Preparing is Caring

Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. I’m Mark Cole. And what if I asked you the question, how much do you care for the people you lead? How much do you care for the people that you want to influence in your life? Maybe it’s your family. Maybe it’s A leadership team, maybe it’s a company. And then what if I said, how much do you prepare yourself to lead them? Would that answer be equal? Today, we’re going to get to talk about preparing is caring. And Chris, you’ve played sports. You’ve spoke in front of large, large audience. You’ve written books.

Mark Cole:
Tell us the place you feel like you had to prepare more than any other area of your life?

Chris Robinson:
Yeah. You know, when it comes to sports, it comes to writing, all those different things, I would say the area that I have spent the most time is in communication.

Mark Cole:
Wow.

Chris Robinson:
And preparing to speak. I mean, countless hours of just working on impromptu speaking, working on structured speaking, sales speaking, you know, business speaking, you know, just all these different areas of my life in order to be a better communicator. And still to this day, I’m still working on it day in day out because just because we do it doesn’t make us any better at it. And so I think that’s the fallacy that people fall into is that, well, I do this every day, so I must be getting better. But in fact, you’re not getting any better because we’re going to fall into a couple of traps that John talks about in today’s episode. But for me, it’s been communication’s been the hardest thing that I’ve had to work on.

Mark Cole:
Well, it’s funny that you say communication because number one, you’re a great communicator, but it’s also interesting because one of the best global communicators on leadership, is getting ready to talk to us about preparing is caring, about how we prepare is directly connected with how much we care about the people that we’re leading. And so I hope you’ll jump in and listen. By the way, if you would like to download the bonus resource, if you would like to watch us on YouTube, you can go to MaxwellPodcast.com/Prepare and you’ll be able to get all the links, all the different resources that we bring in and bundle for you in today’s episode. Hey, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper. Here is John talking about preparing is caring.

John Maxwell:
You cannot deliver what you have not developed, because I watch a lot of people and they’re trying to deliver something they haven’t developed. And I can always tell. When I hear somebody communicate off the top of their head but not out from the core of their life, I can almost always say, “Ha ha, yeah, they’ve read about the subject but they haven’t lived the subject. They know about the subject but they haven’t experienced the subject.” So let’s talk about preparation. Let’s talk about the fact that honestly, You show that you care when you start to prepare. So I’m in my first church, in a little country church in Hillham. And it takes me about 3 months. I mean, I have these precious, a small group, just 30 people, real small church, country church.

John Maxwell:
Farmers, just beautiful salt of the earth farmers. And I’m there for about 3 months, and one day I realized something. Well, I realized it by the fact that one Saturday I really didn’t have much time to prepare, and so one Saturday night I kinda put together what you might wanna call a Saturday night special. And I worked for maybe an hour and a half on a sermon, and I got up and I preached it the next day, and they were so thrilled, they were so happy. And as I was leaving, they were saying, “Good message, Pastor.” And as I went home that day, I thought to myself, These farmers are very content, they’re very happy, and I think if I just work about an hour and a half or 2 hours a week on preparation of sermons, I think that’s all I’m gonna have to work. And I got tempted to wing it. And I thought, oh my gosh, if I only have to prepare for 2 hours a week, I can play more golf. I began to think of all kind of important priorities in my life.

John Maxwell:
And I went through an absolute inward battle for about 6 months. Do I wing it or do I work for it? Which do I do? In that 6-month period of time, I tried winging it a little bit, I tried working for it a little bit, and I came to the conclusion that if I would be a wing-it communicator, because I was gifted in communication skills. Remember this, if you’re gifted in communication or if you’re gifted in any skill set, understand this, you can wing it and get by with it. And the worst thing that can ever happen to you in your life is to wing it and get by with it. Because then guess what you’ll do? You’ll get by with it. And if you wing it, if you’re gifted, you could probably land in the top 20% of in this case, communication profession. But if you work at it, you can get into the top 2%. And that’s when I made a decision in my early 20s that I would not be a wing it communicator, I would be a work for it communicator.

John Maxwell:
And I developed the discipline at 22 to write out all my sermons. And I wrote them out. And I wrote sermons out for 25 straight years.

Chris Robinson:
Years.

John Maxwell:
Why? I wanted to develop the discipline of wordsmithing. I wanted to develop the discipline of phrasing. So when I give phrases and I turn words around and people say, oh my gosh, he’s amazing, it’s not amazing, it’s called work. And I decided I would work for it instead of wing it. And it was a life-changing decision for me. I went inside of my intuitive self And I asked myself, like on preparation, I went and I said, okay, now how do I really prepare teachings and lessons? And I wrote them out. And here’s what’s beautiful. I discovered that every time I teach, I teach two messages.

John Maxwell:
I didn’t know this. I teach what I call the best message, and I teach what I call the big message. Let me give you the difference. The best message is the message that I’m preparing to teach to the audience. It’s what I’m doing right now. And I call it my best message because I’m giving it my best shot. I prepared it, I developed it, but the best message changes. It’s the message I have for the audience that they are requiring or expecting from me when I teach.

John Maxwell:
Does that make sense? That’s the best message. You see, the best message is the lesson I teach you now. The big message is the DNA of me as a communicator. It’s who John Maxwell is. So you listen to the best message, but the big message you receive emotionally. For you to determine what your big message is, because by the way, you all have one, you just haven’t developed it yet. For you to know what the big message is, you ask yourself, 4 questions. Question number 1 is what do I want the audience to see? Question number 2, what do I want the audience to know? Question number 3, what do I want the audience to feel? And question number 4, what do I want the audience to do? So when I ask myself, I go into myself and say, what do I want my audience to see? What do I want you to see? What I want you to see is your possibilities.

John Maxwell:
I’m a possibility communicator. So what do I want you to know? I want you to know that you’re valued. Whenever you hear me communicate, I will always treat you with respect. I will always talk to you about your potential. I will always share with you how much I believe in you. I am a value communicator. I value you as a person. So I want you to see your possibilities.

John Maxwell:
I want you to know you’re valued. Well, what do I want you to feel? Empowered. I’m an empowered communicator. When you hear me teach, I’m talking about the fact that what I do, you can do. And I’m going to encourage you to pick up your tools, pick up your resources, and begin to, when you leave me, I want you always to feel I can do this, I can do this. So I want you to feel empowered, I want you to know that I value you, I want you to see your possibilities, and what do I want you to do? Apply and multiply. I want you to take what I taught you and apply it to your life, and because I do leadership, I always want you to multiply. Who am I, what do I do? I add value to leaders who multiply value to others.

John Maxwell:
So I’m an apply, multiply communicator. Now that is my big message. What I want you to do now is I want you to ask yourself those same 4 questions. Now your answers will be different than mine. They should be different from mine because you’re not me, I’m not you. But when you can answer those 4 questions with great integrity, and look around at people who know you best and kind of throw it at them and say, is this me? Is this, I mean, they’ll help you. Then what you’ll know is you have your big message. The reason you need to know that you have a big message is the moment you have that big message, no matter what your best message is, the weight of the message is carried by those 4 questions.

John Maxwell:
No matter what the subject. When they leave me, gosh, they see possibilities. They feel valued in their life and empowered in their life, and they wanna go out and apply and multiply. That’s who they are. But when you know your big message, guess what? The big message gets bigger because now you teach with incredible purpose and meaning and big picture, and it’ll take your communication to an entirely new level.

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Mark Cole:
Hey, welcome back. I’m so excited because to the subject matter that we’re talking about here, we have created an online, a social community to connect with you. You write in questions, we get them. You give us comments, we really appreciate it. But how we know to make this community better is feedback from you. But how we know to make this community stickier is by creating an online community that we’re so excited about. So we’re going to start a Facebook community for our podcast listeners. This is a place for leaders to reflect, to discuss, to apply what we’re talking about each week.

Mark Cole:
So you can join at the link in the show notes and it’ll tell you exactly how to get there. It’ll tell you exactly how to be a part of this community, because by the way, we care for you and we’re going to prepare ourselves to care for you and we’re going to be active in that community as well. So Chris, I’m so glad to be back talking about how we prepare ourselves to lead more effectively.

Chris Robinson:
Yeah, really excited about this. Well, this is one that I got caught smack dab in the middle of. In the book that I wrote for Drift to Drive, I talk about a moment that really catalyzed this exact scenario, and that was being in Cambodia with John Maxwell. I didn’t really prepare to the tune that I should have prepared. I prepared, but you know, like John talked about, I was giving him the Saturday night special, you know. And, and just afterwards, everyone came up to me, oh, it was so great, it was so awesome. And then I went back and I sat down with John and I I’m sitting at the table and I said, “John, go ahead and give me some feedback on my talk today. It’s been a little while.” And John obliged.

Chris Robinson:
He gave me about 10 things on there. And then there were other people at the table, good friends of mine as well too. And they thought it was a brainstorming session. They start giving me feedback and I’m just sweating. And I’m going, “Man, I just, I didn’t think it was that bad, but here I am.” But I go back that night, Mark, and I look at the notes. There wasn’t a thing on there that I didn’t know, but there was everything on there that I didn’t prepare to do.

Mark Cole:
Wow.

Chris Robinson:
I had spent more time preparing to go speak at a Chamber of Commerce, a Rotary Club years before than I did to speak on stage in front of 3,500 people. And so when I heard this one right here, I was like, oh my goodness, I can’t wait to talk about preparing because that was the jumpstart, getting the battery shock on me to go, oh my goodness, you’re drifting as a communicator because I was doing it all the time, every single week. And so I truly, truly related to with this message, but this also converts over to our everyday lives as leaders.

Mark Cole:
Yes, it does.

Chris Robinson:
We have everyday meetings that we have to prepare for. We have everyday one-on-one interactions that we have to prepare for. But talk to me about it, Mark. Where is it that you’ve been gifted in your life where you’ve winged it or could have winged it instead of actually working at it?

Mark Cole:
Well, I’ve got a real life example in leadership. We’ll talk about communication in a little bit as well, my own. Lack thereof in preparation that John got me. In leadership, because I do love that bridge, that connection of John talked a lot about communicating, I think you can apply every one of these principles to our leadership. A real-life example yesterday, you were in so many of these meetings that we had yesterday, and boy, I woke up early preparing for every one of those meetings except one. And the meeting that I prepared the least for was my meeting with Reggie, my right hand, my CFO, strategy officer, my executive partner, his executive partner. And the reason I didn’t prepare a lot for that one was because that meeting was going to be used to set up and confirm everything that we did. But I had two things I really needed to answer in that meeting that then I was going to get to what I really wanted to do, which was prepare for the rest of the meetings with them.

Mark Cole:
Those two items completely torpedoed that entire hour meeting. I did not anticipate the response of my team when I was preparing those two things. I just jotted them down. I need to ask about these two things and then we need to do it. I just spent— I’m down here late to this podcast right here. I’m down here late because today I was repairing for a lack of preparing yesterday in that meeting. Spent an entire hour just before this meeting. So my hour meeting became 2-hour meetings, and an hour and 45 of it was repairing for the fact I did not prepare.

Mark Cole:
So this is a very good question you asked me and a very timely response on the difference between repairing and preparing. ‘Cause by the way, John teaches in other lessons, we’re either repairing or preparing. In meetings, in communication, let me tell you something, I’ve communicated from stage before that I was not prepared for. I did more repairing on what I did not say correctly because I did not prepare.

Chris Robinson:
Right, man. Well, that was great. Well, I hate that they cost you that much time in this short period, but I think this happens so often every single day in companies all throughout the world where you go into a meeting with one agenda, not fully preparing for it. You just kind of walk in and then you get handed these grenades that just take you in all different directions. And then one meeting turns into 2 to 3 to 4, all the way down the line and we find ourselves consistently chasing. And so a little bit of preparation for every single meeting really goes a long way.

Mark Cole:
It absolutely does.

Chris Robinson:
When we look at this next thing I want to talk about, John really said something powerful here. He said that they were thrilled with this Saturday night special, but he could tell the difference inside. And just like myself in Cambodia, the crowd was thrilled with it, but I knew inside Those closest to me knew as well too that there was more. But how do you build an internal standard that’s higher than external applause?

Mark Cole:
Yeah. So I love this question. I love the concept in both communicating from stage or communicating to a boardroom, a group on your team, and applying it to leadership because when we often When we often begin to challenge ourself to do well, and then we satisfy ourselves that we did good compared to the time we had to spend, the time that the last person that spoke, I beat them. We began to allow our barometer of success, our indicator of success to be on external factors rather than an internal perspective, I think we get into trouble. It’s a comparison trap. I’m not trying to be better than you, Chris. I’m trying to be the best of me. I learned a long time ago, in fact, to a fault, I learned a long time ago on how to self-critique.

Mark Cole:
I grew up in an environment that was just high demand, high expectation. We wanted our family, we wanted our family image to be a hard worker, to be living above reproach, to be living the standards set. We wanted to be above the standards, and it was just a drive in our home to not only know the standards, but to live above the standards. That was just kind of a drive. What that has done to me as a leader has been both a gift and an enemy. It’s been a gift that I never have to worry about somebody else’s critique on making me better. I’m already critiquing. That has been an incredible gift to me.

Mark Cole:
My internal or external, excuse me, my internal perspective of the work that I’ve done has always been not how did I do, what could I do better? That’s a friend. I love that. The enemy has been, I’m never satisfied even when I did my best. I am not my own best friend. I’m my own worst critique. And that, has caused me at times to not enjoy the journey of impacting others because I’m always asking, what should I, could I, would I have done better?

Chris Robinson:
Right. When you’re in that self-critique, because there are a lot of people out there go through that exact same feeling of self-critique, would you find that you’re more of a— do you have more of a negative bend on what you critique or do you have more of a positive bend on what you critique?

Mark Cole:
Negative.

Chris Robinson:
How it is?

Mark Cole:
Negative. Well, John has told me often, he’s told me often enough that I’ll repeat it for all of you podcast family. John has said the thing that he wishes the most for my leadership is that I would not be so hard on myself. Because yeah, it’s one thing to critique yourself and to edify you to better, and it’s another thing to look and say, you should have never done that. That was not helpful. That was not good. And so it really is, I’m a lot more positive with the people that I lead than how I lead myself. And so it’s a challenge that I get mentored on, not just from John, but from other coaches in my life and how to, changed my self-talk, right?

Chris Robinson:
Yeah, that’s a big, big deal. I think listeners really deal with a lot of that. Is there any other advice that you would give to someone that has that bend in critique that’s more negative than positive?

Mark Cole:
I’ll tell you what’s funny is I’ll give you my own Cambodia story. It was not Cambodia for me. It was actually Argentina for me. And I’m in Argentina. John’s there. Our team is there. Our director of content, our executive vice president of content, Jared’s there. Our content curator, Aaron, is here.

Mark Cole:
And just like John, John has always, even when I was terrible from stage, John was always giving me critique. Even when I was resistant, I don’t want to go on your stage. I run companies. Thank you very much. John was very critiquing of my speaking. He wanted me to become more believable, get better. And so I can remember a time in Argentina, we’re all sitting around a table and John starts the critique. And then all of a sudden, Jared, who happens to quote unquote work for me, I mean, he’s on my team, he chimes in.

Mark Cole:
And then Erin, the content curator that I also have the chance to sign her paycheck, she jumps in. So I let John finish, ’cause he signs my paycheck, he gets to say what he wants to. I let him finish. And then I looked at the other two. I said, have you ever thought that I might need some encouragement in an area that I’m not very good? And they just kind of stopped and went, Oh, we thought we wanted to critique. And I went, no, I want encouragement. And I really did, Chris, for about 6 to 8 months, I said, here’s y’all’s role. Tell me what I’m doing right.

Mark Cole:
I’m getting enough of what I could have done wrong from me and John. You tell me what I did right. And I said, I’m now putting in your job description, give me affirmation. That’s what your job description is stating. I really had to have that because if I would’ve listened to myself, which is very critiquing, very negative, if I listened to John, which was very constructive. He’s not negative at all, but it was all the things I should improve. If I kept continuing my steady diet of what I should have done right or should have done better, I would not have felt the encouragement. Here’s my whole point in saying that, Chris.

Mark Cole:
Know yourself. And there are times in my life in certain leadership situations, in this case, certain communication situations that I needed encouragement. And so I put it in somebody’s job description, find what I did right and tell me all Tell me all about it because I need to hear it.

Chris Robinson:
Right. No, that is awesome. Now I live on the opposite spectrum, as you know, and I’m very, very positive. So the last thing that I need, I mean, I can take encouragement and I’m just swatting it just left and right. Like, all right, good, good. Yeah, that’s fine. I don’t really want to hear that. And so I’m always looking for that negative bend to go, hey, no, no, no, tell me what I did wrong.

Chris Robinson:
And then I can take so much of it that I’m like, okay, I’m good. I got it.

Mark Cole:
I got it.

Chris Robinson:
Okay, I’ll fix those couple things. I’ll come back, I’ll get some more. And it truly is this balancing act that we have to have to where we have to have enough encouragement, but be willing to face enough truth so that we can actually change.

Mark Cole:
I agree. And I know we’re going to get into this, but it comes back, Chris, we talk a lot about critiquing ourselves, positive, negative. I love the differences of how you and I self-talk and then how we utilize input. I’m in a middle, Chris, incidentally, I’m going to come back to something I was going to say, but Incidentally, I’m now in a place to where, man, I really want to become world-class in specifically communication. I have always wanted to be world-class as a leader, but I’m in a place to where I really want to be world-class. And now I hunger for the constructive criticism that will allow me to step up. I’m hungry. I’m desperate for it.

Mark Cole:
I also now swat the affirmation, got all that. What can I work on to make it better? One of the things that I think that is not tied to quality from an external voice or an external perspective is an internal understanding and gauge. I’ve told the story before on the podcast. It bears repeating right here. It’s the story of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He was the Secretary of State for both Nixon and for Ford, President Nixon, President Ford. And he had an infamous discipline, specifically to speechwriters. He was a Secretary of State in war times, which means his job was really important.

Mark Cole:
And so every speech by Nixon would go through his desk before President Nixon gave that speech. And they would bring it, and it was always last minute. It was always another war thing had changed, and they would bring it to him and he would say, before he even looked at it, he said, “Is this your best work?” Is this the best you can do? And 50, 60% of the time say, well, we felt like we could have done this. And as soon as they go, well, if he’d say, don’t give me this yet. I only want it when it’s your best work. What if we did that to ourselves and with ourselves every leadership moment, every communication moment, every meeting that we was going to do? Is it our best work? And you know who answers that question? Is not you, because you may not like my work, but can I answer, yes, this is the best I could do with what I’ve been given to do?

Chris Robinson:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. John talks about that is your best message versus your big message. And he gives us the 4 questions to ask. And I think from a leadership lens, as we look at going into the next meeting that you’re getting ready to walk into, asking these 4 questions, he said, what do I want the audience to know? What do I want my coworkers to know when I walk into this boardroom? What do I want them to know? What do I What do I want them to see? What do I want them to see and what am I going to model throughout what I’m doing? What do I want them to feel? Are they going to leave this meeting depressed? Are they going to leave this meeting happy? Are they going to leave this meeting motivated? Giving some context there, but then what do I want the people in the meeting to do? And I think if we ask those questions and really take a look at each individual meeting, oh my goodness, can you imagine the intentionality if I actually answered these questions? I’m not saying, hey, I’ve not done that. Okay? So I’m saying this as a group collectively podcast. Listeners as a whole, what if we started this and what would meetings look like moving forward?

Mark Cole:
What’s interesting is, so John says often, I’ve spoken over 13,000 times. I’ve been with him on many of those times. And to this day, he’s still checklisting those questions. So he’s perfected his best message. He’s perfected his big message. He’s got all of that, but he still asks himself that question before he goes out to an audience. And I think if we could get a discipline like that, going back to the whole topic of this podcast, preparing is caring. If we could get a discipline like that to where we put ourselves as a leader, as a communicator, into the seats of the people we’re communicating.

Mark Cole:
I have a really good friend, you know him as well, a guy here in Atlanta, great communicator, Andy Stanley. And Andy prepares every one of his stage talks. With several people groups in mind as he’s preparing. And what that does is it makes sure that he puts a nuance, an application, an awareness into that talk of the people that he’s going to be communicating to. If I would’ve done, I went back to my illustration from yesterday. If I would’ve just had just 10 minutes of preparation of going, what is the potential mindset of the people in that first meeting? I would’ve caught that my lack of preparation could torpedo the results that I wanted in that meeting. And so often, if we would just slow ourselves to the discipline, what is the state of mind? What is the posture? What is the position of the people I’m getting ready to go meet? It will be a game changer to the effectiveness, but it’ll be an even greater game changer to the things that you missed that caused them to out before you ever got to your agenda.

Chris Robinson:
Wow. Wow. Absolutely love it. Well, this will get us wrapped up here today, Mark, with preparing is caring. I mean, it means a lot to prepare. And so I think as podcast listeners, as we’re out there, think about your life on a daily basis of what it is that could be more effective. What could you be better at if you just took a little bit more time to prepare each and every single day? We’ve all got different areas of our life. It could be preparing our food.

Chris Robinson:
Preparing our food for the week. It could be preparing our calendar. It could be preparing our kids. It could be preparing in all these different areas, but they all add up. And if we’d spend a little bit more time preparing, we’re going to get a lot further in life.

Mark Cole:
Oh, I agree with you. It’s so fun to do this podcast with you. I love that Jake does all this preparation, gets John’s audio clip to us. I love the conversations that we have before we go live. And what I love podcast family, podcast listeners, viewers. Here’s what I love. I love that you’re in our minds for every podcast. I come do my best to sit in the car with you.

Mark Cole:
Some of you, I get on the treadmill with you. Others of you, I kind of put it on background where I— because I know I’ve got 15 other things to do. How much do you care for your team?? Because again, it’s a direct correlation to your preparing, and I hope that you’ll do that. Hey, I want to come back to inviting you to our community. I want to invite you to our Facebook community. We’re putting that in the show notes. We want to have conversations with you. We want to take these conversations a little bit further.

Mark Cole:
We want to hear from you and continue to up-level the impact that we want to have with you. We are here because we want to add value to you. We are here because we expect you to multiply value to others and let’s go do it together. In fact, Jim listened to our 400th episode. Jim, it took us 400 episodes to create a Facebook community. We’re a little slow around here, but 400th episode was just a little while ago. And we talked about, John and I, John was live in the studio with me, we talked about how to use failure for Success. I hope you’ll go back and listen to that.

Mark Cole:
Jim said, it’s an incredible milestone, 400 episodes and still adding tremendous value. Love the reminder that failure is not final, failure’s just feedback. You got it, Jim. That’s exactly what we wanted to communicate in that episode. If you’ve not heard that episode, go check it out. Until then, go bring some powerful positive change to the world around you because everyone deserves deserves to be led well.

Chris Robinson:
Do you feel like you’re meant for more, but you’re not sure what next step to take? Whether you’re leading a team, building your business, or just trying to lead yourself well, you don’t need more noise. You need wisdom. Real, proven, practical wisdom. That’s why we created the Maxwell Leadership App. Inside, you’ll get daily bite- night-sized videos from John C. Maxwell and other world-class thinkers designed to help you grow every day. You’ll unlock curated playlists on personal growth, leadership, mindset, communication, confidence, and much more, all for just $9.99 a month. And here’s the best part: it’s growth on your terms, at your pace, in your pocket.

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Transcript created by Castmagic.