Magnificence Is Not a Solo Journey: Finding Someone to Hold the Vision
Featured Narrative: Tim Toterhi, Founder, Plotline Leadership
Sometimes your mentors know exactly what you need.
When the brass knuckles met his face, it was with enough force to knock him to the ground. Twenty years old, Tim Toterhi had been hit many times before. It had been nearly a decade since he’d first wandered into the neighborhood karate class where Sensei Sara had taken him in and put him in the dojo with adults. But this was different. This was the street, and the attack had been planned. Tapped on the shoulder from behind, he’d been mistaken for someone else that night. It was “devastating,” he recalls during our interview. But as brutal as the physical assault, and as ravaging as the financial fallout without health insurance, that event, more than the lousy neighborhoods that he’d grown up in, more than the dyslexia that had made test taking impossible in school, put his future in jeopardy. Because, for the first time since he’d been practicing martial arts and slowly creating a trajectory to a new life, Tim was in doubt. It was, in his words, “a huge setback that tested kind of everything that I had been taught up to that point about what was possible.”
Tim recalls with certainty that he was 12 years old when he first walked into the martial arts school. “Amazed,” as he was, “at what was going on in that dojo,” he couldn’t help but stick around. Sensei Sara had invited him into her adult classes that met several times each week. And discerning the economics of his situation, she reduced his fee. But even still, Tim remembers, “There were certain times when three bucks wasn’t possible.” So, instead, Sensei gave him a job sweeping up and helping out at the school in exchange for classes. It would be years before he realized there was a janitorial staff to take care of those duties. The dojo would become more than a place to go after school, more than merely something to keep him out of trouble. It became a portal to a different life.
“The challenge that I faced at that time was I could only see one path,” Tim tells me, reflecting back to the period before he met Sensei Sara. That path meant that a friend might leave an afternoon’s game of playing cards with a vague reference to having to “go do this thing.” Tim knew that in the Bronx and the neighborhoods just outside of New York City that he called home, those words could have different meanings, likely none of them good. And despite the worry over groceries and the challenges of life at home, Tim tells me that the greatest impediment to a different future other than what the neighborhood offered was to get “out of your own frame of reference.” That was the most difficult part of composing a different life. It was also the most essential. Sure, the obvious right choice was to “go to school, and get an education, and do that sort of thing and take a different road,” Tim explains. But there was a nearly insurmountable challenge. “You have to see that that’s actually possible,” he tells me.
At the dojo, for the first time in his life, Tim was witnessing firsthand “what success could look like.” He watched as people in class would “go from knowing nothing about an endeavor to actually making progress and moving through the ranks.” Success was there, in front of him. He could see it. And surrounded, as he was, by adults, the dojo was a crystal ball of sorts where he could “flash forward” to what his own decisions in the present might mean for his future. He watched and listened as former students returned to class to put their lives back together after wrong turns, while others came back and spoke about reaping the “dividends” of staying the course. Sensei’s first gift, he tells me, was showing him a different path for his life. Her second, he emphasizes, was teaching him how to have “the discipline and rigor to choose it every day.”
The wooden floor of the dojo was also a teacher. On it, he practiced. Over and over again, he faced adults who were bigger, stronger, and more experienced, honing his martial arts skills, but perhaps more crucially, becoming conditioned to facing seemingly overwhelming challenge. That lesson, of how to “embrace your circumstances and the reality of what they are” he contrasts to the “fluff” he’d heard espoused from some who, even if well meaning, would talk about “motivation” but leave him at a loss for how, exactly, to change his life. Tim explains: “That whole concept of limitations and not having any, I thought was actually kind of harmful.” The mat acknowledged limitations and obstacles, even put them on display. And then it asked that he answer the question: “What do I have to do to go around the rock?” Over time, he explains, that became a new way of thinking. But its sum total was much more than a good habit. It was a new frame of reference.
“I always used to joke, I had more points on my license than I had on the SAT,” Tim tells me with wry humor that often leaves me laughing during our interview. Despite adhering to Sensei’s expectation that he “go to school, go to class, go to do the right thing,” dyslexia had presented its own set of challenges. “Bs and Ds don’t make for good test-taking,” he shares. But, there were teachers who’d taken an interest, and as he made his way through school, they helped him “navigate through the insanity that is night school.” He was working by day, in college at night. And despite the fact that it was a “tough road,” there was a path, and he had a plan. The process of taking “slow, methodical” steps toward a goal, something that he’d learned and perfected at the dojo, had given him the experience of endurance. On what would become a pivotal night during this period in his life, when an unforeseen blow to the face would leave him on the pavement, Tim had a year and a half of college under his belt. He’d been gaining traction.
Vinnie was a “New York cop,” Tim recalls. Tough, big, and very accomplished in martial arts. When he took you into the dojo, he meant to knock you around a bit. And the day that Sensei put Tim on the floor with Vinnie was no different. Since the attack, Tim had been teetering, on the brink of “leaving everything behind.” The question whirring around in his head, overcoming his hope for the future, was “What else is going to come along to knock you away from school, or knock you away from a job?” But as they sparred, Vinnie asked different questions: Could I have done anything? Could Sensei? Tim had to answer no. And then, it was like an “instant switch,” he reports. The self-interrogation stopped. Although damaging, the assault “was a circumstance, it was something that happened, and I had beaten circumstance before,” Tim shares. In that context, the incident lost its grip.
Tim would go on to write a book on personal safety and dedicate it to Sensei Sara. In keeping with her teachings of a “payback type of philosophy,” he donated proceeds to an organization that worked with survivors of violence, turning the horror of that night into a “circle around.” He also went on to teach martial arts to kids, taking to heart Sensei’s instruction that success was not just for oneself. “As you grew up in the ranks, you had more responsibility to actually help others,” Tim recalls. And after completing night school, he made his way into the professional world, initially at smaller companies and then, landing a global role to which he’d aspired. The first time he applied for that position, the interviewer rejected him, saying that he didn’t have the right qualifications. Upon reapplying when the position became vacant again a couple of years later, he was met by the same interviewer. This time, he pressed and suggested that he was capable. In the end, he got the job and the thanks of a grateful employer. That role was the beginning of a career working across the globe, authoring more books and articles, and helping others progress in their own careers. I tell him during our interview that it strikes me as gutsy to not only reapply but also face the person who’d already once disqualified him. Tim tells me that in his head he’d been thinking, “Maybe you’re playing at a black belt level, and right now I’m a green belt. . . . What else do I need to do? You tell me.”
Given the challenges he’d overcome, it’s hard to imagine that Tim might look back and think that he’d do anything differently at all, but he shares with me that there is one thing he wished he’d gotten earlier, understood sooner. “The tough things that you have, whether it’s in life or work or family . . . let it pass if they’re those uncontrollable things,” he reflects. There were times growing up when he was annoyed and frustrated at situations in his life that were not in his power to change, and for those that were particularly tough, he relays that he “didn’t realize how heavy anger was.” It was much later before he realized that not only was he lighter without it but also that not carrying it made his own progress easier, as well as his work “lifting other people up.”
In part, Tim’s story is an extraordinary account about the lens we look through and its power to shape the course of our lives. But it is also a narrative about a vision holder who altered the course of Tim’s trajectory by helping him see when he could not. As critical as our frame of reference is, it is not enough. We need others along the way. And perhaps those who are the most complete vision holders do more than see our potential and nourish it. Instead, they also steadfastly accompany us, when we’re not soaring, when there has been a significant setback, or, as was the case for Tim, when we are in danger of utter derailment, and in those times, help us find our way back to ourselves so that we might find our way forward again.
As he looks back on that 12-year-old kid who was taken in by a sensei, Tim tells me that he was “really lucky.” I can’t help but think of the contrast between the boy who couldn’t see a viable path out of the neighborhood and the man whose frame of reference is “Know your circumstances, find a work-around from it, and then get really methodical about moving to the next step.” We can’t know what might have become of his life’s arc had Tim not wandered into that martial arts school, nor can we know what might have happened had he walked away from his new life when he was struggling to recover after the attack. But it’s likely not an exaggeration to suggest that the second juncture was as critical as the first and that had his teacher not known her student, not known that he was in trouble, some, if not all, of the accomplishment of Tim’s life since might have evaporated into an unfollowed future.
Tim tells me that they are still in touch.