Emmy Award Winning TV Anchor

 

“It’s about attention, and it’s about intention.

Attention seems very simple, but these days we’re very distracted by a lot of things.

What do I want my life to be about? I need to make sure that I’m putting my attention in that direction.

So, with intention, put my attention in a specific place.”

 

Career and a Servant’s Heart

 

Tracy Davidson is a news anchor. She’s a public speaker. She is a breast cancer survivor.

Tracy’s passion was ignited for news while working in her college’s radio station. She fell in love with learning, information and sharing information hoping that it would help people somehow. Tracy made the jump from radio to television 32 years ago. She was focused on journalism and reporting when the CBS station in Syracuse asked Tracy to become an anchor. Tracy said no.

“I was so focused on the reporting that I didn’t want to be distracted,” she said.

However, CBS assured Tracy that being an anchor would give her more input at the station and time to work on stories she felt were important. She worked at that CBS station for ten years. Afterwards, she moved to NBC10 in Philadelphia where she has been for the past 22 years.

Tracy’s career and personal life revolve around one main life focus: serving.

“I’ve always wanted to serve other people,” she says.

Tracy kept this goal in mind during hard economic times and hosted events at the NBC10 station.

“People lost their jobs, so I got job events here at the station. People were losing their homes, so we were having all kinds of mortgage help. I knew that people needed in-person help as well as just what I could do on TV. So, I started to host events, and I started to go out into the public.”

These events really kickstarted the public speaking part of her life.

Then, in 2015, Tracy battled with and conquered breast cancer.

She has continued to serve others through and because of it.

“Of course, I want to tell people, ‘Don’t wait. Listen to your body.’ So, I go out and speak about that as well.”

Tracy used this difficult time to be more vulnerable than ever with her audience. “I’ve always been honest with people about different things about my life, but I think that that maybe opened the door for me to be more honest and more vulnerable.”

“Let’s face it.” Tracy continued. “All of us have a real us that is vulnerable, and, so, when I was able to actually be super vulnerable in telling my breast cancer story, that’s helped me to be even more comfortable about being more vulnerable in front of other people.”

Tracy considers herself “the luckiest person on the planet. I was able to catch it early, I had a great support system in my friends and family, I live in a city that has world class health care, and I know many, many, many women around the world that don’t have that.”

 

Intention and Attention

 

Tracy’s life exemplifies a life lived with purpose, but this purpose-mindset doesn’t just happen.

For Tracy, intention and attention are key to living a purposeful life.

“When I am distracted for a couple of minutes here and a couple minutes there, whether it’s social media or whether it’s some frustration that you’ll never remember 5 years from now, that’s about attention.”

“Those minutes string into days string into months. So, what do I want my life to be about? What do I say I want my life to be about? Then I need to make sure that I’m putting my attention in that direction and try all the time to not be distracted.”

To maintain her focus, Tracy goes away “every year, and I spend two days, I say, ‘This is the life I want. This is what I care about. This is where I want to spend my time both professionally and personally.’ And then I look at my days. ‘Am I really doing that? And how can I make that adjustment?’”

For Tracy, saying “no” is key to keep intention. “The word ‘no’ is a challenging word for me, but it’s a critical word for me. I think it’s a critical word for everybody. If you have a focus and you say, ‘These are my priorities,’ whatever it is, your top five, your top three, “These are my specific priorities and this is how I want to live.’ Well, that means that you’re going to have to say ‘no’ to the other things.

And ‘no really opens up the door for more ‘yesses’ in your priority areas.”

Tracy made this advice applicable to her own life: “So, really, every single day that I have a request to make this appearance or a request to attend this event, I really have to look critically.”

Then, Tracy spoke directly to women: “I think a lot of people feel like, especially women, ‘I want to help everyone. I want to do everything. I want to be a superwoman.’ Well, you can’t possibly do that number one, and you’re really going to be harmful to your priorities and to your health if you think you can say ‘yes’ to everything.”

Along with saying no, Tracy says down time is also key to living with purpose. It helps us focus bringing us back to Tracy’s intentional attention.

“What’s happening I think for all of us, because of these digital distractions, our brains are physically being trained to do task switching which is different from multi-tasking. Our brains are getting stronger at going back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth which is decreasing our ability to focus both in depth and duration, so when you do want to focus in depth and duration your brain doesn’t do that as easily.”

This affects more than just your day to day: “If you don’t train it then you have no shot at being focused during the day on whatever you say your priorities are.”

Tracy’s “faith plays a very big role” in her purpose: “I go back to, “What am I here for? I’m here to serve. Who do I care about pleasing? I care about pleasing God and myself.”

Her servant mindset is evident through her trials and in her successes. It’s something she reminds herself of daily and yearly. 

“The older you get, you realize how finite life is, and, at the end of my life, I do want to be able to look back and say I spent time focused on this. I don’t like to beat myself up, but there are days I get home and I think, ‘What did you do today?’ And it’s one thing if I say, ‘Well a friend called me up and she needed me to be fully present and not thinking about anything else and really to be with her.” Well, that’s a value to me.

But if I was sort of a gerbil on a wheel, not really paying attention to anything and not really getting anything done and then I get home and say, ‘Oh, my gosh. What did I do,’ then I know that it’s time to sort of change my plan for the next day.

“I really do, I do, and for some this is going to sound hokey, but I do, when I get to Heaven, I want to hear God say, ‘Job well done.’ You know you tried every day.”

“Everyone is going to fall down everyone is going to get off course. Everyone is going to have a day or a week or a month where things are not good or they’ve made a bunch of missteps but at the end of the whole road, am I going to be able to say, ‘I said I was here to serve and I did serve’?”