Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cedric Solice. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Cedric with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
Throughout my childhood I was blessed to be able to participate in activities that required discipline to be successful. Team sports were a part of my initial experiences, and then music was added. Each experience taught me new ways to work together with people while being a responsible, prepared, and effective contributor. Failure in many instances was one of the best teachers and developer of work ethic I ever had. Failing in a team sport or in a musical ensemble means that people were let down as a result of my lack of preparedness. Letting people down because of my inability to produce as a result of simply being too lazy to prepare to be the best I could be was not a characteristic I wanted associated with me as a person. However, it was the summer following my sophomore year of high school where I experienced the crucible that would lock in a lifechanging and undeniable work ethic that people would come to rely on.
Drum and Bugle Corps is an activity that brings together top talent from across the country to prepare performances at an elite level to compete for a world championship. At the end of my sophomore year in high school, I was fortunate enough to earn a spot in one of the top ten groups in the country. It was bootcamp for the marching athlete! Drill instructors fussing along with demanding musical preparation that required tremendous attention to detail was the everyday norm. It was an overwhelmingly difficult experience to navigate in the early stages. To be honest, at one point in the summer I was just not performing up to par and one day I told I would be sent home if I did not get it together by the very next day. After picking up my pride from dirt, and with the amazing support of a fellow Corps member I flipped the switch and gutted it out. Fighting through every day I learned one day at a time what it takes to truly be a great teammate and be successful. My time at the Crossmen Drum and Bugle Corps is where my work ethic was forged and cemented. It was refined through multiple experiences over the years that followed. I always tell people, Drum and Bugle Corps not only changed my life, it saved my life as well.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Born in Washington, D.C. to a career government employee and U.S. Army officer, I had a pretty amazing childhood! Moving from state to state was one of the only consistent experiences of my grade school years, but it was an important formative experience. Sports, music performance, Boy Scouts, student government, and community theater were major developmental influences as a kid. Growing up as the son, nephew, and grandson of military service women and men originally set me on a trajectory for a life of military service. However, God had different plans, and I was blessed with opportunities to go to college and earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in music. Teaching marching bands and drum and bugle corps for over ten years were my first leadership opportunities. Coaching high school boys’ basketball and college women’s basketball for sixteen years were the second stanza in leadership opportunities I was afforded. Both music and basketball allowed me to travel throughout the United States and to twelve different countries across the world teaching and instructing children and adults the very skills and disciplines that have afforded me success over many years. More importantly, those careers led me towards living in the passion of my purpose.
CLS Leadership Solutions LLC was officially launched in September of 2022. Helping others discover their best authentic leadership voice is the passion that fuels my purpose daily, and why I started the company. CLS Leadership Solutions LLC endeavors to challenge leaders to investigate their own leadership capacity through the exploration of a variety of subjects, thoughts, and methods with the ultimate goal of developing today’s leaders for tomorrow. The company serves as a multifaceted platform that allows me to help people in areas that I am passionate about and built to serve in through education and experience. CLS Leadership Solutions LLC has grown to now provide individual and group leadership training, organizational culture assessment and enhancement services, consultation services, and professional speaking services for small groups to large organizations. This business gives me the opportunity to help people. Helping people is not only something I love to do, it is truly my purpose.
Anyone who wants to see what is going on with CLS Leadership Solutions LLC can find the company on LinkedIn at Cedric Solice and YouTube at The Solice Spot. There is great content discussing life, leadership, and purpose posted regularly, and services can be requested on both platforms. The website will be launching soon!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Resiliency has served not only my career, but my life in amazing ways. Anyone who attempts to push the envelope will ultimately experience a lack of success, even flat-out failure. Resiliency has been one of the main catalysts for my success in the midst of failure. This quality and skill ensured that when the chips were down and times were tough my resolve to achieve and succeed trumped any obstacles and challenges that could and would be faced. The best lessons are learned and skills developed when one is forced to be resilient. Resiliency is not only an indicator of one’s ability to be successful, but I have found that the best leaders have deeply developed resiliency traits. A great way to develop resiliency as a quality or skill is to expose oneself to challenging experiences that extend beyond one’s natural comfort zone. Facing adversity and challenges builds a resilient base that will be solidified throughout various experiences.
Curiosity is a quality that fuels discovery and inspires creativity. It is a progressive quality that facilitates the development of expertise and creates opportunity for innovation. Curiosity makes way for the necessary exploration of future possibilities to become essential realities. A curious nature will overshadow personality characteristics such as shyness and timidness because the need to know outweighs anything that would impede that need. My curiosity opened doors for me that I never imagined possible. I was curious about playing music at a young age, and many years later I held multiple degrees in music, and I was blessed with performance opportunities that I never thought was possible. The same thing happened with basketball, which turned into a national championship game experience as a coach along with once in a lifetime international experiences in the game as well. Curiosity made me better at every facet of my job throughout my career. Someone who aspires to employ curiosity as a more useful professional and personal quality should start with asking questions out loud that they would normally internalize. Be unafraid to explore in unrelated areas to seek ways to make them relatable.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am very passionate about the things I do. Passion is the salt that adds flavor to experiences in life. Without out passion I believe success is still achievable, but it is not nearly as impactful. Many people have heard perfectly played and performed musical selections that simply bored their socks off. The performance was technically flawless and musically accurate, but it felt sterile and dry. It left the listener severely wanting. Conversely, people have heard spirited but imperfect musical performances that charged the soul in such a way that it created a lifetime memory. Action without passion leaves much to be desired. Passion allows a person to push past mistakes and through obstacles. Passion maintains clarity of vision even when detractors attempt to blur it. Of course, the goal is to perfectly mix passion and perfection in the pursuit of success, but if I have to embrace one above the other, I will always choose passion. Passion is what wakes me up in the morning excited about that day’s journey in my purpose. I am so passionate about championing the success of others, and helping them to actualize the best version of themselves. I am passionate about excellence in performance, whether that be musical performance, athletic performance, career performance, leadership performance, or life performance. People experience a tireless version of me when I am operating passionately in my purpose. To experience passion as a lifestyle quality, I think it is essential to identify what one’s purpose is. A great way to start that process is to figure out the things that you absolutely love to do and marry your time, energy, and efforts to those things. Opportunities will begin to appear that help you to refine gifts you never knew you had, and you will begin to notice that your purpose in life starts to become clearer. Once there is clarity of purpose your passion to live in and share the gifts formed by your purpose will become uncontrollable. It will wake you up in the middle of the night and early in the morning. Alarm clocks are not needed for people who operate in the passion of their purpose.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
This is a great question, and I think it speaks to the heart of the value I place on the parenting of my mother. The answer is simple, discipline followed closely by a love of reading. For a significant portion of my childhood my mother was a single parent working to raise children on her own. This often meant long hours at work simply to get bills paid on time, food on the table, and clothes on our backs. As a result, her time was limited, and she needed to ensure that home could function safely, effectively, and efficiently in her absence. The solution was a clearly defined, highly detailed, and unyielding regimen of chores and duties at home. She would demonstrate something once with a level of detail and precision that would make a drill sergeant proud, and the expectation was for us to consistently replicate her example. Anything but perfect attention to detail resulted in a 12:00 am or later wake up where the error was pointed out and directions were given to correct the error immediately. One can imagine that the message was clearly received after a few wake-up experiences! She demanded that we pay extreme attention to detail regardless of the task. She demanded excellence in the performance of our duties. Over time, a sense of pride developed, and it became a joy to find excellence in the details. Even as a grown adult she will still call me out because the sheets on my bed are wrinkled! The lessons stuck, and I have been blessed to experience multiple successful careers because she cared enough to be relentless even when I thought it did not matter. My mom made sure that I knew that everything matters, that discipline matters, and success is in the details.
Boys will be boys, and I was no exception to that rule! Many groundings were the result of my disobedient and rambunctious ways. This meant no television, talking on the phone, or playing outside for whatever period of time she deemed appropriate. However, every time I found myself in this situation, she would take me to the bookstore the very next day and let me buy as many books as I thought were necessary to get through the “sentence.” By the seventh grade I was reading Tom Clancy novels with legitimate comprehension of the content. The more I read the better orator I became. My ability to comprehend written information and apply it in different mediums grew leaps and bounds. The gift of this impact helped me to become a solid writer, but more importantly an effective speaker. Why is the latter so important? Speaking to groups of people and organizations large and small is something I love to do! It is one of the foundational reasons CLS Leadership Solutions LLC even became an idea in my mind. Unknowingly, through the application of tough love my mom prepared me to be able to excel in my passions for communication, instruction, and leadership. Reading was more than fundamental. It was lifechanging and purpose focusing!
Contact Info:
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cedric-solice/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clsleadershipsolutions1260/featured
Image Credits
Rob Segaar – Company Logo Designer
Michael Okoniewski – SU Basketball Photos
Betsey Mitchell – Boogie Band Photo
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
