Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Congressman Tim Ryan

I recently interviewed Congressman Tim Ryan on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today spent two decades as a member of Congress. Tim Ryan was elected to the House in 2002 and won ten times before running for Senate in the past election cycle. Congressman Ryan is currently the chief Global Business Development Officer for Zoetic Global. And as the leader of the new national advocacy group We The People. Tim, thank you for joining us.

Tim: Hey, thanks for having me.

Adam: You grew up in Northeast Ohio, the same region that you spent two decades representing as a member of Congress. You were raised by a single mom who worked a clerical job to support the family. You played football in high school, you were a quarterback. And you played until you had a career-ending knee injury. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

Tim: Yeah, that's a great question. I just turned 50. So I enjoy more often now looking back on some of those experiences, but really growing up really, it's about halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh in Niles, Ohio, a small town. And really growing up there were two things really driving the culture around my brother and I and our family. And that was sports that we played, growing up from the backyard to baseball and flag football, and then eventually went to my high school years with basketball and football. And it was really my coaches, especially like many kids coming out of a divorced family where there was a lot of conflict. And my pops wasn't around a ton. We've since reconciled and life is good. But back then it was a little more difficult. So many coaches and teachers were a big part of shaping who I was, and really through the competition of athletics, learning how to work hard, learning how to be disciplined, learning how to work as a team and really become a leader as a quarterback or a captain of the teams over the years. And the other thing really was the church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel church, and then I went to Catholic school my whole childhood through high school. And it was the idea of service, the idea of you are going to be an altar boy, you are going to participate in the church. My grandfather was an usher, my grandfather ran the beer tent at the Summer Festival, my mom and grandmother volunteered. And that idea of the social gospel in the Catholic faith, of giving back, of serving, and also having a spiritual dimension to your life. So meditation, praying the rosary, contemplation, like that was always a big part of growing up too. So those are the two things that really drove me and I think I've carried all of that with me now into my 50s. So it was a great, great childhood, a great way to grow up and my mom was 100% Italian too, so we ate a lot of good food along the way.

Adam: Clearly the power of mentorship, instrumental to your development, you mentioned the role that coaches played stepping in, in the absence of having a dad who was there for you as much as you would have liked. An early mentor for you, someone who is known in the world of politics, maybe not in the best way, you wound up running against him, and that's Jim Traficant.

Tim: Yeah, yeah, Congressman Traficant was very much a mentor to me in my early years. I met him coincidentally enough at my high school football banquet. And he was the guest speaker, and I was the quarterback of the team. And he used to be the quarterback back in the day when he played. And so I was running late because we were coming from basketball practice to the banquet. And so when we got there, my mom said, ‘Hey, you better go say hello to the congressman. He keeps asking. He wants to meet this quarterback. He wants to meet Tim Ryan, the quarterback.’ And so I went over and said hello, and we sat down. Dinner was late. I ended up BSing with him for probably almost an hour and he was telling stories and charismatic as you can imagine that I tell people all the time. I've met Barack Obama, I've met George W. Bush. I've met Bill Clinton on multiple occasions. There was nobody more charismatic than Jim Traficant. And he was just completely entertaining. I got a scholarship to play football. When I blew my knee out and I couldn't play anymore, I was looking for some direction. And I went to Washington, DC, and I interned for him. And I caught the political bug and kind of put the sports bug behind me. And he was very much a mentor. And he had some demons like the world passed him by and he thought it was still 1930 and 40 and 50, where you could maybe take a little money on the side, which the federal government tends to frown upon. And so he ended up in prison. And it was very ironic because when he got out of prison, seven years later, I had run for his seat and won it for Congress. And he came back and I literally had to run against him. So it's still the hero's journey there of having to slay your father figure. But he was a very, very good politician. And like most mentors, I think you or any of your listeners will know from life that you have these mentors, and they have a great deal of influence on you and you learn a great deal from them, you learn a lot of what you should do. And you also learn what not to do. He provided me with that example.

Adam: It's a great point. And there's a lot to learn in what you shared, there's a lot to unpack. Your career in politics is really a byproduct of that one-hour conversation that you had with Jim Traficant, him calling you over you engaging and being engaged for an hour, having the ability to connect with someone and connect with someone in a natural, organic way and develop an authentic relationship, a relationship that has real meaning. That's invaluable. And that, in your case, kicked off your career and kicked off an incredibly successful career.

Tim: You never know who you're influencing in that every interaction you have with somebody is an opportunity to share and be engaged. And maybe if you're a little bit older to coach up a little bit or give some good advice. Now that I'm 50, and even the last few years, I give unsolicited advice to young people all the time, whether they ask for it or not, when I think it's important for those of us who have been through the kind of experiences that I've been through to share with them. And he was an open-hearted guy, and we're clearly not perfect. And had some demons as I said, but he was a very open-hearted guy and he wanted to help me and he gave me his card. And he said, ‘Hey, if you ever need anything from me, call me.’ And I never thought I would, because I was going to the NFL to be the Cleveland Browns quarterback, I never was going to need some congressmen. But yeah, it was really just an interest of mine, politics. I went to John F. Kennedy High School and my grandmother worked at the courthouse. And my mom then later worked at the courthouse, and we would hear about the judges and the state representatives and the county commissioners. So it was always a little political gossip going on at the dinner table. But then to meet the main figure in our area, it really was something and to work for him was really prestigious. I mean, you're talking about politics isn't less prestigious today as it was 30 years ago. But it was a big deal for my family to have somebody interning for the congressman, that was a big deal. And then I got a job with him. That was a big deal. My grandparents were first-generation Italian American, we were in a working-class community. And here I was working for the congressman. And then that provided the level of prestige and honors for our family too, which is really interesting. So we hope that we can all help each other, get on the path and hopefully stay on the path.

Adam: Jim Traficant, the most charismatic leader you've been around. Who do you consider to be the best leaders who you have been around? And what do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader?

Tim: Wow, that's a great question. I had some great, great coaches along the way. I was fortunate enough I played for Jim Tressel, who recruited me to go to Youngstown State to play quarterback there. And then he left and went on to Ohio State to win a national championship. He was a phenomenal leader. He knew how to do it. He was very focused, and I think very mission-driven so he was one and then I really have had a chance to become very friendly over the years with Bill Clinton, who helped me a lot over the years. He was, I think, a very, very good political leader, again, with flaws as well, but he was a good leader and I think he did a lot of really, really good things. So those two I've got to know Bernie Kosar who was the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns when I was growing up, obviously through athletics, a good leader, I just feel like these great leaders are people who are really willing to take a stand against the crowd, sometimes sometimes in politics against your own party, if you think that they're doing something wrong, and really being able to hold the line. So those are a couple of examples. I find today honestly, I draw most of my inspiration around leadership, from coaches, from athletics, and in a lot of the sports psychologists that I follow on social media and read their books, I think are the real leaders of today who have really held the line on what leaders are really like, especially in very high-pressure situation. Unfortunately, today, I think a lot of this we get from athletics.

Adam: I'm with you. I have had a lot of great athletes on the podcast, great coaches on the podcast. I did an interview with Joe Maddon. And if you listen to that conversation, you don't need to know the first thing about baseball, you could learn the ins and outs of leadership by listening to what Joe Maddon has to say, you could learn from Jim Tressel, from Bill Clinton, from Bernie Kosar. Leadership is leadership, whether you're leading in politics, on a football field, on a baseball field, in a company in any context.

Tim: Yeah, I really become more and more convinced the older I get is that it's an emotional skill that leaders need. Do you have the guts? Do you have the intestinal fortitude to make the tough call, or to make the tough decision? Or to take the pitcher out when the pitcher’s complaining that they want to stay in but we’d better get this pitcher out of here or we're gonna have a big problem. Do you have the guts to do that? And just over time, you see a lot of the emotional development that you don't see in politics a lot, you see people going along to get along, you see people not making the hard decision, you seem taking the path of least resistance. And that's just not a recipe for success. And it's certainly not the recipe for a strong country. And you've got to be willing to stand with an internal guide, which I think a lot of what we need to do in society is how do we build out that emotional regulation? How do we build out those qualities in people because everybody's a leader, in some capacity, you could be the leader of a family, of a church, even in your day-to-day interactions with people, you can provide some leadership and mentorship as you said earlier. And so we've got to get about the business in this country of really teaching those emotional skills, those qualities that help us develop our kids, especially young boys who don't get that kind of leadership and mentorship that they need.

Adam: It's never too early or too late to get on this journey. The journey of self-discovery, the journey to become a better leader. And I want to ask you about your own journey as a leader. What were some of the toughest decisions that you had to make running for office as a member of Congress? And what did you learn from them?

Tim: Well, there's certainly a lot. The decision to run for office, first and foremost, is a significant decision to make. Because you are really putting yourself out there and which I did at a young age. But then to choose to do that when you have a family, when you have a spouse that works in the community and kids that go to school in the community, who you're really opening them up to the nastiness of politics in modern America. So those decisions themselves are pretty difficult. That made for some tough decisions. I was a Democrat in Congress for a long time and our leader was Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And I made a decision after the 2016 election when Donald Trump won and he won Ohio and Pennsylvania in Michigan and Wisconsin. I had been for a while very critical of Democrats for forgetting our working-class roots and getting away from economic arguments and more into social arguments that I was starting to see how much this was hurting us with working-class people in places like Youngstown, Ohio, that was my district in Akron. So when we lost I made the decision that we needed some new leadership in the Democratic Party and I ran against Nancy Pelosi, who was the most powerful Democrat in the entire country. That was not an easy decision to make. I had to tell her that I was doing it. I had to go face-to-face with my colleagues. She had a lot of support from them. I had to give a speech in front of 230 members of the Democratic Congress, people from across the country, with Nancy Pelosi sitting in the second row staring at me. Like, these are tough decisions, but you know, you have to do what you think is right. And I did what I thought was right. And fortunately, we are still friendly. And I didn't win the race and chose to run for Senate. Like those are tough decisions. And there were some votes along the way, where you have to vote against your party that you're going to get grief from or you have to tell your friends no, when being the youngest child from a divorced parents, like conflict is not necessarily my favorite thing. But you have these moments where you have to make the right decision. And so those are a couple along the way.

Adam: The key theme here is the importance of doing what you believe is right. Having deep conviction and following it, staying true to it. How can one develop that?

Tim: Well, life rubs up against you. And I think having mentors throughout your life that teach you how to do that, that you've watched make tough decisions when they've encouraged you to do the right thing along the way. I think it is really, really helpful. I think about growing up. I mentioned I went to Kennedy High School. I remember President Kennedy making a very, very tough decision on civil rights. That probably wasn't the best political move for him at that time and early 1960s. To say, we can't fight for freedom abroad against the Soviet Union and all our citizens aren't free here at home. And to do that from the Oval Office. Back then the Democratic Party was a very Southern party. And it wasn't a popular thing, I don't think, for him to necessarily do but he did it because it needed to be done. For him to give a speech on peace. When so many people were promoting war with his American University speech. I think President Kennedy is an example for me politically anyway, that you've got to make these tough decisions. When you're a leader and coaches over the years you'd watch take a player out that didn't seem like the thing to do. I remember getting benched myself. I was late for a game by just a few minutes. But I had to ride the pine for the first, I think quarter or two of the game because I broke the team rule. And that was somebody making a tough decision. I was the highest-scoring player on the team. But rules applied to me too.

Adam: Tim, something that you shared, which is very interesting to me. Are you born with character? Or can you develop character? Or is it a little bit of both? And what you shared is, you can get it by osmosis. You can get it by virtue of surrounding yourself with the right mentors, whether they're mentors who you have a personal relationship with, or whether they're mentors who you learn from afar, as you learn from by watching President Kennedy on television. It also requires having a growth mindset, being open to learning, wanting to learn, wanting to listen, wanting to absorb the information that is going to be available to you from the people who you're surrounding yourself with. Being open to that information. Being open to that knowledge, being open to that feedback, being open to getting information from mentors, that's going to help you improve and it could help you improve your moral compass. It could help you improve your EQ. It can help you improve in just about every way possible.

Tim: 100% 100% it helps you improve, but it also allows people to trust you then. One of the key components of developing leaders and one of the key attributes of really good leaders is they're trusted. So here's President Kennedy giving his speech on civil rights. He wasn't just a guy, he wasn't just a rich man's son. He was a war hero. He was a man who knew loss, who lost family members and his brother in the war and he knew suffering and knew pain and people trusted him. At that point, and so he was able to move the needle because people who were in the middle or not necessarily had a strong opinion, one way or the other could be moved because of the strength of the leader. And we see this in our company. I mean, so at Zoetic, where I'm a Chief Global Business Development Officer, the founder of the company, Jerome Ringo, worked for the National Wildlife Federation for 12 years. He ran that organization, he moved over to the Apollo Alliance, which was a climate group of both activists and businesses. And then he went on and started Zoetic to be a clearinghouse for clean technologies. But I say all this because we have people bringing us technologies to Zoetic, whether it's a refrigerant or some other technology. They're not bringing it to Zoetic. They're bringing it to Jerome because they've known him for 30 years. And they trust him. They know he's been in the environmental movement, they know he cares. They know he's a trusted leader. And then, because of that, they have a technology that they want to bring to the market. They bring it to Jerome because they trust him. That's the kind of leadership qualities that we need more of, but I'm watching it. I watched, you use the public sector examples and political leader examples, but it happens in the company I'm with now, because of Jerome's own personal character that people trust him. And that's the leader. If you're the quarterback and the coach is calling a play, there better be a lot of trust there. Or if you're a quarterback, and you're dropping back, and the backside tackle is responsible for you not getting blindsided, there's a lot of trust there. So this is all really an important thing that we've got to again, continue to work on to try to develop. 

Adam: Whether you're a CEO of a company, whether you're a political leader, whether you're a left tackle, how can you develop trust?

Tim: Well, people, they have to trust your character, I think depending on the circumstances, but I think that comes over time. The quarterback is going to stop trusting you if he keeps getting blindsided, then he'll trust you more if he doesn't. And so it comes with experiences, shared experiences over time, where you can trust each other. And it's mostly time that can develop that trust, whether you're a parent or your kids can count on you and trust you that you're going to be there for them or a teacher or coach or a co-worker, it just happens a little bit at a time. And once you have that you have trust, then you have a relationship. And then you can do things together that can lead to a lot of success. I think that's part of it. If you look at the failures of our institutions today in society, political or otherwise, there's no trust between the leaders of the two main political parties in the country, period. And so you can't make a deal, because you don't trust anybody to hold up their end of the bargain. So that's been the political breakdown. That's why Republicans ran, they passed a tax cut, because they can only pass it with Republicans. Democrats ran, they passed some of the infrastructure bill and some of these other reindustrialization initiatives because it was only Democrats. I mean, you look at the breakdown in the Boy Scouts, the breakdown of trust in the Catholic Church, with the huge scandal around the altar boys, that's a complete breakdown of trust. Workers don't necessarily trust the companies. In the area where I come from in Northeast Ohio, where companies slash tens of thousands of workers and move jobs over the border to Mexico or overseas. And there is a complete breakdown in trust in between the worker and the company and workers used to benefit from if a company improved productivity or increased profits, there was a good 3-4 decade period in this country where workers got a significant piece of that action, of the profits and then it became productivity was going through the roof. And workers wages were stagnant. So that led to a breakdown in trust. You go to a doctor and a doctor spends like five minutes with you as a patient and gives you a bunch of prescription drugs. And then you'll walk out and next thing you know you're on 10 or 12 prescription drugs. Well, where's the trust and relationship between the doctor and the patient? There's been a significant breakdown there. You saw the pandemic breakdown of trust between parents and teachers and school boards with the policies around trying to deal with the complexities of a pandemic for the first time in our lifetime. Like that just exposed the lack of trust and so it's pervasive throughout society and it's frustrating. But if we can wrap our arms around it and have some strategies to move forward, we can fix it, we have the ability to do that. But I think identifying that as the underlying problem really is going to be important.

Adam: It really comes down to character, character, and time. Doing. Living your words, living your values, having a deep moral compass, which we spoke about, and then acting on it. Proving your character over time. 

Tim: Amen. 

Adam: You're the rare former member of Congress, who wrote a book on mindfulness. Has any other member of Congress ever written a book on mindfulness?

Tim: No, I'm the only one.

Adam: What can anyone do to develop a winning mindset?

Tim: You have to want one, you have to become aware that that's an important thing. And you have to realize it's hard. It's not a pill that you take. It's not a seminar that you go to, if you were talking about character, it just develops over time. And I think your mindset develops over time. There's rare exceptions of people later in life, who are able to break free, break out, have an experience that can help them break through, maybe that's trauma, or whatever, into a growth mindset. And I worked a lot with veterans when I was in Congress. And I was just really excited as things started to shift from a conversation about post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth, which is flipping the switch on how we look at what the trauma that happened to the veteran and how we're going to deal with it, are we just going to manage it, put them on prescription drugs, and hope that they don't hurt themselves or anybody else for the rest of their life? Or do we say, this is a terrible freakin’ experience and traumatized you, but out of this, you can become stronger. And so having that attitude of ‘you can grow out of this’ shifts the culture on how we deal with that. And I think we can do that same thing. When you talk about mindset, you talk about stress, you talk about teaching kids emotional resiliency, you literally can teach kids how to get their brain out of fight or flight mode. I learned this when I wrote that book A Mindful Nation, or now it's called Healing America, the book I wrote on mindfulness, that you can teach kids in people how to get out of fight or flight mode, through breathing techniques, through contemplative practices, through meditation, through yoga, through body practices. You can literally get your mind from fight or flight mode into a more balanced state. If we could teach these techniques to our kids, you could give kids a hell of a tool to allow them to deal with the trauma that they're dealing with, to get out of the fight or flight mode, and to get back online so that they can learn, they can have more balanced relationships, they can be more in the present moment and experience life. We yell at kids to pay attention, but we never give them the tools on how to pay attention. So that's got to be a part of the plan. It can't just be a philosophical thing. It's got to be a discipline, and some kind of technique, whether it's journaling or meditation or whatever, to start to discipline the mind to be able to operate in that way.

Adam: You were one of 435 members of the House. A lot of different personalities. A lot of people who you agreed with on the issues, a lot of people who you disagreed with on the issues, presumably a lot of people who you liked personally, and presumably a lot of people who you just fundamentally didn't like as human beings. What are the keys to building successful relationships, successful coalitions building consensus, and working successfully with people who you don't agree with and don't particularly like?

Tim: Yeah, it does test your emotional skills for sure. But I think being honest, being friendly, being open, not being so super judgmental. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's just some people who are in it to get attention. They're in it to get a rise out of people, they're in it to get reelected. They could care less about anything else. It's like any other workplace. Everybody's worked in an environment where there's 20% of people like this and 60% like that, and 20% like this, that Congress is no different. But I think being honest. ‘Can I help? You want to work with me on this? I can't. I don’t agree with what you're doing or my constituents aren't for this,’ either those kinds of things. But then if there is something like I think honestly, trying to search to find something to work across the aisle on with somebody from the other party. I tried to do this a lot in Congress, and you grow to have a working relationship with somebody, it's called being an adult. It's called being a mature human being who said, I don't have to agree with everybody on everything to be able to get something done. I had this joke during my Senate campaign that I started telling. And then we eventually made a commercial out of it. But I would say to the audiences that people today, because of the broken down trust and broken systems that we have, they think they've got to agree with their Congressman 100% of the time, their Senator 100% of the time, the President of the United States 100% of the time. And I would say, is anybody here married, and people would laugh, and I would say, I love my wife, and she's my best friend, and this and that. And I said, but if we have 10 conversations in one day, and we agree on like six or seven of them, we crack a bottle of wine and celebrate how great our marriage is on that day. So if you don't agree with your spouse 100% of the time, how in God's name would you think you're going to agree with your Congressman 100% of the time or the President 100% of the time? So even when my wife and I have disagreements about things, which we often do, that's just the reality of a relationship. When it comes to our kids, right? We agree on a lot of the main things about how to raise a kid and what's important and what the priorities are. So we agree on things, and we work together on them. And if there's things we don't agree with, we don't like, sit around, talk about them all day long. Like, let's talk about all the things we disagree on. It comes up and you have to manage it. And I think it's the same in Congress, it was just like having an open heart and an open mind, and then trying to just figure it out. And I think if you get on that level, with people that there's no expectation, I think it reduces the conflict. And it helps you resolve when you have, again, now you have trust, that makes it easier to resolve the conflicts. And I think we've lost that art form and political system today.

Adam: Tim, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Tim: I've always felt like you've got to take some quiet time, every day. I think that's essential, especially in today's environment, you have to have some quiet time. And like I mentioned, I wrote a book about mindfulness meditation, but there's all kinds of different contemplative practices or just shut everything down for 20 minutes and just be and I think that can start to get you in touch with the deeper parts of who you are. And all religions, if you're a religious person, all religions have some contemplative practice. The Hindus have mantra-based practices. And the Jewish religion has the Kabbalah, a lot of contemplative practices there. The Catholic Church has centering prayer, rosaries, like there's a lot of doors in, and then I would say, do that. And really, you got to read stuff. You know, you've got to read about great leaders, and watch documentaries. I mean, if you're not into reading, do audiobooks, I really encourage people, the books that coaches write, that the sports psychologists write, very, very powerful lessons in leadership and life that transfer from sports to life and business. And there's a lot of great folks out there, I would just say, tap into that, and you'll be well on your way.

Adam: Tim, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Tim: Awesome. Thanks for having me.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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