Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success.
Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. Today, my special
guest is Terry Tucker, founder of Motivational Check LLC. Terry's a motivational speaker and
author on the topics of motivation, mindset, and self-development. He has a business administration
degree from the Citadel and a master's degree from Boston University. In his professional career,
Terry has been a marketing executive, a hospital administrator, a SWAT team hostage negotiator,
a high school basketball coach, a business owner, and a motivational speaker. For over 12 years,
he's been a cancer warrior and the author of the book Sustainable Excellence, 10 Principles to
Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life. Welcome to the show, Terry.
Sheila, thanks for having me on. I'm really looking forward to talking with you today.
And me too. Your background is extremely diverse and I can't wait to learn a little bit more about
about how you got to where you are today. What was that pivotal moment that led you to become
founder of Motivational Check LLC? I think I really have to go back to
right after I graduated from college. I moved home to find a job. I was actually the first person in
my family to graduate from college. And I was all set to make my mark on the world, you know, with
my newly obtained business administration degree. And I look back now and realize I knew nothing
about business just because I had a degree. But my dad was dying of cancer. And in all honesty,
I wanted to follow in my grandfather's footsteps. My grandfather was a Chicago police officer from
1924 to 1954 and was actually shot in the line of duty with his own gun. So when I expressed an
interest in doing that, my father, who was an infant when his father was shot, was like,
absolutely not. You're going to college, you're going to major in business, you're going to get
out, get married, have 2.4 kids and live happily ever after. But that's what my dad wanted me to
do. That's not what I felt my purpose, my calling in life was. So I had a decision to make.
I could have said, sorry, dad, I'm going to go blaze my own trail and follow in
Papa George's footsteps or out of love and respect for you, I will do what you want me to do. So
that's kind of if you look at my resume, my first few jobs were in business because that's what my
father wanted me to do. But that's the one thing I guess that I'm proudest of, if I'm even saying
that right, or most proud of in my life. I never let my dream die. I was a 37-year-old rookie police
officer, but it's something I always knew I wanted to do. I could have said, you know what,
I'm comfortable as a hospital administrator, I'm making good money, but it just wasn't in my heart,
it wasn't in my soul. So that was really kind of the pivotal moment in my life. It was like,
I need to follow my dreams. I need to follow my purpose in life.
Well, we all know that setbacks are inevitable. What are some of the strategies you use to
cultivate resilience and stay motivated through challenges? I try to do difficult things. I try
to do hard things. We talk about controlling our mind and things like that, callousing our mind,
making our mind tougher in our life. And one of the ways to do that is to do things you don't want
to do. You're laying on the couch watching Netflix, boy, I really should go to the gym.
And I don't want to do that. Get up and go to the gym. I always tell people, first thing in the
morning, make your bed. Make your bed in the morning because one, it gives you a win right
out of the gate. It's like, bang, I did something, something positive, something productive.
And no matter how bad your day is, when you come home, you've got a freshly made bed to get in at
the end of the night. So doing difficult things is something I try to do. The other thing I try to do
is to always be a lifelong learner, always be learning. I think a lot of people get to a point
in their life where they're like, you know, I'm good. I know enough. And I've never been, I want to die
learning. I want to be one of those people that's constantly learning. And one of the things I find
interesting about the more I learn, I thought that the more I learned, the less questions I would
have, the more knowledge I would have to be able to answer questions. And what I find is the more
I learn, the more I read, the more I grow, the more questions I have. So, you know, it's just the
opposite. You think you're going to have more information, but that more information leads to
more questions, leads to more learning, which leads to more questions. So those are a couple of things
that I do. Through Motivational Check LLC, or your speaking engagements or your books,
you talk about the four truths that you developed to encourage, guide, and support your audience. Can
you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. So this was really, you know, where did I come up
with these truths? In all honesty, I was on a podcast that was called The Three Truths. So I
needed to really come up with what I, it forced me to figure out what was important to me. What was
the bedrock of my soul, so to speak, things that were immovable that I would not move off of. And
so I came up with these three truths, and then I added a fourth one to them. So I have them on a
Post-it note here in my office. So I see them multiple times during the day, and they constantly
get reinforced in my mind. So here's the first one, control your mind, or your mind is going
to control you. The second one is embrace the pain and the difficulty that we all experience in life,
and use that pain and difficulty to make you a stronger and more resilient individual.
The third one, and this is the one that I added, I look at as kind of a legacy type of truth.
And it's this, what you leave behind is what you weave in the hearts of other people.
And then the fourth one, I think is pretty self-explanatory. As long as you don't quit,
you can never be defeated. And I refer to these four truths as kind of the bedrock of my soul.
I just think they're a good place to start to try to build a quality life off of.
So tell us a little bit about the book and where our audience can find it.
Sure. So Sustainable Excellence is available anywhere. You can get a book online, Amazon,
Barnes and Noll, Apple I books, wherever you get your books, you can get Sustainable Excellence.
And the book was really born out of two conversations I had. You mentioned that I
was a high school basketball coach. I coached girls high school basketball when we lived in Texas.
And I had one of my former players moved to the area in Colorado, where my wife and I live now
with her fiance. And the four of us had dinner one night. And after dinner, I remember saying to her
that I was excited that she was living close and I could watch her find and live her purpose.
And she got real quiet. And Sheila, she looked at me and she was like, well, coach, what do you think
my purpose is? I said, I have absolutely no idea what your purpose is. But that's what your life
should be about finding the reason you were put on the face of this earth, using your unique gifts
and talents and living that reason. So that was one story. And then I had a young man reach out to me
on social media from college. And he asked me what I thought were the most important things that he
should learn, not to just be successful in his job or in business, but to be successful in life.
And I didn't want to give him that, you know, get up early, work hard, help out. I didn't want to give
him sort of the cliches that we all know. I wanted to see if I could go deeper with him. So I spent
some time taking some notes and eventually came up with these 10 principles. And so I sent them to
him. And then I stepped back and I was like, well, I got a life story that fits underneath that
principle. Or I know somebody whose life emulates this principle. So in 2020, right after I had my
leg amputated because of my my cancer, when I was healing, I sat down at the computer every day
and I built stories and they're real stories about real people underneath each of the principles.
And that's how sustainable excellence came to be.
So what is your next milestone?
My next milestone is another book. Sustainable Excellence is a book about success. I'd like to
write another book and I'm actually I have a first draft that I just finished. It's also about another
word that begins with S and that's significance. Success is what we do for ourselves, what we do
to make ourselves successful in life. Significance is what we do to help other people. They don't get
me wrong. I think you can be both. I think you can be successful and significant in life. But this
second book now is going to be about how I think we can help other people. We can help other people
on their journey through life.
About like that negotiation skill you learned in the SWAT team, I bet you that
that would have some really interesting lessons behind it.
It really did. I mean, we learned we learned a lot about communicating, you know, with people
in SWAT. And I'll never forget when I first started, they gave us a formula and the formula
was 738.55. And it had to do with how we communicate with each other, not necessarily
just in a SWAT situation, but all of us how you and I communicate, how we communicate with our
kids, our spouses, our friends. And the 7% is the words that we use. And think about how we agonize
sometimes about, oh, did I say the right thing? Or, you know, should I have said something
different? 7% of our message, how we communicate message is the words. So not a very big part of it.
38% is the tone of voice that we use with those words. And then 55% of how we communicate a
message is our body language and our facial expressions. So think about us as negotiators,
you know, if we were negotiating with somebody who was barricaded in an apartment, you know,
with a gun, I was not in that apartment with the guy trying to talk him out. I was somewhere else.
So I didn't have the luxury of that 55%. I didn't have the luxury of saying something
and seeing him kind of roll his eyes like, oh, what an idiot. I can't believe he said that.
So we had to get good at figuring things out, certainly based on what people said,
but also what they didn't say and how they said it.
Where can we find out more about you? Do you have a website? Do you have social media?
Yes, I have. I both those have a website called Motivational Check. You can also get access to
my social media there. Every day I put up a thought for the day. And with that thought,
usually comes a question about how maybe you could apply it in your life. The recommendations
for books to read, videos to watch, that's all at motivationalcheck.com.
All right. And before we wrap this up, is there one piece of advice or a tip that you can give
that you can give our listeners that they can implement right away to take action?
Yeah, let me tell you a story. I think I could give you a tip, but I think it's better to tell
a story to try to illustrate this tip. And this is a true story. Back in the 1950s,
there was a professor at Johns Hopkins University here in the United States
that did a very simple experiment with rats. He wanted to see, put rats in a tank of water,
actually wanted to see how long they could tread water. And the average rat treaded water for about
15 minutes. And just as those rats were getting ready to sink and drown, he reached in, grabbed
them, pulled them out, dried them off and let them rest for a while. And then he put the exact same
rats back in that exact same tank of water. And the second time around, on average, those rats
treaded water for 60 hours. Now think about that. The first time, 15 minutes, it's not like your
business is going to fail or you're going to flunk a test. You're going to die. Your life is going
to be over. And the second time around, 60 hours, which taught me two things. Number one, the
importance of hope in our lives. That if you know you're doing the right thing, maybe not today,
maybe not this month, maybe not even this year, but at some point in time, more than likely,
not a hundred percent, you'll probably get to where you want to be. And the second thing it taught me
was just how much more our physical bodies can handle than we ever thought they could. We quit,
we give up, we give in long before our body is saying I'm done because we don't callous,
we don't control the pain in our body. It's our brains that are saying, hey, this is uncomfortable.
This hurts. I don't like this. Stop. And we listen to that. It's kind of like a marathon runner who,
you know, they always talk about hitting a wall where they get to that point where I just don't
think I can go on. If you can push through that, if you can keep going, eventually you get your
second win. Now don't get me wrong. I think we all have a breaking point, but I think that breaking
point is so much further down the road than we ever thought. So whenever you get to that point
where you think I can't do this, just keep going, just put one foot in front of the other and you'll
be amazed at how far you can go in life. Thank you so much for sharing that story.
And thank you so much for your time today. Well, Sheila, thanks for having me on. I
enjoyed talking with you. And thank you to all of you listeners for tuning in to another episode
of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership.