Maxwell Leadership Podcast: 5 Ways to Inspire Change

Mark Cole:

Hey podcast listeners. Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders who multiply value to others. I’m Mark Cole, CEO of Maxwell Leadership. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt stuck between where you and your organization need to go and your people, your team’s, reluctance to get there? Well, today we’ve got a great lesson for you if you feel that way.

It’s a lesson about how to inspire change. See, change is a difficult thing for both leaders and followers, but leaders are tasked with inspiring those they lead to adapt to an ever-changing world. This lesson from John Maxwell will cover five ways you and I can inspire, motivate, and challenge our team to step into the future of the organization.

Here at Maxwell Leadership, we’ve been going through some of our own changes this year, and I’m excited today to be joined by Becky Bursell, to talk about how we are using these principles to inspire our own teams to carry us into a brilliant future.

John covers some very helpful points in this lesson. So I’m going to encourage you, download the bonus resource for this episode. This is a free PDF worksheet that accompanies John’s teaching, and it will help you capture all the points and some key takeaways. Just visit maxwellpodcast.com/inspirechange and click the bonus resource button. Also, if you would like to watch this episode on YouTube, just head on over to maxwellpodcast.com/youtube, or click the YouTube link in the show notes. Now get ready, lean in, get ready to inspire change. Here is John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:

This lesson is all about helping you and me grow through change. So here are some ways to inspire change. Number one, change what needs to change, not what is easy. I’m so glad to start off with this lesson. Change what needs to change, not what is easy, because here’s what I’ve noticed. When changes are necessary in an organization, there’s a high temptation for all of us to make change that is kind of easy, but not what is needed.

In other words, to change a little bit because we won’t get nicked too much by that change. And what happens is we make cosmetic changes instead of cultural changes. Cosmetic changes are easier than cultural changes when what we really need to do is get off the cosmetic changes and fix what the issues really are.

Okay. Here’s a classic example, a question just to see if someone answers. How many of you have the real experience of being at an organization or a company or going to a store did not match the ad of the company? How many of you know what that’s like? It happens to me almost daily where I’ll be doing something or being somewhere, and I’ll say, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen their TV commercials. I’ve heard their radio ads. Can I tell you something? These two people should have a meeting. They ought to introduce themselves.” In fact, probably what would be nice is if they showed their employees the ad to just give a picture of what it should look like. Cosmetic change is very easy. Now what’s our point? When you got to make changes, you don’t do the easy stuff. You do the important stuff.

Observation number two: Effective change usually begins with the inside-out change rather than the outside-in change. 90% of all problems would be fixed and all changes would be positive if we just said, “We’re going to go and work inside-out instead of outside-in.” Now, sometimes outside-in changes are very necessary. If you’ve got a scruffy looking building, clean it up, obviously. Cleanliness and tidiness. I mean, I’m not saying go on back and mess up your building, but what I am saying to you when you’re done painting the building, if you haven’t changed the attitude of the people on the inside of the building, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it looks. You with me? You got that point, didn’t you? That’s number one.

Here’s number two: Let go of yesterday so you can go to tomorrow. You’ve got to let go of yesterday so you can go to tomorrow. Eric Harvey and Steve Venture said, I love this quote, “Our brains are like closets. Over time they are filled with things that we no longer use, things that don’t fit. Every once in a while they need to be cleaned out.” You know what? This quote is new to me, but for 20 years, I’ve said, “I wish the attitude were tangible. I wish it were in the head. And I wish there was a zipper on the head that you could just unzip a person’s head, reach in, pull out the attitude and spray it off.” You know, just kind of want you to say, “Excuse me, your attitude needs a huge cleaning right now.”

You know what I’m saying? And just spray and then suck it back in and zip that sucker up and pat them on the back of the head and say, “Go.” You know? I mean, I wish it were that easy. But they hit it just exactly right. There are just some things in your life you got to let go before you can move on.

Number three. The third thing that will help us activate change effectively, number three, is to activate belief. A good leader inspires people to have confidence in their leader. A great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves. It’s a great distinction, isn’t it? And an activating belief which allows people to make change, because people only change something that is important to them if they have a high belief that there’s a reason for that change.

Number four: To bring creative change in your organization. Boy, I could do the whole lesson on this one alone because I think this is something as a young leader I learned and I really worked at this very, very hard. Number four, remove barriers. If you’re going to have to help people change, you’ve got to get the barriers out of their way. Here, let’s read. If you’re an employee, nothing is more frustrating to understand the change mission, to embrace the change mission, but to be trapped by barriers beyond your control job.

Number one for any leader, this is maybe the most important statement in the lesson. Job number one for any leader in times of change is to start removing barriers that will keep your team from executing the plan. Get the stuff out of the way. For example, if you’re a business person and you want to have like a customer-first culture. Okay, if that’s the culture you want to do, that’s the change you want to create, the first thing you got to do is ask yourself, what are the barriers? What are the barriers that keep us from being a customer-first culture?

Now, barriers are created by outdated systems, outdated procedures, outdated people, or outdated products. Almost all the barriers will fall in one of those four categories. Here we go. Very important statement, this next statement. The first and most important part of this challenge is to do some serious diligence to clearly define the enemy. What’s the enemy that’s keeping us from making this change? What barrier is it that we just have got to knock down? This requires getting input from everyone, especially those frontline employees who are dealing directly with their customers.

Number five: Simplify the message. If you want change to occur effectively, you’ve got to simplify the message. Charles Mingus, here’s your quote, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” Now allow me to give you communication questions as a leader you got to ask yourself. Number one, this is really good for you, pastors. In fact, your layman are going to high five me after this is over. Your layman are going to come and slip me five and $10 bills, say “Lunch is on me today.”

Question number one: Do I understand what I am saying? That’s a question should be asked every preacher after he is done. Very fine sermon. Do you have a clue what you said? Do I understand what I’m saying? Because it all starts there. Simplifying the message starts with, do I understand what I’m saying?

Question number two: Do they understand what I’m saying? What would happen when we got done doing our teaching if before we had our holy benediction, we just asked the people in the audience to talk back to us for five minutes and see if what we said is what they understood. I want to tell you something, two things would happen. By the next Sunday, we would simplify our message. We’d make it shorter. We really would. Trust me on this. Do I understand what I’m saying? Do they understand what I’m saying?

Number three: Can they tell others what I am saying? In other words, can they go out and tell somebody else? Because if it’s good news, it ought be spread. I mean, what value is it if I figure it out, but I can’t tell anybody else? So do I understand what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying? Can you pass on to others what I am saying?

And number four: Can others understand what they are saying? There you go. Four questions. Simplicity should continue to last from the speaker to the people, to the people that they’re going to speak to. It ought to go three generations. And if it doesn’t go three generations, it’s not simple enough.

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Mark Cole:

Welcome back. I know if you’re like me and Becky, we’re sitting here wishing John would keep inspiring us to inspire change. There’s a lot of change, Becky, that you and I are getting to lead through. We’re getting to be defined in our leadership because some of the changes. I’m reminded of Socrates’s quote that says, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” It’s what John says. He says, change is inevitable, but growth is optional. And Becky a year ago, you and I, we sat down with each other and we said, “You know what? The old is pretty good. Yesterday was really good. But boy, there is a new a brightness that’s pulling us into the future.” And have we not experienced some change over the last year?

Becky Bursell:

We definitely have, and it’s been quite a ride and it’s still quite a ride. I think it’s amazing how we all get excited about change, talking about it. But then when it comes time to implement it, we find there’s a few problems that we don’t get excited about. And when you think of tackling these things, especially with change, why do you think we as a leadership organization or any organization, why do you think it’s so hard for us to actually move forward with that? I mean, I think myself in particular, it’s easy to want to put off the hard things and want to tackle the easy things first.

Mark Cole:

Well, and it’s this thing that John talks about in number one. Change what needs to be changed, not what’s easy. And we were talking right before we went live here, Becky. We were talking about this idea that for all of us, if you’re a task person, and I’m not saying that I am or am not a task person, but I will tell you, I like to check some things off. I got my little boxes and I like to check them off. And so maybe that makes me a task person, but I think everybody likes a sense of accomplishment. “I got that done. Let me move on to the next thing.” And it’s true that, whether it’s John or any of us that are teaching, we challenge people. Don’t get caught up in the trap of checking off the easy things, and leaving to the last minute the most difficult things. And we say that a lot in responsibility or daily tasks.

In change, it’s even more of a warning that I want to sound, because if you try to change what’s easy you will never get to what’s hard, because there’s easy changes all around it. We’ve got to work hard to get the changes that require the most energy, the changes that need to be done. We’ve got to really do a good job, Becky, in my opinion, to intentionally beginning to build that out so that we can have the most energy to make those changes. No matter the difficulty of the task, it’s about the importance or the priority of the task that we need to work toward when it comes to change.

Becky Bursell:

That’s true. And I love how he references the difference between a cosmetic change and a cultural change, because we’re kind of living in that right now.

Mark Cole:

Yeah.

Becky Bursell:

We had this beautiful cosmetic change of everything from branding to logos. And as much as we thought that was going to be the hard part, that’s not the hard part. Like that’s actually the fun, beautiful part. When it came time to actually culturally embrace those things, even changing the language that we used, I think you and I are still getting used to some of the change in the cultural side.

Mark Cole:

Well it is. And you know it’s true. I made a miscalculation as a leader in 2020, or excuse me 2021. So in 2020, we all led through COVID and we really didn’t know what we were doing. And most of us, we circled the wagons and kind of back-to-back, we faced the world. Right? We all kind of led like that.

Well, in 2021, I began to say, “Okay, we’re done circling the wagons. We’re moving out to the promise land. Let’s go to the frontier and we’re going to make this thing happen.” And I think we did. I really was pleased with 2021. But I popularized in our leadership team a statement at the beginning of 2021. And I said, “Hey, today is the best day you’re going to feel about this direction, this change for the next 365 days.” And we would laugh and we’d feel good about it.

Well, I thought 2022 was coming and all the changes had been broadcast. And so now it was time to really run and have this hum, and this just feeling of wow. So this was what the difficulty of 2021 was. And the leadership miscalculation was that change takes longer and costs more than you ever anticipated. The leadership miscalculation is that while people said it and began to repeat it, actually doing it is different than saying it and repeating it.

And I’ve found that in 2022, that the changes that we begin to broadcast and popularize and cast vision for, for now 18, 24 months, really is now requiring more than language change. It’s requiring behavioral change. And it’s much harder to change behavior than it is language. Leaders, listen to that.

Becky Bursell:

Yes.

Mark Cole:

It is much harder to change behavior than it is language. And Becky, you and I are getting to lead in some behavior change time.

Becky Bursell:

Yes, there is. And that really is a reflection. I mean, John talks about disciplines all the time. Mark lives those disciplines every day. But I think that’s where you go from even just behavior to those habits and disciplines, is that phrase that he talks about: inside-out instead of outside- in. It’s easy to just repeat in one of our leadership meetings everything that Mark says. But to actually have that reflected in our language, our attitude, our culture, I think that’s maybe the gauge that we start to look for as far as that inside-out.

Mark Cole:

It is. You know, I’m intrigued. So John, he has so many good points in two and three. But Becky you just said something that sparked me to go to this removed barriers comment that John said. And I want to camp out here with you a little bit here because of what we’re doing with Clear.

Now, podcast listeners, podcast viewers, I hope you’re viewing in today and getting to see Becky and I visually with our podcast. But I’m going to tell you how to get engaged with the C.L.E.A.R. growth strategy, the C.L.E.A.R. Leadership trajectory that we want you on. And we’ll explain all that in a little bit. Becky’s running that, doing a phenomenal job.

But I want to go from a leadership, from a content standpoint and talk about you and I and our leadership as we’re building this. Now, let me be really clear with everybody. This is not a change in that John Maxwell has now written 86 books. He’s given 12,000 plus speeches. And he says that every speech and every book can be synthesized to five categories: communication, leadership, equipping attitude, and relationship. Communication leadership, equipping attitude, relationship, C.L.E.A.R. C-L-E-A-R.

And so Becky and I have tasked ourself to create a C.L.E.A.R. Growth trajectory for any and everybody that will partner with us. And that will lead to a C.L.E.A.R. Leadership enhancement for everyone that takes the journey with us. So we’re on a C.L.E.A.R Growth and C.L.E.A.R. Leadership passion. Becky, we think about it every day. We eat, sleep, drink. It keeps us up. It wakes us up. It’s C.L.E.A.R is on the brain. But the leadership ecosystem and the barriers to get that have been daunting, right?

Becky Bursell:

Absolutely. It’s easier said than done.

Mark Cole:

It is. And it’s not because of a lack of vision. It’s not because of a lack of excitement around a direction that will help a lot more people than we’ve ever helped before. It is because of the changes that are going to be required of us, and the barriers to those changes.

Becky Bursell:

Absolutely.

Mark Cole:

I want you to talk just a minute as a leader and I’m almost flipping hats for a minute and going to interview you for one second here and go, “Talk to me.” You’ve led. You’ve led at massive. You’ve led bigger revenues than we’re leading right now. Talk to us a little bit about that leader that comes in and can see all those barriers and the level of challenge that presents to someone that’s tasked with bringing about the change.

Becky Bursell:

Yeah, there’s definitely an aspect in leadership of being capable of painting a vision. And that vision has to be wide enough that everyone that you’re talking to can attach themselves to it. And as we’ve all experienced, it’s not something you can paint just once. It’s a conversation that goes on and on and on, and there’s always clarifying moments to bring people back around to make sure we’re all on the right track.

You know, I remember a very clear conversation you and I had about C.L.E.A.R. It’s hard to get away from that, by the way. C.L.E.A.R. C.L.E.A.R. C.L.E.A.R. C.L.E.A.R. But in that conversation, we talked about how we knew there were going to be growing pains. And again, it’s easy to say that upfront, and it’s a little different when you start to experience them and then start removing barriers the way that Mark has with our C.L.E.A.R. program.

But there was a very real conversation where I had said, “You realize some people are not going to see the vision that we see, or it’s not where they want to go?” And I remember when you said, “You know what, Becky? In leadership, I’m going to open the doors to the train. I’m going to invite everyone in. I’m going to tell them this euphoric place that we’re going, and how they can be a part of it. But whether they get on board or not is completely up to them.” And I think we’ve seen a little bit of that.

Mark Cole:

Yeah. You know, it reminds me, Becky, and I’m so glad you’re co-hosting with me today on this particular one. Because the peak, the summit, that we’re chasing is the biggest summit that I’ve ever chased, taking John’s legacy to this popularized message of C.L.E.A.R. Growth and C.L.E.A.R. Leadership. I’ll never forget a year or so ago, sharing with John, the vision of C.L.E.A.R.. and John just weeping and saying… You were on that plane, actually, Becky… And John weeping, and saying, “You guys now have a vision that is bigger than anything we’ve done before.” And then John coming on and getting exciting and saying, “This is the right vision.”

And all of that was fun. And then sharing it with the team was fun. But you know, what’s not fun is a meeting you and I had just a few weeks ago when we realized that even after 12 months, we are still uncovering barriers. And I set you and our COO Matt down in a meeting, just the three of us. And I said, “Okay, Becky, I want to know the barriers. I want to know the people barriers. I want to know the marketing barriers. I want to know the performance barriers. I want to know the lack of clarity barriers. Talk to me about the barriers in your life.” And here’s the teaching point, podcast family, because this almost feels like therapy between Becky and I, and y’all just showed up to be honest with you.

Becky Bursell:

It kind of is, actually.

Mark Cole:

It’s like this little bit of therapy going on with Becky and I, but all of the rest of you’re just kind of listening. But let me give you a teaching point, podcast listeners. If you are leading what feels like insurmountable change from a vantage point that is not seen by others on your team, including those empowered or equipped to make the changes, the best thing you can do is to get off your vantage point for a moment and go down and say, “Tell me what it looks like down here, closer to the barriers.”

And that was what this was for me, Becky. I’m traveling, I’ve got a lot going on. I’m casting a vision. The vision is being really appreciated everywhere that I share the vision, but I came down and I said, “Okay, Becky, talk to me about the people, the systems, barriers.” And one of those, Becky, one of those was a very expensive technology that we had invested in. And you said, “Mark, I love you. I appreciate yesterday’s capital infusion of this technology, but it is not going to get us where you are saying that we’re going.” And I kind of gulped, and I said, “Talk to me a little bit about that.”

Becky, I want you to talk to me about what it felt to you as a leader to hear the visionary, the person that does not want to be bothered with the distractions and the obstacles to come down and say, “Okay, help me see the obstacles from your vantage point.”

Becky Bursell:

Yeah. First of all, anyone that knows me personally, would not be surprised that anything attached to me costs more money. That seems to be an ongoing life theme. So you’re welcome for that.

Mark Cole:

Yes. I’m going to call John, your husband, for some therapy actually, that’s going to happen here.

Becky Bursell:

Yeah, there’s a reason I had to start earning money at a very young age was to afford myself. So that’s part of the issue. But I think being able to have a perspective, and this is why, even our conversation with our producer, Jake, before we started, the comment of we’re so much better together than on our own. When I sold my company a few years ago, before I even knew I was going to be a part of Maxwell Leadership, I had to take a step back and think of what I actually wanted to do. And in that year and a half, almost two years, I realized whatever it was I wanted to do, I didn’t want to do it by myself.

Mark Cole:

Yeah.

Becky Bursell:

I didn’t enjoy life as much. I didn’t enjoy eating the frog by myself, like attacking the big barriers by myself. And because that same lesson of when you are staring at something so big, it’s all you can see and having the Jakes, and the Jared, and the Mark and all the people around us to come in from a fresh perspective and realize, “Hey, that barrier’s not as big as you see it, and this is how we can leap over it.”

I love to equate it almost to these races that we run, and hurdles in our place. Because when we start a race if we tell somebody this is a sprint, when they get to those hurdles, what are they going to do? I mean, they’re going to stop. They’re going to turn around. They’re going to quit. They’re going to be like, “How do I get over this thing?” But if we can build up some momentum and they know that those hurdles are coming, the expectation’s already to jump over them. And I think as a team, we do that really well, and give each other a fresh perspective.

Mark Cole:

Well, you know, often, and Jared, in studio with us today kind of reminded me of this. Some time ago, we made a lot of transitions at the leadership level. The changes that we’re making now is more in the process and systems procedures level that John was talking about, the outdated systems, outdated procedures, outdated products. But sometime ago I was making some outdated people decisions. You make those, and anytime you’re making big change what happens? The elephants show up. Right?

Becky Bursell:

Yeah.

Mark Cole:

There’s an elephant in the room. There’s an elephant. Can we talk about the elephant in the room? Anybody said that anybody been in leadership rooms to where that’s said? All of you and on YouTube, you’re raising your hand. You know the elephant in the room.

And I came out sometime ago about a year and a half ago, we were making some big outdated people decisions. And I said, “Okay, guys, we’re going to be elephant slayers.” Now, whoa, wait before anybody gets all worked up. Just a week ago I had my daughter and her one of her best friends out at the San Diego Zoo at some of the most brilliant elephants. So I’m not actually talking about killing elephants. So everybody calm down. I’m not actually talking about that.

But I am talking about the elephants in the rooms of leadership tables, leadership environments where we allow change to become slower, because we’re afraid to deal with the elephant in the room. And we, as leaders, have got to be elephant slayers. We’ve got to remove the barriers, spoken or unspoken, that’s in the room that has the ability to cause us distracted.

Becky, that’s exactly what I was doing with you and Matt recently. I said, “Okay, I get it. I’m traveling the world. I’m not aware that the elephants are raging.” And sometimes they’re not even very hidden. They’re just there. They’re just not addressed. And if I could leave one thing with you as we unpack John’s five ways to inspire change, if I could leave one thing to you in my Southern language, it’s to be an inspiration of change agent you’re going to have to be an elephants slayer.

Becky Bursell:

Yeah.

Mark Cole:

You’re going to have to expose and eradicate the elephants that are in the room that are stopping you from getting the change where you want to go. And Becky, we’re doing that right now. We’re challenging ourself to say, “Okay, these are the elephants. How are we going to expose them so that we can move forward?”

I want to take one more moment, Becky, and make sure before we run out of time that we talk about this concept of simplify the message. John talked about that at the very end. And of course, you’re a marketing genius. I mean, that’s one of the elephants that was in the room. I had you over in a silo in a box over here, building C.L.E.A.R. that I haven’t even told you yet how to get access to. I promised I would. I’ve got you over here building something that people want to be a part of. And yet I have you handcuffed in an area that you can intuitively influence and impact like crazy, marketing.

And so I want to get there. But first as promised, I want to challenge all of you. You need to go to Maxwell maxwellleadership.com/C.L.E.A.R App. C-L-E-A-R App. Maxwell maxwellleadership.com/C.L.E.A. App. And you’re going to see what we’re talking about as it relates to building a C.L.E.A.R. path to growth for you that will clearly design a plan of increased influence in every area of your life. That’s there at maxwellleadership.com/C.L.E.A.R. App.

Becky, let’s talk about this idea of simplify the message, the last thing that John shared with us. Talk to us a little bit, and then you can come back with any question of me, but talk to us a little bit about what it meant to you to hear simplify the message.

Becky Bursell:

For me, it just meant clarity around conversations. I think as human beings, we all have our own lenses that we look through every single day. So depending on our experiences, our faith, our politics, everything else that we go through, even having a bad day. Sometimes we have a tendency to not be grasping onto what that vision is because we’re putting our own obstacles back in the way.

We literally just talked about removing all those obstacles. And then not simplifying the message, we’re actually putting barriers back in that way. It reminds me of even talking to my 10-year-old sometimes when he’s on the iPad or not paying attention to me and I’ll say something, and then I’ll ask him, “Did you hear what I said?” And he says, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay, repeat back to me what I just said.” And he’s like, “Okay, I didn’t hear what you just said.”

I think a lot of times we do that and it might be our own internal dialogue. I’ve caught myself doing that before, where even when John is teaching I’m off on a tangent because he said one thing and in my head I’m already doing other lessons. But I think when we get to a place where we can ask ourselves those questions. Do I understand what I’m saying? Do they understand what I’m saying? can they tell others what I’m saying? And then can they go on, and can others understand that?

I think creating a duplicatable system that is simple is probably one of the biggest mistakes in leadership that I’ve ever seen. I think we try to make things complicated, because it makes us feel more important, almost like we understand something that others don’t. But at the end of the day, if they don’t understand it, who are we leading?

Mark Cole:

You know, I want to talk a little bit about this simplify the message. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for me to have credibility to talk about this. We called it our rebranding strategy. If you haven’t seen, we’re Maxwell Leadership now, not John Maxwell Company. We’re Maxwell Leadership Team, not the John Maxwell Team. And that’s because of one of our thought leaders, Jeff Henderson. If you’ve not picked up his book FOR, F-O-R FOR, we’ll put that in the show notes for you to be able to pick up and give you even a discount. All that information will be in the show notes.

But in that book, he asks two very penetrating questions for a business leader. Question number one is what are you known for? When people talk about your brand, when they talk about your team, when they talk about your personal leadership, what are you known for? And then the follow-up question is just as brilliant. What do you want to be known for? And shrink the gap. And in a lot of organizations, what they want to be known for, and what they wish they were known for, and what they would like to be known for is starkly different from what they are actually known for.

And Becky, we started realizing that we were known for a persona that’s a brilliant persona. John Maxwell, he is the most recognized leadership leader and writer and speaker in the world. And yet our organization was known as John’s organization rather than leaders at large organization. Rather than you listening to this podcast, your organization, oh it’s John’s organization. It’s John’s organization. We don’t want to be that.

We want to be your organization. Here’s why. In this understanding what we are known for, John Maxwell and John Maxwell’s style of leadership, we realize that what we want to be known for is an inspirational organization, a motivator organization, a tools enhancement organization that allows people to lead powerful, positive change. We want to inspire people to bring powerful, positive change because there’s not very much powerful, positive change around the world. We want to be known for that.

That Maxwell organization, that John Maxwell, that Becky Bursell, that Jake Decker, our producer of podcast. They inspired me to bring about powerful, positive change. That’s what we want to be known for. And here’s why. Because everyone deserves to be led well. Everyone deserves to be led well. It’s this simplifying of message. So now every podcast that you listen to, what do you hear me at the end say? “Everyone deserves to be led well.”

You know why I woke up early this morning and prepared for you in podcast land? You know why Becky on the West Coast woke up very early to prepare for you in podcast land? Because everyone deserves to be led well. We’ve simplified our message. We’ve simplified our message because our cause, what we want to be known for is this inspirer, this accumulator, this mobilizer, this empower in organization to help people on the road to powerful, positive change so that we can help others around us be led well. That’s very intentional.

That’s simplifying the message. We spent tens of thousands. Dare I say hundreds of thousands of dollars to simplify our message so that we shrink the gap from what we are known for, to what we want to be known for? And organizational leaders, leaders, individual leaders, it’s a real challenge for you and I. That’s why we created C.L.E.A.R., Becky. That’s why we’re going through change so that we can inspire you to change and become better as well.

So I want you to, today, I want you to remind yourself, go to maxwellleadership.com/C.L.E.A. App. And trust me on this, the C.L.E.A.R App that you get today, it’ll be different tomorrow. We are building this platform of a growing living organism of community leaders, people that want to lead others well, to be challenged in the C.L.E.A.R. program.

Hey, I want to finish out today with a listener comment. I love this from Sam. The Law of Communication series is what he was listening to, and he really asks this question. He says, “So how do you build a relationship to begin with?” He goes on and says, “John jumped straight into talking about relationships that are already established. In other words, John said, You have to enjoy being together. That’s common sense, but I want to know how to start a relationship to have this law of connection.”

And so Becky, I’m going to let you answer that question first. I’ll come behind you. Maybe give a couple of thoughts and then we’ll sign off today.

Becky Bursell:

Yeah, I mean the easiest way to connect with someone is to make it all about them. Coming from a very deep sales background to connect with people, whoever does the most talking loses. If you really want to get to know someone, tee them up with the right questions. You usually find out that it’s everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. Allow them to tell you about themselves, so you can actually know how to connect with them.

Mark Cole:

I love that, Becky. Sam, I’ve always discovered that when you try to connect with people rather than correct people, when you try to add value to them, rather than extrapolate value out of them. As Becky said, when you make it about them, you win the day to have another day of greater development tomorrow. And it’s about winning the day with relationships. I have found in my world, whether it’s leadership or even in close family relationships, tomorrow’s relationship depends on how well I did with today’s relationship. That’s why I have bad relationships for too long, because I won’t make positive momentum in making them a good relationship, or moving on from the relationship today, and they stay too long.

So Sam, going back. All’s well that begins well. Start a relationship making it about somebody else that you can add value to, and you’ll see that you win the day today to grow that to a greater level tomorrow.

Hey, I hope you’ll join the maxwellleadership.com/C.L.E.A.R. App. I hope you’ll come back to the podcast next week. I hope, like we talked about recently, I hope you make this podcast about bringing people together to make them better. And as I said already about simplify the message, I want you to go lead powerful, positive change, because everyone deserves to be led well.