From Credit Card Collections to Teaching Leadership in Prisons: Tamien Dysart on Second Chances and Self-Belief

“Decide your difficulty.”

Tamien Dysart is co-founder of Think3D Solutions and Elevate You, and chair of the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce, the first Black man and second person of color to hold that role in its 119-year history. He was a directionless teenager who became a father at 17, found his way into a career in credit card collections at 21, and spent over 16 years climbing the ranks at Capital One and Wells Fargo before walking away to build something of his own.

In this episode, you'll learn how he took his team's turnover rate from 33% to 6% in 18 months using lessons from John Maxwell's books, the driveway moment on his wife's birthday that convinced him to leave corporate for good, and how his Leaders of Tomorrow program grew from a goal of 500 graduates to over 1,000, including a version now running inside South Dakota's prison system with less than half the state's recidivism rate.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How he took his team's turnover rate from 33% to 6% in 18 months as site director for credit card collections in Sioux Falls

• The “driveway moment” on his wife's birthday in May 2015 that convinced him to leave corporate for good

• Why he tells people the real secret to success is “decide your difficulty”

• How Leaders of Tomorrow grew from a goal of 500 graduates by 2025 to more than 1,000, now accredited through multiple universities

• How the program now runs inside South Dakota's prison system, with graduates recidivating at less than half the state's rate

• The story of the corner of 8th and Phillips in Sioux Falls, the street his father couldn't cross in the 1950s, where the Chamber of Commerce building now stands with Tamien as its chair