare notes. My point for this is all points during our life and at all points during each day, Tracey. We are either a follower, leader or looking for knowledge. This is not, “I'm going to do this next month.” You're moving in and out of those roles all day long.
As far as followership, in the book I talked about it. I don't know if you've taken the test but I have a link in there. Working in my Doctorate, I had a book called Power of Followership by Robert E. Kelly. He tested it on a free online test and you can see what kind of a follower you are. The spectrum is from passive or alienated and cynical. Cynical doesn't mean mean. It means that it takes time for you to ingest and say, “I'm all in,” like a pragmatist. The opposite end is exemplary, which means you want to co-lead. It means you're there to learn, you’ve got that leader's back, you're going to be an early adopter, always looking forward and this is what bosses want and need because we can't do it all on our own.
You take that test and I would recommend it for every reader to take that because before you take your next job, you need to understand what type of leader you're going to be working for. I talked about this in the leadership followership continuum. If you are looking for a leader that is a micromanager and what we say is it's a dirty word, some passive followers want to be micromanaged because there are some passive followers that want to go in, do the same job every day and they want you to tell them. If you ask a passive follower, “How can I improve this?” They would wilt. They would be like, “Don't ask me. Tell me.” That's not a knock but if you are a creative type boss and you have followers that are passive, don't push them into this realm.
When I was in the Air Force, I remember thinking everybody should want to be the chief of staff in the Air Force because that's me. I'm a driver. I want to push it. I'm always going to the next one. However, there's a lot of people who want to launch jets every day for twenty years and retire. I had to get my head around that we're different. One is not better than the other. They want to do this but if you are an exemplary follower like I was, I want to be allowed the latitude to keep unfolding and climbing. If you've got a manager or a “leader” that does not want you to do that and be a maverick in the workplace, this is going to be a horrible unequally yoked relationship. You're going to beat each other up. I know this because it's happened to me many times.
I wish that when I was twenty-something would have understood that you have to get into the head of the person you're working for and say, “How much latitude are you got to give me?” Make sure before you take that job, talk with other people because everybody says, “We're going to come in and let you do everything.” You assign the documentation, show up and realize, “It's always different. It's the hunt. It's the courting period when you're coming in, you're on payroll and suddenly, life looks a little different.”
There's a joke about a bunch of people going to hell and heaven and seeing that. It's important to understand that you already had these leadership hurdles within you. You're going to hone them in your followership. When you can get up to the top, you're going to have to realize that this is the type of boss that is going to support you, encourage you and promote you above them to bigger and better things. That's one thing with followership. Know what type of follower you are. Forget about the leadership stuff. When you're young, you don't even know yet because you're not even aware of the skills, you haven't had the crises hit you yet. You think you know and I tell them, “You guys have all the answers but you don't do any of the questions that are going to be asked.”
I'm sure you reflect back, look back and think, “In my wildest dreams, I thought that I would be doing this or have to deal with this crisis or this betrayal. If I had, I probably would have stopped.” Know your followership type and know what boss you're going to work for. Does this mean that you can only work for certain types of bosses? No, but be aware going into that interview. Let them know, “This is the type of follower I am and this is where I work best. Is that going to be a good fit?” If it's a good company, they're going to be transparent with you and say, “You may be suited better over here,” or, “This is more of a routine, every day, same thing job and you might feel a little bit stifled.”
Thank God, they're telling you the truth. The bad ones will lie to you and you'll figure it out but that's all part of learning and getting better about the choices we make. I would say, “Know your followers' style first.” I did an interview with Monster.com and the question was for Millennials supervising people 10, 15 and 20 years older than them, which is what I've done my whole life. When I was a second lieutenant in the Air Force after I got commissioned, I was in my early twenties and I'm supervising people in their 30s and 40s. You want to make sure when you go in, if you are in the leadership role, know the people's followership style. Know what they need and that will save you a lot of heartaches too. Don't lump everybody into the same category.
I wish I gave it a little bit earlier because I wish I had known any of that, part of it, some of it when I was younger. When I was 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, nobody could tell me anything. I am surprised I'm alive to tell the tale. I was so obnoxious. It's embarrassing.
You know what they sit there and say about the Millennials. I'm like, “I'm a Boomer. We were the original it's-all-about-me generation.” Stop it. Everybody has that, “I'm invincible. I'm going to live forever. I know it all,” at that age. Let him get through it. They'll realize it and they'll come around as we did.
I hear one of your babies barking in the background. Which one is that?
Who knows? That's probably Roscoe.
The reason I mentioned it’s International Take Your Dog to Work Day, which I do every day because my dog lives in my office.
Engaging Employees: Before you take your next job, you need to understand what type of leader you will be working for.
I tell people that’s every day for me and it should be every day. Why is this once a year? Let's campaign. Let's change the world. Bring your dogs to work every day.
Mine does. She's sitting here looking at me like, “Are you talking about me? What did I do?”
The workplace would be so much more productive if everybody brought their dog to work.
It would. Tell Roscoe, “Hi,” for me. We talked about the fellowship, which is important and I would love for you to hear if you have some great stories to share. I have one. I don't go through drive-thru windows often. It's unhealthy, expensive and it's not good in any way, shape or form. Every once in a while, I would drive through the Chick-fil-A window in the town next to me. I honestly didn't know it was a young man at first. I thought it was a female but it turned out to be a young man with a high voice. He was so great at what he did and he was so happy to be at that drive-thru window serving his customers that sometimes I would go to that drive-thru window to say hi. I don't know where he is. I haven't been there for years but he was impressive with the sheer enthusiasm and genuine caring that he brought to the job. It’s been years since I've been there but I'll never forget this kid.
He probably got promoted on to bigger and better things. That’s the function of followership, getting excited about your work. It's important that you realize that the job doesn't make you, you make the job. Denise, I once got promoted and I talked about this in the book. I got selected to be a project manager on this contract for the National Security Agency and I didn't have the right amount of contracting years of experience. I needed two years but I cheered on a lot of other things. I had grown my exposure to experience, another point we talked about in the book, I had produced results. I did have no kidding facts, not just me telling them how great I was. I could show them when I came to the table.
They still said, “We'll put you in the interim and then after two years, we'll promote you.” I'm like, “It's fine. Whether you call me interim or you call me the real thing, I'm here to do a job. I'm not so concerned with the title because I will make this job. The title did not make me. I'm going to make this job.” Six weeks later, they call me up and they say, “We want to make you the formal project manager.” I said, “I thought I had to have these years of experience.” They said, “We decided to waive it because of your enthusiasm and your productivity.”
That attitude and enthusiasm when people say, “You don't know my job.” I’m like, “I don't know your job but I have flipped burgers, waited on tables, done retail and janitorial.” If you can do the less than glamorous tasks with a full heart of service and I hear this guy going through the drive-thru window and you're talking about him. If you can make an impression on people and the little tasks, that's how you're going to be a leader.
You and I know, Denise, when you get up to leadership, it is not all glamour, fancy cars, kicking your feet back and rolling in the dough. When you get up there, if you haven't been able to bring to the table enthusiasm at a tiny little minuscule job, you'll never be able to run a company of 500 people. You won't be able to handle the heat. These little things where you conquer and when you bring in self-restraint, self-awareness and that self-discipline, “I am going to make this a joy to be at,” that's when you're destined to be an epic builder. If you can't do that, you need to stay there until you can learn to control the attitude and bring your own flavor into the job.
It's always been a question in my mind. If you're going to get up every day, do whatever it takes to get yourself out the door. For some it's more, for some it's less, get your family off to school, get your husband, afterward drop off the dry cleaning, whatever it is. Once you've taken all of these steps and you've started down the road to get to your job, why in the world would you want to get in there and make it a crap fast? I don't get it. Does that even make sense?
No, it doesn't but it’s because we have seen the light. There are people that are still living in the darkness of their own self. Whether it's selfishness, fear, apathy or whatever, they haven't seen the light and it doesn't have to be this. The other thing is, there are people that like it that way. They like the drama, complaining and stinking thinking. I can't help you there. For the readers, if you haven't ever read Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Victor was a Jewish psychotherapist and he was imprisoned in one of the Holocaust camps during the Nazi Germany occupation.
What he saw, what he went through and the bottom line is he was in the pits of hell and he said, “I don't care where I'm at. I am going to find purpose and meaning even if it's the ultimate suffering.” When you sit in America and you complain sitting in traffic, you’ve got a car, you're on the roads, you can drive freely, you have money to go to a dry cleaner, I don't understand how people can complain. If you think you got it bad, your worldview is narrow. Until you get that attitude of gratitude even for the crappy boss, lame co-worker, the person that cut you off, you're missing out on the best life has to offer.
It’s moment-to-moment. You can choose to be in gratitude. Every single moment, you can choose to smile instead of flipping off somebody. I smile. To be honest with you, I set my intentions when I leave my home. I'm going to go sit in my car and I say, “I'm going to go here and there.” I don't plug it into my GPS because she's not the boss of me but I know where I'm going. You know me, you can’t tell me what to do. I set those intentions and I also set the intention that I'm going to have a clear shot at where I'm going. I'm not going to run into traffic, I'm going to find good parking and I always do. A lot of it has to do with setting those intentions. I'm grateful for everything I've got.
You'll see what your mind is and I heard a great quote. It says, “I don't fix problems. I fixed my thinking and then my problems go away.” When you see it is not a problem, it's in the grand scheme of things doesn't matter. Don't get spun up over this ridiculous step. I have the modules. I'm doing online modules for each of these lessons and in the introduction, I talk a little bit about what psychologists call the Big Five Personality Traits. I don't talk about it in the book but it's an intro to the online module.
There's an acronym called OCEAN. Psychologists have distilled all the myriad of data and personality traits and they say, “These are the five personality traits you need to develop.” O is for Openness to new experiences. C is Conscientiousness. E is Extraversion. It doesn’t mean that you're an extrovert. Extraversion is the trait of positivity. It's the trait of being able to take a negative and turn it into something positive.
A is Agreeableness, your attitude. N is the opposite of extraversion. N is what psychologists call Neuroticism. This is where you ruminate. You're angry and hostile. Psychologists have said, “If you stay in the state for too long, your body can catch a disease of the mind and you can then start spiraling into depression and a whole stinking thinking.” Some people say, “Tracey, that's my strong personality.” It’s not. It's poor self-control and if you don't get ahold of your negativity, it can become pathology and you can be under psychiatric care. I don't say that lightly and I don't act like I'm a doctor.
I've had dear friends and family members suffer more than this and it ultimately cost them. I lost my brother. I'm not saying there is no such thing as mental illness. I'm saying that's a pathology and you need to go get help. If we can put ourselves in this state where we ruminate and stay in the negative. I had a crappy relationship years ago. Therefore, in every relationship I look at, I see it with hostility. Whether it is or not, if you go through life like that, it's going to cost you and you're going to lose out on every opportunity for somebody that may be a good thing happening to you.
It also shows up in your body in other forms or other illnesses. I thought my English grandmother was a wise woman until much later in life. I thought she was simple. She wasn't. She would say things in a simple manner that were wise but you had to dig in or get older and go, “That’s what she meant.” I remember one time we were sitting somewhere in a park or somewhere. I don't know where we were. I was quite young. There were two older ladies sitting on a bench not too far from us, I remember looking at them and thinking how unhappy they looked.
I realized now they probably weren't all that elderly but their mouths were turned down and they had disappointed looks on their faces. My grandmother never spoke ill of anybody. God bless her. She looked at me and said, “If you ever want to know who a person is, look at their face when they're quiet. In other words, look at their face, repose, mouth turned down, icky expression. You can pretty well figure out who people are.” She was right.
Denise, I'm going to use that. You can see the light in people. Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank, I read an article where she said that the greatest thing she’s looking for is the light within them. I will say to the readers that if you feel you have this negative tendency, I’ll admit it, part of it is your DNA or how you were brought up, the nature-nurture but scientists are saying that the biggest factor in how you turn out personality-wise is because we're changing. Mental plasticity and all the neuroscience says, “We can retrain our brains. It’s your environment.”
Engaging Employees: No matter how good and strong you are, you can't get it right without the right people in your life.
My dad would say that you're going to be the same person five years from now that you are now except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read. If you're meeting tremendous people and you're reading tremendous books, I can see it in your face. People come and say, “Tracey, I'm in a slump.” I can tell right from what they say because the same old sales stuff is in their cup. They haven’t, simply saying, “Smash,” and they haven't gone to the well. That face thing and their body language, you can see it.
I tell some of the younger kids, too that if people are watching your body language and if you show up and you slough off, you're not making eye contact with your boss, you show up late or you're sitting there surfing with your earbuds in, that's not good body language. You want to show in your face that you're in it. If you don't act like you're excited about being at work, how can you expect them to be excited about you? That face thing is brilliant.
Now that we're talking, I'm realizing something that's not bothered me but I've always wondered why this is. You know me well. I am a total, complete, highly committed introvert. I'm probably two cats away from being the lady on the porch with a shotgun and yelling, “Get off my grass.” I’m not shy. I'm an introvert. I need to be alone. Every single time I go out in public, it doesn't matter if it's Nordstrom, Walmart or the grocery store, wherever I go, without fail people want to talk to me. I keep wondering, “Do I look friendlier than I am?” Apparently, I do. It never occurred to me that people are always attracted to me for some reason. I'm like, “What?”
It’s what you have in you. Let me tell you something. It ekes out of our pores even before you say it. People used to say that to me about my dad. We have a lot of his videos online. If you haven't seen him, he was a force of nature. You have never seen anything like this person. It was not an act.
Go to Tremendous Leadership on YouTube.
After he got down off the stage, inevitably, they would say to me, “Is he always like that?” They could not believe that there was a human being walking around Earth pouring out this stuff with this energy and humor but very realistic. It’s not like, “It's not going to be okay.” It was like, “Life is going to kick you hard but that's okay.” It was such a weird thing but a fun thing and it’s what people needed to hear. They'd say, “Is he always like that?” I said, “Yes, he is.” He is a constant vessel for unbelievable things coming in. You start getting awakened with your inner energy and then he pours it out.
He would walk by and pat a child on the head. He’d thanked people for their smiles. When he would walk by them, he'd say, “Thank you for your smile.” It was unreal. He grabbed me and hugged them. He could do it. People are like, “I’d punch somebody.” Not my dad, you wouldn't. You can feel the authenticity. He knew he wasn’t being weird, showy or trying to embarrass you. It was real human interconnection. We've lost that especially with this virtual world. We’ve got to get back to humanity, reaching out, being there and touching one another.
At the top of the show, I talked about doing business in the know, like and trust economy. That's not a joke. We are craving that. Everything I do is 100% virtual. I've got clients all over the world that I've never met but 1 or 2 of them. Some of them have been working with me for a decade or more. I feel like I know them quite well. They know me quite well but we've never physically met. It's going to get more and more like that. Everything seems to be going more towards the internet and being able to work remotely. We're going to have to find ways to let people know who we are. Any suggestions?
You said, “People assume I'm an extrovert.” I was when I was younger but now I'm what they call an ambivert. I'm a half introvert and half extrovert. On the test on the ENTP, I am a 51 E and 49 I. If I stay home on the weekend and hang with my pets and recharge, I'm happy. If I go out and run around with friends, I'm happy. That has taken time. For the readers, I sold a big piece of property and I was working from home. I then started working on my Doctorate. I came off all these boards and stuff and events so that I could focus on school. All of a sudden, I looked up and I said, “I am one step away from becoming a recluse.” Do you know what the scary thing was, Denise? I was happy about it. I was like, “I like this.”
Me too. I'm fine with it.
I read a book by Dr. Henry Cloud, one of my heroes. He has a book called The Power of the Other. What it talks about is how what we crave and what we need, even if we were the most hardcore introverts, are those authentic connections. I don't have time for the time sucks, the drains and the networking world. I've already mentioned it a million times. That's what drains me, not interacting with people. I talk on the phone with people for 30 seconds, maybe once a month. With you, I could talk like this the entire day because it's enriching. I love hearing from you. It's not the act of talking or people but it's the caliber and the quality of it.
We talked about that in the opening thing, the psychology. Whether you restrict evolutionists or you have a spiritual plan, science and spirituality both agree that what makes man different from every other evolved species on the planet are two things, our frontal lobe cortex and cognitive abilities such as the gray matter. The second thing that makes man different from animals is this unbelievable need for attachment. If you're with the spiritual side, you realize that we were all made to be a body of believers.
Science and scripture both agree that we need to be integrated with one another. Especially in nowaday’s society and the world where everybody is getting more and more closed off, we need to work to develop that for the future of humanity. I love doing everything online. I'm getting my Doctorate virtually. We have classes but I have access to every thesis ever written in the world online. While I love technology, we still are human beings and we need to interact. There are people that need our help, love, support or whatever it is. We can never forget this or we're going to be de-evolving as a society.
I find myself wondering if we aren't already de-evolving as a society. I'm convinced that we are. One thing that everybody sees is this penchant for young people, older people, everybody. They're walking down the street, walking across a parking lot. Thumbs are flying or they're on their phone. I'm sorry, you're not in the moment when you're doing that. Put the thing down. Honestly, I’m tempted to run over them but I won’t. You're not paying attention. You're not in the moment. You're not looking at other people and going, “How are you doing other than the deep south?” It's common for people to say, “How are you? What's going on?” That is dwindling down. I have noticed it. It’s not as prevalent as it was.
We need to bring that back. I watched the Nat Geo Year Million. I don’t care if we all upload our consciousness to the cloud as they say. We still have to interact with one another. We're still physical beings. We're not digital beings yet. You’ve got to still do this. When you are that self-absorbed in your tech device, it is the height of narcissism. A lot of the time, you say, “These kids are going through it. Now they're younger and they had these anxiety disorders.” No kidding because all you focus on is yourself.
If all I think about is myself or how many books I'm selling or compare myself to someone then I start going to this anxiety issue. That's pure narcissism. When you start thinking less about yourself and more about everybody else, that's when you start living a rich life. I don't care what anybody says technology-wise or how we're evolving. People like robots are coming in and I'm like, “Don’t worry about robots getting smarter. Worry about humans getting dumber.” Did you see that movie Idiocracy?
No. Is it with Michael Keaton?
It's Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. He wakes up in the year 2525 and society is dumbed down. Technology doesn't make you smart, doesn't make you a critical thinker, doesn't teach you to control your emotions. People now can't separate opinion from fact. It's scary. I haven't watched the news since May 1, 2014. I'm much smarter and better because of it.
I cut off my cable. I don't even know I had it. I never have been much of a couch potato anyway. My ex-husband had it in the house and I never closed it off. Finally, I did and I was like, “Give me a book or ten any day of the week.” I've been reading since I was three. I will always read. I do listen to other people's opinions but I do it with an open mind. That's part of that followship. You don’t take it all. It doesn't matter who it is, you, me, Tony Robbins or anybody. A lot of what we do is based on our own opinions and our knowledge at the time. You want to learn from other people but you also want to filter it through what you already know and what you're willing to learn.
Engaging Employees: If you act inappropriately as an adult, society's not going to put up with that. So you need to develop self-awareness.
I let people say, “I'm completely objective.” I'm like, “It’s you're pure belief.” Psychologists call it BABS, Biases, Assumptions and Blind Spots. That's why we don't believe the first thing we've read, hearsay or anonymous sources. Do you know what anonymous sources stand for? ASS. Trust but verify. Deming had a great quote and he says, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” It so much of what you get on social media, you’ve got to consider the source and it’s not vetted.
I love this doctoral program because you cannot publish it unless your peers have reviewed it and it's been looked at through as, hopefully, an objective analytical mind is possible. It's taught me a lot, “Tracey, you are repeating these things. You are buying into this nonsense and that's not even the real issue. They were trying to manipulate you.” Leaders have to be discerning. You can't believe the first thing that you heard or go off of what one person says. You have to look at the global perspective.
Your ethical decision-making skills and your sense-making skills have to be superior. You better be developing that as a young follower and that means put the devices down, start getting the true knowledge, developing your cognitive abilities, broadening your perspective and learning all different things. Also, understand the other side's argument better than you know your own before you even engage in civil discourse. That's where you're talking about putting it down and opening up your mind.
That leads me to the next series of questions. You talk a lot about developing self-awareness, self-restraint and self-discipline. I would love for you to expand on that.
There are five gates that psychologists say that we make throughout our lifetime. One is when we’re two, the terrible twos. It’s when we start exhibiting our independence. The next is our early teens, 12 to 13. When we hit the teenage years, we start dialing into our values. The next gate is young adulthood, 18, 19, 20 or whenever that is. We get out into the world and we start realizing that now, we are an actor on the world stage. It's no longer about us. The first eighteen years is everybody's nurturing us and we are dependent on everybody.
That third gate is when you are independent. You're supposed to go out on your own and you are supposed to be of value to society. They talk about another gate when you hit midlife, which is when people in their 40s, 50s say, “What am I doing?” You seek to pour yourself into something that's going to have a legacy piece. There's a gate further on when you realize, “I have fewer years to live than I'd have already lived.” You start thinking more about when you're not going to be on this Earth anymore.
Self-awareness, self-discipline and self-restraint are supposed to happen and be fully locked in by the time you're eighteen. When you enter the workplace, you become a parent, you find your significant life partner, you have conscientiousness, values and control of your impulses so that you can be a good citizen. What we're seeing now is the behavior is almost worse than two-year-olds. I'm sure you've been at work where you’ve seen people do a copy-all and blast everybody.
I do prison discussions and they're all in there because they could not control their rage. Somebody got murdered or somebody did something because they could not control their loss, their desires or their rage. If you don't get that, if you act like an animal as an adult, society is not going to put up with that. You need to understand that self-awareness is a hard thing. It’ll make you cry when you see your inner character but it's a beautiful thing because you start to understand, “Here's where I was. Here's why I am. Here's where I want to be.” To me, that is when you live the life of a fully developed human being.
I learned so much. This is stuff I learned in the last couple of years. I wasn't stupid. I had a lot of experiences but I'm like, “It’s starting to make sense.” I read How to Win Friends & Influence People before The Poky Little Puppy. Personal development was a standard diet in my house. I was in engineering and stuff like that. My reading was based on a need to know and not a need to grow. For your readers, if you don't have this love of books and love of becoming more aware of yourself, that's okay. I didn't dial into mine until I was 45 when I came back to run the business. I thought, “I better start getting into this because people are going to spot if I'm not authentic.” In the process of saying, “What's this person's development love all about in a good way?” Now I'm in love with growing, learning, developing myself and pouring out in new and different ways into the lives of other people.
Tracey, wasn't it Maxwell Maltz that coined the term personal development? Isn’t all the work that’s coming out of this now goes right back to his work?
It is. I remember reading Psycho-Cybernetics when I was a preteen. For those of you that don't know, Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon. After 40 years of trying to fix people from the outside in, he realized you can only be fixed from the inside and live it out. It’s a brilliant book. It’s happiness and self-actualization. We have to live our lives from the inside out and not let the outside in. It was a groundbreaking book back then and still is.
For those of you who are saying, “I don't want to read it. That sounds dry and dusty.” Use Audible.com. I have the book on Audible. I've been listening to it and that's why I brought it up. I've been listening to it over and over again. I can compartmentalize. I'll be building a website with my right ear if that makes any sense at all and listening to an audiobook. Never fiction. I have to get into those in my own brain. I never listen to fiction books.
Audio is your friend. It's on Audible. Find them somewhere else and listen to them. To give you an example, I have one of Brendon Bouchard’s earlier books. It‘s a great book but I never could get into it for some reason, which is odd for me. I then went, “I have this book on Audible.” That was a whole new thing. I then heard the passion in his voice. I heard the nuances. If physically reading is not for you, find a way to listen to it if it's available.
We put up Life Is Tremendous read by my father. We finally found it and got permission to put it up there. We have a lot of my dad's speeches in the books he's read. We have a lot of that downloadable for the audiobooks. If you can't find it on Audible.com or Amazon, we have the disk that you can pick up at Tremendous Leadership.
Tracey, I've started to ask this because it's important. You and I both know that people who are successful in life, business, commerce or whatever arena they're in, have success rituals. I am dying to ask all of my guests going forward, what are the success rituals that you do not deviate from every single day?
Believe it or not, although I am incredibly on top of things, I'm not a hard structured person. However, I get up in the morning and I do at least a five-minute devotional where I get my head squared away about the bigger purpose and what I'm doing. I am constantly pouring into my mind new things at least two weeks ahead of my writing and speaking due dates. I will have several different things going on and I will piece two things together. I say in the book, “Inch-by-inch slices.” I break down tasks into little things. I stay pretty organized.
The night before, I will write down the top five things that I have to do the next day. Eat that frog. I put the one I don't want to do, which is cold calling, at the top of the list. You need to get the hard thing done. You can't do it all. That brings the hard cash. Do that and then get to the other things. I have no TV. My dad took away the TVs when we were teenagers. You don't need that. I am judicious about what I spend my time with. People are like, “How do you do it?” I'm like, “When you cut out the non-value added stuff, you cannot believe how much time you have.”
I get my eight-hour sleep. I have good stress, not bad stress. I still put more into the day. The other thing that I can't tell you enough is you have to get the right people. If they're not your employees, your co-workers, your boss, have it be a mentor, somebody that believes in your success more than you. No matter how good you are or how strong you are, you can't get it right without the right people in your life. That goes back to Henry Cloud’s The Power of the Other.
I know you’re reading books but you've got to have these people come into your life. That is going to enable you to achieve levels you'd never even thought you could. Always be on the lookout and make time to cultivate those relationships in your life as well. Don't be working on a business and writing, reading, putting great stuff out on social media and all that stuff. Carve out time where you're further developing these relationships with people that get you, are going to enrich you and help you achieve levels you never thought you could.
Engaging Employees: Sometimes, the followers want to be micromanaged because some passive followers just want to go in. They want to do the same job every day.
I'm glad you said that because as a high-functioning introvert, I've had to struggle with creating relationships and even forming them beyond what I was willing to do. There was always me that was like, “It’s not for me.” There are three of us in this group that we're calling our Girl Power Tribe. We record our calls, we meet with each one of them once a week and then we meet every two weeks because we're all going to be schooled together. Let me tell you something, the collective brain-power and enthusiasm of the three of us are incredibly enlightening. I can't believe that I've gone so long in my life without forming this.
Who are we? How did we think we could do it all?
I don't know. I don’t understand what I was thinking. The three of us individually are pretty powerful women. Together, we are unstoppable.
Warren Bennis has a quote, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Find those people.
They will find you if you're open to it. We're still breathless. We’re like, “How did this happen?” We're like, “Oh my gosh.” I would not have missed this opportunity for the world. It's truly one of the best things that have happened to me and it took way too long but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm living in the moment with these gals and I'm glad they're with me. Tracey, it has been wonderful chatting with you. Look at the book. Where can people find you on the web to find the book and find you?
Denise, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. If our readers would like to continue the conversation, they can reach out to me at www.TremendousLeadership.com. You can go to Amazon and get the book, the Audible, the download or however you want. Facebook, LinkedIn, you send me an email and I will answer directly to you.
Thank you, Tracey. I always love chatting with you. As always the case, this show is what we do best. I thank you for all of your tips, your advice and the sheer wisdom that you have shared with our audience. This episode was sponsored by my company, Your Office On The Web. If you are looking for full-on business creation services such as web development, virtual assistants, online business management, social media marketing and so much more, we’re a one-stop shop. Please visit YourOfficeOnTheWeb.com. Be sure to look for us on iTunes. Look for Your Partner In Success™ Radio! Take us along on your success journey. Tracey, thank you and give the babies a big hug for me.
I sure will. Thanks, Denise.
Important Links:
Tracey Jones – past episode for Your Partner in Success Radio
interview - Down-to-earth career advice for millennials—and everybody else
Tremendous Leadership - YouTube
Amazon – Life Is Tremendous
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