Growing up in Idabel, Oklahoma, Courtland Warren was always aware that there were two parallel existences: one for those who lived on the west side of the town’s railroad tracks, and another for those on the east side—“the haves and the have-nots,” as Warren puts it. “We were in the ‘have-not’ line,” he says, “and I wanted to figure out how you change lines.”
From an early age, Warren excelled at school and in sports, but his opportunity to “change lines” took a big leap forward one day when a crate of books arrived. They came to him when his father, who’d left Warren and his mother when Warren was just 4 years old, brought them to one of Warren’s high school track meets. The crate—which was the only gift Warren ever received from his father—was stacked with self-improvement titles, including Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, among others.
With gold medals from his track meet around his neck, Warren immediately dove into the books on the bus, even as his teammates celebrated their win around him. It was then that he remembered his father, a glass installer, noticing that all the wealthiest homes he worked at had something in common: a library. Something clicked in Warren, and he thought, “OK, I got it. This is how I’m going to get into the ‘haves’ line.”
But when he got home, his mother learned about the books and demanded that he get rid of them. “Later, I learned why,” Warren explains. “My father had read many books but, in my mother’s eyes, had never applied them. To her, those books represented empty promises.”
His mother had her sights set on a brighter future for Warren and consequently ran a strict household with a devout Southern Baptist rigidity. Yet Warren calculated that a rare departure from the rules was worth it in this case and hid the books at his grandmother’s house, under a blue tarp in the backyard. One at a time, and in secret, he read every single one. It was within those pages that Warren uncovered a new world of ideas about personal potential, growth and self-improvement—a world in which, he says, the power of the mind was revealed to him.
Turning a new page
The authors of those books became Warren’s mentors, and driven by their ideas, his mother’s rigorous expectations and a desire to impress his dad, Warren completed high school with flying colors. After graduating from Oklahoma State University with a business degree, he worked in the corporate world for a couple of years until he was laid off. It was a devastating blow for a young person who had built their future exactly as laid out in the traditional playbook.
Nonetheless, it gave Warren a chance to refocus and restart his career in a direction that aligned with some of his earliest dreams. He secured a job as a coach and group trainer, which gave him the opportunity to inspire professionals daily, help them dispel their limiting beliefs and unlock their individual potential. Initially, it was a challenge as a 20-something to convince older participants that he had the wisdom to guide them to success, but Warren has a natural magnetism and authority to his presence—something he theorizes was handed down from his father, who was a preacher and impressive orator. (On top of that, Warren is impeccably stylish and polished, with an authoritative voice, a presence you can observe in his recorded TEDx Talk, “An Elevated Talk on Race.”)
Warren built a career at PSI Seminars, a long-standing personal development and training firm, by facilitating hundreds of sessions and giving keynote speeches for groups over the course of 20 years. In 2023, he launched his own consulting business, which offers public speaking, group facilitation and coaching. “I truly wanted to know if I could create something that I could call my own,” he says.
Immediately, he got in touch with past training participants, among them an executive who, thanks in part to one of Warren’s past sessions that he’d attended, had gone from sleeping on his mother’s couch to leading a multimillion-dollar enterprise. The participant recalls that Warren was “‘the first person [who] ever told me that I could.’”
And just like that, Warren landed one of his first clients.
The future of knowledge
Now, Warren has positioned himself at the intersection of novel technology and personal development. He is profoundly excited by the fact that, as AI widens access to learning and expertise, it has the potential to erase the line between the proverbial east and west sides of the tracks.
Yet while the expansion of knowledge via AI means a more level playing field, it also means greater competition. “I think we are moving into a space where we’re going to be required to bring our best, which means that we’re going to have to unpack a lot of our limiting beliefs—and that can be scary,” he notes. “But the truth of that is that we pull back enough layers… until you get back to the core of who you are, the truth of who you are, your authentic self, which is that you are remarkable and you have something remarkable to offer the world.”
For those who are anxious about the evolving professional landscape, Warren provides more reassurance: “You came into the world with everything that you need to be, to do, to have whatever you can imagine.”
To that end, Warren has built a new coaching platform called AI + You, which helps his clients get to the core of their being and identify their limiting beliefs. “With the right prompts,” he says, “AI becomes a mirror that reveals what’s been running in the background for years. I teach people how to use it not just to move faster but to move truer.”
To illustrate, he points to one client who, though highly intelligent and gifted, found herself stuck professionally. After engaging with his AI + You platform, “she uncovered a core belief tied to her childhood that had been silently running her adult decisions,” he says. “Once it came into the light, everything shifted…. That’s the kind of result AI makes possible when used with precision and care.”
Resilience is the new intelligence
As important as dispelling limiting beliefs is, Warren says that the ability to harness resilience is the greatest skill one can have. “People talk about IQ, [and] they talk about EQ. I think it comes down to RQ,” Warren says. “Not intelligence quotient, not emotional quotient—your resilience quotient.”
This is especially true in a rapidly changing employment landscape affected by AI. “What happens when we enter a world where the information is available to everyone?” he asks. “Well, in an environment such as that, the only thing that will separate people is their willfulness… their resilience.”
Reflecting on his decades of success in personal development, it’s clear that Warren himself developed this type of resilience, grit and tenacity long before he made his way through that crate of books.
And as for that library that spelled success in his dad’s eyes? “I’ve taken the wisdom I’ve gathered—across time, authors and experience—and built a living, breathing virtual library,” he says. “It’s not housed between four walls, but it’s in every lesson I teach, every insight I share and every breakthrough I help someone achieve.”
This article originally appeared in the September/October issue of SUCCESS® magazine.
Photo by ©Jay Wiggins/courtesy of Courtland Warren
