Day 299: TC North

July 26, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“I was a tennis player in college, and it’s like you don’t get caught up in any one point.  You win and lose lots of points in a match … and it’s not about any one point.  I always try to keep that in my head.  It’s not about any one thing or any one day or an event, because there’s going to be lots of failures, lots of things that don’t work out; but how do I learn from those and get better and just keep focused on the end game?”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, TC, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

TC North: You’re welcome, Toni, and thank you so much for the invitation.  Yes, Dr. TC North.  I’m a high performance business coach.  For 24 years, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and midsize companies helping to create great companies that are highly profitable that people love to work for.

Toni: When you think of the word inspiration, TC, who do you think you inspire, and how does that happen?

TC: Toni, I don’t know if I inspire anyone.  You probably have to ask them.  Who I work with, and hopefully I give some inspiration to, is that I work with CEOs.  I work with entrepreneurs.  I work with real high-end salespeople and sort of in the beginning of my career I worked with Olympic athletes and pro athletes and folks like that.

So I work with high performers.  I work with people who lay it on the line every day, people who take risks.  So they need a lot of courage, they need to strengthen their confidence, and you know, hopefully I inspire them by really helping them.  What I do is I help them understand what might block their success, block their emotionality, block them from not having the right skills, identify their blocks to success, then we blast through them; whether that’s fear or a limiting belief system.  By the way, I’m very excited about the Blast Through Fear Project we’re about to do together.

Toni: Well thank you.

TC: I’m very excited about that, with women entrepreneurs.  That’s going to be so exciting, and that’s one of the books that I’m hopefully going to release next year, too.

Toni: So when you do this kind of work, TC, what happens during that transaction between you and these high performers?  I’m sure that … my experience has been that some high performers really have a hard time understanding what’s getting in their way.  So what happens with you and that exchange with them?

TC: Well, they do, because high performers, of course, as you know, will do everything in their power to figure things out and, you know, to get coached, etc.  So when they come to me, it’s because they haven’t been able to figure it out, and they know that they’re not living up to their potential for some reason, and they’re very open to exploring what could be in their way.

I really come from a place, Toni … I heard this line early in my life – I wish I could credit it where I heard it – but I heard “Everyone is a genius,  you just have to help them find what they’re genius at.”  Ever since I’ve heard that, and it’s got to be … it’s probably 40 years ago I heard that, I mean it was pretty early in my life, and I’ve noticed that, and I’ve worked with everybody from … at the beginning of my career developmentally disabled adults and kids.

I remember so distinctly one of the developmentally disabled adult women I worked with back in the last 70s right out of my undergraduate school, she was an absolute genius.  She was a genius in humor.  Absolutely the funniest person, maybe next to Robin Williams, that I’ve ever met in my life.  So here is a developmentally disabled person who absolutely had this wonderful genius of making people laugh, and she is the only person in my entire life that made me laugh until I cried almost any time she wanted.

Toni: That’s fantastic; and what did she do with that?

TC: Well, you know, I don’t know, I lost track of her after a couple of years, but what she did was she brought a joy to her life, and you know, developmentally disabled adult women don’t have an easy life, and she brought joy to everybody around her, whether they were developmentally challenged or not.  She was so fun to be around.  She would pick up nuances that nobody else would get, and she had this ability … you know how Bill Cosby used his face, you know, to … like nobody I’ve ever known as a comedian to be funny, impressions … she did that.  She had that natural ability to use her face and just make everybody laugh.

Toni: Oh, that’s fantastic.  What a great story.  When you do the work that you do, and you know, I wrote down the word awareness … when I interview people on this Project there’s words that pop up for me, and I write them all over the tablet, and right away out of the gate with you I’ve written down the word awareness.  And I’m wondering when you work with people and you come out on the other end with someone, what happens with their potential?  How do you help them to explore their potential?

TC: Well, you know, my background is … you know, I have an education in high performance psychology, which I originally started working with athletes and translated that into business, clinical psychology, and organizational psychology, so I bring the best of all the tools from all three disciplines, so I have the techniques that really allow me to work with people deep and fast.  I don’t necessarily do the pop psychology stuff that’s pretty popular these days, but I have sort of faster, deeper, better tools than that.  So we use those, of course with permission.

What’s really just elegant about that is the ability to change something, a belief system that’s been controlling people’s thoughts and actions for decades that they didn’t even know they had, or a fear that was related to a belief system that they didn’t even know they had.  The end result is there’s just this release of energy towards them attaining what they want that they didn’t have before, that they didn’t know how to get.

So here’s a very different example.  This is a CEO that I worked with, and I have to be a little careful in disguising this story.  So I’ve worked with him about eight years now, and we coach now only about once a month.  His company is five to ten million-dollar revenue, and he’s built it for 19 years; very values-based leader.

He was really struggling.  He lost his excitement for his own company about two years ago, and the reason he had lost excitement was his primary channel – and for people who don’t know what a channel is in business, it’s like a partner – his partner was a Fortune 500 company that they worked together with the clients.  The channel partner was not a particularly honest, upfront, pretty low in ethics partner, and because he was a real high-valued person, he was just always frustrated in that kind of work.

So what we did was we strategically come up with … so we had to unblock that.  So the block was “I really hate working with this partner because they’re unethical, and it’s totally against everything I believe in.”  So to unblock that, first the awareness, get that real clear.  Second, now strategize how can you shift your business from that partner to … he had identified another partner that was about 5% to 10% of his business that was a Fortune 100 company that he loved working with.

Over the last two years, he has shifted his business under the radar of the first company, so he didn’t actually lose any business, to the other business, which is now 70% of his company.  So he completely shifted from the bad partner to the good partner.  And quite frankly, if he loses the bad partner at this point, his company can survive it and he’s fine with that.

Toni: So really where the potential comes in is that awareness that there is an option.  There’s the awareness of unblocking what’s causing the unhappiness and the lack of success in that particular area, and then creating that shift.  And so it is the potential of that choice and awareness that you led them through.

TC: Yeah, and blasting through, you know, the barrier is the really critical part.  Awareness, as you know, is always the first part of change, because the harder part of change is kind of blasting through what keeps us stuck in our patterns.

Toni: I love that word, blast.  It doesn’t get more powerful than that.  I mean, you’re not crawling, you’re not kind of walking into it, you’re blasting it!  Talk about an option!

TC: It’s funny, I often have to say to people when they say “How long is this going to take working with you?”  I say “Well, I don’t know, but the first belief system you have to get over is that it has to be slow and painful.”

It doesn’t have to be slow and painful.  That is a very old paradigm in psychology.  There’s actually tools that are rapid and permanent, and not painful, which is a great paradigm shift.

Toni: Talk about a turbo-charge.  That’s what it reminds me of, a turbo-charged event.  Let’s go, hold on, we’re going through it.  So, TC, what inspires you?

TC: People like you, Toni.  I’m absolutely serious.  Being around other people who are what I want to be in my life.  People who seek to be high performers, who are high-value people who are making a positive difference in the world.  The more I can be around people like that, the more inspired I am to do my work.

Toni: Wow.  Well, thank you.  Have you always shown up this way?  Have you always been built, I don’t know, maybe standing in this confidence, in this belief system that you have that you teach others?  Was it easy for you?

TC: Holy cow, no.  The short story there is I have a mental cognitive disability.  I am pretty severely dyslexic and, you know, I’m 57 years old, so when I was going through grade school, nobody knew about dyslexia.  I have a physical disability with a leg that was built wrong, and I grew up in an alcoholic home, and I was sexually molested by a man at 17.

So like everybody, I got my stuff.  I have my physical, emotional, and cognitive challenges to work through, and for whatever reason … and I think my dad might have … he had a message that I always remember.  He just said “I believe you can do anything you choose to.”  And I just decided to believe that.  So, you know, it really is a driving belief system for me now.

I became a public speaker, and a professional public speaker now, and I was a shy, introverted dyslexic kid who would never raise his hand in school for fear of being wrong, all through grade school into high school.  And now I stand and entertain groups on a regular basis.  That took tremendous courage.  I didn’t have any confidence when I started that.  It just took courage to go out and do it one speaking engagement at a time.  And I don’t know how many hundreds I’ve done now, but I still get really nervous even though I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of these, maybe getting close to a thousand.

Toni: So how did you blast through your fear?

TC: One step at a time.  Using that analogy of doing the speaking engagement, you take one at a time.  If we had time, I could tell you all kinds of horror stories about bad things that happened …

Toni: Oh, I’ve been there.

TC: Anybody who’s gone on stage a few times, saying Freudian slips onstage to large audiences – not good.

Toni: Or giving a hand gesture that isn’t appropriate for that country?  I’m right there with you.

TC: Oh, there you go.  Makes for great stories later.  Years later.

Toni: Are there tools and resources, TC, that you use, that you tend to reach for, that are your go-to resources when you need or seek inspiration?

TC: You know, again, I’m going to go back to … it’s people.  It’s the people that I’m around, and it’s also the people I want to serve.  I’m continually reminding myself that I have something that benefits others, the knowledge base I have, the tools, the techniques, and the processes.  So just keep reminding myself that no matter how far down something takes me, how much something might hurt and how disappointing some failure might be, to keep focused on the big picture.

What is the end game?  The end game is to help a lot of people and not get caught up … I was a tennis player in college, and it’s like you don’t get caught up in any one point.  You win and lose lots of points in a match, but you focus on how do you come out in the end, and it’s not about any one point.  I always try to keep that in my head.  It’s not about any one thing or any one day or an event, because there’s going to be lots of failures, lots of things that don’t work out; but how do I learn from those and get better and just keep focused on the end game?

Toni: What a great piece of advice.  Don’t get caught up in any one point.  I love that.  What do you do now, these days, to explore your own potential?

TC: Well, I guess there’s a couple of things there.  You know, from an internal perspective, one of the things I learned somewhere along the line was to be able to go inside and pay attention.  I can hear my thoughts.  I’m pretty aware of my thoughts, so I hear them when they’re off track.  I question “Why are they off track and what’s that reflecting?  What’s the belief?  What’s the fear that’s going on in there?”

And then I step outside of myself and go “How do I want to be?  How do I want to think?  How do I want to act in this situation?”  That’s been a really valuable technique to be able to pay attention inwardly and then sort of be the outside observer.  And then I also watch and I listen from the outside.  If I’m interacting with somebody, and I can see and feel and sense they’re not connecting or they don’t like me or what I’m saying, “What am I doing that might be creating that?”  I’m always sort of taking that outside information and then taking it back in and going “What could I do differently so that I can create the relationship or the situation or the environment that I’m trying to create?”

Toni: So really, it is about awareness for you, whether it’s the internal awareness or the external awareness of that moment that you are constantly focusing on.

TC: Yes.

Toni: That’s fantastic.  You have … some of these interviews are … it’s such a shame that they’re only 15 minutes.  Most of them are like this, and it’s such a breath of fresh air to interview people like yourself with so much insight and value.  And for showing up to the Get Inspired! Project, we cannot thank you enough, TC.  Thank you for everything that you’ve shared with us today.

TC: You’re welcome, and thank you for doing your Get Inspired! Project.  I think it’s awesome, and that’s why I say people like you inspire me.  And thanks for teaming up with me on the Blast Through Fear Project we’re about to do.  That’s going to be real exciting.

Toni: It is going to be fun, and thank you so very much .  Take care.

TC: You too.

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For more information about TC North:  www.tcnorth.com

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