A Conversation With... Richard Gordon

The Monthly Aspectarian: Stedman, you're the Chairman and CEO of a company that creates customized corporate training and leadership development programs. You're also the author of You Can Make It Happen: A Nine-Step Plan for Success. How did your interest in this field evolve over the years?

Stedman Graham: It evolved from having been programmed every single day, doing the same thing over and over and following the same program that everybody else follows. People always told me, go to school, get a job and work " and so, you know, you kind of follow that. What you realize as you grow older, is that you're not doing exactly what you should be doing or want to do " nor do you know how.

I discovered a process that I call the Nine-Step Process. It teaches how to create our own opportunities and control our own lives, based on understanding who we are and applying the best of the principles to the foundation that we build for yourself.

TMA: What sources did you draw on as you put this together?

SG: I grew up in the church and went to Sunday School -- you know, mom made you go to church every Sunday -- but I enjoyed that. Growing up, there were Boy Scouts and various smaller organizations that I got involved in. Playing sports was a major part of my life growing up -- basketball, Little League baseball -- and high school sports and organizations. Through that whole process, I was developing myself, trying to find myself and trying to build some value into my life, which I think everybody tries to do.

A couple of things had an impact on me. I had some work experiences with some close and very special people like Bob Brown of North Carolina whom I worked and traveled around the world with. He was former Special Assistant to President Nixon and had a PR business. I worked with him in PR and marketing, and met all kinds of people. We went to South Africa and a number of places. I traveled around the world and found that it wasn't really the way that I thought things were. That was my first eye opener in terms of how the world works, because I really hadn't understood that.

Of course, being in a relationship with a very powerful woman, Oprah Winfrey, was the other thing that really opened my eyes in a major way. I got type-cast as her significant other, her boyfriend, and I kind of lost my identity based on that. I was able to make the decision to find out who I was as a person, because of those two things.

One of the things I was a victim of is that I had a race-based consciousness. I thought my world was dependent on white America and that I couldn't do anything without it. I thought the color of my skin was the reason I was held back. I then realized that it wasn't about my skin color, about my race, it was about my own lack of personal self-development. When I saw that, I began to understand, through my travels and involvement, that there is a process for success. Once I discovered that there is a process for success, I realized that you really can create your opportunities based on how you think and feel about yourself.

TMA: Were there any specific books or teachings that had an influence on you?

SG: I read the books of Stephen Covey and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. They were a big influence in my life. I read a lot of others that talked about personal development. Ideas that were process-oriented and systematic really opened my eyes. The combination of traveling and learning, being in a situation where the spotlight's on you ... you have to look within yourself because you're in the public eye and the pressure's on you almost every day that you walk out the door. I served in the army for a number of years. I worked in the prison system for five years and that was a big developmental piece for me. It's a combination of all the things that make you who you are. All of this was the stimulus for me to discover what I call real freedom, which is the ability to build a foundation, understand who you are, and understand how you're going to relate to the world that you live in.

TMA: How did you arrive at the nine points?

SG: I looked at the lives of successful people around the world, and of course I had my own base of experience to compare it to. I grew up in a kind of culturally deprived community, so I knew how it was to live one kind of life; I looked at other people's lives and said, "What's the difference between us and what's the commonality? What makes people achieve? What makes people perform at the highest level?" Through that process of finding answers, I was able to come up with nine steps that I thought were applicable to a person becoming successful.

TMA: Would you mind taking us through them?

SG: The first step, Check Your ID, is really the most important thing. If you don't get that, you really don't get anything. Being able to understand who you are and build a foundation based on what you're made of and what your mission in life is, is a critical thing.

The second step is Create Your Vision. What do you want to do? What are you passionate about? What's your passion, what are your talents and what do you love to do? To create that vision is the second step. How do you visualize yourself in the future? How do you see your image? What can you be? What can you become? Who do you want to become?

The third step is to Develop Your Travel Plan. How do you reach the goals that you're setting for yourself? How do you develop the plan to make this happen? How do you incorporate it into your life? How do you develop a time management program that allows you to accomplish what you want?

Step four, Master the Rules of the Road of your guiding principles, your value system that you create for yourself that allows you to determine how you're going to live your life.

Step Into the Outer Limits, step five, talks about your fears, and risk, and taking a chance. It talks about what's holding you back.

TMA: Fear stops a lot of people.

SG: Yes, it stops a lot of people all the time! Step six, Pilot the Seasons of Change, talks about being flexible and able to adjust to the different kinds of things that you deal with. That's a big one because of all the adjustments you have to make. Do you have the internal capacity to deal with all the issues you have to face every single day, or do you break down?

Step seven, Build Your Dream Team, is essentially what it says. No one makes it alone. You need a team to be able to see the vision and accomplish the goals that you want. Who's on your team? What are their value systems as compared to yours?

Step eight is Win By a Decision. It is making the right choices based on having the right information. Most of us suffer from bad information, and not knowing the right things to do. For years, I suffered from this. I was hearing the bad information that "You can't do this because of your color." Some people say they can't do something because of their gender. You just get bad information that has an effect on you all of your life.

Step Nine is Commit to Your Vision. It's one thing to talk about what you're going to do, it's another thing to develop and sustain a program that you're going to follow every day of your life, based on these steps. What's it going to be like to sustain the program that you're going to develop for yourself to take action?

TMA: Anyone from any background can follow these steps.

SG: That's what's wonderful about them. I've taught them in corporate training, in school-based programs, in college, and I use them every day for everything I do. I look at what vision I want to create, ask myself, "What kind of image do I want to create for myself based on this project?" It's a way of thinking. What it does is to enhance your own human performance because you're looking to maximize your effectiveness and the results of whatever you do. You can apply this thinking process to whatever you're doing, whether it's in your job, your family, your school, whatever it is.

TMA: Everyone's interested in improving the quality of their lives, but I think we need to communicate to people that if you improve the quality of your being, the quality of your life goes up right along with it.

SG: Right. You got it.

TMA: You have a new book, Build Your Own Life Brand.

SG: That's an extension of the Nine Steps, which takes you to the marketplace. Build Your Own Life Brand (I spent a lot of time in advertising) is really about seeing yourself as a personal brand and then utilizing the same strategic management principles that companies use. You can use those principles and adapt them to yourself. What happens is that when you take control of your brand, you see yourself differently. It's more of a development tool. It's good for people who are working, for people who are out in the marketplace. It's for people who have developed a platform for themselves that they can now use and have it enhance their own personal value.

TMA: It's quite a personal journey you've had. What economic level were you born into?

SG: My father had his own business; he was a painter and a carpenter. We were better off than most people. I never wanted for anything.

TMA: But you had a mindset to overcome.

SG: You're right, I had a mindset. It doesn't make a difference where you came from or what you had. The mind keeps you from moving forward. It's how you think and feel about yourself. I played in the European Pro Basketball League for a number of years but I knew that I could have played in the NBA if I would have had a different mindset. Today, when I'm competing, playing tennis or even just doing some hobbies, I realize that because of how I grew up -- I really have to force myself to have the kind of intensity that I need to have all the time to achieve the level I'd like to achieve.

I was in Washington to interview Michael Jordon. I saw the intensity that he has in terms of winning. Winning is everything to him. So he sets himself up with the mindset first, and that's what you've got to have. You've got to have a steel trap. The difference between one professional and another is a mental capacity and intensity for what you want to achieve. I look back at most of my life, where I was taught a lot of fear, and so I reacted with a lot of fear. Today, I realize how much fear played a part in my life, and still I have to deal with it every day to catch myself from falling back into that old comfort zone of being afraid. I have to overcome that. I'm constantly retraining myself, trying to get rid of those old bad habits. If you work at it long enough, you improve. You may never really become 100%, but you improve to the best that you can. You do achieve if you can have some self awareness of what you need in order to be able to overcome the stumbling blocks that get in the way.

TMA: Nobody works harder than Michael Jordon.

SG: His skill level is high, which is good, but also his ability to not ever give up. The reason he scored that last basket in Utah when they were winning the championship when there were a very few seconds left to go is an indication of how he thinks and feels about himself. He will never give up. But you've got to have that stuff in order to get past some of the obstacles you might have in your way. To transcend race, to transcend gender. A lot of people will try to keep you down. Yet anybody can transcend it! That's what's wonderful about it, and that's why the Nine Steps are so applicable, because you know, you can take a kid who doesn't think he can do it and show him how, and all of a sudden, he can do anything he wants because he understands the process of how to do it. That was the piece the kid was missing.

TMA: We're all in the same boat. The human condition transcends race and gender and nationality and all of those things.

SG: True. It's all about the ability to see yourself differently, to see your possibilities, to see the strengths that you bring and the talent, not the weakness. If you're taught to see the weakness, and you're programmed all the time to think that you're a second-class citizen, that's exactly how you act. And that's exactly how people will respond to you.

TMA: When you operate out of fear it creates more of what you're afraid of.

I thought I might not bring up your relationship with Oprah because I figured you might not want to talk about it. But since you mentioned her earlier ...

SG: Well, it's very freeing to be able to talk about her. I think that what's wonderful is that she has her own career and does the things she want to do. She loves what she does and I love what I do. My life is different from hers, even though we focus on the same things, which is trying to get people to improve the quality of their life based on our philosophies. She does it on television, I do it on the ground. I enjoy what I do, and it really doesn't have anything to do with her. And that's a great thing.

TMA: It's good that you've gotten past the point of being affected by people's attitudes about you vis a vis her. That must have been a pretty big thing for you.

SG: It's something that I had to deal with, but I think it's the same for anybody in that situation. For me, it was more public, but people have to deal with a lot of issues when it comes to relationships. If you're in one where your wife or significant other makes more money, I think that's an issue for any man. I think men probably have a hard time dealing with that.

TMA: It's really distasteful what the super-market tabloids do to you guys.

SG: They're just trying to make money. We're not the only ones who are affected by them ' a lot of people are. With the media now, there are so many outlets for it, a lot of people are affected by a lot of what's said. People are looking to sell newspapers, sell advertising, sell television programming. They use other people to do it.

TMA: Do you have any words you'd like to close with?

SG: It's wonderful to know that you can do anything you want if you understand how and you understand the process of success and you understand who you are. I go back to building that foundation. If you don't have a foundation or base, then you're subject to turn all of your power over to the external, to everybody else who defines who you are as opposed to you defining who you are.

I think it's the greatest gift in the world to be able to define who you are and build the kind of program and the kind of life that you want for yourself without having to relinquish your power to somebody else to determine who you should become and what your possibilities are.

TMA: This is something that anybody can do. There isn't anybody who can't do better in their lives.

SG: We all have the ability inside to be anything that we want, and to maximize our effectiveness. It's all about understanding the process of doing that, and it's all about really believing in yourself. That's a big one. To believe in yourself and to believe that you can do it -- that's the big piece. A lot of people are intelligent, a lot have all the intellect, but can they believe in themselves? To utilize what God has given them, what they've been blessed with to be able to move to the next level and achieve what they want -- that's the connector. We can connect our belief system with our intellect and our technical skills and our aptitude and build whatever we want based on the resources that the world offers. You can put all this together and become a whole person in a whole world so that you can create maximum effectiveness.

Stedman Graham is chairman and CEO of SGA, Inc. and Graham Gregory Bozell, Inc., a firm that provides management and marketing consulting services related to sports and entertainment, and works to create and advance intellectual properties that promote education and personal development. Graham is also a partner in Kemper Golf Management, Chicago. He serves as director of George Washington University's Forum for Sport and Event Management and Marketing and also writes a monthly lifestyle column for Inside Sports magazine. Highly active in community service, Graham is the founder of Athletes Against Drugs, a nonprofit organization of athletes and community leaders committed to eliminating drug use among the nation's youth. Graham serves on many boards, including the national boards of the Urban League and Junior Achievement, and a member of the Economic Club of Chicago. He received his bachelor's degree from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, and his master's degree from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.