When Work Works: Building the Kind of Culture People Don’t Want to Leave

Tamien Dysart is the CEO and Co-Founder of Think 3D and Elevate You, two organizations and platforms united by a mission to build better people, workplaces, and communities. At Think 3D, he helps organizations transform culture through leadership development and intentional engagement, along with an emphasis on community focused programs to uplift underserved populations. With Elevate You, he empowers individuals to become their next best selves through a science-backed personal growth framework through their transformative app. Together, his work champions purpose, intentionality, and access to growth for all.

Overview

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is a weekly conversation with nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who are shaping the future of mission-driven organizations. In this episode, we welcomed Tamien Dysart, a leadership speaker, entrepreneur, and founder of the Elevate You platform. Tamien’s work focuses on personal transformation, intentional leadership, and building healthy cultures that allow individuals and organizations to thrive. This conversation explores how leaders can elevate themselves so they can elevate their teams, organizations, and communities. Damian Dysart is an entrepreneur, like I said, speaker, he’s a profound leader, and not only the founder of Elevate You platform, but the Think3D Solutions platform. He’s known for helping leaders develop intentional habits, strong cultures, and personal disciplines that lead to lasting success. Through his speaking, coaching, and leadership programs, Tamien teaches that personal transformation is the starting point for organizational impact. His work focuses on mindset, leadership development, culture building, and community empowerment, helping individuals and organizations unlock their potential. and create meaningful impact. And this is so relevant, Damian, to our audience of nonprofit leaders and faith leaders. So tell us about your personal journey, the experiences that brought you here, and at what moment did you realize this was your life’s work?

Tamien Dysart

Yeah, great question. So thanks for having me, Hugh, again. Pleasure to be here. So my journey, I’d spent, you know, plus, let’s say it’s 15 plus years in corporate America, corporate environments. And so when I got early on, went to school, business management degree, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, stumbled upon credit card collections. And so when I spent 15 plus years in corporate environments, like a lot of leaders, you learn a lot about what to do by watching what not to do. And so those early lessons, you saw a lot of those lessons and those types of things out there, but the challenge really became, How do you really start to put these things into practice? How do you really start to climb that ladder when, again, it wasn’t exampled for you? The changing point for me probably started mid-20s when I got a hold of John Maxwell books. I had no idea who John Maxwell was. I was bargain shopping at Sam’s Club. I saw $7.99, and it was a great title across the core of it. So I purchased it and started reading, and I was like, what is this? So that coupled with my journey of starting to climb into leadership positions and putting these things into practice, at a highlight point for me, when I was at Capital One, I was able to get our turnover down when I became the site director from 33%, which is very industry average in credit card collections, down to 6% in 18 months, like unheard of. And the core of that was personal development, investing in the culture. And so when I knew this was my life’s journey was when I really saw the impact on people beyond the walls of your organization, you truly was able to have an impact that rippled beyond just the workplace and it truly transcended into the communities and the families and into our homes.

Hugh Ballou

So we’re going to talk about your book later, but this is called Elevate. But you quote quite a number of people, people that I’ve had direct experience with and are friends, and then people that preceded us by centuries. So who are some of the profound influencers in your life?

Tamien Dysart

I was mentioning John Maxwell is probably the biggest influence. I mean, I read 40 plus of his books. Back in 2021, I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with John Maxwell. So he hands down professionally has had the biggest influence on my life. Tony Robbins is another one again, inspirational again, mindset, really mind state and core human behavior. Classics like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich is up there. And so I’m just a consumer. I hated reading growing up, but once I understood the impact that you could get somebody’s 10,000 hours of knowledge boiled down into a two to five hour read, I became addicted. So I probably read 50 plus books a year at this point. And I just love consuming other thoughts, which elevates the way I think, which has truly transformed my life.

Hugh Ballou

There’s a, there’s a, there’s a theme going on here. Elevate. Let’s dig into what elevate is. So, um, You know, readers, leaders are readers. And so your thirst for knowledge, and I love his many quotes, and I quote John Maxwell often, but the law of the lid. Organization cannot develop any further or grow any further than your ability to lead it. So you don’t need a whole lot of words to understand a concept. So let’s dig into the elevate philosophy. So what does it mean to you and why should we care?

Tamien Dysart

Elevate really at the core, Hugh, is about personal empowerment. So many people are at effect to the environments around them. One of the questions that we ask within organizations when we do work with businesses is, how many of you at Current are leading a life that your kids or your future kids would want to live? Amazingly, it’s not surprising, but it’s amazingly, less than 3% to 5% of people ever raise their hand. Think about that. Less than three to five percent. And why I draw that point home, this is at one of our trainings called The Power of Culture. Why that’s so important. I say that next person you hire might not be your kid, but that’s somebody’s kid. And when you think about right now, the average tenure amongst 25 to 34 year olds is 2.8 years and shrinking. If we’re not leading and empowering ourselves by living that example, elevating ourselves as leaders, it’s not just about titles or positions or money, because you can find that in a lot of spaces. This is about how many people are truly leading and living their best life. It doesn’t happen overnight and really the core of the book of the Premises Elevate platform was breaking it down to behaviors and habits and mindset because if you start just with actions, the precursor to your actions is based off of how you feel in the moment. And science is now showing us around 95% of our actions is based off of how you feel in the moment. Well, the precursor to your emotions, it’s what you’re thinking about. When you’re excited, what are you thinking about? When you’re sad and depressed, what are you thinking about? And so the whole book and the premise of this platform is if you start to elevate the way you think, you’ll start to elevate the emotions behind that. If you elevate your emotions, you’ll take actions behind that and that elevates your outcomes. And now you start to get this positive cycle that escapes from the past that we came from and the environments and really the prison that most people are in, which is called their brain to their past thinking.

Hugh Ballou

Yeah, Bob Parker speaks about that eloquently. So you talk about thoughts and thinking, and then you said there’s like several times 60,000 thoughts we have in a day. So when somebody says, oh, I have a lot of thoughts, what’s the difference?

Tamien Dysart

Intentionality. It’s one of those things, of course, things that we have or believe is nothing of significance happens without intention. And so 60,000 thoughts a day. The question for everybody is, are you thinking your thoughts or are your thoughts thinking you? For most people, it’s just happening, right? Your thoughts happen with or without you when you’re sleeping, your brain is still active. And so most people, if your thoughts are on autopilot, therefore your emotions are on autopilot and your identity isn’t something you designed, it’s a byproduct of your environment, the people around, etc. Thinking is creating that pause button. is noodling on these things. When you look at great philosophers like Socrates and Plato, what they really did, they paused and they looked at something from this angle and then they talk about it and they philosophized around it and they recognize how does this apply to my life in which Part of the reason, the way I wrote the book, Elevate, the second half of it is inviting people into, here’s a quote, here’s a way to think about it, but then invites them to write down, how does this apply to your life? Because if you can slow down and start to elevate your thinking, if you start to align your thinking with other great thinkers and other people who are successful, just by the nature of proxy, you’ll start to elevate your life in the same manner.

Hugh Ballou

Elevate is a great, great visual because it’s about personal development, personal growth, and empowering ourselves. I used to speak at a lot of leadership conferences. I’m 79, I don’t do it much anymore. But people would come to me after I had spoken about leadership, and they’d come, what’s that you do again? Because there are multiple speakers. And I said, I do leadership personal development. Oh, I read the books. I don’t need that. So why is that the wrong response? And why do people need to continue their personal self-growth journey?

Tamien Dysart

When you’re done growing, you’re done, right? Right now, as we’re having this conversation, we are on a hurling rock, going thousands of miles an hour through an expanding universe. Everything expands. And so the moment that you pause and you stay the same, life is continuing to advance on with or without us. And so if you’re not not only keeping up, but if you’re not adapting intentionally, you become that byproduct of the conversations you’re having. And even more importantly, Hugh, right, as we know this right now, The world around us, when you look on social media, you look on the news, we are filled with an abundance of negativity. And so just the simple, we got one of our sessions that we do training on is called the principle of exposure. Simply put, that in which you’re exposed to influences who you become. And so if you stop sharpening yourself, A, you don’t have enough to give to the other people behind you, but again, that’s how you’re gonna get bypassed. And then you wake up similar to, I think, was it 20 years ago, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies are no longer existing.

Hugh Ballou

Yes.

None:

52%.

Hugh Ballou

That’s quite remarkable.

Tamien Dysart

Because they knew everything, right?

Hugh Ballou

Well, they were blind to… I used to have a Kodak dealership. They own solar imaging in the world and they just were blind, you know, confirmation bias. No, we got this. There’s many kinds of shortcomings that we have. So, you know, there’s people come to non-profit world with wrong ideas, with myths and myths about what it ought to be. and also they’re barriers to us elevating ourselves. So what are some of those myths or barriers either that pre-exist or maybe we create those?

Tamien Dysart

I’ll give you two that come top of mind. First one, the biggest barrier to growth, period, it’s biology. It’s not a willpower issue, and that’s where people beat themselves up. Right now, beginning of the year, everyone always sets these New Year’s resolutions, right? Less than 20% of people actually set goals anymore. And so the core of that, you mentioned Les Brown earlier, one of my favorite quotes from Les Brown is, if you don’t have goals, you’re basically a wandering generality. And so people then kind of beat themselves up because they try, they stop, they try, they stop. What the core? What’s really happening in the biology? Your brain doesn’t care about success. Matter of fact, it doesn’t want success because new success is new. Your brain wants comfort, it wants familiarity. And so when you study human biology and the human history, our brains were meant for survival and reproduction. And part of survival was comfort. And so the brain will fight you every step of the way trying to be better. We’ve all heard the statistics around people who grew up in abusive or drug-ridden homes, 95% repeat the cycle. Like if you grew up in that, why would you ever repeat the cycle? One reason, it’s familiar, it’s all you know. And so that’s a barrier number one is recognizing you have to break this down to habit building, your mind state, your mindset, those type of things is core building blocks one and two. Behind that, the second opportunity within nonprofits, most people go to the nonprofit world. Obviously, it’s not for the money, it’s for the impact. But what happens is you lose the impact oftentimes because you’re so busy, there’s burnout, various things. And the reality is when you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, You cannot, I very strongly believe this, you cannot, you will not be able to reach self-actualization absent of service to others. But what gets lost in the translation is we’re not investing in ourselves. And I understand how hard it is for non-profits. You had to go to your board, which is predominantly made up of business leaders who don’t invest in their culture. So they want every dollar to go to the thing. Well, what about the people taking care of the thing? And that part of we have to redefine how we’re investing into nonprofits. Leaders in nonprofit space has to lead by example and make sure you’re taking care of your people along with the mission because without the people, there is no mission.

Hugh Ballou

Oh, that is so spot on. What I’ve observed over my many years of leadership coach and trainer and strategist is that people who succeed do things that others are not willing to do. You mentioned intention. There’s the intention and the commitment and the discipline. And as a musician, as a musical conductor, those are important elements. You got to do it right. You got to learn it. You got to work on it every day. What are some of the things, your comments about this intentionality and the discipline and the commitment for this?

Tamien Dysart

Discipline, I love this word discipline. Like for most of us, you know, most of our lives, it was a negative connotation. If you got disciplined as a child, it wasn’t good or in school or at work, it wasn’t good. But I think it’s Jim Rowan that said it. He said, discipline is the bridge that takes you from where you are to where you want to go. And so you need to learn a very intimate relationship with discipline. For me, I’m somebody who loves to sleep. And I always ask folks again, like, do you expect that? I’m not a morning person. What does that mean? Do you expect to wake up like you’re in the movies? You know, just ready to start my day. That’s an impossibility. One of my favorite books around this is called the 5 a.m. Club by Robin Sharma. And 5 a.m. Club is a story form but it shares six of these top six things that most people do, highly successful people do to start their day. Another book, Miracle Morning Series, the same six tenets or principles. And so one of the things that has been a game changer in my life is learning to beat the sun up. So my whole process to prime my body, to prime my mind, to prime my spirit for each and every day is about a two hour and ten minute process. So that just informs me, I get up at this point, four o’clock in the morning, because I’m usually out the door by 4.15, 4.25. And so getting up in the early, whether it’s four o’clock, five o’clock, it’s just starting to discipline yourself to set your intention for the day. I ask people oftentimes, if you want to have a phenomenal life, but you can’t figure out what a phenomenal day is, you’ll never have a phenomenal life. So when you wake up every day, every day has to have the potential to be phenomenal based off of what’s on your plate today and there’s versions of it how you go about it. Priming the start of your day is the game changer that will help you visualize what kind of day you want to have Execute on the kind of day that you want to have and get your mind, body, and spirit in line with what kind of day you want to have. When you discipline yourself on that, now the trajectory over a week, in a month, in a year start to build what Albert Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world, compounding interest. You can’t catch up on compounding interest of putting the work in, period.

Hugh Ballou

put the work in. Jim Rohn influenced so many people and he commonly said, you know, 3% of you will do what I say. The rest of you will just listen so that it’s not everybody. Somebody’s listening to this and they’re getting all excited about it. Where does someone start if they want to elevate their life?

Tamien Dysart

Start small and simple. This is one of those biggest challenges of habit building, right? Again, when you look at habits, our brains love habits because people ask, how long does it take to build a habit? 21 days, 60 seconds. The bottom line is it takes as long as it takes, right? How long does it take for someone to become addicted to TikTok? seconds and it’s the reward center that’s going off in their brain that’s why it’s so addictive in the moment. So the core of it is I don’t care if it’s starting to drink half your body weight in water a day, what you really have to get after is you’re trying to change your identity at the core of it. For most of our lives, how many times have you lied to yourself How many times have you let yourself down? How many times have you disappointed yourself? Countless. And so you have to start to build this new identity. I’m the type of person who says something and follows through. And I don’t care if it’s one thing over three months. It was one of the core when I do executive coaching, I teach folks, simply pick one thing that you know you can move forward over the next three months. 3 months is 2,160 hours. So start small, pick one thing and prove to yourself you can do that thing and then pick up the next. Over a period of time, that law of momentum really kicks in and now you start to say, okay, maybe I can do two things every three months. But give yourself a realistic, I love looking at the world in 90 day windows, because whether it’s 21 days, 67 days, there is zero excuse you can’t pick up and adopt one new micro habit within your day over a 90-day period of time. Start there, whether it’s reading, again, five minutes of exercise, do something that you know, no questions, non-negotiable, you will move that thing forward.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. So I’m reminding people that are watching and listening, if you missed some of these great ideas, they’re in the transcript at thenonprofitexchange.org. So, Damian, talk about culture a minute. Now, I spent a 40-year career building high-performing cultures, choirs, and orchestras, and the real success in my work was the performance. You know, I’m totally dependent on the culture. So creating a high performance culture is a reflection of the leader. Talk about the culture and why it’s so important and our positive, you talked about having a positive mental attitude. Where does that play into this?

Tamien Dysart

Yeah, I love that question. I mean, culture at the core of it is currency. One of the questions we ask people is if I worked at a competing organization up the street and I said to you, I’m going to pay you $10,000 more than you’re getting paid today. People are like, I’m interested. But what if I told you you’re going to be 7% more miserable? Still want it? No. Culture is currency. There’s a real cost of currency. One of our core sayings at Think3D is a culture will emerge whether intended or not. But if it’s not one that you invest in, it is most certainly one that you will pay for. Key word in that is you. The core of this, when we really think about this, here’s a very bold statement, but I can prove it in our trainings, is you cannot and you will not be able to live your best life, whatever it might look like to you, independent of an ideal workplace culture. Ideal is not perfect. There is no such thing. Ideal is about progress. Because when you really break down what culture is, culture at its core is an aggregate or a sum total of all of the individuals that make it up. And so you talk about the positive mindset, there is no culture that has all the healthy traits in it and zero toxic because there’s people there. And there’s no organization that has all the toxic and zero healthy ones because they would go out of business. So there’s two fires that are burning every single day within your culture. When you walk into your job every single day, you are given a log. And the analogy is both fires are burning. Whichever fire you choose to place your log on is going to burn the brightest and burn the longest. And so when you think about culture, when everyone goes home from work at night, there’s no culture there. It’s a building. When does the culture show up? when the people show up. And so when the people show up and the individuals and their level of mixture of mindsets, oh, it’s a Monday or let’s get after it, whatever their mindsets are collectively, that’s the microculture. That’s what you take home to your family. And that’s a very definitive statement that the average person spends between 50 to 75% of their waking hours at work, going to work, thinking about work, et cetera. So investing in the culture is one of the greatest gifts you can give to your overall life because it sends you home with enough for the rest of your life.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. And the culture elevates the leader too. So, people on the podcast can’t see it, but I’m holding up a copy of your book called Elevate. Now, this is where people can take you home with them. So, this has a lot of wisdom in a very accessible form, I would say. So, the You have chapters that are very profound and spot on about the lessons of life that you’re talking about, and you quote throughout the book some important leaders. But the different sections, you have the first part of the book, it’s about your lessons around the main themes, and then you have some quotes. Talk about the format of the book. You know, leadership is leadership, and non-private leaders are leaders, and they’re leading in some of the most difficult situations, so they need this as much as anybody. So, talk about what people will find in this book, the first half and the second half, both.

Tamien Dysart

Absolutely. So the first half of the core of that is really helping understand the biology or science behind thinking, right? Most people, as we shared earlier, everyone has thoughts, very few people think. And so the first half of that is really given that science behind it, why this is important, et cetera. But the second part of this was written in a way to invite people in. In today’s day and age, people are scrolling on social media, they double tap on that quote, and they kept it moving. What did that do for them? Nothing. It’s like taking a seed and throwing it on the ground and say, I’ll come back in the fall waiting for some fruit to bear. In order to get fruit, you got to plant it in the fertile soil, you got to water it, you got to think about it. And so that the second half invites people in to have their own thoughts around these things. If you sat around a campfire with Socrates back 100 years ago, he wasn’t the only one speaking. He was having counsel with other individuals. And so that really is built to, you can’t give people wisdom, you only can give them knowledge. Knowledge is not power. Applied knowledge is power, but it’s only experienced knowledge that turned into your own wisdom. And so that was the invitation to give people a pathway to be able to develop their wisdom through experience and applying it to their life.

Hugh Ballou

I want to go to your website in a minute. Now, people on the podcast can’t see it, but tell them what the URL is for Think3D.

Tamien Dysart

The URL is lets, L-E-T-S, think, T-H-I-N-K, the number three, letter D, dot com. This is the Think3D side of things, transforming workplace culture, which transforms your overall life in that realm. So when people go here, they’re going to find a pathway to improvement, whether you’re an individual contributor. We have online availability for various things. And again, primarily, we work alongside organizations to build better cultures. We don’t work with bad cultures. They don’t call us. They don’t care. We work with organizations that are interested in getting better, because there’s always levels of getting better.

Hugh Ballou

Love it. It’s not one and done either. So, the button at the top, contact us, and I bet you do answer people who inquire of you. So, this is powerful stuff, Damian. So, I want to ask you a few focus questions toward the end. What qualities do you see in the next generation of leaders that give you hope?

Tamien Dysart

My hope really lies in their curiosity. Obviously, they’re being born into a world of technology, of AI, all these various things, and they understand kind of the plight to a degree. There was a kind of a window of that, you know, millennial-ish that maybe people will talk about in a different way, but this next generation really is a curious generation, and they’re going to help accelerate. So my hope really lies in that they understand that they’re handed a pile of stuff to deal with as the world has given them. And they know that they need to lean in. And so I’m seeing the next generation curious and also having a more compassionate heart for humankind, which in the space of nonprofits, right, it falls very much in line on that. So I’m very optimistic about their level of curiosity and engagement.

Hugh Ballou

In Richard Rohr’s writings, he says, transformed people transform people. And so in the essence that leaders who learn are transformed, how do we pay it forward and become mentors for those others coming behind us?

Tamien Dysart

It’s interesting you ask that, Huw, so I have a group of mentees that I, it’s called the Young Kings Collective, and it’s seven men of color that I meet with on a monthly basis. And we’ve had these luncheons over the last two years with legislators, our mayor, chief of police. And so we’re sitting down around this table learning from these leaders. And what’s interesting, I’d say about 75% aren’t very good at articulating their journey. all these lessons learned that got to these positions and so one of the best things that one of the, Trey Loner was one of my early leaders, he helped put his arm around me but he walked me through experiences as they were happening real time because failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it and that’s one of the best lessons that I learned of if you spend time reflecting, if you spend time reviewing what maybe went wrong per se, Now you can start to learn from other people’s journeys as well as learn real time in your own. So one of the greatest things I think that leaders can do is pass along their experience by slow walking their lessons learned, what’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten, all the various things. But then secondarily, you have to give people chances to be able to fail a little bit, right? Give them a little bit of leash, but then teach them the lessons along the way. It’s not black and white. Walk them through what they could do better so they can learn real time so that when you’re not around as a leader, they know the methodology of accelerated learning.

Hugh Ballou

That’s a powerful place to end. We’ve just come to the end of our interview and we’ve covered a lot of territory. Tamian, thank you for sharing your insights today. Your message about elevating ourselves so we can elevate others is both timely and inspiring. For our listeners and our viewers who want to learn more about your work, you’ve got your website, they’ve got your book. So, I encourage people to reach out. ask a question on the contact us, get a copy of the book. There’s a whole lot in a very little space for us to learn. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, Damian, and I’ve learned something today. Thank you so much for being my guest today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Tamien Dysart

Yeah, thanks for having me, Hugh.