Maxwell Leadership Podcast: Courage to Continue

Mark Cole:
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Mark Cole:
This will get you your free copy. That’s right. MAXWELL to 55123. To start delegating with Belay. Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast, a podcast that exists to add value to leaders who multiply value to others. I’m Mark Cole, and today I’m very excited because John is going to teach us a lesson today that will make a difference for you for many years to come. In this episode, John is going to help us answer the question that many of us leaders have not asked just once, not twice, but every time in difficult situations. And the question is, how do I continue? How can I go on from here? Today, John’s going to talk about the courage to continue.

Mark Cole:
And I’m reminded of a Nelson Mandela quote that says, I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. So as John challenges you and I about the courage to continue, which, by the way, for those of you watching the podcast, I’m holding up a book, Change youe World. Because in this book, John talks about courage. In this lesson today, John’s gonna talk about the courage to continue. After John’s done teaching, I’ll be joined by my friend and co host, Traci Morrow to help us apply what John has shared to both our life and our leadership. Now, if you would like to download the free bonus resource for this episode or even watch this episode on YouTube, you can go to MaxwellPodcast.com/Courage. Now, let’s go take on courage and continue from here.

Mark Cole:
Here is John Maxwell.

John Maxwell:
Hi, John Maxwell here. I want to talk to you. Having the courage to continue. You know, often I’M asked the question, especially during difficult times, how do I continue? If you and I want to continue and really have courage in the midst of all kind of difficulties in our life, the answer is very simple. We need to focus on today. Today matters. And if you and I focus on today, trust me, my friend, we will have enough courage for 24 hours. I don’t know if I have a courage for a week.

John Maxwell:
I’m not sure I have courage for a month. Wow. Maybe I don’t have courage for the next year. But I’m not asking for that. I’m saying that if you want to continue in your life to be successful, you have to have a focus on today. You know, courage. I describe it in a picture, like, courage is like a door, okay? And what’s interesting about this door is the handle is on the inside. It’s not on the outside.

John Maxwell:
And the only way that door is going to be opened is for you to walk over and for you to turn that handle. There’s nobody on the outside that can open the door of courage for you. There’s nobody on the outside that can do something for you that’ll make you courageous. It’s a personal act that you just basically say, you know, I’m gonna go over to that door. I’m the only one that can turn that handle. I’m the only one that can open up the door of courage, and I’m gonna do. It’s a choice. It’s a commitment.

John Maxwell:
So let’s talk about that commitment for a moment. I want you to know, first of all, courage is not an absence of fear or failure. So when we think of courage, don’t think of a person that just has no fear. Oh, my gosh, they just have no fear. Look what they do or failure doesn’t seem to bother them at all. They seem to be able to overcome their failures. I just want you to know that courageous people experience failure in their life. Courageous people have fears in their life.

John Maxwell:
But the difference is, remember the door. The door’s on the. The handle’s on the inside. And they understand something about their fear, and they understand something about their failures. They understand something about their faith and their belief. And what they understand is that they have to build up the stronger emotion by focusing on it, because what you focus on expands. And so what they do is they focus on courage instead of focusing on fear. If I focus on courage every day and if I live every day to be courageous just for that day, one day at a time, guess what happens every day? I Increase my courage.

John Maxwell:
Just like if I, instead of focusing and going to that handle, that door that has courage, what happens if I go over and turn on that handle that has fear in my life? If every day I get more fearful, all I do is I increase by focusing on a negative emotion until it expands in my life until the fear dominates the failure. Whichever emotion dominates. The positive, faith, belief, the negative, fear, failure, whichever dominates. That’s where our actions follow the dominant emotion. And what’s powerful about this is it doesn’t have to be 90% belief and 10% fear. It could maybe be 60, 40. You can have quite a bit of fear in your life and still be very courageous because you’ve got 60% belief that allows you to go ahead and try it even though you’re not sure. So you want to always build up the stronger positive motion.

John Maxwell:
Another thought on courage is the fact that courage requires action. You have never become courageous by thinking about it. You and I never become courageous by hoping for it or dreaming about it. We only become courageous when we take action. There is no success without action. I’m always amazed at the people who tried to think their way into success. They tried to kind of maybe wait on success. You have to take action.

John Maxwell:
When I was a young leader, I had a mentor that just gave me an exercise that was life changing to me because he said, john, you don’t take enough action. And so he said, I want you to for 30 days. When you wake up in the morning, before you get out of your bed, say out loud to yourself 50 times. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now.

John Maxwell:
Do it now. He said 50 times. Say it out loud every morning, then get out of bed. He said every night, before you lay your head on that pillow 50 times again, say out loud, do it now. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. He said, I want you to do that for a month, 50 times every day, every morning, 50 times every evening.

John Maxwell:
And I did. I mean, I just went home and every morning, do it now. Every night, do it now. Two days, three days, one week, two weeks, three weeks. And what I want you to know is by the time, by the time I got into 30 days, every morning when I wake up, my first thought was action. Act on it. Do it now. Do it now.

John Maxwell:
And I want to encourage you. I began to start saying things. I mean, right now I’m talking to you. I promise you there are things that you have procrastinated that you’re hoping will go away and you’ll never have to deal with. And you’re just fooling yourself. They’re not going to go away. And the only way that you’re ever going to knock that giant out of your life is by taking action. And the last thought I want to give you about courage is that life expands with your courage.

John Maxwell:
Just like, let me just say this, it shrinks with your lack of courage. Your life can get bigger and better or your life can get smaller and it can get worse. Let me illustrate it by saying there’s a difference between a puzzle and life. If you’ve ever put together like a thousand piece puzzle, you know what you do? You put the pieces on a table like this, but you got a box, don’t you? And on that box is a picture. Every puzzle has a picture. The picture is the vision of what that puzzle will look like when you complete it. So here’s what’s interesting about the difference between a puzzle and life. With a puzzle, you get to see the clear picture before you begin.

John Maxwell:
In fact, you watch that picture and you find the pieces and you put the puzzle together. But you see the picture before you begin. In life, it’s exactly the opposite. You have to begin before you can see the clear picture. And most people lack the courage because they don’t understand. It’s the action that will provide the picture for them. That the moment that they move out, that the moment that the closer you move to what you see, the clearer you see what you’re moving toward. So don’t miss it.

John Maxwell:
Don’t wait for the action to become clear. Don’t say, well, the moment that I really figure it out, I want to get started, or the moment I get my answers, boy, I’m going to begin. You get the answers as you begin. You figure it out as you go. It’s the action that brings clarity to the picture. So courage is basically going to that door and turning that knob. No one’s going to turn it for you and say, I’m going to take action. I’m going to walk out this door today.

John Maxwell:
And as I start walking, I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll find them as I start walking. I don’t see the whole picture, but I’ll see it more clearly. Trust me, that’s how you get the courage to continue. You gotta start to continue, take action today on what you know you should be doing, but you haven’t done it yet. And you’ll be surprised how quickly the courage comes to you.

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Mark Cole:
Wow. Traci Podcast Family I just felt as John was talking, I just felt this energy, this excitement, this belief that with courage we can make a difference. In fact, in my prenotes I talked to you about the book how to change your world, and it’s a book. We’ll try to get some kind of a promotion for you before the end of the podcast episode. But John starts this book out with a brilliant quote by Augustine of Hippo, and here’s what it says. It says, hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

Mark Cole:
In other words, courage to do something about it. And what John is really doing for us today is not trying to get courage for tomorrow, but he’s trying to give us a dose of courage today. Our hope, our prayer for you and this podcast is that we awaken that courage within you and begin to challenge you to take on that task that has been paralyzed by fear. So, Traci, I know, man, you’ve tried a bunch of new things in your life, constantly just redefining yourself. And I know there’s been times you’ve relied on courage. That’s certainly been true for me.

Traci Morrow:
Yeah. And I think what I love about this lesson, as with all of John’s lessons, I think why we love to follow John and learn from him is that he makes it so personal and so real that when he talks about that, it’s not the absence of fear, it’s doing it afraid. It’s doing it when you’re uncertain and nervous and sometimes just like, oh, the inner scaredy cat. And so I would love to just kick this off by hearing you get a little vulnerable and share from personal experience. Mark, is this a lesson? You know, you’re a person of action. So John really Kind of gives the feel that it’s being frozen in fear, that it’s action that gets us out of that momentary fearful and into the courage space of. It’s in movement, it’s in action. And so being a person of action, it’s easy to look at somebody and think, oh, you know, certainly they don’t struggle with that.

Traci Morrow:
So is this something that you’ve ever personally dealt with is just being frozen in fear?

Mark Cole:
Yeah, yeah. More often than I, than I even have time to be vulnerable about. Not because I would hide it from you, but it’s just true. Even today, I mean, it’s true. John said something, Traci, and I’ll talk a little bit about a couple of times in my life and talk about others that I’ve had connection with that are very high profile, very effective, that have that same tendency today with fear that they did when they first started. But John said this because we’re talking about courage to continue. And John made a quote in this lesson I don’t want anybody to miss. I hope I mention it five more times.

Mark Cole:
But he said, you gotta start to continue. And often we say, man, I wanna have courage. And John says, well, to have courage, to continue, encourage, you gotta start by doing something courageous. You cannot overcome fear. You cannot obtain courage if you don’t start. You can’t continue. Encourage if you don’t start. And we started the lesson off today really answering the question about people that say, can I quit? Or how do I continue? And that question really is what we’re talking about.

Mark Cole:
You know, Traci, I was thinking about communicating. You know, I now communicate to tens of thousands of people a year through different venues or different formats. And I can remember a time being so paralyzed by that fear. I spoke before I was on John’s team. So it’s not that I can’t stand up in front of a crowd or do a public speaking course and do that, but there were components of trying to communicate on John’s stage, in John’s shadow, that were very paralyzing for me. And fortunately, John never allowed me to have an option of not doing it. He just didn’t give me an option. He gave me an option of being bad.

Mark Cole:
And I took that option quite often. He gave me an option to grow. And fortunately, I took that option very often as well. But it wasn’t an option not to start. You had to go do it. Just this past weekend, I was with a world renowned communicator. You would know him were I to call his name out you would know him, all of our podcast listeners, you would know. And I was at an event where he was speaking and just got privileged to sit right beside him.

Mark Cole:
Connections with John. John wasn’t with me, but I got to sit right beside him, and he leaned over to me and he said to me privately what he actually said in public. He said, I never, ever lose the fear before I go on stage. This is a world communicator, a world class communicator. And he said, mark, I never lose the fear that I feel right now before I get on stage. He said, do you know the types of people that sit on the stage before me? You know, the people that will come in the next few weeks and stand on the same stage? He said, man, they’re all better than me. They all bring something to the table that I don’t bring, and it keeps a fear. Well, I was like, wow, he just took me in his inner circle.

Mark Cole:
I’m in his inner circle. He just was. He was just very transparent with me. And then he got up on stage and said the same thing. And I went, well, I feel like just one of the crowd now. But here’s what my friend said. My friend was saying that there is not, in some cases, in some environments, there is not the ability to eradicate fear. There is the ability to not be paralyzed by that fear.

Mark Cole:
That’s what I want to leave you in this conversation with is fear will dominate you to fail if you will allow it. John said that today, fear will dominate your thinking until you fail, when really the failure was not getting up and trying, not getting up and doing a bad job or a good job. And often communicators that have communicated literally tens of thousands of times still fear that fear of stage. But it’s a courageous fear. Now, what do I mean by that? It’s a fear that keeps them honing their skill of courage. If they ever got used to it, if they ever got accustomed to it, they probably would lose their sharpness and therefore lose their effectiveness. And so fear is not necessarily the absence of fear is not necessarily the goal. The lack of paralysis by fear is the goal.

Mark Cole:
You’ve got to continue to have courage. You’ve got to start to continue, and you’ve got to overcome fear to begin. And so I just hope for all of us, whatever the fear is that you feel, I used a couple of public speaking examples. I think that’s the greatest fear out there. Traci, I think I’ve heard that before, is the fear of speaking publicly is a Fear. I think there’s other things that really dominate our sense of failure or our sense of accomplishment that we need to look at through the lens of not eradicating fear, but eradicating the paralysis that often comes with fear.

Traci Morrow:
So will you take us inside your thought process a little bit? Because John talked about the process of do it now, do it now, do it now. And I would love to know if you’ve ever practiced that. But I would also like to know that’s. That’s a little bit farther along in the lesson when he’s talking about just doing the things that you don’t want to do, doing the things that you maybe are procrastinating about. But specifically when you are maybe getting ready to step on a stage, when you are kind of feeling paralyzed by fear or not paralyzed because you have to get out on that stage, people are waiting for you. Take us inside your thought process a little bit. How do you talk to yourself? What are some of the things that you say to yourself in those private moments?

Mark Cole:
Yeah. So let me take you through another scenario that generates fear within me and I’ll parallel it and we’ll answer the question as it relates to speaking as well and kind of some of the thoughts. But there have been many times. I mean, let me think of the last time. It’s probably in the last couple of weeks. No, I’ve had a good bit of peace last year, certainly last year there were times I would wake up in the middle of the night with a. Just a cold sense of fear that I was going to fail as a business leader, that I was going to squander the opportunity that I’ve been given, that I didn’t know how to overcome the current cash challenge or the current business performance challenge that I had. I don’t know if everybody does this, but there have been times to where I will awaken with that kind of a fear and I will just stay engrossed in the thoughts of what coulda, what shoulda.

Mark Cole:
Oh my goodness, what if all those things. And I have laid for hours, two and three hours paralyzed in my bed of what I might not could handle. Now again, maybe, maybe the rest of you don’t ever do that. I find myself just at times been so paralyzed that literally I didn’t get out of the bed. What I’ve learned is when I start feeling that at 3 in the morning, let’s say 3:15, if I can be up and sitting at my desk with a pen in my hand and a paper in front of, I overcome that fear by processing it and putting down the fear, speaking to it, and then writing solutions that are just. Sometimes the solutions are just as fictitious as the fears. I mean, sometimes I’m as ludicrous with my solutions as I am with what the fear tells me is going to happen. And think about it.

Mark Cole:
We allow fear to go rampant in our mind. Of all the bad things that could happen, why don’t we just start writing some crazy good things in response to that fear? Oh, I’m going to overcome this. By this time next week, I’m going to be swimming in a million dollars. Why don’t we just sometimes compete the ludicrous thoughts of fear that’s in our life with some of the crazy ambitious things that could happen just as much as the fear could happen. I began to write and I first identified the fear. I write it down, and then I began to attack it with just as crazy opportunity as what the failure is telling me. So back to your question on taking the stage. A lot of times John’s in the audience, John’s right there.

Mark Cole:
I discovered something. It’s the same thing I use every time I come into this studio to record a podcast. John’s the communicator content guru. He is so incredibly profound that even when I take the microphone of this podcast, oftentimes I’ll tell myself it’s not my content. It’s not my eloquent language with the Southern vernacular. It’s the fact that I have sat for the last 20 plus years in the seat of observation, of leadership that no one else around me has ever had. And I can tell you more about how leadership works and how I have observed world class leaders than perhaps anybody in the world. And when I realized that I’m not an authority to anybody else, but in my mind, I’m an authority on observing leadership.

Mark Cole:
And I can walk to the stage or I can walk into the studio and go, you know what? If I will just live out the exposure that I have had, I will inspire somebody with that exposure that I have had so they too can become a great leader. Like the people I’ve observed, finding that place that is uniquely me, whether it’s a struggle as a business person, whether it’s a communicator on John Maxwell’s stage holding his microphone, I have found that when I find the uniqueness of what has positioned me to even be in this place, I walk with a greater courage and a greater confidence that helps me overcome that fear.

Traci Morrow:
Okay, so what that’s doing is you’re just going through in your mind, you’re taking away the competition and all the negative chatter and you’re anchoring yourself back to what is the reality of your store, your personal story and your personal experience. So that when you step back out there onto that stage or into that moment, you’re remembering that you can’t compare yourself. You’re remembering that you are just where you should be and that the experiences that have brought you there have actually earned you that space where you’re at and that you’re in a unique lane all of your own. And I think if each person takes that advice of what you just kind of walked through that moment, of bringing yourself back to your own reality and walking yourself through why, why you are where you are, I think every person, no matter what their experience is, who’s listening to this can do the exact same thing and walk with step, with confidence into that next moment and finding action when they may be frozen in a fearful moment.

Mark Cole:
Traci I agree. Let me say this. I believe that most fear, especially in the areas that we’re talking about now, speaking or business overcoming you, most of the fears that we have really is one of three things. It’s fear of comparison. I won’t be as good as people think I am, or I won’t be as good as Tracy, or I won’t be as good as John Maxwell. That fear also is all about people. People will think worse of me after I speak than better of me. People will think I’m not a good business leader than I was.

Mark Cole:
So it comes in this comparison thing, as if there’s not going to be somebody out there no matter how good I do. Go, man, he could have done a lot better. Do you know people are impossible to please? Podcast family, I just dropped gold on you. You can’t please people. They’re too finicky. They like something today that they don’t like tomorrow. And if you allow someone else’s perception of you or somebody else’s comparison of you pause you, then you are putting fear on something you literally cannot help. And if you don’t stop comparing yourself to others, and if you don’t stop trying to please people by not doing, by stopping doing what you know you’re supposed to do, you’ll never get where you’re supposed to go.

Mark Cole:
So that’s number one, people comparison, people pleasing. The second reason people do fear all the time is a lack of confidence within themselves. In other words, they don’t believe they should be given that opportunity. They believe that they don’t deserve to be there. And so the fear is a lack of self belief. What I did in my scenario with you is I went, if I don’t speak, nobody’s going to get the firsthand vantage point of what I’ve observed by John Maxwell by traveling the world with him 80% of the time for the last five years. It became a stewardship issue for me. So I quit telling myself that I had to say it all eloquently and right and I just went, you got to get this out.

Mark Cole:
Therefore, I overcame the fear of saying I’ve got to be good to saying, I get this out there. If I don’t get this out there, it’s a stewardship issue. So fear number one is comparison to others, pleasing others. Fear number two is I don’t qualify. I’m not good enough. If you’ve been given the opportunity to do something, own the fact that you’ve been given the opportunity. Not qualifying whether you deserve the opportunity. No, you don’t deserve it.

Mark Cole:
You never will, you never shall. Quit worrying about that. It’s not about deserving, it’s about stewardship. The final reason that I think a lot of people get fearful is they fear that they’re going to be found out to be a fraud, they’re a fake, they have a facade on. And once again, I fight that fear the same way I do the fear that I’m not qualified by saying, yeah, they may have a perception of me that is not right, but as John says, I’m not as bad at the beginning as they think I am. And I’m not as good at the end as they think I am. I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m me and I’m going to be the best version of me and be at peace with myself and not try to qualify to be on the stage.

Mark Cole:
I’m going to step through the opportunity because it’s been given to me. And when I step into the opportunity because it’s been given rather than because I feel like I qualified, I reduced the fear and began to continue encourage.

Traci Morrow:
That is so good, those three points. I’m so glad that you like stepped back in and clarified those three points because those three points were dropping gold on. Some people needed to hear that. I know I needed to hear it again. And it’s. And I know that they hit three very different audiences and maybe for some poor audience members that they are some of our listeners, it’s all three. And when you can identify those enemies inside your own head and attack them with action and that’s magic happens, or at least action happens, you know, and then. And that’s what I want to talk about this next one.

Traci Morrow:
When John talked about life expands, if you’ve never taken action because you have been frozen in fear, you don’t know what this means. But I would love for you to talk a little bit about this point that John makes, that life expands with your courage and shrinks due to your lack of courage. I’ve had team members who have love to. To like, just learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and. And spend their whole life collecting enough information so that they can execute with perfection because they’re frozen in fear. They want to execute with excellence on the first try. And I love that John always says, and I have to remind myself of this all the time when I’m taking my first step in something for the first time. You’re never good the first time.

Traci Morrow:
That’s a. That is such a blessing that John says that to us. The more you can remind yourself of that, because it takes away of kind of it being junky the first time. Like, oh, man, that did not go great. But that’s okay. I got the first time out of the way. So the second time has got to be better. But can you talk a little bit about what that means for somebody who’s never taken that courageous first step because they’ve been stuck in fear? What it means that life expands with courage when you take a step and versus if you spend your life shrinking and never taking action due to having a lack of courage.

Mark Cole:
It was 20 something years ago, 22, 23 years ago, I had my first invitation to take a leadership position here at Maxwell Leadership wasn’t the name of the company back then. It was nJoy. But for those of you that are familiar with my story, you know that I came to NJOY back then with one vow. I’m not gonna lead ever again. I don’t feel like I deserve to lead. I feel like I’d been given a. A great opportunity to lead in the first 10 years or so of my professional career.

Mark Cole:
I just feel like I missed it. And so I don’t want to lead. I’m not going to lead. And so I can remember the first request, hey, would you like to lead? And I went, no, thank you. I’m quite confident like I am right now. I don’t want to do that. And really, that was a form of fear. The fear was, if I lead again, then what’s going to happen? What if I lead and people figure Out.

Mark Cole:
I’m not a good leader. It was all the stuff that I talked about just a moment ago. And I did. I didn’t take the first promotion opportunity. I didn’t take the second promotion opportunity. On the third one. The opportunity was to coach the company softball team. This is not a made up story.

Mark Cole:
My first leadership position was the third invitation to lead, and it was to lead our company softball team. And I’m telling you this, Traci, I took it. We were terrible. We were terrible. For a year and a half, we were terrible. And I said, I’ll take it. But on the softball field, I don’t care if you’re the president of the company. I don’t care if you’re my direct boss.

Mark Cole:
I don’t care if you’re two, three bosses up on the softball field. If I’m coach, I’m the boss. And you can’t come in there and use your position and you can’t come in there and tell me I’m going to pay for it the next day. Now, the reason I felt like I could do it on a softball field because it was irrelevant. It was a game. People weren’t really calling me leader. And so I thought I could get away with not being a leader but being the coach. But I put the rules down.

Mark Cole:
Baby.

Traci Morrow:
Baby.

Mark Cole:
The fourth game of the year, I’d played on the softball team a year and four games. We had lost all but two games the first year I played on it and we’d lost all four games of the second year, Tracy. And so I said, I’m going to take this softball team and I’m going to start keeping stats. And then in week six, I’m going to start showing my leadership position. So in week five of the season, my first game of coaching, everybody played in the positions they wanted, which was positions that the senior most leader of people of the organizations wanted to play on the softball field. And they were terrible. And I let them do it for two games. On the third game, I changed the whole batting order up and I changed people’s field position.

Mark Cole:
The leader of the organization had been batting second or third and I put him at 10th because his stats said he needed to be at 10th. Oh, it was Hades to pay. I mean, it was bad news. We won that game. We won the next game. We won the final four games of that season, getting us a chance in the playoffs. We won every game in the playoffs and won that championship that game with a five, five season because we got to go to the playoffs undefeated. The Next year, undefeated the next year.

Mark Cole:
Now, now that I’m done sounding like I’m the reason that they did it, I put myself, by the way, I put myself on the bench because I wasn’t very good on the field either. So let’s just be really honest with one another. Here’s my point. I began to understand with that win and that winning season, I began to understand that if I would just take the role of a leader and quit paralyzing myself, I could lead something else. And I could lead something else. It was literally in that same season with the leader that had gotten mad at me for changing them in the baton order, came to me four weeks later and says, okay, I’ve asked you twice to take a leadership position in this organization. And then I’ve watched what you’ve done on the softball field. Here’s the third ask and I really want you to consider it.

Mark Cole:
And I took it. I took it that year, three weeks into the softball season. Why? Because I had a confidence that if I just start leading, it could begin to be transferred into other leadership positions. Here’s the whole point in my very long self serving story. Some of you have opportunities right now you’re considering and you’re waiting to qualify. You’re waiting for it to be perfect. You’re waiting for the scenario to make sense and you need to stop waiting and you need to get the courage to continue. You’re not given the opportunity because you deserve it.

Mark Cole:
You’re given the opportunity because it’s a door open for you to walk through. I promise you I’m going to get from this podcast episode. I’m going to get 1, 2, 10, 20 of you that’s going to sin and say, mark, you pushed me over the edge to make a decision that I had been waiting for a year, five years, six years, and the rest is history. It gave me confidence to keep getting courage to keep winning at the next season of Life. I can’t wait to see it because it’s going to happen for you.

Traci Morrow:
Do you know that my last question for you was not a question at all, but an ask. I was going to say to you, literally, I have here, march. This lesson is hard for a great many people. Will you please close us out? One of the things that you said last week is that you wanted your sentence to be remembered by the. The sentence you wanted to be remembered by was that he inspired us to be more than I thought I could be. And I was going to say, mark, can you please close us out by encouraging our people to take that first baby step to be courageous. And look at what you just look at that did.

Mark Cole:
We’re almost drop yes, we’re on the same page.

Traci Morrow:
You can’t help yourself. So that is a mic drop. And what a great way to end this courageous. Go out there and be courageous our friends.

Mark Cole:
Well the best way to end it is by quoting a incredible podcast family member. A member that listened to the podcast become a world class leader and it’s Ikaika. Ikaika, you are right on it. This is the first statement Akaika said. Best podcast ever. Ikaika, you’re right. It is the best podcast ever. I’m kind of teasing, but I do think it’s pretty good.

Mark Cole:
Ikaika said, I’ve been listening since 2018. I’m an Amazon delivery driver and an Amway Ibo. It gets tough some days, but this podcast gives me energy to keep going. I’ve grown so much in my life. Most importantly, my thinking has changed over the years. Thank you and the team for doing what you do. Ikaika, we do what we do because of you. Go get courage and exercise that courage.

Mark Cole:
Continue the courage and tell us the impact you’ve had in your life. Because everyone around you, starting with you, deserves to be led well.