Meet Cordney McClain

We were lucky to catch up with Cordney McClain recently and have shared our conversation below.

Cordney, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
The origin of finding my purpose came from the occurrences of three events happening very closely in duration. The first – during my time in the aerospace industry, hungry for promotion and understanding, I brought my work home often but disliked my job. My wife asked a pivotal question to me one evening while I was working overtime for no pay, “Why do you bring your laptop home every night for a job that you don’t even like”. The second – I was approached randomly at my job site by a man that I had never seen a day in my life and he told me, “Son, take more days off because if you walk out these doors and get hit by a truck, this company will post your job replacement before your obituary is written”. The third, my team lead told me, “Cordney, time is so expensive and you can not get it back. I have worked here for over two decades and I hate my job”. All of these instances happened so close together and made me look up from the rat race that I was stuck in and focus on the things that I love. The orator and motivational speaker, Dr. E.T. Thomas stated, “find what you love to do, become great at it, and someone will pay you for it”. I always understood that I wanted to help young marginalized students find resources that I never had access to and I wanted to perform spoken word. I found a way to merge the worlds.

While creating curriculum- based material around self-identity and self-actualization while around my spoken word, I began to frequent colleges, universities, and K-12 summits, conferences, and workshops providing professional development and life skills. I have been blessed to accomplish many of my goals such as becoming an author, a spoken word performer, and a trained actor, honored with a Cherokee Nation Public Service award, and an Oklahoma Journal Record’s Achievers under 40 awardee. With all of that considered, my most significant accomplishment has been becoming a father. I am married to a beautiful woman named Carrie McClain and we are blessed with two daughters, Kimora and Camílla. Coming from a single parent household onslaught with gang infested neighborhoods among peers that were trying immensely to become a “man” by the standards of other boys who also lacked father figures, my mentality has developed into just this, “we are not our environments but of it and they are components that if used correctly will be the powerful weapons to build our evolution.” In the journey of figuring out how to become a father, I very much understand what I do not want to be, so I am deliberate in being everything to my children that I desired from a father. Being a father who is present in my children’s lives and keeping my family unit in tact is by far an accomplishment that I am most proud of every single day. I am breaking the vicious cycle of fatherlessness, making my children a part of my dreams and passions, being intentional with my rearing, and understanding that they are watching every move I make. I am building a legacy for them.

My dreams, my work, my ambitions and something so important – the great heights of my unconditional love for my family are all elements of their father figure that I want them to recognize and be acquainted with every day of their lives. I purposefully give them daily affirmations, positive reinforcement, I apologize when needed, and provide constant physical and mental affection so they will understand what it looks and feels like to be loved. These are pertinent elements that as a Black boy I went with a low amount of and at no fault of my single mother who only could give me what she knew. The way that many of us with similar backgrounds grow up in households in which our parents are trying to understand life, not drown from bills, and keep us alive. The result of these circumstances leaves us with a low amount of emotional intelligence, but I can say confidently that I’m doing well so far as the father of two small divas that have me wrapped around their pinkies. Reaffirming that this is my biggest accomplishment, being an active “Girl Dad”. All of this – is MY PURPOSE.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
The mission is to give all the gifts that God has given me back to the world so that when I go home to my father, I had left this place a little better off than the way that I found it. This mindset for me is based our relationships but not “networking”. That term is way too transactional. I have made it my mission to create relationships from my engagement and social endeavors. To sum up what I have been doing within my passion is the relationship cultivation in arenas that create accessibility, funding, and educational innovation to improve the opportunities of the marginalized. I have did this by working with police departments, juvenile centers, K-12 entities, colleges, universities, and non profits providing my expertise from performance arts, curriculum building, grant writing, company partnerships, and mentorship.

I live by the mantra of “show and prove”. This saying speaks directly to not just speaking on your abilities but doing the work and letting your actions speak for themselves. On all social media platforms, I post my service, speaking engagements, performances, and community outreach efforts. We live in a world too involved with the negative backlash of what showing your accomplishments and community service can bring but I believe if you do not show “it” or young people do not see “it” then they cannot fathom the possibilities. I live and grew up on the Southside of Oklahoma City and very often I will have strangers, young people, approach me in local stores and establishments and let me know that I have somehow inspired them. These young people tell me of food drives, mentorships efforts, coat drives, and simple individual community service that they are now involved in because they saw someone from their neighborhood, Me, that looked like them doing this type of work. When I would negotiate million-dollar aerospace deals or acquire new business for a high priority client in the corporate arena, it didn’t impact me the same as it was just another day at work. Knowing that I’m making a difference by not only words, but my actions is creating a generation of young people that will push to do the same. This notion is such a mind-blowing achievement for myself and I believe it is immense for my community and society at large.

My day job as Partnerships Manager in Tulsa, Oklahoma focuses on the work being created to retain talent and actively invest in youth professional development. I work with the surrounding major companies and small businesses to educate them and train them within the ecosystem to develop young professionals. Artistically, I currently am preparing to release my sophomore album, “Pressure Cookers”, a concept album that focuses on men metaphorically being like the pressure cooker. This is a sealed cooking vessel that uses high pressure to increase the boiling point of liquids. This machine cooks food faster, but its way more dangerous . The different causes for explosions – the types of food you put in it -Inadequate Venting –releasing pressure in unsafe ways. And, one can cook up to heats of up to 250 degrees but right at that, you can explode too. The dilemma – just because you can handle it does not mean it’s healthy.

This project will be available on all platforms along with my current single out now, “Peace”. I consistently take performance, workshop, and acting bookings and I can be booked through my site and also contact via my social platforms.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
My first “most important skill/ quality” is the vital source or asset of mine is a purposeful mindset combined with my “say YES” mentality. I believe we as service minded people should keep monetary gain in mind because we do live in a capitalistic world, but I have appreciated opportunities that I have experienced by saying “YES” when there was no payment involved. I either left from many spaces feeling such a high sense of fulfillment because of the lives I was able to affect and how my life was affected in the process. As a biproduct, those “free” opportunities usually resulted in another opportunity in which someone with a budget for my passion could provide payment. I would have to say that my philosophy and what I believe with all my heart that this intentionality, saying “Yes”, and the desire to make my family proud of me has had the most pertinent and instrumental part in my success and the discovery of my purpose.

My second “most important skill/ quality” is my acumen for project management. I have over 20 years of community outreach, team leadership, and project management experience combined with 6 years of direct experience in diversity and inclusion programs. These experiences range from leading corporate teams within the annals of Government contracting of over 20 professionals within an array of respective departments, running military operations and for the Army, conducting summer outreach programs with over 150 youth, teaching at juvenile center programs with 8 week residencies, and operating as a director of diversity and inclusion overseeing all diversity initiatives for approximately 4,000 students and over 150 faculty and staff consulting deans, presidents, and the Provost office for a major division I university. Excluding project management certifications and internal trainings which are beneficial and job specific, the key to my project management prowess is truly my eagerness to communicate proactively, the desire to advocate for others, and my willingness to keep the mission and not my own ego at the forefront of my efforts. However, SWOT analysis, strategic planning with set dates, and scribing every detail have all been immensely powerful weapons in my arsenal.

My third “most important skill/ quality” is resiliency which came to be most developed honestly from time and life experience. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” Within the military, higher education, working with non-profit organizations, and especially as an artist, mics may not work, vendors may show up late, equipment will fail, and people will sometimes not show up and hold up their end of the deal. All of which are examples of things occurring that was not in the plans. I have had to understand this hard fact in the professional realm and also with life. The loss of loved ones to being laid off and everything in between, I learned early that I had to allow the pain to be exactly that but to learn, to grow, and to push myself through the dilemma because apart of being resilient is being accepting. As humans, we dwell but when that becomes a sustained behavior, we let ourselves down and others that love us. Being able to embrace change and struggle and propel ourselves despite of circumstances is God’s grace and I do not take this quality lightly at all but it takes life to truly develop this grit.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
As a child, I frequented my mother’s hometown of Muskogee very often and many people not familiar with the area would not know of the high drug dealing, drug abuse, and violence was in the area in the 90s compiled with all of the crime and violence that Oklahoma City provided during the time as well. As an observant child with nothing but influences of male role models such as pimps, pastors, or drug dealers, I realized how powerful my family’s matriarchs were.

These strong women in my life, my mother, grandmother, and 6 aunts, shaped how I looked at manhood, being family-oriented, and my infatuation with success and monetary gain at a very young age. I excelled through high school but not because I was highly intelligent but because I had a stronghold on self-motivation which I believe I inherited from my Grandmother, Ms. Velma Jean McClain, whom I watched and went with to clean other people’s homes, had an intricate part in raising up to 15 grandchildren, and was also a strong matriarch figure in her neighborhood.

My mother, Ms. Juliette McClain, who raised me by her lonesome with values that I still get complimented on to this day as a 38 year old man leading his household, with her working multiple jobs as long as I can remember. These women and host of the McClain family including now my children are the primary source impacting my drive on my career.

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