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Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.

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I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you

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insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise

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but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.

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So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the

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milestones that mark the path to success.

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Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. Today, my special

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guest is Terry Tucker, founder of Motivational Check LLC. Terry's a motivational speaker and

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author on the topics of motivation, mindset, and self-development. He has a business administration

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degree from the Citadel and a master's degree from Boston University. In his professional career,

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Terry has been a marketing executive, a hospital administrator, a SWAT team hostage negotiator,

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a high school basketball coach, a business owner, and a motivational speaker. For over 12 years,

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he's been a cancer warrior and the author of the book Sustainable Excellence, 10 Principles to

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Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life. Welcome to the show, Terry.

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Sheila, thanks for having me on. I'm really looking forward to talking with you today.

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And me too. Your background is extremely diverse and I can't wait to learn a little bit more about

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about how you got to where you are today. What was that pivotal moment that led you to become

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founder of Motivational Check LLC? I think I really have to go back to

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right after I graduated from college. I moved home to find a job. I was actually the first person in

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my family to graduate from college. And I was all set to make my mark on the world, you know, with

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my newly obtained business administration degree. And I look back now and realize I knew nothing

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about business just because I had a degree. But my dad was dying of cancer. And in all honesty,

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I wanted to follow in my grandfather's footsteps. My grandfather was a Chicago police officer from

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1924 to 1954 and was actually shot in the line of duty with his own gun. So when I expressed an

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interest in doing that, my father, who was an infant when his father was shot, was like,

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absolutely not. You're going to college, you're going to major in business, you're going to get

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out, get married, have 2.4 kids and live happily ever after. But that's what my dad wanted me to

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do. That's not what I felt my purpose, my calling in life was. So I had a decision to make.

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I could have said, sorry, dad, I'm going to go blaze my own trail and follow in

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Papa George's footsteps or out of love and respect for you, I will do what you want me to do. So

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that's kind of if you look at my resume, my first few jobs were in business because that's what my

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father wanted me to do. But that's the one thing I guess that I'm proudest of, if I'm even saying

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that right, or most proud of in my life. I never let my dream die. I was a 37-year-old rookie police

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officer, but it's something I always knew I wanted to do. I could have said, you know what,

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I'm comfortable as a hospital administrator, I'm making good money, but it just wasn't in my heart,

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it wasn't in my soul. So that was really kind of the pivotal moment in my life. It was like,

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I need to follow my dreams. I need to follow my purpose in life.

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Well, we all know that setbacks are inevitable. What are some of the strategies you use to

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cultivate resilience and stay motivated through challenges? I try to do difficult things. I try

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to do hard things. We talk about controlling our mind and things like that, callousing our mind,

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making our mind tougher in our life. And one of the ways to do that is to do things you don't want

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to do. You're laying on the couch watching Netflix, boy, I really should go to the gym.

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And I don't want to do that. Get up and go to the gym. I always tell people, first thing in the

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morning, make your bed. Make your bed in the morning because one, it gives you a win right

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out of the gate. It's like, bang, I did something, something positive, something productive.

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And no matter how bad your day is, when you come home, you've got a freshly made bed to get in at

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the end of the night. So doing difficult things is something I try to do. The other thing I try to do

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is to always be a lifelong learner, always be learning. I think a lot of people get to a point

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in their life where they're like, you know, I'm good. I know enough. And I've never been, I want to die

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learning. I want to be one of those people that's constantly learning. And one of the things I find

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interesting about the more I learn, I thought that the more I learned, the less questions I would

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have, the more knowledge I would have to be able to answer questions. And what I find is the more

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I learn, the more I read, the more I grow, the more questions I have. So, you know, it's just the

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opposite. You think you're going to have more information, but that more information leads to

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more questions, leads to more learning, which leads to more questions. So those are a couple of things

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that I do. Through Motivational Check LLC, or your speaking engagements or your books,

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you talk about the four truths that you developed to encourage, guide, and support your audience. Can

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you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. So this was really, you know, where did I come up

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with these truths? In all honesty, I was on a podcast that was called The Three Truths. So I

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needed to really come up with what I, it forced me to figure out what was important to me. What was

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the bedrock of my soul, so to speak, things that were immovable that I would not move off of. And

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so I came up with these three truths, and then I added a fourth one to them. So I have them on a

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Post-it note here in my office. So I see them multiple times during the day, and they constantly

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get reinforced in my mind. So here's the first one, control your mind, or your mind is going

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to control you. The second one is embrace the pain and the difficulty that we all experience in life,

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and use that pain and difficulty to make you a stronger and more resilient individual.

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The third one, and this is the one that I added, I look at as kind of a legacy type of truth.

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And it's this, what you leave behind is what you weave in the hearts of other people.

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And then the fourth one, I think is pretty self-explanatory. As long as you don't quit,

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you can never be defeated. And I refer to these four truths as kind of the bedrock of my soul.

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I just think they're a good place to start to try to build a quality life off of.

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So tell us a little bit about the book and where our audience can find it.

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Sure. So Sustainable Excellence is available anywhere. You can get a book online, Amazon,

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Barnes and Noll, Apple I books, wherever you get your books, you can get Sustainable Excellence.

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And the book was really born out of two conversations I had. You mentioned that I

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was a high school basketball coach. I coached girls high school basketball when we lived in Texas.

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And I had one of my former players moved to the area in Colorado, where my wife and I live now

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with her fiance. And the four of us had dinner one night. And after dinner, I remember saying to her

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that I was excited that she was living close and I could watch her find and live her purpose.

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And she got real quiet. And Sheila, she looked at me and she was like, well, coach, what do you think

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my purpose is? I said, I have absolutely no idea what your purpose is. But that's what your life

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should be about finding the reason you were put on the face of this earth, using your unique gifts

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and talents and living that reason. So that was one story. And then I had a young man reach out to me

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on social media from college. And he asked me what I thought were the most important things that he

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should learn, not to just be successful in his job or in business, but to be successful in life.

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And I didn't want to give him that, you know, get up early, work hard, help out. I didn't want to give

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him sort of the cliches that we all know. I wanted to see if I could go deeper with him. So I spent

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some time taking some notes and eventually came up with these 10 principles. And so I sent them to

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him. And then I stepped back and I was like, well, I got a life story that fits underneath that

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principle. Or I know somebody whose life emulates this principle. So in 2020, right after I had my

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leg amputated because of my my cancer, when I was healing, I sat down at the computer every day

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and I built stories and they're real stories about real people underneath each of the principles.

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And that's how sustainable excellence came to be.

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So what is your next milestone?

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My next milestone is another book. Sustainable Excellence is a book about success. I'd like to

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write another book and I'm actually I have a first draft that I just finished. It's also about another

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word that begins with S and that's significance. Success is what we do for ourselves, what we do

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to make ourselves successful in life. Significance is what we do to help other people. They don't get

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me wrong. I think you can be both. I think you can be successful and significant in life. But this

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second book now is going to be about how I think we can help other people. We can help other people

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on their journey through life.

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About like that negotiation skill you learned in the SWAT team, I bet you that

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that would have some really interesting lessons behind it.

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It really did. I mean, we learned we learned a lot about communicating, you know, with people

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in SWAT. And I'll never forget when I first started, they gave us a formula and the formula

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was 738.55. And it had to do with how we communicate with each other, not necessarily

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just in a SWAT situation, but all of us how you and I communicate, how we communicate with our

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kids, our spouses, our friends. And the 7% is the words that we use. And think about how we agonize

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sometimes about, oh, did I say the right thing? Or, you know, should I have said something

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different? 7% of our message, how we communicate message is the words. So not a very big part of it.

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38% is the tone of voice that we use with those words. And then 55% of how we communicate a

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message is our body language and our facial expressions. So think about us as negotiators,

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you know, if we were negotiating with somebody who was barricaded in an apartment, you know,

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with a gun, I was not in that apartment with the guy trying to talk him out. I was somewhere else.

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So I didn't have the luxury of that 55%. I didn't have the luxury of saying something

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and seeing him kind of roll his eyes like, oh, what an idiot. I can't believe he said that.

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So we had to get good at figuring things out, certainly based on what people said,

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but also what they didn't say and how they said it.

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Where can we find out more about you? Do you have a website? Do you have social media?

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Yes, I have. I both those have a website called Motivational Check. You can also get access to

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my social media there. Every day I put up a thought for the day. And with that thought,

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usually comes a question about how maybe you could apply it in your life. The recommendations

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for books to read, videos to watch, that's all at motivationalcheck.com.

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All right. And before we wrap this up, is there one piece of advice or a tip that you can give

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that you can give our listeners that they can implement right away to take action?

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Yeah, let me tell you a story. I think I could give you a tip, but I think it's better to tell

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a story to try to illustrate this tip. And this is a true story. Back in the 1950s,

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there was a professor at Johns Hopkins University here in the United States

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that did a very simple experiment with rats. He wanted to see, put rats in a tank of water,

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actually wanted to see how long they could tread water. And the average rat treaded water for about

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15 minutes. And just as those rats were getting ready to sink and drown, he reached in, grabbed

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them, pulled them out, dried them off and let them rest for a while. And then he put the exact same

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rats back in that exact same tank of water. And the second time around, on average, those rats

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treaded water for 60 hours. Now think about that. The first time, 15 minutes, it's not like your

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business is going to fail or you're going to flunk a test. You're going to die. Your life is going

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to be over. And the second time around, 60 hours, which taught me two things. Number one, the

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importance of hope in our lives. That if you know you're doing the right thing, maybe not today,

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maybe not this month, maybe not even this year, but at some point in time, more than likely,

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not a hundred percent, you'll probably get to where you want to be. And the second thing it taught me

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was just how much more our physical bodies can handle than we ever thought they could. We quit,

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we give up, we give in long before our body is saying I'm done because we don't callous,

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we don't control the pain in our body. It's our brains that are saying, hey, this is uncomfortable.

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This hurts. I don't like this. Stop. And we listen to that. It's kind of like a marathon runner who,

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you know, they always talk about hitting a wall where they get to that point where I just don't

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think I can go on. If you can push through that, if you can keep going, eventually you get your

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second win. Now don't get me wrong. I think we all have a breaking point, but I think that breaking

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point is so much further down the road than we ever thought. So whenever you get to that point

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where you think I can't do this, just keep going, just put one foot in front of the other and you'll

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be amazed at how far you can go in life. Thank you so much for sharing that story.

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And thank you so much for your time today. Well, Sheila, thanks for having me on. I

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enjoyed talking with you. And thank you to all of you listeners for tuning in to another episode

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of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership.