🎙️Resilience, Leadership & Life Lessons with Tom LeNoble | Real English Conversations Podcast for Global Professionals

This is the Real English Conversations podcast. Where we help you to communicate clearly and confidently in the conversations that matter most in the workplace and your professional life. Hey everyone, it's Curtis Davies here from the Real English Conversations podcast,

helping global professionals speak clearly and confidently at work. This week's guest is someone whose story blends leadership, resilience, and reinvention in a way that I know will inspire you. My guest is Tom Lenoble, an executive leader, international speaker, resilience coach, and philanthropist. His career spans Fortune 500 companies like MCI,

Walmart.com, Palm, and Meta, or also known as Facebook, as well as high growth startups. He's currently the CEO of the Academy for Coating Excellence and a leadership coach with the Miller Center at Santa Clara University, where he mentors leaders and entrepreneurs worldwide. Tom is also a forthcoming author of My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Downs and High Heels,

a book that reflects his extraordinary journey, including surviving two life-threatening illnesses and three separate diagnoses of six months to live. He lives by a simple but powerful conviction. I'm still here. And this week, we're going to talk about what that really means for resilience, leadership, and how to create impact in the face of adversity. Tom, welcome to the show.

I'm really glad that you're here. Thank you, Curtis. It's great to be with you. Excellent. Let's start here. You've worked with some of the biggest companies in the world as well as some fast-moving startups. What moments in your career have

shaped your approach to leadership? Well, I'll give you three examples. One is I worked for an amazing company called MCI. That company here in the United States broke up the bells to be able to allow what's called Equal Access so people could dial long distance with a one versus codes.

And I was with them very early in my career. It was a great company because they invested in their people. They realized that the people in the company is what made the company and therefore impacted their customers and their success.

And as a result, we got lots of leadership training, which was really amazing because the company was really growing and fast paced and so we were able to get it from some of the greats like Peter Drucker and the like. The second example I'll give you was at Walmart.com where I was the head of customer service.

I spent a lot of my time in Walmart headquarters in Bittenville, Arkansas, a place I never expected to be in my career. But I'll tell you when you are at the presence of the largest company at the world at the time.

It was amazing because you can imagine some of the leadership that was going on and the people leading in the different ways they were approaching it. I'll never forget being there one time, waiting to speak to the president of financial services. And I was sitting in a break room and a woman walked in and I said, hi, I'm Tom.

What's your name? And she said, my name is Melanie. I said, Melanie, what do you do? She says, I monitor the refrigerators.

I looked around this break room and saw three refrigerators and thought, wow, they to have a person watching these three refrigerators. She saw the puzzle look at my face and said to me, I don't think you understand.

I monitor every refrigerator in the United States, every freezer. I know if it goes out before the store does. That type of leadership that it requires

to run something like that with efficiency and the systems to support it was amazing to be able to be exposed to it and learn about it. And then finally I would share with you,

I started at Facebook, I was in the first 100 employees, I think 57, but who's counting? I interviewed with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 19, and everyone there had deferred business school,

law school to work for Facebook because it was still in colleges. It was their dream job. As a result, I was old enough to be everyone's father.

What an extraordinary opportunity to learn leadership in a new way of leading people that were so much younger than I was and who were brilliant. Three fascinating examples, I hope your viewers enjoyed.

Yeah, I'm enjoying listening to these examples. You're such a great storyteller and a great speaker. You have a great voice that is really easy to listen to, really easy to understand,

and we're gonna get a little bit more personal here if you don't mind, but you've survived some huge things in your life, multiple life-threatening illnesses,

but you always find this way to come back, pick yourself up, and dust yourself off, and you're kept coming back stronger and stronger every time. What did these experiences teach you about resilience that no school or business school can ever touch or teach? Did that really bring to the experience of life learning for you?

You know, Curtis, it's interesting that you asked this question because, yes, two life-threatening illnesses. The first one I was told was terminal. I was given six months to live three times and I have lived with metastatic cancer. And as you know, I fondly say I'm still here. I think what I've learned about resilience is resilience isn't about just getting up.

Resilience is about getting up, reinventing and having growth from your experience. I see resilience as a muscle. Just like we would exercise our bicep or tricep, you can exercise the muscle of resilience and it will then be stronger and stronger as you face things in life. I remember on my second time of being six months to live, I chuckled when the

doctor told me that. Now if you want to disturb a group of doctors, give a chuckle when they tell you have six months to live. They don't know what to do with that information, but I felt like I knew something which was at that point that the ability to look at it as something that was a challenge, yes, but that was potentially overcomable

and that I could stand tall in the presence of it, knowing that that's what I was facing. It wasn't something to hide, to tuck under the rug. It was real.