Tommy Spaulding On The Book That Changed His Life

An Interview With Sara Connell

Speak less and listen more — Listening to someone is a profound practice. Allowing someone to feel they’re truly heard, because sometimes that’s all people really need is to be heard and be understood. Take the time to listen and understand the people you interact with. Not only will you learn a lot about those people, but just by listening you may profoundly impact them.

Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tommy Spaulding.

Tommy Spaulding is the founder and president of Tommy Spaulding Companies, a leadership development, speaking, training, and executive coaching firm based in Denver, Colorado. A world-renowned speaker on leadership, Spaulding has spoken to more than one million people and to hundreds of organizations, educational institutions, and major corporations. He is author of three books; his first two rose to national bestseller status on The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today lists, and his new book, The Gift of Influence, comes out on September 20.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and how you grew up?

First, I just want to thank the team at Authority Magazine for hearing my story and relaying it to your readers.

I grew up in upstate New York to a very humble, middle-class family of hard-working people who worked in service industries, helping others. My dad was a public-school teacher. Other family members were police officers, hairdressers, and secretaries. This is where I learned the importance of serving other people and making a difference in my community.

I struggled academically in high school, as I had dyslexia and suffered because of it. I had no plans to go to college because my grades were so bad. When I was a senior in high school, a group called Up with People came and did a presentation to my class, and it changed my life. I joined this organization and traveled all over the world with them. They really changed my heart and put me on the trajectory to dedicate my life to serving other people and making the world better.

Let’s talk about what you are doing now and how you achieved the success that you currently enjoy. Can you tell our readers a bit about the work you are doing?

As an author, speaker, and leadership coach, my job is to teach others about the importance of servant leadership and how that can benefit everyone.

You see, there are two types of leaders in the world. Leaders are either heart-led, where a leader naturally serves others before himself/herself, or leaders are self-serving and always think of themselves first. Most leaders in the world, unfortunately, are self-serving, so I’ve dedicated my life to teaching this heart-led leadership concept to everyone from high school kids to Fortune 500 CEOs. All my work — the books, seminars, events, speaking engagement, webinars, etc — comes back to what makes a heart-led leader, and how that can lead to incredible success.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

For me, the answer to that question is: humility, humility, and humility. I know that is just one thing, but I truly believe that if you can go through life and have deep humility, that will be the most important measure of success there is.

I think we think we need more people that are walking around the world who are just listening for the right answer. The most beautiful secret sauce is when you have high confidence in what you do, you’re great at what you do, and you then match those qualities equally with deep humility. This holds for anything you set out to do, whether it’s athletics, whether it’s in education, business, or whether you’re a doctor. The most powerful leaders have high confidence and high humility. Unfortunately, most of the leaders in the world have high confidence, but they also have big egos which hold them back.

What’s the WHY behind the work that you do? Please share a story about this if you can.

We all grow up in a society that measures us, starting at an early age. What’s your GPA? What’s your SAT score? What’s your class rank? What college did you go to? How much money do you make?

We have all these hoops that are answered by numbers.

But I just don’t believe in that. I think the greatest contribution and the greatest worth of any human being, and their greatest value, is their contribution in life. My goal is to create leaders that not only understand the numerical value of results, but more-so that their greatest legacy is loving and serving other people. And that is my “why:” to teach leaders that love and being a servant to others is the cornerstone of true leadership. This applies not only to businesses, but also to building a great marriage and family, and in everything that we do.

There’s a CEO named Bill Graebel, and he is the second-generation leader of Graebel Companies, which is the largest relocation company in the world. When a major corporation like Microsoft wants to relocate a thousand employees to Singapore, for example, they call Graebel.

I’ve never met a more heart-led leader than Bill. I remember when I first met him like 20 years ago, when was the young president of the company. We visited one of their massive warehouses — one of the largest I have ever seen — and you can just imagine the number of people working forklifts and moving furniture around. Bill and I went through the warehouse and I was stunned at how he stopped to speak with every single person, and he knew each of their names and about their families. I was just in awe and remember saying to myself: I want to be like Bill one day. I mean, he was so humble and running this incredibly successful company, and he knew everyone’s name. We need more Bill Graebels in the world.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Besides my mother and father, no human being on this planet has invested in me more than Jerry Middle. He’s not family. He’s not my boss. He is my insurance salesman! Ever since the day I met him more than 20 years ago, Jerry, who is about to turn 80 years-old, has either called me, emailed me, or texted me every day of my life. He’s taken me out to breakfast once a week. Jerry has invested so much in me and who I am as a person. He’s taught me about humility, about philanthropy, about how to be a better husband, about how to be more generous.

Jerry is incredibly successful; he built a very large life insurance company. And he treats me like a son and celebrates every major moment of my life. But in those 20 years, he’s never asked me for anything. Not once. It actually took a few years for me to even ask, don’t you sell life insurance?

Jerry has taught me that when you engage with someone for the sole purpose of getting something in return, then that is called a transaction. It is not an authentic relationship, and that is not how a heart-led leader should approach any relationship. No one has changed my life more than Jerry.

Awesome! Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”? Can you share a story about how it impacted you?

When I was young, my father knew that I was a struggling school kid, in eighth grade at the time, and he knew that I had some sort of learning challenges. But he saw something in me. He knew that I wasn’t athletically, artistically, or academically gifted, but he knew that I loved people. And so, he gave me a book one night called How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. We read that book together and it completely changed my life. It was the first book that I read that really talked about the importance of investing in other people. And that what is important in life is not just about your GPA, your SAT score, your class rank and all these other numbers that we are measured by. The book taught me that what is important is the influence we each have on people’s lives. And that book really was what got me thinking about creating a legacy in this world based on the influence I have on other people. I still think it is one of the greatest books ever written.

What was the moment or series of events that made you decide that you wanted to take a specific course of action based on the inspiration from the book? Can you share a story about that?

I remember the exact moment in my life when I learned how powerful the notion of influence can be. I was a senior in high school and I was the field kicker for the varsity football team. That fall, the schools went on strike and not only were we not having classes, but the football season was in jeopardy of being cancelled. It was a very stressful time in our community. A Board of Education meeting was set up, and all the teachers and parents were going to attend. Before the meeting, one of my teachers, Mrs. Singer, said to me: you might think you’re just a a 17-year-old high school kid, but you probably have more influence in the school than anyone, and I think you should say something at the meeting.

The auditorium was packed, and it became clear there would be no deal for the teachers. I had never spoken in public before, but out of respect for my teacher, I raised my hand and walked to the microphone. I shared my heart, talking about how many in my family were teachers, all they have taught me, and how amazing it is to be a senior and experience playing on the varsity football team. My message was well-received — I got a standing ovation — and they voted to give the teachers a new contract. The next day in the newspaper, the story talked about how a high school kid gave an inspirational talk that influenced the board to make the decision on the new contract.

That’s when I realized that anybody can have, and does have, influence, and that it is a powerful thing if you use it correctly. Unfortunately, we live in a world now where influence — especially being an “influencer” — is a negative thing. Today, influence has become about how many hits you have, how many likes you have, how many social media friends you have. And if you look up the word influencer in the dictionary, there’s a whole different definition on social media. But the heart of influence — and the message in Dale Carnegie’s book — is about how we can change other people’s lives through our actions.

Can you articulate why you think books in particular have the power to create movements, revolutions, and true change?

I have a new book coming out in September called The Gift of influence. I wrote that book to start a revolution, to start a movement that every human being on this planet has a gift in their heart. And that gift is the power of influence. The gift that you can give others, to influence other people’s lives, and the gift that you can allow other people to influence your life. I think really good books come from a place of wanting to make the world better.

A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, the size, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that can change lives?

If you look at all the number one songs in the world, not matter which genre of music, they all tell a story, and they have a great beginning and a great ending. And I think books are very similar in that when you write a great book, you have only two or three chapters to grab the reader’s attention at the beginning. As soon as a reader opens a book for the first time, I think readers ask themselves if they like the author. Do I like him/her? Like, did he/she come across as humble? Can I relate to the author? Can the author teach me something? Are they authentic? If the reader doesn’t answer those questions in the first few chapters, I think they lose interest. My advice for people that are writing books is that you really must make that first part of the book powerful, so the reader says, I’m going to finish this book because I like this author and can learn from this.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why?

1: Be heart-led — always, always, always be humble and think about how you can serve others first. This applies to everyone you meet, whether it is the mailroom guy or the CEO.

2: Speak less and listen more — Listening to someone is a profound practice. Allowing someone to feel they’re truly heard, because sometimes that’s all people really need is to be heard and be understood. Take the time to listen and understand the people you interact with. Not only will you learn a lot about those people, but just by listening you may profoundly impact them.

3: Help your followers become more successful than yourself — As my friend Jerry showed me, influence is not building a relationship based on a transaction. True influence is loving people and leaving them better than you found them and helping them up the ladder.

4: Choose to love people — everyone has a story, reasons that point to why they are the person they are and determine how they interact with other people. Choose to love people; you don’t know what chapter they’re on in their story.

5: Help others, but don’t ask for anything in return — When you do, your relationship becomes a mere transaction and not something authentic

The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?

I would like to start a movement one day called Red, White, and You! As a society, we seem to have lost that deep love of country that we used to have. I have a stepson, Anthony, who is at West

Point, and he has literally told me that he is ready to die for America. When you hear those words from someone that you love, it makes you think that there are so many people in this country that don’t hold that same view. So, I’d love to create a movement of love, and to have a country where we truly can have people with all different beliefs and backgrounds who love their country, are proud of it, and want to give back to it by serving others.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Information on my new book, The Gift of influence, and all my leadership endeavors can be accessed at http://tommyspaulding.com/

Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.