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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I know that you are going to love today's guest, because I can already tell, and in looking at all the work that she does and looking at the way that she articulates it, and especially talking to her off air, I can see that she embodies so much of what it means to be an entrepreneur and so much of what it means to be a high achieving leader, and that's why I love the fact that her mission is to help others step into those roles, particularly the high achieving leadership roles as well, also while living lives that we actually enjoy.
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Let me introduce you to today's guest.
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Her name is tracy bednar.
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Tracy is a high tech leader turned certified executive coach and corporate trainer with over 20 years in high-stakes roles at industry giants like Best Buy, fitbit and Google.
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From navigating the fast-paced world of startups to also managing a $3 billion P&L, tracy knows what it takes to deliver results under pressure.
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Today, she's on a mission, and I love the way she states her mission.
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She's on a mission to bring sanity, humanity and results back to corporate culture.
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Her coaching and programs help high-achieving leaders increase their influence and impact and actually enjoy the work that they do.
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Now, of course, trace is also one of us.
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She's also an entrepreneur, so that's why I love the fact that she is the embodiment of an optimistic pragmatist with a rebellious streak that ignites her innovative approach.
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She believes the real magic happens at the intersection of individual growth and corporate success.
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You're going to see why clients love her, why I'm so excited to have her here on the air, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Tracy Bednar.
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Say anything else, let's dive straight into my interview with Tracy Bednar.
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All right, Tracy, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, brian.
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I'm so excited to be here.
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Heck, yes.
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Well, I'm excited to kick things off by hearing your backstory, because I love the fact that you are now doing the work that you're doing after such an impressive career.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Tracy?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Great question.
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I am going to take you back to my roots, so, my Midwest roots.
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I am a Midwest girl through and through, so I grew up in a one stoplight town with less than 2000 people and I'm going to tell you a story that is going to give you a flavor of who I am, where I came from and, more importantly, it's going to kind of tell you how I got to where I'm at and why I'm doing things the way I do them today.
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So picture this it is the early 90s and I've got, you know, some pimples going on.
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I'm in an awkward stage.
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I've got the big hair of the early 90s and I'm sitting in my seventh grade history class and I didn't know that my life was about to be radically altered.
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And it was altered just by one simple thing that my teacher said to our class.
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He looked at us and he said, statistically speaking, most of the people sitting in this room won't do as well as their parents have done.
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And what he meant by that was standard of living economically.
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And I remember in that moment I had been kind of zoned out.
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History wasn't my favorite subject and loud and clear I heard this coming in and everything in my body woke up.
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I just felt myself sit up straight and I felt this voice.
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And I was a very polite young lady, but I felt this voice rising up inside of me saying oh hell, no, that's not going to be the case for me Now.
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For context, I grew up in a really blue collar family, so my mom was one of five girls raised on a farm in the rural Midwest.
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She was her dad's main helper on the farm and as I was growing up, she worked in a factory.
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She did 12-hour overnight shifts and when she came home she did everything she cooked, she cleaned, she fixed things, she volunteered at the church.
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So she was always giving and she was so busy and so tired.
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And my dad was equally busy.
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He helped run a chain of convenience stores and so we always had what we needed.
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We never wanted for food or clothing or things like that, and I was loved.
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But what I witnessed with my parents was that they lived this life where they were constantly toiling and they didn't have much time or energy to savor the life that they had, and I knew that I didn't want that.
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Additionally, I think there's two kinds of small town people.
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There's the people who grew up in a small town and they absolutely love the experience.
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And then there's the people who grew up in a small town and it's got its gifts.
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But perhaps there is that silver lining of escaping the small town and seeing what else is out there in the whole world, and I was the latter.
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So back to that history class.
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I'm sitting here and I hear this thing and I have this revelation of oh heck, no.
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And up until this point in my life I had been just incredibly shy, incredibly introverted.
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I had kind of kept my head down.
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I had a couple of close friends, but I was just living a very, very quiet life at that ripe old age of 13.
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Well, being the person who over-processes, things still do to this day.
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I sat on that information and I kept hearing my teacher's voice for a couple of weeks and the way I started looking at the world around me changed.
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So I started looking for how can I defy this statistic, how can I be the person who creates more, not just income, but more choices and options and freedom for myself as I grow up?
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And so I had my very first lesson in negotiation.
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As a result of this, I learned that if you were a valedictorian, you were to receive a full ride, scholarship to any school in Wisconsin.
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So one day I sat my parents down after dinner at the dinner table and I said to them you know, I told them what I learned and I sat them down and I said, if I'm valedictorian in another, you know, five and a half years, would you be willing to pay my room and board when we go to college, when I go to college?
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And they said yes, and I bring up this story because it really was the impetus for changing the way that I approached to living.
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So from that point forward, it kind of was the same thing with sports.
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I started sports and I realized that if I worked hard and it wasn't working, I could work even harder and I could usually get what I wanted.
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Well, this became the formula for my life.
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So it was work hard.
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If it's not work, working, work even harder.
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And you know, looking at my parents and the amazing role models they were as people, it was also about doing all that and going after something, but doing it in a way that had high integrity, where I could show up, being the person I wanted to be.
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No shortcuts, no taking advantage of anybody, but being the person I wanted to be, and it worked for a while.
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So I was valedictorian, I became a good athlete and I started to have a lot of external accomplishments.
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And life went on and I had things like.
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I started my career at Best Buy Corporate, I ended up managing a $3 billion P&L and working with some of the biggest brands in tech like HP and Sony and Apple.
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While I was there, you know, I won President's Club at a different company and had a private, was able to go on a private yacht in Turkey and Greece, and I even ended up at Google.
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This blueprint, though, of grinding, of serving others and doing the right thing, ironically put me in the exact same spots that I had witnessed my parents being in, and that was being drained and without much time or energy to actually enjoy this ride I was on.
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Everything looked just differently for me than it did my parents.
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It was a little fancier, but it felt much the same, like there just wasn't enough time or energy, until one day when, as often happens with people, you have to have your breakdown before you have your breakthrough.
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I had had my second child.
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He was a baby, and my daughter, grace was 18 months old and I was still following this formula and I finally couldn't take it anymore the demands of being a full-time parent to a baby and a toddler at the same time as trying to achieve the excellence I always had through overwork.
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It just didn't work anymore, and so I had an ugly breakdown with my boss on a snowy day in parking lots and said I can't do this anymore.
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I can't work the way I've been working.
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And, much to my surprise, he didn't say you're fired.
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He slowed down and he said let's talk about this.
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You're too valuable, tracy.
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I want to find a way to make this work for us.
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And that kicked off a decade.
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I'd like to say everything changed overnight, but a decade of experimenting with how can I be somebody who shows up and makes a huge impact, makes a huge contribution, while at the same time enjoying my work and enjoying my life?
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So that's my backstory, brian.
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Yeah, I love that, Tracy.
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There's so many elements of it.
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I love me a good story.
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And, going all the way back to your valedictorian story, what I really hear, Tracy, is this is that and I obviously talk to a lot of people for a living and I hear so frequently people who think that results happen, whereas what I hear about your story is you chose your results and then you went after them and you got them.
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And so I think about societally, it's even further down the path of the overview that you gave us of we're kind of trained to believe that we can't have it all.
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We have, colloquially, we have phrases like oh, you can't have your cake and eat it too All of these different things that I hear.
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And so I love the fact that you've experienced all sides of the coin.
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You've had that high achievement, but you've also had that side of the coin of you sacrificed a lot of things through the work that you did.
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Obviously, now you help people have their cake and eat it too.
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Talk to me about that, because it seems to me like you're rubbing up against so many of society's views and things we're trained to believe, which are kind of false beliefs of we can't have it all.
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How does that factor into your mindset now and how you help others?
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You are 100% exactly right.
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I would say.
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The first thing that happens when I'm coaching somebody is that I figure out where are their limiting beliefs.
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And most of the time, where people start is they've told themselves a story that they have a very, very, very limited set of choices.
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Usually it's very black and white thinking, like it's either this or it's this.
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Most frequently, somebody will come to me and I basically exclusively work with high achievers.
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So basically, a high achiever will come to me and they'll say I'm getting all the promotions, I'm getting all the accolades, but I'm dying inside.
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Or I love my work, I just want it to feel good.
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And they think their choices are I either need to do what I've been doing because it's what's worked, it's been their blueprint, or I need to leave and, like, live in a van down by the water, right.
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And there's.
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The truth is, there's just so many shades of gray and choices in between that are not mediocrity, that are not being a slacker, that are not taking a step back in your career and, um, you know, just coasting, because the people I work with aren't built.
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I'm not built that way and they're not built that way.
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They don't feel good unless they're giving it their all.
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But there's a different way that you can go about giving your all, and that way really is centered around figuring out what your zone of genius is and developing an influence and communication style so that you're communicating what you're all about, what your desires are and the value that you bring.
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Tracy, I'll tell you what hearing you talk about this where it brings me is back to 2013, when I was running and growing a marketing agency and search engine optimization agency back in Boston, which is where I grew up, and I was putting in 80 hour weeks, tracy, and I was getting the results.
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If someone outwardly looked at it, in my first year, I passed six figures really easily.
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I was 22 years old, probably, and so I thought I was riding high.
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The hardest thing for me, tracy, back then, was to be real with myself, because if I really looked at it and I looked at the metrics of success whether it came down to revenue, whether it came down to how cool the clients were I was working with the coolest clients in the world by all measures.
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I should have loved every single thing that I was doing, but inside I was getting burnt out.
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It was impacting my romantic relationship, it was impacting my relationship with my parents, it was definitely impacting my health and wellness, and so what I'm going to, I guess, throw a little shade on today is that high achievers.
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A lot of times, it's difficult to be honest about the realities of the situation, because we are achieving the things that society has told us to aspire for.
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I would imagine in your line of work, step one is to get real, and step one is to paint that real picture of what's actually happening.
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What's it look like in those conversations to get these high achievers, these executives, these business leaders to say, yeah, these things, they're actually not where I want them to be, and I am struggling and I am drowning.
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What does that look like, tracy, because you obviously have the ability to go there with these people.
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What does that actually look like?
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I had a great question.
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Thanks for sharing your story as well, because I think we've all had those jobs where we're working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week and it all looks great, but, holy Hannah, we don't feel good.
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So what that looks like, you're right.
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You're right Because, a lot of times, my clients will come on and we don't have trust, we don't have a relationship yet We've just met each other, and they'll kind of show up very poised, right, with me being an executive coach, even with the executive in front of it.
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Even them knowing the other types of clients that I'm working with, there can be this veneer.
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And what happens, though, is once we start to get to know each other and once I start asking them questions about you know what's really going on here, what's really important to you?
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You know what's really going on here, what's really important to you, what do you really want?
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Organically, the conversation, you know it'll start with sort of the veneer of things are really great, and then, inevitably, two or three questions in.
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This is why we're here.
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You know, I will tell them immediately that the way that we work together, I can only help them if they can show up and be vulnerable, if they can show up and be honest, if they can show up and like, share the real deal in this confidential setting with me and, very quickly, we're able to have some real conversations.
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Now what is more challenging is the point at which they need to share their experience.
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They may or may not need to, but sometimes it's really important for them to share elements of their experience with somebody in the workplace, like a boss, for example.
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And again, in that binary thinking, people have a tendency to think this means that they have to do what I did right when I had my ugly cry with my boss and that's not necessarily true, but you know, coaching them on.
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How are we going to communicate this in a way that is really clear?
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What they do need with their boss is something that we do spend a lot of time on, and what that looks like is people don't know how to have that conversation is what I found, and have it in a way that can be heard, because what I see happen over and over and over again is there's this pendulum and, again, I work with a lot of high achievers and a lot of high achieving people, pleasers, so people who, yes, they're smart and, yes, they have a big impact to make, but they've spent their life being hypervigilant and anticipating everybody else's needs, which means that they know their audience almost better than they know themselves.
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So they'll get to.
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You know they're afraid of having this conversation because, number one, it's a vulnerable position to be in, but, number two, they are afraid that they're actually voicing their own needs.
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That you know.
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I recently had a client say I can't hide anymore because I was always able to hide under my positive outlook and look what I'm doing for you, and there's a level of vulnerability to that.
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So, practicing with these clients, role playing with these clients, how do you show up?
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Still professional, still putting the business first and positioning the business as something that's going to benefit from this conversation, but address, um, address things that are having you show up, you know, in a, in a role that just doesn't feel good anymore.
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So, getting to the root of what's going to make this job feel really great and, at the same time, have you continue to be really impactful we spend a lot of time on that.
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Yeah, tracy, I'll tell you what.
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When I get to talk to people like you, and what I really mean when I say people like you is change agents, people who bring about change, who bring about that inflection point in someone's life that I always think of.
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The scientific principle of an object in motion will stay in motion.
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And so, coming back to that time in my life where I was getting burned out with my business back in 2013, I probably would have kept doing it, tracy, unfortunately, until something broke that cycle and stopped that object in motion from being in motion.
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In my case, it was my business partner sending me an email saying this is unsustainable, like we can't keep doing this, I'm out, and so that's what broke my cycle.
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Now you talked about breakdowns happen before breakthroughs.
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Hopefully, we all see the, the spark or that catalyst or that invitation to change before we hit rock bottom.
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But it's why I love asking people like you, the change agents of the world, of what are those triggers, what are those points that can spark someone into action, because you've had multiple of those moments in your life and career.
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I've certainly had multiple of those moments in my life and career.
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What are those moments that can remind us of hey, hold on time out, let's actually do something about this.
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What are those things that invite people to reach out to you those times, those moments?
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What are some of those triggers?
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Yeah, great question.
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I see so many of them.
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So some of them are all the things that you would expect.
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Oftentimes, frankly, they're some of the less lovely things in life.
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So there are things like having a conflict with a colleague that is making your life hell, or a boss and people not knowing how to navigate that situation, and so they're butting up against that feeling of being in kind of the ick part of their job, but at a huge, a big, a larger percentage of the time, and so they're kind of swimming in it and it just the this boiling point happens and they need to remedy that situation.
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So that's one example of a moment.
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Another one is just any kind of life event.
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So you know, I have clients who have just gotten married and they're saying, hey, I knew I wasn't happy before and my job is many, many hours of the week and a big percentage of my life, but now I have this other person in my life and I wanna be really intentional about how I build my future going forward.
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Same thing with having children, right?
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So a lot of times it's some of these landmark moments in life or it's like what you experienced, brian, where somebody else is waking them up to it, whether it's a friend or a family member or a colleague saying like dude, this can't continue on anymore this way.
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This is unsustainable.
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Those are the types of moments I've also had, gosh, I have.
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I do have a subset of clients who are just very self-aware, and maybe they've studied personal development for a long time and they're at that inflection point where you know they're in their early thirties and they're saying is this what I want from the rest of my life?
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And so they're just looking for growth as well.
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Yeah, I love the fact that you brought personal development into this, because it's obviously something that all of us as entrepreneurs, we either love it, we've experienced it, we've dipped our toes in it, we've gone deep in it.
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We all have our different experiences there.
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But it's fun to have you here on the air Tracy, because executive coaching is a world that a lot of people have heard of but maybe never experienced, and I would imagine that personal development is a core part of what it is that you do.
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Of course, you yourself, you also very much bring that business background to the table, and I would imagine it's also a blend of strategy, it's also a blend of tactics.
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It's also a blend of dreams, ambitions, hopes, desires.
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It's a blend of all of that.
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Peel back that veil for us.
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What does executive coaching look like behind the scenes.
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Yeah well, executive coaching sounds really fancy, but what it always starts with is there's a human being on the other side of the conversation for me and that human being is deeply desiring something that's not in their life right now me and that human being is deeply desiring something that's not in their life right now.
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And so you know, depending on the context, it can look a little bit different.
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So many of my clients are private clients and then sometimes I'll contract with a corporation and they'll have a very specific goal that we want to work on.
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They'll have a very specific goal that we want to work on.
00:23:24.489 --> 00:23:31.931
So it can look like it definitely starts with really the inner landscape of somebody, of like, what's working in your life, what's what could be better in your life and and work?
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Where are you getting stuck?
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You know what are your values and are you actually living those values out as you look at your time and the way that you're spending your time?
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So I would say that it really starts with the individual and what makes them tick, what brings them joy, what's bringing them down right now, where they're stuck.
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But then it also ties to a bigger goal.
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So always at the beginning of our process, is talking about, basically, where are you today and where do you long to be, and how do we create a map to get you from where you currently are to where you want to go?
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And there's lots of, there's lots of, you're right.
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There is strategy, and a lot of the strategy for me, and what I specialize in that, I would say, is coaching, but then this is also consulting is around communication, because I firmly believe that most of our challenges in the workplace can be remedied with the right communication.
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Most of our challenges in the workplace can be remedied with the right communication, and so I do a lot of consulting on all right, here's what you're trying to communicate, here's what you want to get across.
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Let's come up with a strategy of how you're going to say that in a way that can be received and heard.
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And I started talking about this earlier, but I was talking about the pendulum swing, because I started to tell you what I see in the workplace is that people are either on one end of the pendulum, which is like I'm going to call it the you, you, you pendulum, so they're focused on getting ahead, like what do you need?
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You know how can I, how can I help you, you being, you know whoever they're working with internally, or a customer or the company.
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And then there's the and that's, and that end is where, like people, pleasing and overworked lives, and then there's that we're getting tired, this isn't working.
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The other end of the pendulum, and that's what I call the me, me, me end of the pendulum, and that's where entitlement can show up and people go from not stating any of their needs when they're over here in the UUU to the fists pounding on the table in some instances and the ultimatums.
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And you know what this has to be this way, or else I'm out and people look at you, at the person and the me, me, me end, and they say whoa, I don't even recognize you.
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Who are you?
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And so a lot of my work is getting people back into the middle, into where the magic is, which is the we, we, we like.
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This is a conversation that is about that individual that I'm helping, but they also have a J-O-B that somebody is paying them for for a reason, and so it's about you know how can the company or your boss or whoever you're trying to influence, how can they get something out of the situation and you get something out of the situation.
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So how can they win and you win, and that's really what I structure our conversations around, once we're really working through the issues and the goals that we're trying to work toward.
00:26:57.306 --> 00:26:58.469
Yeah, tracy, I'll tell you what.
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I've never asked this question here on the air, so I'm totally going to put you on the spot.
00:27:01.964 --> 00:27:22.469
But you called out that there is a difference between coaching and consulting and I would say for a lot of people those lines are blurred and people are unclear about that and probably in those moments where a lot of people feel lost, feel like they're at that turning point in life or in their career, they think to themselves I don't even know what to ask, let alone know how to find those answers.
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And I'll tell you, obviously, working in consulting in various capacities throughout my life, I've always loved that quote about you can't read the label from inside the jar.
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Sometimes it's so much easier for someone external to walk up and be like holy cow you just need to fix this in your business and like you'll start capturing more leads, you'll converting more leads, whatever that situation may be, whereas coaching is obviously a much more intimate, a much more it's more depth to that sort of relationship in dynamic.
00:27:49.734 --> 00:27:51.939
How much of your work is about?
00:27:51.939 --> 00:28:08.411
I guess the way I want to articulate it is getting the answers out of people, helping guide them to those answers, versus offering that external perspective reading that label from outside the jar oh, I love the way that you asked that question.
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I love the, the reading, the label analogy.
00:28:11.547 --> 00:28:22.847
Um, I would say in the beginning, when I'm first getting to know somebody, it's much more heavily in the coaching and in pure coaching you're never giving advice in it's much more heavily in the coaching and in pure coaching you're never giving advice.
00:28:22.847 --> 00:28:46.210
In fact, it's a big no-no, it's a big you're helping, you're guiding people, as you said, toward their own wisdom and the answers that are uniquely right for them, and there's just tremendous power in that, because there's many times that people will throw a bunch of tactics at somebody or like have you thought about this and have you thought about this and have you thought about this?
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And they might all be great ideas.
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The truth is it's just not the right solution for that person and they have the answer inside of them.
00:28:55.953 --> 00:29:25.037
There's also a time where it's time to act and it's time to action things and the person may not have the skill set to move things forward, and that's really more when I see the consulting come in so early in the coaching relationship or in the coaching consulting relationship, there'll be much heavier coaching emphasis and then later, as we're getting really laser focused on taking action, then it's really a blend.
00:29:25.037 --> 00:29:43.770
So there's always the space in every session, there's coaching, but there's also the consulting that comes in, as we're really like we're cooking now, we're making some progress and we're taking some, some action and we're getting out and we're rolling up our sleeves and doing things in the world.
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That's when the consulting comes in.
00:29:46.286 --> 00:29:55.817
Yeah, tracy, as the action taker that I know that you are, I love the fact that you bring that to the table for your clients, because that blend, of course, that really is that path.
00:29:55.817 --> 00:30:00.957
You talk so much today about the blueprint, that roadmap between where we are and where it is that we want to go.
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I love the fact that this is the work that you're doing after the career that you've had, and I'm sure that there's so much depth and meaning to it with every single different client that you serve.
00:30:10.397 --> 00:30:11.730
So huge kudos to you.
00:30:11.904 --> 00:30:22.561
I also told you before we hit record today that time would fly by, but I'm not letting you go before asking you the super broad question that I enjoy asking at the end of every episode, and that is what's your best piece of advice.
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Not only are you a subject matter expert that you've showcased here today, not only are you an executive coach, but I always remind listeners, you're also one of us, you're also a fellow entrepreneur.
00:30:31.811 --> 00:30:37.310
So, with that hat on, what's that piece of advice that you want to leave for listeners, knowing that they're both entrepreneurs?
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They're entrepreneurs at all different stages of their own growth journeys.
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What's the thing you want to leave them with today?
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I think the number one thing that has helped me and has helped my clients is just coming back to that zone of genius.
00:30:53.267 --> 00:31:09.598
So Gay Hendricks coined the phrase zone of genius, and the way that that's defined is the intersection of your unique talents, passions and strengths, and what I add to that is dot, dot, dot and what's good for the company.
00:31:10.085 --> 00:31:19.730
So that applies if you're not an entrepreneur, probably, but it's that both for organizations out there and for individuals.
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It's good.
00:31:21.034 --> 00:31:36.298
It's back in that middle zone of magic of if somebody is spending their time, if we're spending our time in what lights, not just what lights us up, but also what we are uniquely gifted to do.
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That's where we can make our largest and best contributions to the world.
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And so finding a way to limit distractions, finding a way to get out of the weeds, finding a way to delegate what you can delegate that's just sucking your energy dry so that you can be spending the majority of your time in that zone of genius changes everything.
00:32:01.576 --> 00:32:22.807
It changes what you're contributing You're just going to see this huge multiplication effect and it changes, most importantly, how you feel, so that everything that you've been toiling so hard for for so many years it only can pay off when it feels good, and that happens when you're operating in that zone of genius.
00:32:23.627 --> 00:32:26.935
Boom, that right, there is powerful advice, tracy.
00:32:26.935 --> 00:32:46.170
You know, having gone through our pre-interview questionnaire, how much that zone of genius is important to my perspective, because it's so much fun to hear from you amazing guests and fellow entrepreneurs where you are in your zone of genius, and I think it's so clear here today, having the chance to interact with you, that you've stepped into that, tracy, and I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing.
00:32:46.170 --> 00:32:53.185
I love everything from the type of work you're doing it, how you're doing it, but also even the brand that you've built inside out coaching.
