Terry Tucker

Support for the following podcast is provided by the user experience specialists at Johnson Taylor. More information follows this episode What if the Miracle You get isn't the one you asked for. I'm Joe Taylor, Junior. This is Search and Replace. It's fair to say that Terry Tucker's experienced a bunch of ups and downs in life, along with a bunch of career moves that you might not expect. Grow up on the outside of Chicago, oldest of three boys, my brothers and I were all college athletes. Graduate from college, first person of my family to graduate from college. I found that first job in the corporate headquarters of Wendy's International, the Hamburger chain, in their marketing department. That was the good news. The bad news was I spent the next three and a half years living at home, helping my mother care for my father and my grandmother, who were both dying of different forms of cancer. I shifted to hospital administration. I actually went to work for the hospital that cared for my father and my grandmother. And then I made a major pivot in my life and became a police officer. And part of what I did during my law enforcement career was I was a swat team hostage negotiator. After that started a school security consulting business coach girls high school basketball. It's the last job on that list that plays a huge role in Terry's story, revealing something that he might not have discovered otherwise. I had a callous break open on the bottom of my foot and initially didn't think much of it because as a coach you're on your feet a lot. But after a few weeks of it not healing, I went to see a p dietrist, a foot doctor friend of mine, and he took an extra and he said, Terry, I think you have assistant there and I can cut it out. And he did, and he showed it to him. Nothing that gave either one of us concern. And then two weeks later I received a call from him that I think we all dread in our lives, and as I said, he was a friend of mine. More difficulty he was having explaining to me what was going on, the more frightened I was becoming, until finally he just laid it out for me. He said, Terry, I've been a doctor for twenty five years. I have never seen the form of cancer that you have, you have this incredibly rare form of melanoma. Mine has absolutely nothing to do with sun exposure. It's just this really kind of off the wall kind of cancer. Despite that diagnosis, Terry kept looking beyond the odds. When I was diagnosed, I was told that if I got a miracle, I might live five years, but more than likely I'd be dead in two years. So I thought, well, what the heck, I've been given a death sentence. Maybe I can turn that death sentence into a life sentence. And that's what I've been trying to do for the last eleven and a half years. You know, when I die, where I die, how I die, way above my pay grade. Don't spend a lot of time worrying about that. There's kind of that old saying when you can't do what you were good at, you begin to do what's important in life. And you know, through this cancer journey, I've had my foot amputated in twenty eighteen and my leg amputated in twenty twenty. I still have tumors of my lungs that I'm treated for every three weeks. It's just part of my life. So the dying part, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about I spend more time focusing on the things that are important to me, which for me are my faith, my family, and my friends. Don't get me wrong, I think we all have a breaking point. But I think we quit and give up just because things are hard, things are difficult. When things are hard and difficult, that's when we grow, that's when we approve, that's when we get better. So I've used this cancer experience just to make me a better human being. I don't like it. You know, I'm a human being just like everybody else. I have bad days. I get down, I cry, I feel sorry for myself. But when I do, I think, come on, Terry, You've got a whole lot more to give to yourself than quitting and giving up at this point in time. So Terry decided to start writing down some of the things he's learned from his experience, and he turned those thoughts into a book. The book was really born out of two conversations I had. One was with the former player that I had coached when I was a basketball coach, and I remember saying to her after dinner that I was excited that she was living close and I could watch her find and live her purpose, and she got real quiet for a while, and then she looked at me and she said, 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 this earth, using your unique gifts and talents, and living that reason. And then I had a young man reach out to me on social media from college, and he said, what do you think of the most important things I need to learn, not to just be successful in my job or in business, but to be successful in life. I didn't want to give it, you know, get up early, work hard. I didn't want to give them some sort of the cliches that we all know. I wanted to go deeper with them. So I spent some time taking some notes and eventually had these ten thoughts, these ten ideas, these ten principles, and so I sent them to them and then I stepped back and I was like, why I got a life story that fits underneath that principle, or I know somebody whose life emulates this principle. So literally, during the months that I was healing after I had my leg amputated. I sat down at the computer every day and I built stories. And there are real stories about real people underneath each of the principles, and that's how sustainable excellence came to be. Terry hopes his message can help us learn how to better cope with the pain in our lives. Our brains are hardwired to avoid pain and discomfort and to seek pleasure. Pain in our lives is inevitable. Suffering, on the other hand, suffering is optional. Suffering is what you do with that pain. Do you use it to make you way stronger and more determined individual, or do you wallow in it and feel sorry for yourself and want other people to feel sorry for you? Make it, make the the effort to focus on someone else. And if I think, if you do that now, all of a sudden, one you're helping another human being, and two you're not focused on your plight. You're focused on making a positive difference in another person's life. We spend a tremendous amount of time working on this body. We go to the gym, we eat right, we get enough rest. And I'm certainly not telling you not to do that, But what I am suggesting is maybe every day, spend a little more time working on who you really are, that heart, that mind, that soul. We know this body's going to die, but I think our heart, our mind, and our soul those things are eternal. Those things will live on, and if we spend more time working on them, imagine what the future might bring. That's Terry Tucker, author of the book Sustainable Excellence Ten Principles Leading your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life. We've got links to Terry's work in our show notes, but on our website at search and replace dot show. Today's episode produced by Nicole Hubbard with help from the entire podcast Taxi team. I'm Joe Taylor Jr. This has been a podcast Taxi radio production support for surch and Replace is provided by Johnson Taylor User Experience Specialists serving media and technology companies that want their websites to work. Learn more about how top performing businesses eliminate barriers between customers and their goals at www dot Make the website work for me dot com