EntreLeadership - #121: Shawn Achor—How Happiness Fuels Your Success

Episode Date: November 16, 2015

Positive psychology expert Shawn Achor joins for a fascinating conversation on happiness and how it can change your world and your organization. Through his years of research, this former Harvard professor has found that a positive mindset can lead to increased intelligence and creativity. It can even triple your problem-solving skills! And here’s the best part: Happiness is something anyone can cultivate—even in the worst circumstances. We’re also talking with leadership consultant Brad Lomenick on the essential habits you need to get things done. Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, we're grateful for the download. Fun episode today, two authors, two books, and a whole lot of goodness. Sean Acor, our primary conversation in this episode, brand new book from him, The Happiness Advantage. Guys, a two-time bestseller.

The Happiness Advantage, which is the new book, and Before Happiness. We'll tell you more about that. But this is great stuff. The principles of positive psychology and how they fuel success and performance at work. That'll be the big part of that conversation. And then an old pal who has been a longtime leader, specifically in the live event space, that's Brad Lamanick. He's got a brand new book out called H3 Leadership. Be humble, stay hungry, always hustle.

So those are the conversations that we'll bring to you on this podcast. And, of course, we're powered by our dear friend. friends at Infusionsoft. You want to learn more about what they're doing to help the small business, man and woman, the companies, the organizations that you're running, go to infusionsoft.com slash entree. Infusionsoft.com slash entree. So I mention this all the time that one of the cool parts of my gig, and there are many cool parts, but one of the cool parts is I get a lot of free books. Eric, the producer and I, between the two of us, we have a bookshelf that just keeps filling up, filling up. By the way, I need to remind myself to ask you, what do we?

we do with all the books? Because like I tear them up and read them and, you know, write all in them and all that kind of stuff so we can't like resell them. Maybe we could resell them in a special like interview notes type used book. But we get a ton of books. And so one of the latest books we got across the desk was the happiness advantage by Sean Acor. And honestly, I'm going to tell you something. If you ever write a book, I think you should put a lot of effort into the book cover because the book cover is what grabs people's attention. If you have any hope at flipping to the back or flipping to the inside, looking at the glossary, I think you've got to catch their eye with the book cover. So this bright orange book with an arrow going up, the happiness

advantage, the seven principles of positive psychology that fuels success and performance at work shows up. I've never heard of Sean before, but it's an intriguing looking book. I like the idea of the happiness advantage, so I dive into it. I immediately call Eric the producer and say, this is really interesting stuff. I want to read more into this. Let's see if we can get this guy on here, because I'm really enjoying what I'm reading. And I got to tell you, when I see things like principles and things like that, I automatically get a little bit of that side cock of the head, you know, just, okay, well, what is this based on? And here's this great. A lot of research, and this is huge. And happiness in today's age. Everybody wants to be happy, but so few people are happy.

So when you are happy, why are you happy? And then how does happiness truly give us an advantage? Some great stuff we talk about. And all this applies to leaders. It also applies to you men and women in every other area of your life, specifically relationships. So let's get right to it. You're going to love this conversation. Get out your pens, pencils, and pages. get ready to learn. Here's my conversation with Sean Acor on the Happiness Advantage. Sean, it's a thrill to have you with us. This topic, happiness. It's a fun topic to discuss because so many of us want it. And interestingly enough, so few actually ever achieve it across the course of their life. So you studied it. And it becomes an international

bestseller, the Happiness Advantage. Twelve years at Harvard, you studied this topic. So let's start simply. How do you define happiness in your words based on your research? Oh, that's a great question. So I actually got started in this before psychology at the Divinity School. I was studying Christian and Buddhist ethics and how people's beliefs change their actions in the world. And the way that the ancient Greeks defined happiness was not the way we do in the modern world, which is pleasure. They defined happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential.

And for me, I love that definition because it changes the pursuit of happiness. It changes it from something that's momentary to something you can experience. Joy is something you experience even when life is not pleasurable, right? Like working long hours and days and months and years trying to start up a business, but you find it to be meaningful or in the midst of, you know, childbirth or long run, you can have high joy but low pleasure. And the other part is I think a lot of people are afraid of happiness because if I'm happy now, maybe I'll stop pushing as hard.

And that's what pleasure does, but joy does the exact opposite. Joy actually fuels us towards our potential. It makes us want to learn about the world. Makes us want to see as much of as we can and to find ways of being able to see more and more of our potential. Okay, that's really good. I want to stay right there. First of all, one more time, that one sentence,

how the Greeks define it, that is so good. And then the follow-up to that, Sean, I want you to break that down a little bit more of the difference between pleasure and joy. That's really strong. So first, the one-sentence definition for folks to write that down. Sure.

So happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential. Pleasure is a momentary feeling within the brain. It causes us to want to seek different activities, right? So if you feel pleasure after an ice cream, you want to have another ice cream, but then you need more ice cream, right? So your brain gets used to it. Joy doesn't have that problem. Joy, you can actually experience over sustained periods of time.

You can feel joy even when life is not pleasurable. Like if I'm going on long run, my legs might be burning. I might be feeling lots of pain in my legs, but I feel this joy that I'm getting to see what my potential is. I'm actually running. I'm not sitting behind a desk right now. In each one of those moments, that's the type of experience we want. Joy is something that actually is not just about the individual. It actually connects you to the rest of the world. Joy makes us want to see ourselves and other people. It makes us want to find ways of helping the world in a better way. It makes us want to make this external world, a better world for all of us. So it actually is a transformative emotion, instead of of one that you try and grab hold of, and then you watch slip through your fingers like pleasure. You just mentioned the word world multiple times in just a few sentences. And as you said that, it got me thinking about happiness in America versus happiness around the world. And you've traveled all around the globe, I believe 50 countries, if not more, you know, just discovering and researching this topic alone. what do you observe when it comes to joy around the world?

And where I'm going with this, Sean, is maybe the countries where they have a lot less than we Americans are blessed to have. What does joy look like around the world versus an America? So it is interesting. I started doing all this research at Harvard. So the vision of happiness was related to grades. It was related to a very,

closed and insular and very privileged society. And I realized that this research is useless unless it works out in the messiness of life. So in the middle of the economic global collapse that happened in 2007, I started taking this research out to try and battle test it across the globe. And what I found was I started learning so much more from these other countries, more from people outside of Harvard than I had been learning in a decade of studying happiness there. One of the things that was most impactful for me, partly what you were described, I had some assumptions about what creates happiness, and I assumed that if you put somebody in a place with beautiful buildings and with tons of money, and they have all these opportunities and intelligence, that they'll be much happier than somebody who's living in the midst of poverty, or that there's instability, or that they're living with debt. But it turns out, as I started traveling, that's not the experience at all.

And as we did the research, we found that if I know everything about your external world, we can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90% of happiness is a mystery to scientist, if all we have is your external world, because it turns out that 90% of our long-term happiness is based upon how your brain is processing the world you find yourself in, how you think about your money, how you think about your position, how you think about your family. And I did travel to 50 countries. Two of them, I was shocked to find happiness there. I was in Venezuela working with people who are under threats of kidnappings. Their families were under threats of kidnapping. And I work with some farmers in Zimbabwe who had lost their lands. The government had taken away the land from the farmers, and now the entire country was starving. The entire currency actually collapsed. They were moving their money around in wheelbarrows. And I was like, well, this is a place where people are not going to be happy, right? I was just up with Swiss bankers who didn't get their bonuses once, and they were devastated and depressed. And then I found these people who had lost everything. And I was like, well, of course they'll be unhappy. And I was stunned.

that was not the case at all. And what was keeping them together was two things. First of all, they had optimism. They believed that eventually their behavior would matter to improve the situation. So they thought, no matter what had happened up to this point, things will get better if they keep trying. But even more powerful than that was actually social connection. In places like Venezuela and in Zimbabwe, I found that while there was tons of instability in their life, what they had was deep social connection, the breadth, depth, and meaning. in their social relationships was so strong that even in the midst of chaos, they could actually still find meaning and joy within their life. I feel like it's very easy for us entrepreneurs

and for people who are sometimes chasing a job to leave all of our social support networks for it. And I realized that that's not what creates happiness. I need to live with my research. So I actually left Harvard after coming back from South America and moved down to the same street as my sister down in San Antonio. And when her husband got moved with the military, We moved and we brought sales guy with us, and then we just moved back to Dallas with six families. So we're really trying to keep that social connection together because it turns out it's the greatest predictor of long-term happiness we have. The social connection is the greatest predictor of long-term happiness. That's simple.

By far, and let me say one other thing I think is amazing. We just found out that social connection is not only the greatest predictor of happiness. Social connection is as predictive of how long you will end up living as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking. we fight so hard against the negative in our society, and we forget to tell people that if you can actually find ways of creating these positive habits in your life and find ways of creating social connection, we can extend your life just as much by getting you to connect to other people as getting you to stop smoking. And when you connect to other people, your likelihood of continuing to smoke drops and your ability to lose weight improves as well. And we found that if you can choose to surround yourself with positive people, we find that your mood is oftentimes an aggregate of the five people you spend the most time around. But also, the more you choose happiness, the more you're likely to get your family members,

your friends, those potential clients to become positive as well and to believe that their behavior matters. And you can create it with, you know, four hour long dinners and drinks, but you can also do it with a two-minute positive email in the morning. We were doing this research out at Facebook. We got them for two minutes a day to just write a positive, email praising or thanking a new person each day for 21 days in a row. By day 22, it turns out that the people who had done this experiment, they report extremely high levels of social connection on the metrics we're using. And why that was important is along with that improvement, it turns out while

they spent two minutes creating that meaningful impact upon other people's lives, they also got amazing emails back from those people. They felt like that they had 21 people in their lives that they had meaningfully moved forward. And it turns out the way that they rated their entire day, was meaningful. And all the other research I do is around this topic that happiness is actually an advantage. So when your brain feels that meaning in your life, all these places we've tried this research, it turns out that their productive energy rises by 31%. We find sales rise by 37%. We find that your likelihood of promotion rises by 40% if you start providing social connection. Not only do you feel happier is an incredible advantage in your life. Yeah, I love that because

you actually, one of the passages I highlighted in the book is the greatest competitive advantage. in the modern economy is a positive and engaged brain. That's direct statement from the book and it's dead on, but it leads me to ask the question how much of this is learned versus DNA. That's such a great question because this is something I feel so passionate about. I feel like we're living under the tyranny of a belief that we learned in high school that's actually holding down our potential as a society. We've been teaching people for decades that you are your genes and your environment. So your happiness is basically upon what you were born with, how your parents raised you,

and whatever's going on in the markets right now. That's the entirety of people's happiness. But as we researched it, we found that there was actually a third path beyond genes and environment that while the average person doesn't fight their genes, and if you think about it, science only cares really about the average. If you stopped looking at the average and the data and looked at people who actually started changing their habits and their mindset to try and cultivate a more positive mindset each day or did some of these positive habits that we've been hearing about for centuries,

right, about practicing gratitude or doing random acts of kindness. It turns out that we could get their levels of happiness to rise dramatically above their genes and above their environment. Let me show you how powerful this is. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania have found that if you have four-year-old children with genes for pessimism and around the dinner table, you have them practice thinking of three new things that they're grateful for that have occurred over the past 24 hours. Simply three new gratitudes each day. You can take a child with genes for pessimism and rewire their brain over a period of just 21 to 28 days to actually become a lifelong default optimist if they continue those patterns. So that two-minute pause of intervention, which they've actually

found with 84-year-old men as well, you don't have to just be a child. You can do this at age 84. It turns out the reason why this research is incredible. It's not that gratitude's good for you. Everyone that's listening gets that. The reason why this research is creating a revolution within the society is because it's saying that a two-minute positive intervention in your life could actually trump not only your genes, but eight decades of experience, making happiness and access to joy a possibility for all of us, and actually allowing us to use more of our brain. It turns out we have higher levels of intelligence. It triples our levels of creativity. It increases our ability to solve problems. All of those things improve when the human brain is positive. And it turns out happiness is not something

you inherit. Happiness is something you cultivate. That's extraordinary. If we could just soak on that for a minute. I know it's in the middle of a conversation, but I hope those of you that are listening, grab that. Two minutes a day with your kids asking them three things that they're thankful for. Over and over and over, completely rewires a brain. That is earth-shaking data. It just is. Sean, I've got to tell you, that is really amazing. If you think about it, because here's just something that I want to just riff on here. I want to get your thoughts on this. What bothers me, Sean, is that if I pay attention to any news at all, social, online resources, 24-hour cable, the networks, on and on and on, it's negative, negative, negative, not beating up on the media. It's worked just like

anybody else, but the fact of the matter is negative gets our eyeballs, it gets us to click, and so on and so forth. But the fact that the matter is, I was having a conversation another day with my father, and it seems to me what I see in the news is 10 times more negative than what I see on my own sidewalk or on Main Street. Would you speak to that? It's such an important point, because not only is it 10 times worse than what you actually see, but it changes people's perception where they actually think that their society is so much less safe than it actually is, and it teaches your brain over and over again. Your behavior doesn't matter, that even if you're having a good day, at any point it can be robbed from you.

My wife is a happiness researcher as well. She was actually a network news anchor for CBS and New York. And she quit her job at the top of her career because she didn't want a five-year-old to walk through the room while she was doing her job. My wife's name is Michelle Gieland. She and I just completed a study with Ariana Huffington and what we were just stunned by, and we actually haven't even gotten to publish these results yet. You're one of the first people I've gotten to tell, that we just found, this is incredible, three minutes, three minutes of watching negative news in the morning, six to eight hours later, you report that day as actually being a more negative day than if you had watched three hours of positive news in the morning. So incredibly, what we're

doing in the morning is we're actually priming our brain for either having a good day or in a bad day. And amazingly, as we were talking about right before we got started, you know, there's so many people that are listening that have an entrepreneurial spirit that want to be able to create change within their life and create those businesses. There's a study that I think is phenomenal about how important it is to have that positive mindset where they did this with college students. I love this. They had college students come in and they said, do you think that this world is going in the right direction? Are you an optimist? Are you a lucky person? Do good things just happen to you? Or do you think this world is going down the tubes and that you're resilient but you're not really a lucky person?

So after they answer that question, they gave them newspapers and had them count the number of photographs in the newspaper. And if they get the number correct, they make $5. So they go through it as quickly as possible reading, trying to count all the photographs. On page two of everyone's newspaper in big letters that says stop the experiment, if you stop the now, we'll give you $50. What's incredible is that the people who are optimistic, turns out 80% of them stop the experiment and ask for their money.

Of the monks of pessimists, the ones who think that the world is negative, 80% of them do not stop. And afterwards, if you ask them, did you see that big opportunity that was right there in everyone's newspaper stopping the experiment? They said, no, shoot, I didn't see that. I was so focused on the photographs. But we actually can track their eyes now, and we can watch their eyes scan right over it. And our brain deletes good information. It deletes opportunities when we think that the world is negative.

When we're in a positive state, when we're optimistic, your brain thinks it has more resources to solve what's going on in the world. So it actually lets more opportunities in. it turns out optimism is the greatest predictor of entrepreneurial success because it allows your brain to actually see possibilities where no one else does. This is, I mean, I love that this book is an international bestseller. It's no surprise. But, I mean, is it just hard for you at times not to levitate when you think about this stuff and talk about it? I'm positively buoyant right now. It's so exciting, but it's also frustrating too because you realize that people have a choice, that happiness scientifically is actually a choice. and I think that so many people feel like it's not.

They tell me that it's their genes or their neurochemicals, or I can't be happy I didn't get my monos, or I can't be happy I'm in debt right now. And then I meet somebody in our research that, I mean, I was working out a very large company, and they were saying, well, we can't talk about happiness on the store floors because, you know, some of them don't have education,

some of them have family that are in prison. We go out to those stores, and I met a woman there, and she said, I'm the happiest person in the entire world. And I was like, well, we have to study you. And we found out half an hour, I found out a half an hour later that her husband had died over the past two years. Her son had died five years before. But when she came into work, she was such a bright beacon for everyone else. So she made other people happy.

And when people would come into the store, she'd be like, today is an amazing day. How are you doing? And it's very hard to choose negativity in the face of somebody who has experienced external negativity, but actually can choose happiness. Here's why this is so important to entrepreneurs and to leaders. I want to shift the conversation a bit because we've been talking about the science behind this. I think it's so important. But it occurs to me, Sean, while I'm listening to this, I'm going, this is mandatory for how leaders should communicate. It's not just a personal prescription.

Leaders should communicate this way because of the mirror neurons. If you got nothing else out of this, the mere neurons, leaders in how we carry ourselves, but more importantly, how we communicate with those that we lead, This is breakthrough stuff. If you want a positive company, if you want a happy company, people who believe in the mission, this is a big part of it, is it not? It's so important. You know, actually, over the past seven years, I've worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies. So one of the things we found was that most entrepreneurs actually get into trouble because they think, if I work harder right now, I'll be more successful.

And as soon as I achieve these lofty goals I've set for myself, then I'll feel happier. So they hit their sales target, then they raise it. Or they hit their growth earnings. They want to double it for the next year or keep that doubling happening. Or a student might get good grades in school, but then they have to get into a better school. The problem is that success is a moving target for the human brain. So if happiness is on the opposite side of success for you, if that's how you're motivating yourself, you're actually limiting both your success and your happiness because your brain

never actually gets to happiness. You've pushed it over what we call the cognitive horizon because it's on the opposite side of a moving target for the brain. But flip it around, if you can get your team to become more positive by first changing your leadership, if you can become more positive yourself as you're trying to pursue these entrepreneurial ideas or to create a strong business, it turns out that when the human brain is positive, every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for rises dramatically. Productivity rises, creativity rises, profit, triples.

I was just actually out, I have to tell you a brief story. I was out in nationwide insurance. We were working with one of the leaders, the president of nationwide brokerage services, and he said he was the numbers guy. So if he saw somebody smiling at work, he knew they probably weren't working hard enough. And I said, if you're a numbers guy,

we'll show you the numbers. We've been doing this for a decade. If you can get yourself to become a positive leader, we can dramatically improve your company's bottom line. He looked at the numbers. He allowed us to do two-day training, teaching positive psychology to his entire company. They had flatlined at $350 million,

for 18 years in a row. With no new hires last year, they went from $350 million to $950 million, and they've already eclipsed a billion dollars this year. And when we do that, sometimes leaders are like, what was the changes I made or, you know, it's the market changed. But the president said, nope, it's the fact that I actually started being a positive leader. And then I invited my team to actually choose happiness and use that to propel the success. And that's what the team says as well. Now all nationwide insurance is looking at how do you teach people from the very beginning that sales don't lead to happiness. Happiness leads to sales. And now people from Google are flying out.

So what I'm saying is that what we've seen over and over again is that if we can take a neutral team or a neutral leader, get them to positive. On average, we see sales rise by 37 percent and we see revenues actually triple. Well, there it is. Our time has come to a close, Sean. But I want to thank you personally. This is so enriching. And when I think of leaders who want to create environments or people that work with them are flourishing, the people that they serve, their customers are flourishing, parents raising kids that will flourish in society.

It all starts here. And this is groundbreaking stuff. And we're grateful. I know you've got a lot going on in your life, massive success with the book, The Happiness Advantage. but we're grateful that you spent time with us today. I am way better for hearing this and learning from you today. I know our audiences, so we're grateful. Thank you so much for having me on and letting me share this research.

If you want to dive deeper in what Sean is doing with this book, Happinessadvantage.com is the website. Happinessadvantage.com. Highly recommend it. Really good stuff. So you know one of our commitments is to bring you conversations with leaders that aren't always the biggest bestseller, aren't always the name brand, if you will.

But somebody who's actually been in the trenches. H3 leadership, be humble, stay hungry, always hustles. Written by Brad Lomeneck. He's been on this podcast before Chris Hogan interviewed him. He's a longtime friend, ran the conference Catalyst, which is specifically a leadership conference. Dave has spoken, Rachel has spoken there, Chris Brown, many of our friends, mutual friends, Dave and I's friends.

And I got to be a part of it. MCD it for a while and hosted the Catalyst podcast. Many of you listen to this podcast also listen or did listen to the Catalyst podcast when I was hosting it. So, you know, I know Brad's journey, and this book was written from, I think, a very vulnerable place. And there's some practical leadership stuff there. But what I love is that he addresses a lot of the leadership mistakes and lessons that he learned in his time there. So I think this is great stuff. It's very, very practical.

Here's a short conversation with Brad Lomlin. Let's talk about the practical. stuff in the book and specifically your style of getting things done. There's a lot of entrepreneurs out there who find themselves more in the category of great idea, got a lot of connections, you know, but they struggle with the follow through. I remember you are not a guy who struggles with follow through. I mean, it comes natural to you to just get things done. What are some of the practical tips? Give us a few that our entrepreneur leaders can get from this book and particularly take away from this conversation? Well, I think part of understanding the way you lead best

is you've got to be self-aware. And that's where things start. I mean, it's the understanding of identity, and you talk about calling all the time, and the understanding of sort of what makes you tick. And so there are many of us who naturally, we just gravitate towards action. We gravitate towards follow-through. We're creating the list. We're checking things off. But there are a lot of people who don't naturally go there. And what I would say, the practical side of that is that you have to develop a habit of execution. And part of the premise of the book is there's these three H's, but there's also 20 habits

that I hope actually get put into practice. Because at the end of the day, habits, right? I mean, habits are the things that actually will move our behavior from this idea to actually getting practiced on a regular, consistent basis. And in the craziness of the event business. Oh, gosh. And the businesses that the men and women that are listening in today, it allows you to keep things somewhat in order as far as priorities and getting things done despite the craziness and the unsuspecting moments that just kind of come out of nowhere. Right.

And discipline is part of that. You know, I mean, discipline is not something that any of us really would sit down at the beginning of the day and go, boy, I just wish I could have more discipline in my life. But discipline and habits are the fuel that will allow you to actually. If you ask a leader, do you want to get better? 99.9% of leaders will say yes. And I believe the way that you do that is you actually create habits that will sustain that behavior over time. And so if you're not an executor, if your natural proclivity is not to necessarily move things

to the finish line, then you have to create a habit that says, I'm going to be devoted and committed to pushing things past the goal line. There are 20 habits that you mentioned in the book. We don't have time to go through all the habits. I'm going to cherry pick a few, as I like to do. And I want to talk about the habit of conviction. Well, in the reason that I want to use a habit of conviction versus the idea of a habit of integrity or morality was that conviction denotes a much stronger storyline. And everybody can sort of feel and see conviction.

And, you know, for me, the idea of sticking to your roots, and this is, you know, the idea of principle is huge in that, once you start to become something of influence and significance. Yeah, people want to be there. People want to be there. And you also will always have more opportunities to stray away from your convictions. When you're nobody, when you're starting out and you're a one-man show and nobody cares. being able to stick to your convictions is really, really easy. But once you start gaining influence, popularity, you become the person that everybody wants to partner with, that's when it starts to really show up in how you do that. And, you know, the way you start, the roots and the establishment of your sense of conviction when you start will determine how you finish.

And this is for young leaders especially, before you ever get to a place of importance. this habit has to start being put into practice. And many times we think I'll figure that out when I get there. No, you need to figure it out now. The habit of ambition, I love this, develop an appetite for what's next. Is there a fine line between looking too much for what's next and kind of stay in where we need to in the now? I think that's a balance. Do you agree?

Yeah, it's a tension. And how do you balance it? Well, it's a tension that has to be managed. And I don't know if you ever figure it out. Yeah, I don't think so. the balance between identity and between calling and between ambition. You know, ambition is one of those words that many of us, especially those of us who are men or women of faith, many times we'll think that ambition is bad.

But I would disagree. I think ambition is really healthy if it's balanced with the proper perspective that is about humility. So when you combine humility with a proper understanding of, you know, what does it look like for me to be ambitious and go after something that's healthy? You know, the thing about ambition, I think that's true for so many of us, especially if we're labeled as type A leaders. Many of us get labeled that way when we're young because we don't settle. You know, we want to win. We want to go after the achievements. We're the ones who win all the awards.

And, you know, I would say that when it comes to ambition, the goal line for me is excellence. And that's another of the habits. But if we're striving for that sense of going after perfection and a standard. of we want to be the best. As a believer, I would say that is lived out because I'll serve a God who is great. So therefore I want to be great. And so then ambition holds something completely different for me. It holds a sense of being a healthy posture that says there's nothing wrong with going after the best, wanting to be the best,

looking at tomorrow and saying, I want to go after what's next. But when ambition gets blinded, that's the point when we all have to make sure we've got a again, the proper conviction, the humble piece of this that sustains us and balances us out. And we've all worked for leaders who their ambition went out of whack, and it became all about them. I want to talk about risk, just a smidge. And I know that this is a unique business that we're talking about. Brad was running a conference. So you've got people paying a lot of money and a lot of people come into a conference,

and you've built this brand, you build this expectation. how do you manage risk when trying something new? Well, I think there was an expectation on the part of the catalyst audience during those years that they wanted us to risk and they expected us to risk. And they realized that part of risk was potential failure. And they were okay if we went for it and it bombed versus the other side, which said, we're going to, because we built something that has significance now, we're going to play it safe, and we're going to just shoot for the middle.

I always felt like there was this permission and a sense of awareness from the audience going, we want you to push for some things, and if it doesn't work out, we're okay with that. So I never felt like there was this pressure that if we screwed up, we were going to lose someone. I think a lot of the people who truly were our customers were the ones saying, Thank you for showing that you screw up as well. Because so many of them are walking in and we're giving them permission now to go risk. And you're using screw up in a, you know, this is when you test new content, new ideas, new speakers, things of that nature. But that is your core business.

And so it is intriguing. And that's a good word. Final question for you, you're very candid in this book. And I think that this is a great model for leaders. You were very successful running this business for several years. years and then the transition time comes. Yeah. And not many people do transition well. And when I say people, I mean leaders. You're very candid in the book. Give us a summary of what you share and why you share it and what you want leaders to take away, especially those who are in a situation like this where

they know they need to transition. They're in the process of it, but they're finding it terribly difficult. Well, there was three things that came together when I stepped out. One was that I turned 40 and it was this moment of Cadillus was always about young leaders, and I felt that a little bit of the stirring of saying, hey, Brad, remember when you were 30, and you thought when you're 40, if you're still doing this, you might want to look at something different. I also had my own leadership crisis.

My leadership was getting stale. I was running one of the largest leadership movements in the country, but I wasn't a very good leader. and I had to sort of reevaluate and reboot my leadership combined with the reality that said, you know what, part of succession is that when you're the leader and you've gotten to a place where what you've been doing for quite a while,

somebody else can potentially do in your place, it's time for you to get out of the way. And all those things came together. And I had a moment where I had to say, you know what, it's time to move on. And there was no. like crisis other than my own sort of personal leadership. But the lesson I've, when I look back and people constantly will say, why would you step away at the sort of the pinnacle of the movement of

catalyst? And I think part of the role of a leader at every level, not just when you're in charge, but at every level in the organization is to succeed yourself. And you allow someone else to step in to the role that you've had to give them a chance. And I just had lots of other opportunities. I had other things I wanted to do. I wanted to speak more. I wanted to focus on writing and sort of, you know, stepping more into the leadership space as a thought leader. And it was just time for me to move on. And it's been a great transition. So much of us as leaders is we define ourselves and we identify ourselves. Our identity becomes what we do. And my advice, my encouragement, my challenge to those listening is make sure you're very aware of who you are

compared to what you do because who you are is not defined by what you do. Yeah, that's really good. He is Brad Lomeneck a long time and dear friend. This book is very practical and he gets very, very real, tells a lot of his story. And I really recommend it. It's be humble, stay hungry, always hustle. H3 leadership, three big H's. You know, as a Baptist preacher's kid. Oh, you love the illiteration. I love the alliteration. You love the literature. I mean, it's fantastic.

Yeah. That'll preach right there. He is Brad Lomeneck, the book H3 Leadership. Be humble, stay hungry, always hustle. I want to give you one takeaway from the conversation with Brad that again I found to be refreshing. And that is that he walked away. He saw the handwriting on the wall, whether it was his wall or others, but he made the decision to walk away. This is a hard thing for leaders to do.

And I'm not suggesting that you walk away from your leadership. But what I am saying is that you have some real sensitivities to the environment around you. And there have been many successful leaders that their time was done where they were at. And they continued to move forward and find new areas of influence and areas of leadership. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes that's natural. And it's okay. It takes a lot of courage to own that. Get better.

Look to the past for lessons. but keep moving forward. So, hey, this is all about replacing yourself at the end of the day, and at some point, every leader will have to replace himself. That is probably, in my opinion, the most pure form of leadership. You show me a leader who replaces himself well, and the organization is healthy and even goes higher after he or she has left. To me, that might be the final test of leadership.

You'd have a hard time convincing me otherwise. Speaking of great leadership, hey, I want to tell you about the summit. Really excited about this is the second time we've done the Entree Leadership Summit. Dave Ramsey, Jim Kyle, and Seth Godin, Pat Lynch, U. Henry Cloud, our very own Chris Hogan and Christy Wright, and the mystery speaker. Most of you by now, if you've been listening to this podcast, have gone to the website, Entreeleadership.com slash summit to see who the mystery speaker is. It's pretty cool.

By the way, Eric, I've been telling people live from our live events because that's okay within the contract. It gets an audible gasp. It's going to be in Dallas, Texas. It's going to be a great, great time. So check out all you need to know, Entreleadership.com slash summit. Next May, we'd love to see you there at the summit. Hey, we are loving getting all the stories.

I asked Eric, the producer, before we started recording, how are we doing on the stories from listeners? His inbox is absolutely crammed. Podcast at entreleadership.com. That's the email address. Podcast at Entreleadership.com. First time you're hearing this, here's what we want. We want to hear your success stories.

How is Entree leadership, the podcast, the book, All Access, our entire program. How is it helping you win? This is not about an endorsement. We're not asking you to send us how great we are stories. We want to hear how you're winning. That's why we're here. We want to brag on you. We want to hear your stories because we believe your stories will also inspire our community,

specifically here on the podcast. So many of you are sending the stories. We really do want these podcast at entreleadership.com. All right, that is going to do it for this edition of the Entree Leadership podcast on behalf of Eric Anthony and our entire Entree Leadership team. Thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.