“But what do you think we should do?” Many in-house lawyers dread this question from business colleagues. What’s the best response? Certainly not “It’s a business decision!”

Tracey Lester-Smith, former General Counsel of NASCAR and Bellator MMA, joins The Legal Department to help lawyers confidently give opinions. Tracey argues that providing thoughtful opinions is a key differentiator between good lawyers and truly great ones.

In this episode, Tracey shares how working with civil rights icon Elijah Cummings and her MMA training empowered her to give opinions as the first lawyer in a male-dominated combat sports company. She also discusses her transition from the racetrack to a year-long family journey around the world, and how she learned to take her hands “off the wheel.”

If you’re ready to elevate your legal advice and become an indispensable advisor, this episode is a must-listen.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

More Than Just OK: Great Lawyers Give Opinions – Tracey Lesetar-Smith TLSK Advisory, Former NASCAR GC

Introducing Tracy Lesetar-Smith

My name is Tracey Lesetar-Smith. I am the CEO and founder of TLSK Advisory. A fun fact about me is I took time off to travel the world with two children, 3 and 6, over 12 months with five suitcases, over 42,475 miles, and three continents.

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On this episode of the legal department, I’m excited to welcome Tracey Lesetar-Smith, who is the founder and CEO of TLSK Advisory. She’s a powerhouse in the sports entertainment space and in-house, a former in-house leader. We’re going to talk about how to give opinions in the Legal Department. It’s really a tricky area for folks, especially those new to the role. Tracy, thanks for being here. Appreciate it.

I’m delighted to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.

First, you got on my radar screen because you’re a contributor to the ABA Journal. People ask me a lot about where I source guests. Thank you, American Bar Association, for sourcing really great thought leaders. You wrote an article, I want to say it was about giving an opinion. It really resonated with me as one of those hard things. I had just interviewed Kevin Rubin, who’s the CFO of BetterUp.

His direction to GCs was, “I want you to give opinions. I don’t want you to just tell me the law and say throw it over the wall.” I thought you’d be the perfect person to talk about that specifically. That’s the contours of our show but I wanted to give people if you could just a little bit of your very exciting background in the in-house space. I know you went from a firm to become right to general counsel of Bellator MMA. Tell us about that and about NASCAR too.

I always say this, many people feel like you have to follow this predetermined path. You want to be let’s say, a GC and you have to follow a set path or somewhere adjacent to it. I will tell you, “I don’t necessarily think I ever envisioned myself going into sports and media. I fell into it.” As I’m sure you hear a lot of people say about their careers. They’re falling into it. I did start at a firm, but I had originally wanted and figured I would be going into politics. I was fortunate enough after college to work on the reelection campaign and subsequently in the Capitol Hill office of a civil rights icon, the late Elijah Cummings.

That’s a mic drop. That’s pretty amazing.

It was really formative. I don’t think I will offend anyone by saying this, when you come out of college, you don’t really know how to do a whole lot of stuff.

Law school, for that matter.

I think that question definitely keeps getting posed. Are we learning everything we need to learn in law school? When I got out of college, I ended up with a motley group of just recently graduated college kids on the reelection campaign for Congressman Cummings, who have the things that I always wistfully talk about is how hard campaign work really is. It’s long hours, it is sweat, it is door to door, it is running the votes. No matter what side, what campaign you’re on, these young people especially, this is truly formative work.

I was lucky enough to get that opportunity and off of the group of us that were working for Congressman Cummings, he ended up selecting just two of us to come and work for him full-time. I ended up getting what I viewed as just the plum gig, which is going and starting out as a staff assistant in his Washington, D.C. Capitol Hill office in the Longworth building on Capitol Hill. That’s how you start. You start by answering phones and eventually, he moved me up. To be honest, the Congressman was the one who actually convinced me to go to law school.

He was a lawyer by trade and he really wanted me to come back and work for him after law school but as is standard in Congress, at a certain level, you have to have a grad degree. This was the one that made the most sense. I thought I was going to go to law school, come right back across the road, and go back into politics. Once I got to law school, I was fortunate enough to go to GW, which was just down the road in Foggy Bottom. I started in the evening program while I was lobbying for a nonprofit.

Once I ended up doing a summer associateship at a great firm called Orrick, Herrington, Sutcliffe, you may know it. I really liked it. I liked the practice. I liked the people and I thought it was really interesting. I made the decision not to actually go right back into politics. I actually did go and join a firm, the Sacramento office of Orrick, Herrington, and Sutcliffe. I started out as a labor and employment litigation associate.

Again, I really love the people, but I had been a martial artist at that point for many years. One of the senior associates there, J.R. Riddell, who was a good friend of mine and a mentor. He and I were both training out of the same mixed martial arts gym in Sacramento, Ultimate Fitness, which was founded by Urijah Faber. This gym at the time was really churning out all of the best lightweight MMA fighters in the world.

Let’s talk about how you went from training in the gym and now you’re the general counsel of one of the biggest brands in MMA.

Entering The World Of Mixed Martial Arts

My colleague and I, we surmised that there were all these lawsuits going on in this niche. This industry was still nascent. It was still very young. The news articles that were being written about the lawsuits that were going on simply weren’t really giving the issues any justice. We, as firm lawyers, had the resources to be able to pull the pleadings and figure out what was really going on. We essentially created a moonlighting side hustle writing for what was at the time, the primary provider of MMA content, ESPN.com.

If you go to ESPN.com, you actually very oddly can still find some of our articles on there from way back in the 2000s. We turned it into a business development opportunity and we started bringing in mixed martial arts industry clients to Orrick. Although I’m sure there were some partners who found that a bit shocking, I had a wonderful partner who really mentored us and saw this as a huge opportunity in a new industry. He essentially said, “Look, you guys bring in the clients, you pitch the business, I will write the business, but you will essentially be the relationship partners here.”

Eventually, we brought in Bellator MMA. Right around the time it was about to become acquired by Viacom. Viacom of course is the company that had CBS, Paramount, MTV, CMT Spike. I helped with that transaction. Around the time I was deciding that the billable hour was not necessarily my favorite thing in the world. Bellator was also deciding it needed a full-time GC and it needed somebody who understood the industry and understood the issues that were at play in the industry and the players who are playing roles in the industry.

When you got there, there was not an existing GC, correct?

That’s right.

I’m just going to say my perception of an MMA business is that maybe they’re rough and tumble. Like that it’s a business, but that they’re a little edgy.

I would say that is entirely accurate, especially at the time, because the MMA industry, combat sports generally, and even in the more established sports like boxing have been around many decades longer than MMA. It always has been a bit of the Wild West, highly male-dominated, both in what I would call the field of play and highly male-dominated in the front office.

You’re in the Wild West as you said, but you know the law so that seems like a tough place to break in. I was the first general counsel at my company where I am now. It’s a very heavily, health care very heavily regulated. My business partners know a bunch of rules. They probably know the rules better than me. I don’t have to convince them that there are rules or I’m not shining a light on a new area they don’t know about. What was that like?

You spotlight the challenge actually in saying what you said. That was in this industry that was still so young. You really had, on one hand, this great sense of sport. You have people who have been martial artists all their lives in a lot of cases, and because of that and because I am and was a martial artist, there’s a certain code switch that happens. When you meet somebody who is also a martial artist and you too discover this fact, there’s this code switch that happens in your conversation where suddenly you realize that person’s operating system is similar to your operating system.

Now we’re having a different type of conversation and that’s very much how the combat sports industry is. Luckily for me, especially in such a Wild West and male-dominated space, I had a bit of that credibility that I could bring to the table because I did actually have a solid understanding of not only the sport but the various arts that underlie the sport. It was a bit of a siege at times to bring people along. I think it was really an early exercise for me in the art and sometimes science of stakeholder buy-in.

For you, for example, the fact that you are working in such a heavily regulated environment means that your business folks, the folks that you’re working with day in and day out, they already have this baseline level of knowledge. They already understand the need for certain things. They already understand a lot of the risk profiles so you don’t even have to explain to them. It’s already unspoken. Now, in any sport, in any business, there are those huge pockets of things that you don’t have to explain.

For example, if I’m doing a venue agreement for an MMA event, I don’t have to explain to my fellow business people and they don’t have to explain to me that we need to be working in enough time in the day before the event to make sure we have a room for weigh-ins, to make sure we have facilities so that the fighters can be able to cut weight. This is an entire process that each fighter probably goes through before their fight. Understanding that we need that type of space, that we need to allow that type of time.

Understanding the production of the event, what has to be pre-rigged, and what can be brought in on the day, because I understood the sport and how the events work, we didn’t have to have that conversation all the time. Now, when it came to understanding independent contractors versus who is an employee. When it came to understanding verbal contracts versus written contracts. When it came to understanding some of the compliance issues. I came in as the first GC, yes, but I had to wear so many different hats.

I was in essence in many ways, the first HR officer, the first administrative officer, and the first compliance officer. I think that it’s really important, and this is a continuing theme in my career, my life, and in the advice that I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to give, that understanding your stakeholders and understanding what moves them and understanding their needs is absolutely critical because everybody is moved by a different operating system, by different motivations, by different backgrounds and understandings. The more that you can understand that, the quicker you’re going to be able to get people to yes or perhaps to no.

Everybody is moved by different operating systems, motivations, and backgrounds. The more you can understand them, the quicker you can get people. Share on X

Do you think then that having that martial and understanding the underlying language gave you more confidence? Like you said, credibility, but do you think it gave you even more confidence? It sounds like you’re one of the only, if not the only woman on the team.

A Female GC In A Male-Dominated Space

I was definitely the first and only woman to hold that position or a similar position ever in the sport for a global fight promotion. I think I still to this day was the only one. I do think that it lent credibility, which was very important. Confidence, I think is something that is important to build throughout your practice and your career, but also your life. We cannot just rely on our career and our career experiences to give us confidence.

That’s just not the way that things end up working. We have to also have things in our personal life that give us confidence. I will say that the practice of martial arts itself was something that gave me a great deal of confidence to quiet confidence to be able to stand up if necessary in a room full of men, to be perfectly honest, we’re not used to having a woman at the table. If I get called doll or sweetheart one more time.

I just had to roll with that. I’m wondering, on the topic of giving opinions, there are a couple of things that I think hold lawyers back from giving opinions. I’m wondering if the confidence and credibility that you had bring coming into this room where you’re the sweetheart in the room. Did those things help you get comfortable giving opinions and not just saying, “You could do this or you could do that. It’s really up to you?”

I think it was really an evolution. When I first went into sports, the founder who hired me was himself originally someone who went to law school. He had a modicum of understanding of the basic legal issues. It was good because there were certain things I didn’t have to explain or justify to him. I will say that because of the way that the business was at that time when I first became GZ at 31, I definitely had to in terms of confidence and giving opinions, the way that I was operating in many ways was a little bit more of a cop.

There were so many different branches of the business, it really was wild and thorny and untamed in so many ways. In that position sometimes, you end up having to be in a permanent ongoing state of reeling people in. I think that years into my being general counsel at Bellator and a Viacom lawyer, the leadership transition that Bellator underwent was really formative for me and enabled me to go from being a cop to being a facilitator.

At that point, the point at which the founder departed, and the new CEO president came in, who had an enormous amount of experience in this industry, was extremely well-respected, extremely well-heeled, very kind person. At that point, within the business now, built a lot of knowledge. That’s part of what you do as a general counsel. As you said, you are probably very fortunate in many ways because you have business folks throughout your business who are very familiar with the high level of regulation that comes with your particular business. At the same time, sometimes that can probably be disadvantageous.

It slows you down.

If somebody thinks they know and perhaps there’s a nuance that they don’t necessarily appreciate that can gum up the works. In this case, when the leadership transition happened, I had been able to build relationships within the business and build a knowledge base within the business. Now the business people inside were able to say, “No, we cannot do that. Those people are definitely independent contractors. Talk to Tracy. No, go talk to Tracy. Now you have to do the venue agreement this way because it’s a union house. Go talk to Tracy because she knows.”

That was helpful. I wasn’t starting from zero anymore. When that leadership transition happened, I actually could start being more of a facilitator. When I say that really is the essence of when giving an opinion is most helpful, when you are in an environment where you can offer advice and you can offer counsel, especially on risk and everything like that. Where your business people have a sense of the risk profile so that you don’t need to beat that dead horse all the time on the risk profile. You can start talking more about what does the business wants to do.

The essence of giving opinions is most helpful when you are in an environment where you can offer advice and counsel on risk. Share on X

What do we value? Given this particular legal government affairs issue, for example, given our values, what road do we want to take? As part of your role as general counsel, I think that oftentimes giving an opinion is convoluted with making a final decision. Those two things are not the same thing. If you give an opinion, you’re not imposing your will or your decision onto your client unless you are extremely aggressive and your client is the opposite. In most cases, you’re simply offering paths. Tell them what you think because you are the person who has the background to understand the complexity of the issues.

To me in that environment, it became easier over time to simply give an opinion. Without seeming as though one is trying to impose their will onto the leadership. Especially if you have strong leadership, you develop a partnership in that regard. There’s not going to be a power dynamic where your opinion is aggressive and weighs more than your say CEO. That is extraordinarily rare. If you find yourself as a general counsel or a counsel in that position, you have to understand that personal dynamic and account for it.

To make sure that if your CEO is simply trying to rubber stamp everything that you say you engage in that dialogue. Every business is different. Every business has a different set of stakeholders. You as counsel have one of the most difficult jobs because you have to understand those people, what moves them, what they care about, and what the business cares about.

Adapting Communication Styles To Different Executives

Let’s pause on this because where I thought your article was really insightful. As you wrote about it, I was thinking you were looking at who am I giving advice to. It’s not just what I, as the speaker, want to say or my opinion necessarily without context. You were saying, “Look at who you’re talking to. Somebody might be a bottom-line person. I am one of those people. I don’t want to know how the watch is made. I want to know what time it is. Other people really like to know how all the gears are put together.” Let’s talk about those different types of people and how you have to adapt your advice style, and your opinion based on who you’re talking to.

Going into an organization, for example, like NASCAR, that is incredibly sophisticated, well-heeled, and has an enormously rich history. With people inside the business who have been there for many decades, you definitely have a culture already going in. Learning about that culture, just like learning about what the culture was like, or helping inform the culture in, say, the combat sports industry company. These are things that are really critical. This can be a gross oversimplification, but I think of three big types. I feel as though business people are one of these types or perhaps maybe a hybrid combination of a couple of them. I can tell you, that when I first arrived at NASCAR, immediately there were a couple of executives who just said, “I just want you to know, I don’t like lawyers.”

I have heard that many times. The chair of a board I was servicing, in meetings, talked about how much he detested lawyers and how much we were a pain in the neck. Offline, he would say, “Stacy, I don’t like lawyers, but I love general counsel.”

There you go.

Maybe you could say that in the room.

I think early on really had to ask myself, “Why is that? Why is it that there is this sentiment out there?” I arrived at a suite of different conclusions, but chief among them was this notion that especially with outside firms in particular, business executives, and revenue-driving executives, tended to get the feeling that they were paying exorbitant amounts of legal fees. In return getting equivocating, middling advice that made them feel as though they were alone in the canoe paddling by themselves. The lawyer was simply going by on a motorboat saying good luck.

That’s a great metaphor.

I think that getting in the boat with your fellow executive colleagues is absolutely critical. Knowing who they are, and what type they are, is really critical to building that trust so that they feel like you’re in the boat with them. I think that one type of business person that I know you and I have both dealt with frequently and this is especially the case in sports and media, by the way, is I call it the executive who moves fast and occasionally breaks things. This is certainly not meant to be pejorative to executives who really don’t want to see how the watch is made because time is limited.

There are only 24 hours in any day. If you’re healthy, there should only be 16 to 18 hours in any day or less. With that type of executive, you only have like a couple of minutes to get out what you need to get out. They have very, very limited time and a limited attention span for you. You need to come in and arrive at the conversation with the top-line items. This is the part where it really is very critical to have your opinion prepared. As one of my mentors likes to as well, I tend to like to do things in three option sets. If the business, which if you are counsel, you should, or if you are a more junior counsel, you should be active every day working to really learn the business.

It builds your credibility, it builds your trust, and it builds your ability to actually make an opinion, to form an opinion. I like to think of this as a three-option road. If we value this, there’s this option, and that might be a good one. If we together value B, then maybe X is a better option for us. If C is the root and maybe we’re just trying to get this done fast, then let’s consider option Y. I think that is still giving a really solid opinion foundation.

It’s more structured as opposed to, I don’t know, you could do this or that. Like you’re guiding them. If this is important, then this is the road. If X and Y.

That’s right. I do think that when you offer those types of opinions, you are getting in the boat with them. You are showing that you understand the values of the business. You’re not just offering a strictly legal, non-contextual almost opinion and then throwing up your hands and saying good luck. It’s up to you. That’s a business decision. I never like hearing that phrase come out of the mouth of anyone on a team that I’m fortunate enough to supervise. That’s a business decision, okay but we’re in the boat too.

It is the client’s final decision, but we have to be giving meaningful opinions and we have to be in the boat with them or else they’re going to lose trust in us. This executive type one is the person who you really need to make it concise. You need to make it snappy. If you feel like that particular executive is somebody who is apt to point fingers down the road or say, “I didn’t get those details.” If you get that sense, it is perfectly okay to backstop yourself by sending a memo, or even if you know that person would bristle at getting something like that, even just writing a memo to file that contains the contents of your conversation.

That’s type number one. This is in some ways the most challenging type to deal with because we have to take so much nuance and we have to condense it down. This is a skill that you must build as an attorney, as a general counsel, outside counsel, whoever you are. This is absolutely critical. Type two is usually the in-house leader or the general counsel, CLO, who has an appreciation for all of this nuance, but just doesn’t have the time to sit with you and talk for 45 minutes about all of those nuances. I admittedly am type two.

I have to trust that you, as counsel outside or internal have done the research, and know your stuff. I will ask relevant questions. I don’t have the time in my day to be able to do an exhaustive conversation on most days. Even if I want to. For that person, you have to hit really a nice, happy medium where you are still offering an opinion, but you’re giving a little bit more detail as to what’s behind your opinion so that you’re helping that general counsel.  You’re helping that in-house leader to go to the table with their fellow executives.

You’re going to help make them look good, by the way, because you’re arming them with the information that’s going to help them talk intelligently with other executives about it. Also, this reflects well on the team. When you give them something that is concise, that is well researched, but that can be condensed down quickly, you are giving them the ammunition to be able to reflect upon the team very well and continue to reflect the important business value. Frankly, the revenue generation value of the legal department, which is typically seen as a cost center.

The third type of person is for us legal nerds. The third executive is that person who really wants to get into the nitty-gritty. They want to ask all the details. For them, you really do need to come fully prepared to talk about all of those. You won’t have a lot of regrets about what was unsaid when you come out of that conversation because they really want to know everything.

I’m fatigued by those conversations.

I concur, but also understand that one of the reasons why we are fatigued is because as general counsel, and as chief legal officer, you really do have to turn your attention to so many things.

We have to keep moving.

We have to keep moving because, in that position, the chair is quite heavy because you are touching virtually every part of the business throughout the week. There is never a day that looks exactly the same ever. You are getting very deeply into each and every division of the business. This is one of the reasons why you see so many lawyers go on to be CEOs, to be presidents, to be commissioners of leagues. Why? It is an excellent position from which to build a foundation that teaches you every aspect of the business and an appreciation for it.

 

Executive Presence And The Art Of The Edit Button

On the on the topic of giving opinions, you wrote, I think that it can make the difference between great lawyers and those seen just as okay, which I thought was a really nice way to put it. I get a lot of questions from people saying, “What’s executive presence? I’m in this deputy role or I want to move up, but I’m not seen as a leader or I’m not seen as having executive presence.” I feel like what we’re talking about is being confident, being prepared, and being able to deliver competent advice concisely and clearly is one of those attributes of what I’d call executive presence. I don’t know if you agree.

I really do agree actually. I think that executive presence often is about your edit button.

That’s a great way to put it.

Sometimes we talk about executive presence and I think that because corporate America especially was in terms of leadership built by men for men. I do think that for decades upon decades, we’ve seen executive presence be a dog whistle euphemism for male presence. That is changing. It is changing. I’m here from the front lines and you’re on the front lines to say this is beginning to have some meaningful momentum of change behind it. I do think that it’s that edit button. You have all this information.

The nature of the general counsel chief legal officer position and even just simply counsel. The nature of this counsel position is that you have all of this information. If you walk into a meeting and proceed to present reams of minutia to say, “I don’t know, the president of NASCAR or the owner of NASCAR.” You’re going to run out of runway very quickly. The edit button is not just about your words. It’s about being able to back up at a 30,000-foot level and look at the situation and say what is most important here.

What is the priority here? What is the most important thing for the business? What is the most important thing for this particular issue or potential litigation or risk? Potential exposure. What are the big and most important things that we need to address? That really is the essence of the edit button. I think it contributes a lot to whether somebody is seen as having that executive presence or not. Confidence does have, it does play a big role. I do think that sometimes when we say confidence, it tends to seem like we’re saying, “It’s got to be people who are outgoing.”

That is absolutely not true. I’ve seen and had the good fortune to work with a lot of leaders who had quieter, strong, confident personalities. This also, as counsel goes to how you’re interacting with and building trust with your fellow executives and these business people. Stacy, if you’re a facilitator like you and I are, when the business tells you that they want to accomplish something, you’re going to be looking for ways to get that done.

Confidence is not only found in outgoing people. Many quiet people possess strong and confident personalities. Share on X

As a facilitator, you tend to say, “Yes, but, or yes, and.” If they propose something that is just not going to work, what you want to say is, “I love your idea. This is great. If we do it a little bit differently, it won’t be illegal, or have we thought about how we will handle it? Have you considered?” I think that when you become that facilitator and you say yes and or yes but often when you say no, outgoing, introverted, it doesn’t matter what your personality type is. When you say no, they know that you mean it.

There’s a lot there. Tracey, I have to tell you, I feel like we’re just simpatico on this. I think the edit button is really good advice. I think it comes down to, as you were talking about the different types. Communication is not about you and not about showing everything and all the research and every person you talk to to get to your answer.

Effective, confident, executive presence level communication is looking at the other person. How do they need to hear it? What do they need to know? Like the CEO does not want to hear, you talked to three different firms and you read these articles and you looked at these cases. Doesn’t care. Wants to know what is the bottom line? How quickly can we do it? What’s the impact on revenue? Is there anyone else that I know, CEO knows that you’ve talked to?

That’s what they care about. It’s very hard, I think, especially for more lawyers newer to in-house to realize that it’s no longer a performance in your law school class that you’re trying to show you’re the smartest person and you’re the first person with your hand up. It’s just being an effective communicator. I agree with you that executive presence has gotten a little bit of a bad name in recent years, but there’s something to it. It’s yes, you’re smart. Yes, you’re accomplished but can you communicate in a way that the business needs to hear?

I really couldn’t agree more. It’s important to see that as effective communication as say, if you are in-house counsel, it is your responsibility to learn how you best become an effective communicator because everybody is a bit different. Everybody has a little bit of a different style. I invite everyone to embrace their own personality and really try to figure out how do I get folks to yes, given my personality. What is my best road to yes on the thing that I’m trying to get input on or on the decision that I am trying to help this business make?

Taking A Sabbatical To Travel With Family

I want to just shift a little bit. You had a big role, obviously first general counsel at Bellator and then general council of NASCAR, which is a mind-blower. That was a huge role. You took a downshift. You took a break. This is a personal question for me. I have a little bit of FoMO about your sabbatical you took with your family. I’m curious if you could share how did you prepare for that because I feel like I could never get off the wheel.

The getting off the wheel is so, so difficult for so many of us. My husband who is a fantastic husband, dad, and teammate, I mean get yourself the right partner. I mean, that’s number one, get yourself the right partner. We had even before we were married, talked about this bucket list item. That was being able to travel and live abroad with our children, if and when we were blessed enough to have children. I had gotten to study abroad when I was an undergrad. My entire junior year I spent in London. I had grown up going to Europe.

I am first generation Hungarian American. My dad escaped when he was 23 at risk of life and limb. We went back to Hungary during the summers to visit family and grandparents. Going to Europe and being in Europe was something that was already table stakes for me. I had already visited so much, been there so much, and lived there. My husband, I think he had FoMO because he ended up putting himself through college at a little bit of a later age. He had never had that opportunity to just go and untie the anchor and stow it and go and live someplace abroad.

This was always something that he had a little bit of FoMO on and he had wanted to do. even before we got married, even before we had children, we said at some point, Tracy is going to stop working and we are going to maybe go live abroad with children for a year, it’s this general idea. As we had our children and they started to age, we did have this exigency in this sense of, if we let the children get too far along and we start hopping them around the world, it’s not going to be easy anymore.

We’re going to reach a point where we really cannot plaque my daughter and put her into a school in the middle of Budapest. We had always had this dream. I was fortunate enough in my years at NASCAR to have found an incredible successor who is their CLO now, Amanda Oliver. I think that we came to a good stopping point. In realizing the urgency of not letting my eldest get too old before we actually did this, we went ahead and we just did it.

Can I ask you real quick, were you worried about getting back on the wheel? Like after you decided to jump off.

Here’s what I think. I think that decisions that are primarily based on fear are usually not the right ones, period. Fear’s not really my thing. I was in the fight industry for a long time. I was in NASCAR where they’re going around a track at 185 miles per hour. Fear is not really my thing. For me, is that something that we considered? Yes, obviously. We had done our level best to financially prepare in terms of budgeting and in terms of what was this going to look like. Our original idea was actually going to do what I called the heritage sabbatical, which is we would do the first half of the year in Europe based in Budapest, because that’s my heritage, and we jump off from there.

Decisions primarily based on fear are usually not the right decisions. Share on X

In the back half of the year, we would do in Asia. My husband is half Okinawan and his family, although it has been in Hawaii for several generations, his mother’s side of the family is Okinawan Japanese. We said, “We’ll do Japan. We’ll be based in Japan for the back half of the year.” Ultimately, we did complete the first half of the year and we lived in Budapest and went all over Europe, but we had our children in the British International School in Budapest. One of the best experiences I could possibly imagine for them. You’re taking public transportation.

You are immersed in the language. I, for the first time in my life, actually got to do an intensive Hungarian course. Growing up and having my father speak Hungarian, but also primarily speak English, it’s a really difficult language. I really hadn’t had the chance to immerse myself in it. You get this great experience. When we went to come back through the States to prepare for the Asia leg of our trip, Omicron happened. Japan just shut down. It shut down. We decided we wouldn’t be able to do Japan in the way that we wanted to do it. We flexed and said we went to Thailand. We started in Thailand for a month and a half.

We ended up going to Singapore, Bali. On the flip of a coin, we ended up going to Nepal as our final stop. It really took a while. I have to tell you, it took a while for me to pry my own hands off the wheel. I would wake up a month in. Remember, we also landed in Budapest one day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Essentially, Hungary is on the doorstep of Ukraine. I kept our things packed for two weeks because I wasn’t sure if things were going to work out if this was going to end up spilling over.

Back to the go around the track at 185 miles an hour.

Importance Of Embracing Different Seasons In Life

It took me a while to pry my hands off of the wheel. I’d wake up a month in and, “What are we doing? What are we doing? This was silly. I cannot believe we did this.” Again, we had really been quite deliberative about this and I eventually was able to pry my hands off of the wheel and for my own good. Having that time to be able to reflect on what I actually wanted to do was incredibly important. I think important for everyone. You have seasons of your life and seasons of your career and you don’t need to always feel like you’re in the same season and trying to chase this one season forever and ever and ever. You have to embrace those different seasons.

That’s great advice. I appreciate it. Maybe we’ll talk more another time about how I can get my bags packed. We’re near in the end, the final turn here. I ask all guests the same question. I’m sure you’re going to have a very interesting hump-up song.

I love this question by the way. I dearly love music. I have to be honest with you, I probably have a different pump-up song every single week. It’s almost like asking me about my pump-up song if I change pump-up songs like I change my clothes. It’s interesting, I think of it more though, what do I listen to when I want to be inspired? That is something that has been more consistent over the years to be perfectly honest. I always loved this one track and it’s by Sting and it’s called, Why Should I Cry For You? I always was very inspired by it.

I think I always thought it was a love song. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that Sting who had grown up in Newcastle, his father was a milkman who delivered the milk seven days a week and Sting would actually go along with him early in the mornings and help deliver the milk, which he was a little bit bitter about because all his friends were still in bed. He really started to have this appreciation for what his dad did. I don’t think that he had a lot of communication with his dad, despite that time spent.

One day his father took him down to the docks and sat with him and looked out at the sea and said, “Son, when you finish school, I want you to go to sea.” I think that Sting really took that not as literally, but to mean that he wanted him to have an exciting life. I think that Sting ended up writing the song, almost as a love letter to his dad. He wrote the song as if he had followed his advice as if he had literally gone to sea.

Final Thoughts And The Power Of Fearlessness

You hear that reflected in the lyrics. “Under the Arctic fire, over the seas of silence, hauling on frozen ropes for all my days remaining.” I always loved this song, I think, because once I found out it was about his dad, it made me think about my childhood and how my dad was always echoing that same sentiment, that he wanted me to throw off the bowlines, he wanted me to explore. It continues to remind me every time I listen to it, that I am really at my best when I am unafraid when I am throwing off the bowlines and going to sea.

That’s a great reason to like that song. Thank you for being here. I really enjoyed it.

This was so much fun. I love all that we talked about and I cannot wait for our next conversation as always.

Important Links

• Tracey Lesetar-Smith – LinkedIn
• TLSK Advisory
• Kevin Rubin
• BetterUp

About Tracey Lesetar-Smith

Tracey Lesetar-Smith is a longtime senior sports, entertainment, and government affairs executive with over 20 years of experience.

She is the former General Counsel and Senior Vice President of NASCAR, , having overseen all legal operations for the league and its many subsidiaries during its historic merger, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the unprecedented and critical growth in the sport’s diversity, equity, and inclusion.

She is also the former General Counsel and Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs for Bellator MMA. Lesetar-Smith was the first and only woman to ever serve as General Counsel for a mixed martial arts promoter in the history of the sport and shepherded the league through its critical growth phase and global expansion.