“We’re all a part of God’s great big family.
And the truth, you know, love is all we need.”
– Lyrics from, We Are The World
When asked what’s one of the greatest things she’s strived for and achieved in life so far, Tierra Bianchi can break it down to one word: love.
“I would say my greatest accomplishment is the way that my team and the people around me perceive and love me,” says Tierra. “I feel like the biggest attribute to me as a leader in any organization I’ve been in, or any group of friends I’ve ever been a part of is just being able to know that the people around me genuinely feel the love that I have for them, the care that I have for them and that it’s reciprocated.”
And there you have it, not just asked for but given and received. The key to leadership is the underlying vibration of love, transparency, and vulnerability, some of the most attractive traits of a leader.
“I have had a lot of different leadership roles,” says Tierra. “I’ve been the president of my sorority and that was something that I did not expect to be at all, but it came from a group of individuals that loved me so much that they thought I deserved it, so I did it. And then moving forward into USHEALTH Advisors, and the role that I have now, I’ve always just sought true, genuine relationships and care with people. So I base my accomplishments around the amount of people I’ve been able to help in my lifetime. And at USHA, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So that’s why I love what I do so much here.”
Tierra is loving life as a Field Sales Leader at USHEALTH Advisors, she was recently promoted, after proving herself as a strong personal producer and team leader as a Field Training Agent. To date, Tierra has produced more than $7 million in personal insurance sales and more than $20 million as a team leader.
Yet with all the outward success, there were internal struggles that had kept Tierra thinking small, doubting herself, and thinking she didn’t belong. It’s part of the human condition, everyone struggles with something, and no one is immune. But when you share your success from those struggles we all benefit, we all learn, we all connect.
“I guess one of the biggest challenges has been trying to find my way and my self-worth throughout my life,” says Tierra. “I had a good childhood, nothing to complain about. I just never really found my place. I have a twin brother who is type A and I’m a type B personality. He is amazing at sports, always listened to Mom and Dad, never went to parties, and always went to bed on time. I was the one throwing raves in the backyard or the basement, not getting good grades, getting detention. And I kind of learned to play that role and I kept doing it for most of my life.”
“My dad used to always say to me, “Tierra, you’re going to be the most infamous criminal in America, or the most successful businesswoman, you just have to pick which one. “I went through a couple of bad relationships. I came to the University of Tampa from New Jersey, and when I came down here, I was 18 years old and living in the sunny state of Florida with no supervision and just life at my disposal. I kind of ran with it and not in the best way possible. I went down a bad path with just drinking, drugs, getting deep into that party lifestyle, and letting everything else go. And I was used to disappointing my parents. So disappointing them in college when I’m hundreds of miles away didn’t affect me too much. I just kept playing into my, I guess, villain role.”
That’s a dramatic statement for someone, who before college, believed she had a higher calling, one that would take her halfway around the world. While she might say there was a villain role, it was an internal belief, not an external reality. Many times in life we feel lost and need to be found by ourselves, winning the inner game that leads to a better world around us.
“In high school, I started to find passion through helping other people,” says Tierra. “I was watching a show at the time, and it sparked my interest in becoming a doctor. So I made my whole life trajectory to be a trauma surgeon in the army. Just like the most extreme thing you could ever do with your life. I spent all of my high school summers and the majority of my college summers shadowing surgeons in operating rooms, doing clinical research, traveling across the world to witness surgeries, and seeing other hospitals. I was going to dedicate my life to that one thing because I thought that that was the greatest calling or purpose that I could do with my life, being able to save someone with my bare hands.”
“And I also thought about how I would handle it if I couldn’t save someone. I’ve always been a strong person. I rack my brain to where the strength came from, but to me, it’s just the high risk, high reward I’m okay with if I did my best, maybe potentially losing someone, but also being the one that someone says to, “you saved my mom, my sister, my brother, whatever.” And that kind of fueled me for a very long time. So I got through freshman year, I got through sophomore year, and then I don’t know what it was, but I just was so in this mundane task every day of, I go to school, I was a cheerleader, the worst cheerleader ever. I’m always a beat behind everybody else. And I just felt like I was living for the weekend, living for these parties, and I was stuck in this redundant routine of just messing up and I wanted to get out of it really, really bad.”
“So I asked my parents one day if I could go to boarding school. No kid does that, but I was like, I want to go to boarding school. And I had two picked out, one in California and one in Maine, and my mom said, “You’re not going to California.” So I said, all right, Maine, it is. I got this scholarship there to the point it was almost free. And I remember my dad drove me up there, it was an eight-hour drive and he was so proud of me. That was the first time in my life he’s ever told me he was proud of me and it made me feel really good. I was like, okay, I’m doing something right. He dropped me off, and it was a school in Pittsfield, Maine. Pittsfield has one stoplight in the entire town. There were 400 kids in that school, 300 of them were from overseas and all across the United States.”
“I’ll never forget, my dad drops me off and it’s a dorm room like a hundred years old and it’s all girls in the dorm. I’m sitting in there with some girls I don’t know, in this shoebox. And I just looked around and I was like, what did I just do to myself? I was coming from a place where I was the popular girl in school. I was in a high school of 2,000 people. I was throwing parties, and getting away with murder, and here I am in the strictest school I’ve ever been in. I am away from home for the first time in my life. I learned a lot about myself that year.”
“At 16 years old, I didn’t know a single soul around me, so I kind of had to get to know me, I had to get to know other people. I had to let myself come out of my shell. And I loved it so much because the entire year I didn’t drink a sip of alcohol. I just found so much joy in the soberness of it all, the innocence of it all, making friends that were from halfway around the world and finding support with each other. That year was hard for me, but it showed me that every time I go somewhere that isn’t my roots, my hometown where I grew up, I’m giving myself the ability to create a new identity for myself that maybe I couldn’t get away from back then because people were kind of holding me to who I was.”
You might want to go back and read that last quote/paragraph from Tierra. Where can you discover and experience awareness, growth, and abundance? As Tierra, learned, and so many can of us can share in her life lesson, it’s from the inside out. It’s the sweet and silent solitude of learning who you are at your core. Then being able to relate to others as you being you.
If you do you the world will beat a path to your door.
But… as life does to us again and again, it puts obstacles in our path and then we give in to our resistance, distancing ourselves from our true purpose. Tierra is no different. After a year of boarding school, she left and went back to her old life and environment where temptation patiently lay in wait for Tierra to arrive.
“Fast forward five years later, it got to the point I still didn’t graduate college. I didn’t feel like I was worth much. I felt like I was letting everybody in my life down. I was still partying, and in a really toxic relationship that I refused to get out of. By the time I arrived at USHA, I was broken.”
Despite opening herself up to discover what was within, for Tierra, the demons were still lurking about. But once she arrived at USHEALTH Advisors she chose to turn around and hug those demons, thank them for the lessons and learnings, and create her new, best life.
She would become an example for others to follow.
“I was super naive and just willing to try anything at that point,” Tierra says. “So that’s why I didn’t have any skepticism when they brought me in here. I was like, sure, teach me what to do and I’ll do it. And along the way I fought through more – let’s get out of this crappy relationship, let’s stop these bad habits. Let’s get away from the friends that I think that I love, but that are always putting me in positions where I have to make bad choices. And that was probably one of the biggest challenges in my life, was transitioning from the person that I was into who I wanted to be. And that was my whole first year at USHEALTH Advisors. I’m always so thankful for the people that I met here because they showed me the other side of myself that I really didn’t know existed. That has taken my life from here to zero to hero.”
From zero to hero. So, it was Tierra getting back to where we all begin, as miracles, masterpieces, and heroes. From there, after learning who she was and what she could accomplish with habits and discipline, Tierra was in a position to lead others. She also had a better platform from her past than she ever realized. While early on Tierra fought back against her foundation, she soon began to embrace the examples she had witnessed from her mom and dad. When we’re young, even though we watch, we don’t always listen.
“My mom and dad were actually both in insurance,” says Tierra. “My mom never told me. She told me this was a scam and not to do it. And then six months after I started making it at USHA, she said to me, “I was in insurance too.” I’m like, oh, great, now you tell me. But they worked at Mutual of Omaha and my mom was a superstar. Then, at the age of 31, she got pregnant with twins. At month five she was ordered to be on bed rest so she couldn’t walk, couldn’t work, couldn’t do anything. And once we were born, two babies are harder than one. So it was more like, who’s going to work? Who’s not going to work?”
“She took a step back, even though she was making most of the money, and she just raised us. Never went back to work for my entire 18 years of growing up and living in that house. So my dad was the one that went to work full-time. He is an immigrant from South America. He came over when he was 16 and didn’t speak a lick of English. He never went to college and barely graduated high school. But when he met my mom, they started to work together. And then once I was born, I remember my dad sitting in bed. He was a soccer player at the time, but he tore his ACL. And then once he tore his ACL, he’d always be in bed with this big ice pack on his knee studying. I realize now he was going back to school to get some type of degree, to get a job.”
“He started as a financial planner. He has worked his way up to being one of the best financial planners in the company at this point. He manages millions of dollars in accounts every single year, and he still goes back to school. I went home last Thanksgiving and he was studying with a Yale book for an extra degree. I’m like, “Dad, you’re still going?” And he said, “Always be a student of life Ti.” He just has that mentality of you can do whatever you want in this world if you put your mind to it and he has shown me that my entire life.”
“It’s truly phenomenal to see what my dad’s been able to build in the years of me growing from a young girl into an adult. It is honestly what has always inspired me to be fearless and go after my dreams, regardless of how big or unattainable they seem, because I mean, he did it and he sacrificed everything for me to be able to do it too. So it’s almost an obligation that I feel to go out and grab life by the balls just to show him that he didn’t do it for nothing.”
We reflect, we realize, we remember. Tierra looked back at what her parents had taught her with their actions. You can’t connect the dots moving forward, only looking back. Besides the lessons from her parents, Tierra says she also learned so much about herself when she decided to venture overseas to Greece, to pursue what she thought might be her career as a trauma surgeon.
“The people I met play a piece in who I am today,” says Tierra, “because they showed me just a little bit more about myself when I was over in that country and once again, didn’t have anyone that I knew. It taught me how much more lovable of a person I could be. I feel like I’ve always shined a negative light on myself for whatever reason. And it just gave me so much more confidence in this world to believe I could go anywhere, find a group of people and I could make a place there and I could build relationships. It gave me this sense that, there’s nothing that I can’t do. It made me feel a lot more grateful for what I had, but then also more confident in my abilities to go out and do whatever I needed to and know that I was going to be okay. Every place I went gave me an extra piece of me that I still hold onto today.”
And today Tierra finds herself in the place to focus on gratitude for all she’s accomplished and continues to accomplish at USHEALTH Advisors.
“My dad instilled this belief in me to do whatever it takes and anything is possible. And I started to see that there are so many people at USHA who don’t think that way, they don’t think that it’s possible, don’t believe in themselves. And that’s the first thing you need. You have to have this unwavering belief in yourself.”
“My people, my team, know I care about them. And the first thing I try to do with an agent when I meet them is try to understand them. Tell me about you. What’s the relationship like with your parents? Why are you here? Because we’ve got to assume that everybody who comes to USHA is broken in one way, shape, or form. Nobody’s rich and nobody’s got it figured out in life. It’s just not how it works.”
“I think back to me starting here and I think back about how much I needed somebody to mentally support and love me and show me my worth. So I try to do that with other people, and I open up first. I tell them about me. They tell me about them. I find a way to relate to them because I’ve been through so many experiences and I’ve met so many people and had so many relationships. My past is one of the best blessings of my life. Sharing what I’ve been through gives me the ability to build this trust within them to where they trust me, and I trust them. I know that if I have an agent that’s in the right mindset they can make this career work.”
There is no defense to love. Tierra wants to be remembered for being that person, the one who turns someone else’s life around. It’s how she wants to be seen, then to see, hear and understand others.
“I’ve thought about this before,” says Tierra. “I want my legacy to be because someone says they knew Tierra, and because of meeting her, I believed in myself, and I was able to go out in this world and do anything that I put my mind to.”
Give love. Share Love. It’s the only way.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Your Storyteller,
Mark Brodinsky
