Learn These Skills to Become a Memorable Leader: A Fireside Chat with John Maxwell and Jeff Henderson

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John Maxwell:
you have to get over yourself. Your nerves. Everything that bothers you about speaking is because you’re thinking of you more than you are of the people. And you got to get over yourself. And I tell people they should. Every one of you. You need to get over yourself. I tell people all the time, laugh at yourself because everyone else is.

John Maxwell:
And I watch people take themselves way too serious.

Mark Cole:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. I am excited now. I’m excited every podcast. I truly love doing the Maxwell podcast. I’m excited today because I always love new. And today, for the first time ever, we’re doing a podcast that is unusual, it is unique. Now let me say this. There is a difference when you read a book and you mark it and when you read a book and it marks you.

Mark Cole:
Recently, John Maxwell sat down with Jeff Henderson. Jeff Henderson is a Maxwell leadership thought leader. He’s also an executive at Chick Fil A. And we were at Chick Fil A in front of Chick Fil A headquarters, world headquarters. And Jeff Henderson brought John Maxwell to the stage and had a stack of John Maxwell books. He pulled out six of those books and told John Maxwell how the book marked him and then asked John what he thought about the point when he wrote it of what had marked Jeff Henderson. It was so incredibly insightful, not only in the content, but how to let a book mark you that. I decided I wanted to make it available to you today on the Maxwell Leadership Podcast.

Mark Cole:
Those of you that don’t normally watch the podcast, you. You want to go over to YouTube and watch this one because it’s Jeff and John sitting down together and walking through six books that has marked Jeff Henderson and why John Maxwell wrote those books and why he wrote that comment that impacted Jeff. It’s incredibly Insightful. So today you always want to go to YouTube, but today you really want to go to YouTube and watch John Maxwell. Hey, by the way, you can get to the YouTube link, you can get other show notes and you can get the link to download a bonus resource to walk through this with Jeff. With John Maxwell, you go to MaxwellPodcast.com/Memorable. Now, I’ll come back after each book and just give you an application point of what I applied and what I want you to apply to these excerpts. Here we go.

Mark Cole:
Grab a pen, grab a paper, click the link. See you on YouTube. Here is John Maxwell. Jeff Henderson.

Jeff Henderson:
When people ask me what’s a leadership book to recommend? This is the classic 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. Here’s one of the highlights in Law of empowerment. To lead others well, we must help them to reach their potential. That means being on their side, encouraging them, sharing the power we have with them and helping them succeed. Great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

John Maxwell:
Tell us about that. I really believe that very strongly. I think insecure leaders never empower people because they’re afraid what happens if they do a better job than me or what will happen to me. And if you have insecurity and you have a scarcity mindset which go together quite often, it could be a real problem. And in my earlier days, I didn’t have a scarcity issue and I didn’t have an insecurity issue, but I had a, I want to hold onto this issue until I get it good. And then I want to sit down with my team and say, here’s what I’m thinking. And they go, we are not worthy. We are not, you know, and here I am.

John Maxwell:
My gosh, that was amazing. What?

Jeff Henderson:
Woohoo.

John Maxwell:
I’m a great leader. And it was a real breakthrough for me, Jeff, when I realized no matter how good I was or no matter how I worked an idea or a thought, that the moment that I sat down at a table with other good people and shared with them the idea that they could make that idea better, and I’m passionate about shared thinking and sustained thinking. I think if you can sustain thoughts and then if you can share that thought. I’ve done this hundreds of times where I’ve gone to the team and say, here’s what I’m thinking, and I lay out my best thinking, maybe I’ve been thinking about it for a couple weeks and literally, I promise you, within two minutes somebody comes up with something better than what I laid out there. And they always improve me. And all These books. These books. I mean, some people think I thought all these thoughts and no, I thought some of the thoughts, but some of the best thoughts in my books were given to me by other people, and I’m very grateful to them.

John Maxwell:
I think that security means that you not only value the people around you, but you value what they can contribute. And we’re just better together. I don’t think it’s possible if you’re with really good people, to give them an idea or thought and have them not improve it. So I think what I would say to anyone is, you’re better together than you are, seeing one is too small of a number to achieve greatness. And I think that’s true. And so I greatly value. I mean, Jeff, you’re one. Jeff, you’re one of the best thought leaders I know.

John Maxwell:
You’re a wonderful thinker, and you’re a great thought leader. You know, when we. I tried to grab something a little bit to eat, and I said, jeff, sit down here with me. Come on, talk to me. Tell me what you’re learning. You know, I could hardly wait to steal something from him that I can put in my book. You know what I’m saying? But I know this. If I had.

John Maxwell:
But If I had 15 minutes with you, I wouldn’t waste it. I wouldn’t waste it. I watch people waste time, all the time in conversations, and I want to say, is that going to improve anybody’s life? Is that going to really make anybody better or different? And I would sit down with you and I’d try to find out what your strength is as quick as I could. And then I would ask you to teach me out of that strength. And trust me, every one of you could make me a better person today if I just had time to be with you. And I think when you have that perspective, I think it just opens up your world to a better world.

Mark Cole:
Can you just imagine what John just said? He’s sitting in environments and people are just not asking questions of him. I’ve watched John for years walk into environments that were hungry for leadership, that people had paid big money for John to speak or to mentor them. And when it was time for question and answers, there would be no questions. There would not be this leaning in and hunger that they were just talking about. You know what? Before I find fault with everybody else, I gotta tell you this. It was some time before I learned how to ask questions from John Maxwell. You see, I had a limit on my learning because I was not asking the right questions. I was not having a posture of learning in my life.

Mark Cole:
We’ll talk more about that in a couple of these segments. But I want to tell you this. I had an inability. I really had a lid. I had a lid on my ability to be mentored. I had a lid on my ability to learn because I was not asking questions. And to be honest with you, I wasn’t asking the right questions. But even more importantly, I was not asking the questions with the right heart, the right motive, the right reason.

Mark Cole:
See, John began to mentor me in this concept of you’ve got to ask questions to learn. You’ve got to ask questions to find your people. I had a limit on my leadership for years. CEO of John Maxwell’s companies, CEO of the company that I had been working in for 20 years. And I realized that my inability to ask questions became my lid for growth in my leadership. That’s when we started asking questions to listen, to learn from those questions and then to lead. We’ve been saying that now on this podcast for some time. You gotta listen, learn and lead.

Mark Cole:
You gotta listen, learn and lead. I could say that as it flowed off of my tongue with the best of them, but it wasn’t a discipline of my leadership. I had a lid on my leadership until I really did listen to learn and I had to listen to lead. John says it often, you’ve gotta find people before you can lead people. And so you ask questions to find people. That’s what we’re talking about. Leading, listening to learn is what can I take, what can I grab, what new thing do I have? Listening to lead is finding out where they are, where you can take them somewhere. But listening for the sake of empathy, to really hear what they’re saying behind their saying, takes the second question.

Mark Cole:
It’s the art of the second question. And you don’t determine the second question before you go into a meeting. You determine the second question based on the response from the first question. So I started a two question lid lifter. I had to constantly, when I had the question I was going in to ask, I had to constantly challenge myself to ask the second question based on what the answer was for the first question. You see, I’ve watched a lot of us lead by asking questions to direct rather than questions to reflect and learn. I now ask questions of myself so that I can understand the people so that I can find them and so I can inspire them understand, find, locate and inspire. And when you begin to ask questions like that with a three prong approach, I’m going to listen so I can understand.

Mark Cole:
I’m going to listen so I can locate you. I’m going to listen so I can inspire within you. You’ll find your capacity where will expand in your ability to lead by asking more questions. Now let’s get back to John and Jeff because now they’re going to talk about another book. That is incredible. Here we go.

Jeff Henderson:
We have a leadership principle here called Think Others first. And you talk about it from a perspective of adding value to people. It’s why one of my favorite books is 25 Ways to Win with People. I want you to talk about this. One of the chapters here is Create a Memory and visit it often. Why is creating a memory for teams and others such a powerful leadership strategy from your perspective?

John Maxwell:
Because it includes them. The memory includes them. You can give me a gift. It doesn’t include you. But the moment you and I do something together, there’s something now that we have relationally that we can connect with. And I think then what I work on hard is really making the memory a better memory. In other words, how can I take something that’s good and make it veteran? I’m always, you know, every year, my wife Margaret and I, we give our children and grandchildren for Christmas. We give them trips.

John Maxwell:
We don’t, you know, you know, buy stuff, they lose it, they break it, whatever, but we just do trips. I just took my daughter and her husband and some of my grandchildren. Margaret and I just took them to the British Virgin Islands just for five days. They love the water, so we did a lot of water stuff, but. But every day from 9 to 10:15, we sat down. And my newest book is how to Get a Return on Failure. And we did lessons every day on how do you get a return on failure? And we talked about it, and it just. It’s a memory.

John Maxwell:
And so when I’m done, when we were flying back and what was your favorite thing? And I mean, we did a lot of favorite things there because it’s a bleak, great place. And I mean, every one of them said our favorite thing was the, you know, doing the. Doing the book together. But I think if you put it in a setting, it’s kind of like they know when we get ready for a trip, that’s going to be a better memory because we’re not going to do a lot of wonderful stuff, but we’re going to have. We’re going to. We’re going to grow together as a family.

Jeff Henderson:
That’s great.

Mark Cole:
Okay, I got to stop right here before we go on, because first of all, What John just said about Jeff Henderson being a thought leader, I completely agree. In fact, this morning, the day that I am recording this podcast, I had breakfast with Jeff Henderson. And what I can say about Jeff Henderson and John Maxwell, they are constantly learning so they can improve their thinking, so they can lead with thought. Catch that. They are constantly catching learning. They’re constantly going after learning. It improves their thinking. And then they become that thought leader that John Maxwell just said about Jeff Henderson.

Mark Cole:
That doesn’t happen just because there’s great thoughts in them. That happens because of what they put in them, how they process what they put in, and then their willingness and desire to put it out there for others. Really, what I pick up from them as they’re talking about 21 laws of leadership is they make the most of of learning moments. They have got a discipline that says, if I’m given a moment to learn something, I’m going to take it, I’m going to make the most of it, and I’m going to make a difference with the people around me. See, I think the greatest limiting factor in someone’s leadership is when they don’t take time to take advantage of opportunity. To the person who’s given much, much is required. To those of us that have access to this podcast, for instance, there is something required of us every time that we get it. See, when John wrote the 21 laws, he made a decision.

Mark Cole:
I am going to give people disciplines in leadership that when practiced, when pursued, when applied, it will make a big difference in their leadership. And so Jeff and John are giving us something today that will absolutely make the most of this podcast. In fact, it’ll make it memorable. That’s what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about learning skills to become a memorable leader. Catch it, John. Jeff, have already dug into two content pieces, but I’m ready for a third. Are you ready to make the most? Are you ready to become memorable? Here they are.

Mark Cole:
Here’s John and Jeff.

Jeff Henderson:
Let’s talk about 16 undeniable laws of communication. Because the principle of leadership is leadership eventually comes with a microphone, either literally or figuratively. You’re going to have to say, here’s where we’re going. Here’s the vision. Fantastic principles here. You have three questions here in the law of content, and these are the questions. How is what I’m communicating affected me? How can I make it unique and different? How can I make it better? I’d like to lean into that first one. How is what I’m communicating affected me? If not, if I’m not moved.

Jeff Henderson:
My audience won’t be either. Tell us about that and how you’ve learned to become a better communicator over the years.

John Maxwell:
I love to teach communication. I think the ability to connect and communicate with people is probably the most important tool a leader can have. And when I was in my 20s, probably 25 or 26, I one day awakened to the fact that whatever I’m teaching won’t have a profound effect on others unless it’s, first of all, had a profound effect on me. And so the greatest message I ever teach is a message I live. And when I was probably 25, 26, I made a very important decision, and that was very simple. If I don’t live it, I don’t teach it. And what that meant was there were a lot of things I didn’t teach, and there are still a lot of things I don’t teach today because it’s not my life. I mean, I teach what I live.

John Maxwell:
And there’s. That’s our. I don’t think people want a perfect leader, but I do think they want an authentic leader. And what that means is that if you read something in my books or you hear me teach whatever it’s going to be, I do it. And to me, if I can lead me well, I can lead you well. And if I could be affected in a positive way, you could be affected in a positive way, too. So if the lesson doesn’t move me, why would it move you? And if it hasn’t changed me, why would I expect it to change you? If it hasn’t helped me, why would I expect it to help you? So I think all great communication begins with I sit down. It’s like somebody asked me one time, Jeff, they said, well, what’s your greatest leadership challenge? I said, well, that’s very simple.

John Maxwell:
Leading me, that’s the greatest leadership challenge. I mean, I can teach you what to do, but when you have to live it yourself, you have to go do it. But it’s out of doing it. Here’s what I know. Once you live it, once you do it, once you embrace it, once it changes your life, it gives you a moral authority that rises above regular communication.

Jeff Henderson:
Do you ever get nervous speaking? And for those who do get nervous speaking for a friend, what would you tell us about dealing with nerves?

John Maxwell:
When people ask me, how do you become a great communicator? It’s very simple. You have to get over yourself, your nerves. Everything that bothers you about speaking is because you’re thinking of you. More than you are of the people. And you gotta get over yourself. And I tell people they should. Every one of you. You need to get over yourself.

John Maxwell:
I tell people all the time, laugh at yourself, because everyone else is. And I watch people take themselves way too serious. It’s like the person said to her, what will they all be thinking? I said, they’re not thinking of you at all. I mean, where did you ever get such delusional thinking in your own life that people. And so just get over yourself. In fact, I wrote a. I’ve written some songs that go with some of my books. I go to Nashville, they give me these number one hit writers.

John Maxwell:
We get in the studio. It’s a lot of fun. I mean, they’re the writers. They’re the good. So. But they use my book ideas and I wrote a song and you get it however you get music. Again, I don’t even know. See, I don’t even know how to.

John Maxwell:
You know how to get music anyway, but. But it’s called get over yourself. And I love it because it’s. I’ve got to. I’ve got to find myself to know myself. I’ve got to know myself to improve myself. I got to improve myself so I can get over myself, so I can give myself to you. You can’t give yourself to people if it’s about you.

John Maxwell:
And my name is John, and I’m your friend. You’re not that important. The people. It’s all about the people. And the moment that you. The moment that you cross that line and you get over yourself, and you now are. Now you can freely give yourself to people and you can be real and you can. And you can really help them.

John Maxwell:
But you know, again, who’s the hardest person to lead? Me. Once I can get through that, I can help lead other people to.

Mark Cole:
All right, I had to jump in right here. Did you catch that? John did this with his family. He took a book and didn’t make it just available for shelf or another leader. He made it available for his family. He took time in their family vacation and dug into a memory that they say to this day was the best moments of all of these incredible opportunities and experiences they had on that vacation. Here’s why leaders make things better. They always do. John says it often like this.

Mark Cole:
He says leaders see more and before. And I believe that. I believe leaders see more than others see. They see before others see. I think leaders make things better than when they found them. I think that’s a leadership trait. And what John was illustrating Right here that I want us to catch right here in this podcast. To be a memorable leader, you gotta be memorable everywhere you go.

Mark Cole:
You can’t hang your leadership up on a nail when you get home and just say, well, I led all day, I’m wore out. You gotta walk into the house to be a leader. You can’t lead when you’re not on vacation. You gotta lead when you’re on vacation too. You’ve got to find a way to lead and make people better wherever you are. We’re talking about 25 ways to win with people, and John just gave us a way to win with our family. Create memorable moments when you’re at home, just like you create memorable moments when you’re at work. I’ve watched a lot of people wait until they have a position to lead.

Mark Cole:
What John and Jeff are sharing with us right here is you don’t need a position and you don’t need a title and you don’t need a work environment to lead. You just need to take responsibility to make people better no matter where you are. And that’s how you win with people. Thanks, John. Thanks, Jeff. Alright, podcast, let’s go. Are you loving this? Lean in. Here comes the next book.

Mark Cole:
Jeff picks up 16 laws of communication.

Jeff Henderson:
Let’s talk 15 laws of invaluable growth. The law of trade offs. This was a chapter I didn’t really see coming. It was very counterintuitive and it says, if you want to keep growing and learning, you need to keep making trades. They will, quote, cost you talk about what you meant by trade offs and why that’s so important.

John Maxwell:
Well, you, you have to give up to go up. And this is a big mess with people. They don’t understand this. I always crack up when somebody says, you know, when I started, I just gave up everything. And I look at him and say, well, of course you did. You had nothing to give up. When you started, you were as poor as Job’s turkey. You had three pieces of furniture in a U haul and you moved somewhere.

John Maxwell:
So don’t give, you know, but what happens is the higher you go, the more you collect. But there are many junctures in your life where to go to the next level. You have to let go of something that you sometimes treasure that are really important to you. But they’re keeping you from getting to where you want it. Because, see, what got you there won’t keep you there. That’s the big miss. So we try to hold on to success and we try to, you know, cage it and Say, okay, I got to keep this because this is helping me, but you got to keep growing. That’s.

John Maxwell:
That’s why you don’t go to the next level. You grow to the next level. If you go to the next level, you could be over your head and not do well to the next level. If you go to the next level, Jeff, as you know, you’ll be over your head, but you know how to grow, so you won’t be over your head very long. And so the trade offs are very important. It’s one of. It’s a message I don’t hear very often, but as I look at my own life, Jeff, it’s the trade offs in my life. It’s the things that I said, okay, I’ll let that go so I can go here, that really have made the difference.

John Maxwell:
And I think that when you don’t reach your potential, I don’t think it’s because you lack giftedness or opportunity. I think it’s because you or I are unwilling to pay the price. It’s a price issue, always is. And I used to think that you pay now and you play later, and that’s not true either. I’ve discovered that, you know, when I do something hard or challenging and I do it well, I learn and I work hard and I do it well. When I do hard, what I get for hard is harder. I get harder. And what people miss is that’s where you get all the respect.

John Maxwell:
Respect is earned on difficult ground. Respect isn’t earned on easy stuff. Nobody ever came and said, I respect you greatly because you made such an easy decision. They respect you greatly because you made a hard decision, one that was difficult for you. And in my case, many times I didn’t want to make that decision. But the decision I did want to make was overruled by the growth I could have if I made it. And I’ve always put, if I can grow more by making this trade off, I will make this trade off. And it’ll be uncomfortable for a while and it’ll be difficult, but that’s all right.

John Maxwell:
So you do hard so you could do harder. Well, if you keep graduating and harder, after a while, you gain ridiculous respect. I’m 79, and I look at the respect I have and I look at, I don’t know where I am, and I want to go up to people all the time and say, my name’s John. I’m your friend, and I’m really not that good. In the beginning, you’re not as bad as people think.

Jeff Henderson:
You are.

John Maxwell:
But if you do it right, Jeff, in the end, you’re not as good as people think you are. And I want to tell people I’m not really that good. I’m just consistency compounds. Consistency is underrated. Intensity is overrated.

Mark Cole:
All right, I had to jump in here. Cause John says, you know how to get music. He doesn’t know words like Spotify, Apple music, but wherever you get music. Let me just say this. You want to go check out the four songs we’ve released on John Maxwell. They’re really good. You’ll enjoy them. But you’ll see and hear his books in every lyric, in every word.

Mark Cole:
So do that. But here’s what I wanted to interject right here. As we’re talking about laws of communication, John says this statement, and I gotta underscore it right here, right now in this podcast. You can’t give yourself to people in. If it’s about you and it’s all about your agenda, you have crossed the line from motivation to manipulation, and that’s what you don’t want. I can remember talking about communication. I can remember when John began to push me on his stages to communicate. I didn’t want to communicate.

Mark Cole:
I was fine running companies, but he said, mark, we’ve got to build believability through your stage communication. And I got to be honest with you, it was hard. It wasn’t just hard on the people that had to listen to me speak. After listening to John, that’s quite the jump. But it was hard on me because I constantly felt like I had to impress them, like I was having to live up to John. And I can remember the day that I got better. Now, it wasn’t that I got better with my communication or my content or even my ability to impact people, but I got better within me. And when I got better within me, it was this right here.

Mark Cole:
When I quit asking myself, what do I want to say?

John Maxwell:
And.

Mark Cole:
And I began asking myself, what do they want to hear? When I began to stop asking myself, how will I say it? How to how will they hear? Became less about me, I began to quit saying I want to be good, and I began to say, I want them to do good. When I switched from what this was about me, my content, my effectiveness to them and their effectiveness and what they were going to do, there was a switch that flipped for me. I don’t know why it took so long. I’ve heard John speak and say things like he just said before. You can’t give yourself to people if it’s about you. I’d heard him say that over and over again. But something clicked one day right before I went on stage. And from that day forward, my communication not only began to be more effective, not only began to be more believable, it began to be more enjoyable.

Mark Cole:
I loved standing on stage with a microphone, making it about others rather than about me. I hope you’ll do that too. Not only in just stage communication, not only as you apply these 15 laws of 16 laws of communication that John’s talking about. I hope that you will do that even in your one on one conversations, in your boardrooms, in your team rooms. Make your conversation, make your communication about the other people and watch the effectiveness in them and the fulfillment in. All right, Jeff. John, they’ve got more to say. Here we go.

Jeff Henderson:
You know, I look at your life and now you’re writing a book. How do I get how to get a return on failure? Why the concept of failure and what can we learn about that?

John Maxwell:
Well, this is Jeff. This is my third book on failure. Failure is kind of like a spiritual gift for me. You know what I’m saying? I’m just good at it. Some people aren’t good at failure, but I just, I excel at it. In fact, I wrote a book called failing forward which was written 20 plus years ago. It was a million seller. It’s just then I wrote a book called sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

John Maxwell:
And then I have a new book just coming out right now. I’m extremely excited about it called how to get a return on failure. I’m gonna say things about failure you’ve never heard. I promise you. I promise you I’m gonna have a chapter that’ll teach you that instead of separating success and failure, which it was never meant to be separated, it should be put close together. Because when failure and success are together, they complement one another and they make both better. I’ll have a whole chapter on keep success and failure together. I’ll have a whole chapter on something you’ve never heard it, you have read.

John Maxwell:
I promise you there’s a difference between a good miss and a bad mission. They are not created equal. They never have been created equal. And if you don’t know the difference between a good miss and a bad miss, a good miss will become a bad miss. I mean, a good miss and a bad. Like for example, a good miss is when you have failed, you make adjustments. That’s a good miss. Oh, my gosh, I didn’t do that.

John Maxwell:
Right. So I’ve got to go in and I’VE got to make some adjustments now. So a good miss is when you make adjustments. You know what a bad miss is? When you make excuses. That’s a bad miss. You cannot go from excuses to success. It’s impossible. No one has ever done it.

John Maxwell:
So you’re not gonna do it either. You can go from failure to success, but you can’t go from excuses to success. And let me tell you the problem with excuses. Your best excuse is your worst excuse. Because you believe it, you’ve bought into it. And it now has totally limited your potential. I have a whole chapter on that. I have a whole chapter on how to develop a cycle, a six phase cycle of how to take success and turn it into a reward and how to turn it into an asset instead of liability.

John Maxwell:
I have learning lunches every month. I take people to lunch at Chick Fil A, if I can, always at Chick Fil? A. But I take people to lunch and I Simply ask them seven questions. And I’ve done this for 40 years. I’ve learned so much from these lunches. And one of the questions I ask them is, what’s the most important lesson you’ve ever learned in your life? I’ve asked this to hundreds of people for over 40 years, different people. Every time I ask the question, they’ll talk about a lesson they learned that had in it failure, heartache, disappointment, misses adversity every time. And one day it hit me.

John Maxwell:
Isn’t it interesting? The most important lesson we learn in life has negative stuff in it. And that’s the day I realized you gotta put it together. When you put it together, you get the most important lesson you ever learn in life. You separate em, you get no lesson at all. That’s huge, you know? No, okay, I’m done. I mean, I’m ready to go teach the whole book now. But if I do that, you won’t buy it. So I’m.

Jeff Henderson:
Did I capture this right? Your best excuse is your worst excuse?

John Maxwell:
Oh, totally.

Jeff Henderson:
Everything because you believe it?

John Maxwell:
Oh, no. Yeah, because anybody knows when you have a flimsy excuse and you’re even laughing yourself saying, well, that was kind of stupid, wasn’t it? But I’ll buy into it for a moment because I don’t want to do it. I talk about excuses that you actually believe are true, they’ll kill you. The worst excuse you have is the one that everybody thinks is true. And it’s limiting who you could be.

Mark Cole:
Hey, I wanted to stop right here. We’ll get right back. This is just a little quick segment Right here to tell you, underscore that in your notes. Consistency compounds. I’m working alongside a leader that his next birthday will celebrate 80 years, and he’s better today than ever. He hasn’t reached the apex, and it’s because consistency compounds in your growth. So I just have two questions for you. We’ll get right back to the content.

Mark Cole:
I got two questions for you. What are you doing today to grow? That needs to be a question you and I ask ourself. Every single day of our life, of our leadership, of our family, of our relationships, of every piece of our life that we want to expand and increase, we need to be asking the questions, what am I doing today to grow? And then here’s the second question I want you to ask. What will I do tomorrow to grow? Go ahead and put a plan in place. Know what you’re gonna do today. That’s intentionality. That’s what you can control today and have a plan. That’s what you’ll do tomorrow.

Mark Cole:
Do that every day, and you’ll begin to do what John Maxwell says. You’ll stop asking yourself, how far can I go? And you’ll be asking yourself, how far can I grow? That’s what I want for you. All right, we’ve got one more second. Are you enjoying this? I am. Jake and I are sitting here in the studio and just having an incredible time listening to John and Jeff putting application to it. So here we go, one more segment, and this one’s a good one. How to get a return on failure.

John Maxwell:
Because the moment I allow an excuse to enter my life, I accept something less than my full potential and I give myself a reason for never having it. Excuses are bad misses Got a whole chapter on that. It’ll just help you because I’ll have to give you, I don’t know, maybe eight or ten. Good Mrs. Bad Mrs. You know what works.

Jeff Henderson:
That’s great. Thank you.

John Maxwell:
Yeah. Thank you so much.

Mark Cole:
We’ve talked a good bit on the podcast, especially recently, because of the book how to Get a Return on Failure. We’ve talked about this concept, but I want to underscore it today as we kind of wrap Excuses are Bad misses Just since our last podcast, I’ve met with a leader and wanted to tell me why they had not made their numbers, why it was not working. And they started with 15 minutes of things that was outside their control, or so they thought that was the indicator or the reason that they had missed and failed. And I got to tell you, I had to stop them about minute 16 and go, let me tell you this, excuses make Mrs. Much worse than the miss itself. When you allow yourself not to give reasons and understand so that you can improve, but when you can abdicate your responsibility of hitting your responsibility or your numbers, that’s a bad miss. Now, I want to ask you a question just as we kind of wrap today. And I want to ask you, what are you trying right now that is so big that you anticipate failure? What is it that right now you are attempting that you know, unless the unknown factor comes into play, you’re not going to get it? And I will tell you what John was saying.

Mark Cole:
Your best excuse is your worst excuse, because you believe it. When you begin to dream bigger than what you thought you could do and therefore anticipating not being able to do it or quote, unquote, failure, you will accomplish more than you ever would have if you had set something you know you could hit. It happens every time. And so I want you to be trying something right now. I want, after this podcast, I want you to go challenge yourself to be doing something that right now you say, this is so big. I just know failure is inevitable. And watch how much you achieve when you do that. I hope you’ve enjoyed today.

Mark Cole:
I really do. I’m going to challenge our team. I hope we can put these six books in a bundle and just make them available to our podcast family. I think that would be fun and give you some kind of a discount just right there in the show notes. But I will tell you what we will do in the show notes because we’ve seen what John’s books has done with Jeff Henderson, high executive at Chick Fil, a good friend, one of our Maxwell thought leaders. And he goes and says, let me show you what I’ve learned from your books and I wanna make those books available to you. But I also wanna make the promotion the product that we have called High Road Leadership. It’s a curriculum to learn how to live and lead with values that connect the world rather than divide the world.

Mark Cole:
And so we’ve made that available in the show notes for you. We’ve given you a 50% discount on that, so you can go check that out. It’s available to you. So let me read you this question from Raul. Raul says, what are some practical ways that I can motivate my team and help them grow? Raul, I love this question because. Well, let me tell you the first thing that came to my mind, Raul. It was my kids. When John challenged me to begin to pay my children on a allowance for reading books rather than an allowance for doing chores around the house.

Mark Cole:
It was a game changer for me. In other words, I put my money where my mouth was. I put my incentive with the behaviors, the disciplines, the actions that I expected of my children. I think it’s the same thing with our team. Figure out the disciplines you want to see in them, figure out the activity around growth that you want to see them begin to model, and then put incentive around that activity, put expectation around it, put follow up around it, and then put accountability to it. What are you going to do with it? So it was one thing to have my daughter read a book. It’s one thing to have a teammate read a book. It’s another thing to get them to tell me after reading it what they’re going to do with it.

Mark Cole:
So incentivize them. Put money where your mouth is and then put expectation around what you expect. Hey, I hope that you have enjoyed today’s podcast as much as I have. I’ve learned I have soaked this up. I was there and at this and today I learned a whole lot more. So I hope you’ll listen to this podcast again and again and again, and I hope you’ll give it to your team and make a difference, because everyone deserves to be led well.