Intentional Communication: Standing in Your Personal Power with Terry Tucker

Sheila Franzen

Welcome to the Spiritual Geek podcast, wisdom for modern Times, where we focus on living with intention to consciously create a life you love and celebrate. I'm your host, Sheila Franzen, and I'm so excited to share another episode with you today. Terry Tucker has joined me for a discussion about intentional communication and intuition with communication in a crisis setting. So Terry brings a ton of wealth of knowledge around this Terry's bio. He's a motivational speaker, author, and international podcast guest on the topics of motivation, mindset and self development. He has a business degree from the Citadel, where he played NCAA Division one college basketball, might have to chat about that sometime. 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, high school basketball coach, business owner, motivational speaker, and for the past eleven years, a cancer warrior, which has resulted in the amputation of his foot in 2018 and his leg in 2020. He's the author of the book Sustainable excellence, ten principles to leading your uncommon and extraordinary life. He's also been featured in authority, Thrive, global human capital leadership magazines, along with being quoted and featured in the new book audaciousness, your journey to living a bold and authentic life by Maribel Ortega and Helen Strong.

Sheila Franzen

So welcome, Terry. Thank you for being here.

Terry Tucker

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

Sheila Franzen

Awesome. So is there anything else you'd like to share as part of your introduction here as people get to know you?

Terry Tucker

Not a whole lot. I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. You mentioned I played basketball. I am actually six foot eight inches tall and went to college on a basketball scholarship. When I graduated, I moved home to find a job. I'm really going to date myself now, but this was long before the Internet was available to help people find employment. Fortunately, I was able to find that first job in the corporate headquarters of Wendy's international, the hamburger chain in their marketing department. Unfortunately, I live with my parents for the next three and a half years as I helped my mother care for my father and my grandmother, who were dying of different forms of cancer. You touched on my professional career, so I think we're good there. And then I guess just finally. My wife and I have been married for 30 years. We have one child, a daughter, is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and is an officer in the new branch of the military, the space force.

Sheila Franzen

That sounds really cool.

Terry Tucker

It is. Unfortunately, most of it's top secret, so I have no idea what it does.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, you don't get to know anything, but it sounds really cool. Well, I played basketball in college, too. Wasn't on a scholarship, but it was a lot of fun. So a little bit in common there of being basketball players. So that's kind of fun. And a lot of probably things driven into our mind about probably in its own way. I don't know what your coaches are like, but a bit of the own. I think my personal motivation and desire to really improve came through athletics at a young age because it was definitely inspired in me, through coaches of that aspect of mastering your physical body and those activities in the world.

Terry Tucker

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I was six foot five inches tall when I was 13 years old. And you can imagine kids at that age, they like to pick on anything that's sort of out of the ordinary. And so I got picked on, I got bullied a little bit, and I took that pain, whatever, and I put it into basketball. It was a sport that unlike, say, football or baseball or something like that, all you needed was a hoop and a basketball, and you could play, you could practice by yourself. And so I spent a lot of time when I was younger doing that. Okay, somebody grabbed my hat on the playground today. It's like, well, okay, I'm going to go home today. I'm going to shoot 50 free throws. So it was an impetus for me to get better. And then the more I practiced, the better I got. And the better I got, the more I wanted to practice and that. So it was sort of a self fulfilling prophecy, and I loved it. I enjoyed the game. I enjoyed trying to get better. So it was a huge part of my life growing up.

Terry Tucker

I really kind of felt it was my purpose when I was a young boy.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, athletics can do that. And being that tall, I bet it did feel like your purpose. It's funny, my brother wanted a few more inches. I only got to five six, and I was down there playing the forward in the center, and, man, I could have used another couple of inches.

Terry Tucker

Yeah. I mean, we always wish we were taller or stronger. And I have a brother who actually was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA, the National Basketball association. And we talk not frequently, but enough that, gee, if we would have known back then what we know today about mindset, about exercise, about nutrition and things like that, we would have been so much better as players. But we didn't know that stuff back then.

Sheila Franzen

No. And it's used so much today. I do remember sitting on the bus and going to away basketball games in high school, and I would sit and run through every play in my head, and not just where I was supposed to be, but where every other player was at as well. And so I don't know where I decided that was a good idea to sit and do, but I've since learned that was actually a really powerful way to create my reality. Right. Create what was going on in the basketball game and how to make things work. Yeah. The tools that are available today for athletes with mindset and nutrition and physical fitness, it's really incredible.

Terry Tucker

Yeah, it is. I totally agree with you. When I was playing basketball, even in high school, we didn't videotape games or record them in any way. And so you'd have to go scout another team that you were going to play. You'd send a coach out to scout them and kind of diagram what they did and things like that. Now everybody just takes not even dvds or anything anymore, VHS and all that kind of stuff. We did do that in college, but it was a different way of doing things, and the game was different. When I played in college, I actually did a podcast yesterday with a young man who couldn't understand that there wasn't a shot clock in college basketball, and there wasn't a three point line when I played. And I said, no, those things didn't exist yet. They hadn't come into things.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, they hit girls basketball my senior year of high school. So, yeah, it's like, what's those? All right, well, that was a fun little diversion. So the topic that you mentioned that we could start with, and I think this is actually a really interesting topic, is talking about effective communication during a crisis. And so just to start, tell me about where that came from. I know you've chatted about many things on many podcast conversations, so tell me where this one comes from.

Terry Tucker

This one comes, really, from my time as a SWAT team hostage negotiator with the Cincinnati Police Department, the importance of communicating with an individual who is probably having the worst day of their life. I mean, we used to always say, if you're talking to us and your house is surrounded by the police, you're probably not having a very good day. And for those who don't understand how a SWAT team is usually configured, there's usually two groups. One are the tactical officers, the men and women with all the toys, and then there are the negotiators. And we used to joke with the tactical teams that if we did our job effectively, then they didn't get to use all their toys.

Sheila Franzen

And things like that.

Terry Tucker

And that was the mean, yes, SWAT can do some really ugly things, but really, SWAT is a life saving organization. You hope that you don't have to use these things. And hopefully based on our training, our experience, we would do our job in the fact that we would get either the hostage and or the hostage taker out safely. That was our ultimate goal in doing that.

Sheila Franzen

So when we think about Communication on a podcast with us known as the spiritual Geek, in this aspect of using our minds and our intention, our intuition to create our lives, you mentioned that you found this to be really helpful during your eleven year journey with cancer. So I'm curious, how did you find this aspect of these skills and strategies around effective communication helpful during this journey?

Terry Tucker

Yeah, from a healthcare point of view. I've been battling cancer for eleven and a half years now. And when I was initially diagnosed I was told this was a death sentence. And I thought, well, can I turn this into a life sentence? Can I turn this into something positive? Because I was told I would be lucky if I lived two years. And now we're eleven and a half years into this fight and I think it's incredibly important. And you and I were talking before we started recording about the. I think it needs to be a partnership. But I've also seen so many people who find out they have cancer or heart disease or diabetes or whatever they end up having in their life and they just turn their entire life over to a doctor, to somebody who has a bunch of initials after their name. And I guess that's fine if that's the way you're wired. I'm not wired that way. I want my life to be shaped by the decisions that I made, not by the ones that I didn't make or the ones that other people made for me. So I asked a lot of questions of my doctor.

Terry Tucker

Still do to this day, still being treated. Why are we doing this? What do you think I should do? Just a quick example. I was talking to my doctor last week about the COVID the new Covid shot. I have a hypersensitivity to vaccines. The last Covid booster put me in the hospital for four days. So the question is, should I take this shot or not? Should I take this? And we came to the conclusion that I should not take. I've had two. I did not need to take this one just based on. I'm afraid the next one is going to kill me, not just put me in the hospital. So I want to know these things from my doctor. I want to know why we're doing a particular test or why we're going to put me on a particular drug or medication and things like that. And it's important for me. But I've seen people just turn their life over to a doctor. Whatever you say, doc. That's what I'm going to do. That's just not me. And based on the discussion you and I had, I don't think it's you either.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, well, I think it's not me. I mean, I've been challenging doctors in the world with questions for a very long time. But I watched it initially with my parents and particularly my mom, who was an RN, and while curious about other ways to heal, was always ready to do what the doctor said. Right. And it's an interesting perspective in this medical world that we have of assuming that a doctor knows best for you just because they've gone to college and read some medical textbooks and you actually never know how well they did in college. Right. You just know they graduated and they got their doctorate, but it doesn't make them. They're experts in their field, but they're not experts in your body. Right. You have to remember that each of us is responsible for and owns our body and we need to choose. I love what you said. The life is about the choices we make. And I want to be the decisions I make, not the decisions somebody else has made for me. And there's a huge part of our inner intuition, our inner strength that has to come forward in these moments where you're in a medical system that's moving very fast and they want you to just do what they say, not ask questions.

Sheila Franzen

That's often not part of their norm, right. Particularly when you get these experts that are super busy and the surgeons or whoever it is, and they just expect that you're going to absolutely do what they tell you to do. And I feel like sometimes you do need those SWAT skills because it's not always easy, right. When they're coming at you and telling you what you need to do and then you have to say, but why? And they're like, because I said so, basically. And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't work for me.

Terry Tucker

And I think more and more people are getting to that point. But you hit on a really good point when you're faced with making these, a lot of times, life and death decisions or when I'm going to have surgery or being put on a medication, you have just been hit right between the eyes. The boxer Mike Tyson said, everybody's got a plan. Until you get hit in the mouth. And I think that's really kind of what's been done here. You just got hit in the mouth. You had this plan for your life, and now it just took a huge detour, and you're scared, you're anxious, your emotions are all over the place. And, oh, by the way, I want you to think rationally now. And you're right. We go back to my SWAT days, when what I used to tell people is when we would start negotiating with somebody, usually think of a teeter totter or a seesaw that we all played on at the park when we were young. So when we started negotiating with somebody, their emotional brain was way up in the air, and their rational brain was way down on the ground.

Terry Tucker

And so over the course of our negotiation of asking them open ended questions, of practicing tactical empathy, help me to understand where you're coming from and things like that, that teeter totter, hopefully would move to someplace near equilibrium. And then with more questions, with developing trust with the individual, with mirroring what they were saying, with connecting with them on an emotional level, then the rational brain would be up in the air, and the emotional brain would be down on the ground. And that's when we would start talking about letting the hostage go, putting the gun down, and coming out and things like that. Because we all make better decisions with our rational brain than we do with our emotional brain.

Sheila Franzen

What's a tip or a trick of. I think of all the techniques I know of that trying to be grounded and bringing our awareness back into our body, is that kind of a crisis environment you were in with being the SWAT host? What was a technique or tool that helped get people out of their emotional brain into the rational side?

Terry Tucker

So I guess. Let me back up for just a second. When I first started as a negotiator, I remember they gave us this formula, and the formula was 738 55. And it had to do with how we communicate with each other. 7% are the words that we use, 38% are the tone of voice, or is the tone of voice that we use with those words. And then 55% of how we communicate with each other is our body language and our facial expressions. So if you and I are talking and I'm standing there with my arms crossed or I'm playing on my phone, that's sending a message to you that, well, Terry's not really paying attention to what I'm saying here. So if you think about what we did as crisis or hostage negotiators, we were not with the person we weren't in the room with, the person with the gun or the person who had taken hostages. So we didn't have the luxury of that 55%. So I couldn't say something to an individual. And there were a lot of times, as negotiators where we were on scene talking to somebody. We had no idea why we were there.

Terry Tucker

We had no idea what precipitated them grabbing a gun and barricaded themselves and something like that. So a lot of times, we would pick a rabbit hole. Just pick a rabbit hole and go down it and see what happens. So if I would say, for an example, if you were a hostage taker and I said something to you, I didn't have the luxury of seeing you or observing you kind of roll your eyes and think, oh, what an idiot. I can't believe he said that to me. So that 55% was something we didn't have. So one of the ways, one of the techniques that we used is we would use how and what questions we stayed away from. Why questions? Because why questions sound accusatory. Well, Sheila, why did you do that? Oh, wait a minute. Is he accusing me? Is he saying, I shouldn't have done that or I shouldn't have suggested that so we can get to the same information, Sheila, why did we do that? Or what got us to this point? Sheila, that's a much softer question, but it gets you talking, and so that's exactly what I want, to burn off a lot of this emotional energy by getting you to talk.

Terry Tucker

So how and what questions, in addition to that, engaged you to help me get you out. You may say something, and my response might be, how am I going to do that? Well, now I just put the ball back in your court, Sheila, how do you expect me to do? Well, so now you start thinking about how you can help me get you out, and you don't even realize, you don't even realize that we're doing that. So how and what questions were incredibly important. The other thing that we used is what we used to call parroting. I think the negotiators today call it mirroring, where we would repeat the last one or two words that you said or the important word that you said, and then we would immediately go silent. We don't like silence when it comes to communication. We want to fill that void, and that's exactly what we were trying to do. We would say the last one or two words, and then we would be quiet because you didn't like that, and you would start talking again. And again, that would help you burn off a lot of that emotional energy.

Sheila Franzen

I love that you bring in. I love remembering the 738 55. I've never heard the percentage. I mean, I've heard them before, but just that quick formula, it's actually really a really fun way to just remember that in our communication with anyone, right? Because it's like we listen to the words or particularly even ourselves, right, when it's our communication. Kind of what I was getting as you were talking through these things is these are. I don't know why. It's this aspect of we do this with ourselves in our own mind, right? We ridicule ourselves and we are tough on ourselves, and we might be tough on the doctors. And then when the doctor tells us to do something, we listen to them and not to our own conversations. And so this whole aspect of allowing the silence, right, there's a bit of that that's just even fun to play with in the world of meditation and slowing down and then this whole aspect of just mirroring and we're trying to improve communication with each other. It does require reflecting back, right? Seek first to be understood and then to understand with the seven habits and the silence, allowing a moment of silence and then choosing to respond based on that and seeing what happens.

Sheila Franzen

So it's just kind of fun to think about. That's calming somebody down in a hostage negotiation, right? Getting back into your rational brain. And these are techniques, actually that are. I think this is the fun part. It's like it's used in a crisis SWAT negotiation. But we can use it in our conversations with ourselves, with our families, with our doctors in a healthcare world, they're all the same principles, right? They're languaged differently so that people can remember them. But at some level, it's the principles of coming back to connection, right? There's a human being sitting across the room from you, whether they're or across the phone from you, whether they had somebody held hostage or not, the way you're going to get back to rational and out of emotional is coming back to their humanness, right? Their individuality, their soul.

Terry Tucker

Absolutely, totally. And I think in any relationship, whether we're talking doctor patient, whether we're talking husband, wife, whether we're talking boss, subordinate, whatever, the relationship is the overarching theme and the overarching thing for us as negotiators when we would do this is trust. We're trying to get somebody we've never met who's having the worst day of their life to trust us, to believe in us. And one of the things, and I mentioned this was tactical empathy, and that was seeing a situation from another person's point of view. And it was one of those things where help me to understand where you're coming from. Not necessarily agree. I mean, if I'm negotiating with somebody that we know just murdered three people, I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, you should have done that, but help me to understand where you're coming from. And one of the big things for us was listening and not listening to respond, but listening to understand. And I think that's where the big disconnect is today, where when we're having a conversation, whether it's one on one or with ourselves or in a group, it's like, all right, Sheila, hurry up and say what you're going to say, because I want to get my two cent in there that's listening to respond versus.

Terry Tucker

Okay, Sheila, I hear what you're saying. I may agree with you. I may not agree with you, but help me to understand where you're coming from, because that develops trust. That's like, oh, Terry cares. Terry wants to understand where I'm coming from. And when we were negotiators, one of the things that we never lied to people, people would say to us, hey, okay, I'll put the gun down and come out, but you got to promise me I'm not going to go to jail. And we would have to say, well, I'm sorry, but you are going to go to jail when you come out. And then we would try to deflect the conversation to something that was more palatable, something that was more positive regarding that. And the reason we did that was because there was a very good chance, and it happened on several occasions, where a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, we would be right back negotiating with this same individual, because the problem didn't go away. They may have had a fight with their mother. Well, their mother's still alive. They had another fight with their mother three years down the road, and we're back negotiating.

Terry Tucker

And if they ever felt, hey, Terry, you lied to me the last time, well, my credibility is gone. You're going to have to bring in another negotiator to talk with this person, because they don't trust me, and I'll end it with this. One of the most important things that we learned was the importance of our own voice, of using an inquiring or a curious type of voice. So every question we would ask would kind of. There would be that upturn of, well, what got us to this point, Sheila, you're in an inquiring type of voice. And the other thing we did, and I think this is incredibly important when we talk about talking with another person or even talking with ourselves, because I'm not very good at this, as you probably figured out, is the importance of slowing down. Most of us talk too fast, and I know I'm guilty of that so much in my life. But the power of your own voice was something that we focused on a lot in training so that we could use it when we were negotiating with somebody.

Sheila Franzen

And the power of our voice, it's our expression in the world when you talk about it in negotiation, well, it's all of those things. But if people are just listening, it's our words and our tone of voice. They can't see our body language and our facial expressions and that power of our voice and slowing down to allow. There's a frequency in sound. There's a frequency in our voices. We often think of it as singers, right? We feel their energy and their intonations because they use voice in a very powerful way with singing. But we all have that ability, and it can echo so much about who we are by just being willing to authentically share our voices, right? Meaning through our words and through what we're saying. Because we often don't slow down enough to allow us to be really intentional with the words that we're speaking. And then often we might regret the words that we've used versus in a crisis or in anger or even with a doctor of feeling rushed and being willing to slow down and truly share what it is that's going on in our hearts and in our minds, and that it doesn't have to be so fast in the world.

Terry Tucker

I remember the Cleveland clinic did a study years ago, and they came to the conclusion that we have at least 60 to 70,000 thoughts that pass through our mind every day. And 95% of those thoughts are the same ones from the day before. So roughly, on any given day, we have approximately 3500 new thoughts. But the interesting thing about our minds is that our minds operate at a speed of about 1000 words a minute. Now, I can talk fast, but I can't talk that fast. And if you think about it, you're right. I mean, a lot of times we get ahead of ourselves. There was that old, I'm going to mess up the saying, but make sure you engage your mind before you engage your mouth. And so many of us do just the opposite. We got to say something but we haven't engaged the brain yet. And you're right, we end up regretting saying something, or we get ahead of ourselves and we're tongue tied and we don't know where we're going with the thought or the idea. And I think if we do slow down, I mean, let's face it, if you're talking to a doctor about a life and death situation, a chronic or a terminal illness, there needs to be time spent on that.

Terry Tucker

It's not, oh, hey, your 20 minutes is up. It's time to move on. It's like, wait a minute, I could potentially die from this. I want to talk more about this. But there's that rush. As you said, you get into the medical system and it's sort of the hamster on the wheel. It's just, how fast can that thing go? Because the more patients you see, the more money you make and things like that. There's a difference in healthcare, I think, between a business centered model and a patient centered model. And I think a lot of times we get stuck in the business centered model where you've got an x number of minutes to see a doctor. But what you're dealing with is incredibly important and maybe even life threatening.

Sheila Franzen

It's just so challenging in the medical environment, because even every disease, as much as we think they're all the same, when you take cancer and different types of cancer, and the treatments that have been identified for specific types of cancer, the response is, well, this is what we do for this type of cancer. And it's like, yes, but this is this type of cancer in my body, and how is it going to affect my body with everything else going on in my body? And I think those are the moments of trying to really be willing to. I had my own journey, it's been a year and a half now of having a cancerous breast tumor removed and the support that they wanted to do after for me, I had done tons of research and tons of alternative health care and have lived in a holistic kind of environment all of my adult life. And the standard treatment can't. Well, our cancer treatment in the US is so brutal when you step back and look at it, but it's like, we're going to cut you, we're going to poison you, and we're going to burn you.

Terry Tucker

Sounds fun, doesn't it?

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, sounds. You know, I'm not here to be a cancer expert, but you have to know what's right for your body. Right. And for your life situation and where you're at and the standard for me was remove the tumor, do radiation, take all these drugs to manage hormones in your body? And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do the radiation, right? I was very fortunate, and it was very early on, it's a very early stage of the type of cancer, and it was isolated and it was very low likelihood of recurrence. And so I kind of did all the calculations and the math and the research, and when I got on the phone with the follow up doctors, I was like, so you're telling me that there's like, I don't know, two and a half percent chance of this, and then that would equate to, I don't know, something less than a percent. And he was like, yeah. I said, so I'm going to take my 1% chance that it's going to come back and I'm going to focus on the 99% chance that it's not. And I'm not going to do radiation.

Sheila Franzen

And they don't like that, right? Because it's like I'm refusing what is the standard protocol and the standard treatment. But I was like, if they had told me it was an 80% chance, I'd been like, okay, fine, I'll consider this. Maybe this is what my body needs. You really have to be willing to ask those, how is it really going to help me? Because it seems like the side effects are going to be worse than the treatment. For me, it wasn't going to reduce the risk that was any substantial percentage. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't make sense. But I think being willing to be curious of what you're saying, whether it's this medical journey that so many people are on. With crisis medical care, you can look around your family and friends and we're sitting here having a conversation and have different forms of cancer. We've both dealt with, and I'm sure you've met thousands on your journey at this point that have some kind of journey they can speak to. I've had other family members come forward. It's like there's just these crises going on where we're faced with this need to really be intentional, with our own communication and our own journey and our own path as we.

Sheila Franzen

It's really self care. It's self care within the medical system that you don't end up down a path that you're like, how did I get here and why did I do this? This isn't what I wanted to do.

Terry Tucker

You're right. And there's a reason they call it the practice of medicine. It's not a one size fits all. And you're right, you get the odds. I always look at doctors kind of like Vegas. They're giving you the ods. And I understand that, and I want to know the ods. But what you don't know about me is that my son is getting married next summer. And by God, I know you told me I'm going to be dead in six months, but I'm going to be there for that wedding. They play the ods, and they tell you what they need to tell you. I am fortunate that I am being treated now at a university setting, so I have access to a cancer oncologist. I have a cancer pharmacist. I have all these people. And I remember I want to be involved in my healthcare. So I read, I try to educate myself, and I remember reading an article about two doctors in Portugal who were doing an experiment with DHA, the fatty fish oil, and they found that it acted like a Trojan horse with cancer cells, that the cancer cells would pick it up and it would kill them.

Terry Tucker

And I thought, great, dha. I want to take DhA. So I reached out to my oncology pharmacist, and I said, hey, I want to take this. Here's the experiment that I found. What do you think? And she is great. She was like, let me look into it, and I'll get back to you. And she does. And she called me back. She said, terry, we don't want you to take it because you had a blood clot as a result of another form of treatment that I had in your lung. And you are on a blood thinner, and DHA will thin your blood even more. So you're much more susceptible to having a stroke or something like that. So we don't want you to do it. And I was like, okay. I understood that that made sense to me, and so I didn't take it. But going back to what we were talking about, I want to be engaged. I want my life to be based on the decisions that I made. Okay, I'm not going to take it. I could have said, yeah, that's fine, but I'm going to take DHA anyway, because I think this is something I want to do.

Terry Tucker

And I've done that along the way. I've done things where this is going to sound really bad, but I take, every morning before I eat, I take a glass of warm water, cayenne pepper and lemon juice, organic lemon juice. And I drink that, and it burns a little bit, but one of my big issues is my liver function, and that helps me not have a fatty liver. That helps me have a much more healthy liver, which is metabolizing all the chemicals that I end up getting when I'm treated every three weeks.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah, that's like a great morning ritual. Mine's pretty much the same. I'm just doing honey with it instead of cayenne. You can't find a much more powerful liver tonic. Cleanse the liver first thing in the morning with some lemon juice and cayenne and restore it. The blood sugars in the liver with a little bit of honey. So these natural tonics that our ancestors did for decades eons, there was a reason. So it's wonderful that you challenge your doctors with the things that you learn and find and that they're willing to work with you and say, yeah, in your situation right now, that doesn't make sense. And I think that's the other part of this aspect of, there is so much out there around what's possible, and you have to figure out what makes sense for you and your health and your body. And I think that kind of comes back to this aspect of we talk about living a life we love and we celebrate, but there are always going to be crises. And so this concept of remembering communication skills and remembering that it's our power and our strength in these moments of crisis, right.

Sheila Franzen

That we don't give that up just because a doctor tells us something. And there's so much available to us and in the world today around these healing journeys and wisdom journeys and our knowledge journeys. And it starts with our communication with ourselves and our communication with others.

Terry Tucker

Absolutely. We are our own worst enemy. Sometimes we get in our way. We get in our own way, and we do that, I think, because of our mind, what we say to ourselves. And I try to do this myself, and I always challenge other people to do this as well. I think we need to control the mind. I just gave you the statistics from the Cleveland clinic. But you need to callous your mind. You need to do that. And people are, well, how do I do that? You do things you don't like to do, and I challenge myself every day. Do one thing that scares you, that makes you nervous, that makes you uncomfortable, that's potentially embarrassing. It doesn't have to be a big thing. But if you do those little things every day, when the big disasters in life hit us and they hit all of us, we lose somebody who's close to us, we get let go from our job, we find out, we have a chronic or a terminal illness, you will be so much more resilient to handle those things when they present themselves.

Sheila Franzen

Yes. It's so much about our mind. One of the quotes, I think this was in the early part of your book around part of the training, was the 40% rule. The rule says that if your mind or your body is telling you that you are through and you can't go on, you're only at 40% of your maximum ability and you still have 60% left in reserve. I really appreciated that because I think that we often, in our overwhelm and the crises that everybody faces, I can't think of anyone who's not facing something in the world today. Right. It doesn't matter where you are. People are facing it in their families. They're facing it at work. They face it in THeir health CAre, their medical system, in wars. Right. You do have it in you to get through it, and you do have it in you to do it in a new way. And I think that's the real gift of remembering communication and remembering that not to give up yourself in a cris. Right. I think it really is about our power and remembering that we have so much more in us to do those new things, those hard things, those challenging things than we might give ourselves credit for.

Sheila Franzen

We let fear shut us down. And how do we rememBer? Oh, I'm challenged today. I still got 60% left. Nice. Okay, let's keep going. I think it's just really a brilliant way to look at life.

Terry Tucker

I think so, too. There's another story I tell. It's not in the book, but it's a true story. Back in the 1950s, there was a professor at Johns Hopkins University who did a very simple experiment with rats. He took rats, and he put them in a tank of water that was over their head, and he wanted to see how long the average rat would tread water. And the average rat initially 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 took the exact same rats and he put them 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 15 minutes. The first time, your business isn't going to go under. You're not going to fail. No, you're going to die. Your life is going to be over. And the second time around, 60 hours, which said to me two things. Number one, the importance of hope in our lives. If we believe we're doing what we need to do, if we believe we're doing the right things for our life, maybe not today, maybe not next month, maybe not even this year, but at some point in time, things will get better for us.

Terry Tucker

And the second thing it taught me is the importance, or is just how much more our physical bodies can handle than we ever thought they could. I mean, I think we all have a breaking point. Don't get me wrong. I think that breaking point is so much further down the road than we ever give ourselves credit for. We give up, we give in, we quit long before our bodies quit. And I think that goes back to what we were talking a minute ago. Can you harden your mind? Can you callous your mind to override your body in those situations? If you can callous your mind, I guarantee you you can handle so much more than you ever thought you could.

Sheila Franzen

And it doesn't mean that anybody listening shouldn't keep self care at the top of your list. It doesn't mean, but it does mean I can hear some people in my head going, well, how's that work with self care? It doesn't mean ignoring self care. But what it does mean is when you let fear stop you or you let laziness stop you or you let tiredness stop you, and you discover that, oh, you still had energy to go for a walk, you just actually had to get out the door. Right? Because it's a balance, right? We're always trying to find the balance of these things, but we have the power of our mind when we train it and we use it to, you use the language harden. But I think what you're really meaning is that you stand in, not letting your mind control you. You choose and control what you're going to do, not responding to your mind. Because if we get too frozen in our mind, that doesn't actually get us anywhere either. But it's being willing to use your mind in the most powerful way possible to create what you want in life.

Terry Tucker

I love that. That's a great way to put it.

Sheila Franzen

Yeah. Well, I think that's probably a good place to wrap up our conversation. So thank you for just sharing your wisdom, your journey through the many roles you've played in life, how you continue to challenge yourself each day and using what you've learned. And I love the statistics you can pull out of the air. It's really fun because sometimes we have conversations, but when you talk about percentages of things, it's like you're like, oh, yeah, right. Like, wow, we really have so much more available. So thank you for your dedication, your commitment, your journey, and for having a conversation here today.

Terry Tucker

Well, Sheila, thanks for having me on. I really enjoy talking with you.

Sheila Franzen

Excellent. So you've just listened to the spiritual Geek podcast. Thanks for joining us. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to share a comment and a rating on your favorite podcast platform. If you were inspired, consider sharing with friends and family, love and light to each of you. And may your day be filled with joy and wisdom as you consciously create your life.