Business Innovators Radio - Interview with John Terry the Black Belt Leader

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Dr. John is a 3-Time Martial Arts Hall of Fame inductee, 2-Time Best-Selling Author, and international speaker, coach, and trainer committed to helping individuals and organizations become World-Class Masters of Who They Are and What They Do. He is a 2021 recipient of the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently named as one of the Brainz 500 Global Leaders & Influencers of 2023.Learn more:https://www.beablackbeltleader.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-john-terry-the-black-belt-leader

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, John Terry, the Black Belt leader. John, welcome to the program. Mike, thank you for the invitation.

I am so glad to be here today. You know, I am excited to talk with you because, as you know, we met at a conference and I just loved your talk and you gave me your book and I already read it, reviewed it on Amazon, and I love your approach. So I want to dive into your methodology and your teaching and your books. But first, give us a little bit of your background because reading over your bio, you've got quite the pedigree, three-time martial arts, hall of fame, inductee, two-time bestselling author and so forth.

But give us a little bit of your story and your background. Well, Mike, you've read the book. So you've heard my backstory. At 13 years of age, my parents relocated from a big city to a small town. I went from being the big city, nobody to the small town, somebody that every bully in school picked on. Dad said, John, I'm going to fix this for you. And he throws me in the martial arts. And now five black belts and three martial arts hall of fames later, I have the privilege of running the United States

martial arts hall of fame. And I'm known across the industry as the black belt leader. So what I found in martial arts is not only some incredible ways to learn to defend yourself, be situationally aware, but there's some incredible leadership principles hidden in the martial arts that are applicable to everyday life. And it's been my mission for the last several years to be telling that story to corporate America and individuals to help them discover, develop, and deploy their own unique black belt leader within so they can become a world-class master of who they are and what they do. You know, I can only imagine when you start,

in martial arts and then all of the training and all of the things and the things you learn and that it kind of um i i remember i took martial arts uh for one summer at a ymCA back in the day but i i didn't do anything since then but i do know that it's very structured and discipline and loyalty all of those great um traits at what point of you going through your training did you start thinking you know there's some applications in martial arts and life in business in success and leadership when did those thoughts start getting clear for you? You know, Mike, for me, it started early on because my dad was a big fan of personal growth and development. When I was 13, dad introduced me to Dr. John Maxwell, who's become one of my personal mentors.

And one of the things dad taught me, he was a pastor. So dad always looked for practical applications of the Bible or any lessons that we learned in life. And so from the time I was very young, dad would always say, John, anytime you're going through something, there's more than one lesson to learn and successful people pay attention to those lessons so they can learn them. I love it. So your early influences, dad as a preacher's kid and then martial arts and then learning lessons personally and in the realm of applying them to more than one thing. So let's talk about your title as the black belt leader. What does it mean to be a black belt leader?

Well, you know, Mike, I believe everybody. leading somebody somewhere right now, even if the only person they're leading is themselves. The problem for far too many people is they never stop to reflectively look inside and discover their passion, their purpose, and their calling. To be a black belt leader is to have an opportunity to go within and discover what it is that you've been put on this earth to do. I believe everybody's been put on earth on purpose for a purpose. And when we would discover that purpose and they begin to develop ourselves through a lifetime commitment to personal growth, we now have an opportunity to deploy that greatness of who we are on the inside and make a difference

not only in our lives, but make a difference in the lives of other people. And as a result of that, leave a lasting legacy to those that are one day going to take your place. That to me is what it means to be a black vote leader. Yeah. You know, that's so interesting because I always like to think of things that you learn and applying them to other situations as well. And what you just said there reminds me of when you think about, you know, sales. And so many times people like, well, I just don't like selling. And when I hear that, I'll say good, because a true salesperson isn't really that pushy salesperson you think of. It's just someone that explains and educates and teaches and just show some options and sees where the person might need. But in reality, we all are selling all day

long at times where we have to sell the fact that, oh, I want to go to this movie versus that movie or this, you know, a restaurant versus that restaurant. So what you said about passion, purpose, and calling is not only what we think of as traditional leadership. I feel like when people say, oh, it's a book on leadership. Yeah, but I'm not a corporate CEO. I'm not a VP in a large company, but you can be leading yourself. You can be leading people that are around you to then achieve that passion, purpose, and call. So talk a little bit deeper about when you learn to lead yourself, then that expands out to those others around you personally as well as professionally. Yeah, you know, Mike, you said it well. Every day, you're either leading yourself or you're allowing other people to lead you. When you're leading yourself, you have the opportunity to take yourself where you want to go. But when other people have hijacked your life, they're going to take you where they want you to go. And you're going to end up living less of a fulfilled life than you would if you were living life pursuing your purpose, your passion, and your calling.

That's something I learned early on. And dad made sure to point out, as did my mom, when they would see other people that were influencing and potentially taking me in a wrong direction and help me see the roadblocks, the pitfalls, and the dangers that were ahead. And as a result of that, I realized I am responsible for my outcome in life. Yes, I lean on. I'm a person of faith and I lean on God's direction and guidance in my life. But at the end of the day, it's the choices I make that determine the outcomes I'm going to experience in life.

And if I'm not learning, I'm not growing, I'm not becoming a better version of myself. I'm probably not making the best choices that are going to lead to the best outcomes. And at the end of the day, we want to be successful. We want to truly be able to lead ourselves well. But that comes through learning, through growing, making sure we make those good choices. and when we mess up and we will, we learn from those mistakes so that we can get the lesson life's trying to teach us and apply that so we don't make that same mistake again. Yeah, 100%.

You know, I love purpose and passion and calling, and I want to go a little bit deeper on a couple of those because I feel like people could go purpose and calling, aren't they the same thing? But I want to start with saying that I love how passion is tied into that because so many times we feel like if you set these certain goals, you feel like you're pushed. And it's like, I've got to do this thing. But if you are passionate and you set those goals the right way with your why in mind, you're pulled. So it's not a push where you feel overwhelmed.

You feel your passion kicking in and you feel drawn toward that. And that's a whole different feel, right? Oh, you're exactly right. You know, Mike, in my book, Black Belt Secrets of Success, I talk about the five piece. It's five camps that you go through climbing your mountain of success. And purpose is that first camp. Because until you understand your why and the passion for what it is that you do, you're really not going to pursue that with all your energy, all your effort, and all your might.

And you're only going to be on a scale of one to ten. You're only going to be a four or a five in terms of success because you're just going through the have-toes rather than the want-toes. When you discover your purpose, what it is you've been put on this earth to do, do and you understand that that can also become a calling in your life that drives you to move forward, now all of the sudden you begin to see and seize opportunities that are sitting there right in front of you, that without purpose or passion to awaken you to those opportunities, you often walk right past them. And then you look back with regret later on wondering, why didn't I see that? It's because you weren't tuned in to your passion and your calling that

drives your purpose that allows you to love it, whatever it is that you're doing. You know, my dad said growing up, John, if you learn to love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. Well, I love what I do, but there's work involved. But because I love what I do, the work to me isn't tedious. It's something I enjoy doing because I can see the benefit of that and how it helps me, but how it also helps those I'm serving. So what do you find is like the delineation difference between purpose and calling? Because I feel like if you had those two circles, there is some overlap there, but where is the clarity between the two?

You know, purpose is your underlying why. Your calling to me is the audience that your purpose is being directed to. So understanding your purpose is the why of what you do, why you do. The calling are the people that you're actually going to serve and to deliver your purpose and to get the results that they're looking for you to help them achieve in life. Yeah. So like your purpose could be, you know, I feel like I want to change the lives of a million entrepreneurs.

Well, the calling might be, but this type of entrepreneur and using this type of platform to make that change. So it's like dialing in with that magnifying glass. Oh, exactly. It's like really defining who your target market is that you have been called to serve and how your purpose is going to serve. them. And when those two align, incredible things happen in your life and in their life because you're serving them at the highest level, giving them 100% of yourself, and you're making a difference that

truly makes a difference. Yeah. So in your new book, Black Belt Secrets of Success, you talk about climbing the Mount Everest of Success. And you just mentioned that the first camp was purpose, right? So talk a little bit more about some of the following camps as you make of that climb. Well, you know, you go from purpose to persistence. And there, that's where the hard work begins. Once you discover your purpose, how do you actually fulfill that purpose? That's where you persist until you succeed. There's a price to pay if you want to get to the top of the mountain.

And so either you're going to pay that price or somebody else is going to pay that price. There is pleasure involved or there has to be some pleasure involved because, as we've already said, if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're really not going to do it and give it your all, and it's only going to be average, mediocre, lackluster at best. But then that fifth camp is what we call passion. It's that understanding that I have an opportunity to change the lives of not just myself but other people. And I determine at that point how my legacy is going to be defined and how I'm going to be remembered when I'm gone.

Those five camps and the lessons we learn along the way help us climb that Mount ever to success get to the pinnacle that truly becomes the significance of how we live our lives. You know, I think that if you listed, if you saw all of those camps listed in bullet point fashion and you said, these are, you put your hand over those bullet points and said, these are the, you know, secrets of success and drum roll please. And then you unveiled them, people would read the words and go, yeah, okay. And it really, they wouldn't get the full important to you dive in and just really illuminate what purpose is and what persistence really means.

So what I would wonder is there's going to be some people that go that I get it. I get it. I want it. I just don't know what I want. I think that in a lot of personal development programs, I hear some of those points coming up where the trainer will say, you know, I sit down with someone and go, great, well, what do you really want out of life? And they go, I just don't know.

So what do you do when you're working with a client and helping them come up with that? passion and purpose, and they are having trouble really clarifying that. You know, I take them back to belief, Mike, and I talk about that in my book, Black Belt Leadership 101. You can't achieve what you don't believe. So when I'm working with a client, I go into their beliefs and understand what they believe about themselves, what they believe about their passion, their calling, and I get a lot of clarity there before I move them forward, because until they truly believe who they are, what

they're capable of and they truly believe in their passion, their purpose, and their calling, they're never going to really step into that uncomfortable place where success happens, where growth happens, where you get a chance to lead yourselves and influence others, they're going to hold back. And as a result of that, they're never going to rise to the full potential of who they could become. Yeah. Yeah, you got to have to give them that thing to strive for. And I know that you agree with this. It's not about the achievement of that specific goal. It's about who you become and how you change in getting there, right? Oh, absolutely. Yes, sir. Yeah, it's not about the accomplishment. You know, you run a hundred yard dash, you won,

but you become a better person from training yourself to win that race. But now to get success, you've got to go run another race. So it's not just the success. The success is benchmarks along the way as we see yourself learning and growing. You know, I challenge audiences all the time. If you can be one percent better today than you were yesterday and then again tomorrow, do that same thing, get one percent better in one area of your life tomorrow than today and consistently do that for the rest of your life. How much better of a person are you going to become? How many more people are you going to have a chance to influence and change and have an opportunity to really make a difference that you'll be remembered not just for weeks or months,

but for years and decades after you're gone. You know, that reminds me of Darren Hardy's book, the compound effect, you know, the 1% difference. And it's not, it's not like, okay, you need to make a 40% difference this week because sometimes those things feel so much bigger and unattainable. But if people look at what a 1% difference would be, it's like, oh, I can do that.

But then when you do that on the next day, and the next week and the next category of your life, all of a sudden it starts to compound. And like that example of, I don't know the exact numbers, but would you rather have, you know, two million dollars cash right now

or one penny that doubles every day for a month? And people like, give me the $2 million, but in reality, the doubling has that huge compound effect. So I think that people look at the end and go, oh, I could never do that big thing.

But if you break it down to just this first step, it's like, well, I could do that. So talk a little bit about, you know, making sure that we know where we're headed with that bigger goal.

we need to have that big vision, that big purpose. But if we can break them down into those attainable pieces daily, weekly, monthly, now we're making progress. And that almost is that self-motivating aspect. You know, Mike, one of the things my mom asked me early on, I thought it was a really dumb question. So she explained it to me. She asked me when I was about six or seven years old, how you eat an elephant. Yeah.

And I looked at her and I said, I have absolutely no idea. I don't know if you start with the leg, the trunk. you know, where? And she laughed and she said, John, you start eating the elephant one bite at a time. And when we're called to do something great, we've got this incredible gift that God's put within us. And we have an opportunity to change the lives of ourselves and other people. Sometimes that task seems daunting. But as you said, if we can take that big audacious goal, and I'll give you an example, a good friend of mine wanted to lose 100 pounds. Now, losing 100 pounds when you're 300-something pounds, that's a lofty goal. And he wanted to do that. that in one year. But he broke it down into saying, okay, if I want to lose 100 pounds, then I need to

focus on losing roughly nine pounds a month. And then he broke that down into a weekly goal, and then from there into a daily goal. And he figured out if he could lose a little over a half pound a day, every day over the next 12 months, he could lose 100 pounds. Well, he accomplished his 100 pound weight loss goal in nine and a half months because he realized after he got started, he began to see success. And he began to understand a concept. I say that you reward success so that it gets repeated. And every time he would lose weight, he would go do something that gave him some energy and some excitement and some type of reward. And in a little over nine, nine and a half months, he lost 100 pounds, ended up losing 120 and has kept that weight off now for 20 plus

years because he realized that when he took that big goal and he broke it down, he could do a little bit every day, alter his eating habits, alter certain things in his life that ultimately brought about the big change that he wanted over time. And the neat thing there, I've used this example so many times where it's very similar to what you just mentioned of, you know, hey, if you feel like you really need to get back into working out and you haven't worked out in decades, please do not go to the gym six days a week, two hours per day, because about the third day, you're going to quit because you're so sore. So you have to pace yourself.

So in your example there, I'll bet you that about three months in, six months in, he started doing things like even more exercise than he thought he was going to do because it was like really motivating. He saw progress and he's like, well, I can do more. I could do more. But yet, if he had done that day one, day two, day three, it would have been overwhelming. So you have to realize, yep, here's my true north. Here's my big old goal.

Here's my daily. But I'm not going to get ahead of myself because you have to realize what motivates and doesn't motivate you. And then I think a cherry on top is recognize that you need to gamify it as well and reward yourself. It's different milestones to kind of keep that momentum going. Yeah. Well, think about it. If you haven't worked out in five years and you say, I want to get myself in shape, what if you started with something simple? one pushup and one setup.

And then you add one pushup and one setup every day. In 30 days, you're doing 30 pushups and 30 setups. In 60 days, you're doing 60 and 60. In six months, do the math. You're doing over 240 pushups and situps. And all of a sudden, you find that you've got energy you didn't have. Now you're probably at least walking, if not jogging in the neighborhood. And all of the sudden, you discover you're capable of becoming so much.

much more than you dreamed of six months ago because you ate the elephant one bite at a time. You know, I think that if we were to pull back to the 30,000 foot view or 60,000 foot view of all of these, you know, camps in the achieving of Mount Everest of success that you've mentioned, it's not just getting there, like we've said, it's about the progress you make in your own self, but I want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on striving and then moving to thriving, meaning once you start attaining these things, even halfway through or when you get to a certain level and then you readjust your goals, at what point do you find your people that you're coaching thriving to give back and go, okay, now I'm going to go and teach people what I've been

learning because that not only is the give back principle, but it's reinforcing to myself what I've been learning and then now it's amplifying the effect. You know, Dr. John Maxwell's been a mentor of mine for many, many years, Mike, as you know. And Dr. John talks about five levels of success, moving from position where people have to follow you because they have to, to permission, where you get permission to lead them, to where you're getting production from them and yourself, moving into people development, and ultimately the pinnacle of where you're developing other leaders around you. As I think about, you know, the goal of going from just striving to thriving, I think of the example of a train.

To get a train to go, you know, massive engine, massive weight, but a small chalk can hold that train from moving forward. But once you begin to get momentum and you get past that initial striving to see some success in your life, when you're rewarding success and recognizing it and honoring that success and allowing it to compound in your life, all of the sudden momentum begins to carry you forward, and you see yourself as capable of doing and becoming more, and people see that. And when people see what they want, they become attracted to you like a moth to a flame or a butterfly to a flower,

and they want what you have. And then when you have the opportunity to teach and train and add your collective wisdom to that of other people, you are empowering them to do what you've done and more, because they've had life experience that you haven't and that I haven't. But when they can add your experience and my experience to their own, they get to shortcut success because they've learned what we've learned without having to go through all that we had to do to get there.

And that lets them accelerate their opportunity to go from striving themselves to thriving in their own lives. You know, using that training example, I've used a similar example many times, which I think the concept is like the switch. the switch back or something like that where you know you change tracks and all it is is that little bar that switches over and once you're in momentum that little slight pivot that's really simple because the train's going down the track and then it just makes that little veer it's not a 90 degree turn so I think many times in life it's like you know we don't need to do 180 degree turns 90

degrees turns sometimes there's just a little pivot a little bit of a you know enhancement to what we're doing and when you're in that momentum that little slight pivot is very simple because you're you're just forging ahead. And I think that goes right along with what you're saying because it really is that like Tony Robbins, Steve is constant and never ending improvement. We all need to just be doing that 1% improvement every single day, every single week,

knowing where we want to go and when that fire of passion is guiding us and encouraging us to that, you know, to fulfill that purpose. Boy, I think that we just have reams of books that we can put into the achievements that will happen. Oh,

absolutely. You know, it's like the pilot that's flying from New York to San Francisco. They're constantly making little adjustments as they're adapting to the wind and the currents to keep the plane on track to get it where they want to go. It's the same thing in our own lives as we're doing things today and making those things happen. Yeah. Well, I love it. Well, John, it's been real pleasure chatting with you today.

I love how you tie in these tried and true success and leadership principles into martial arts the Black Belt Leader principle. So thank you so much for coming on. If someone is interested in learning more and reaching out and connecting with you and buying one of your several books, what is the best way that they can do that? You know, Mike, the easiest way to find all my contact information is to go to my website. Be a Blackbeltleader.com. That's Be a Blackbeltleader.com.

All my social media is on the Contact Us section, and they'll find a store where they can get access to books, courses, all the other resources we have. Or if they want to book me to come speak, they can do that. at there as well. Excellent. Well, John, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. I appreciate the opportunity, sir. Thank you for what you do, and appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience today. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the

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