How to Close the Thinking Gap
32:41 Share

Welcome back to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders who multiply value to others. My name is Mark Cole, and today, John Maxwell is here to share with us a lesson on how to close the greatest gap between successful and unsuccessful people. That gap is really the thinking gap.

And John's going to share with us on how to not only shrink that gap, but to begin to think differently. After John's lesson, I'll be joined by my good friend and co-host, Chris Godey. We'll discuss what John has shared and offer you some advice and ideas on how you can apply it to both your life and your leadership. If you would like to download our free bonus resource or watch this episode on YouTube,

You can go to maxwellpodcast.com forward slash thinking gap and be able to get not only those resources, but other links and other things as well. Okay, grab a pen, grab a paper. Let's go. Here is John C. Maxwell. The greatest gap between successful and unsuccessful people.

is the thinking gap, how we think. I'm not talking about intellect. I'm not talking about IQ. I'm talking about successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. I'm going to give you an example right now. Successful people in every difficult situation believe there's always an answer. And people that don't do well in the crisis believe that there's not an answer. If I think that there is an answer, I'll become a victor. And if I think there is no answer, I'll become a victim. It's just that simple. My father,

Very successful. But he grew up in a little town in Georgetown, Ohio, about 25 miles from Cincinnati. Just a very poor community.

And as he was growing up, he said, John, he said, all of us were poor except for three families and the three families that were not poor. He said, I had the privilege because he was a hardworking kid that I would leave school and I would do errands for those three families. And so I got to know them all. And he said, I came to the conclusion by the time I was a junior in high school, the only difference between the three successful families and the rest of us is that they thought differently. And that goes back to the greatest gap is the thinking gap.

So during the depression, during a very difficult time when my father was still very young, everybody was out of work. So what did everybody do every day? They got in the bread line and they waited for some food. It was a very difficult time. But can I tell you that during that very difficult economic downturn, crisis, crisis, my father held three part-time jobs. And while everyone else was waiting to get bread, my father was earning money to buy bread.

You say, John, what happened? How'd he do it? Well, it's very simple. He thought differently. You see...

He would go down to the hardware store and say, look, I know that you can't afford to hire me. It's a very difficult financial time, but I love to work. And so could I work for free for you today? And just tell me some things you'd like to have done in the store. And the owner would say, well, you got to understand, son, I can't pay. That's it. I don't want to be paid. I just want to work for free for you today. And that's what he would do all day, work for free. At the end of the day, shake his hand, say, I hope I helped you. And of course, the owner said, my gosh, you know.

I just wish I could help pay you. No, no, no, it's okay. You don't have to pay me. I just wanted to work for you. He said, by the way, if anytime there is a little bit of an opening for a job, he said, would you remember me? Well, of course the owner is going to remember him. He's become unforgettable. He worked for free for a whole day. Dad, we go to another store the next day, another store the next day for a whole month. He went to a different place of employment and just work for free. And in about six weeks,

He started getting calls. Hey, we've got to, you know, could you work for eight hours a week for us? Yeah, well, sure, I can work eight hours and we can pay you for eight hours. Can't pay you full time. Oh, yeah, I could. Oh, yeah. You had three part time jobs. Everybody else is out of work. What was the difference? Same place, same crisis, but not the same thinking. My precious friend, there is always an answer. Don't let anyone take that away from you. I will not let anyone take that away from me.

There's always an answer.

It's personal development with a plan. Start your journey today by visiting maxwellpodcast.com forward slash growth plan. That's maxwellpodcast.com forward slash growth plan.

Hey, welcome back. Chris, I'm enjoying this year. We'll talk a little bit about this in the podcast. I've learned in all of our years, right, to change your life. John talks about changing the way you think. Now, he also says it's not what you think, it's the way you think. So maybe you have a hard time thinking you can create about, hey, this is what I want to think on. But more importantly, we want you to develop, and maybe today after hearing some from Mark,

Whether you're watching us on YouTube or listening to us, you begin to think a little bit differently on the way you think. That's our goal today. And John has been a master. And I would say that John's brilliance of leadership and adding value in businesses has started with the way that he thinks. It all starts when he's alone.

at four o'clock in the morning with his yellow pad of paper still and that four color pen is starting to work to it so we're gonna we're gonna dive into that and i asked mark a question before we started john's book thinking for a change a lot of people go ah that what is i'm not gonna read that book and then they read it and i hear this all the time from from business leaders around the world go it was one of the most profound books that i've ever read in there he talks about different types of thinking

Even recently in the years past, I remember you guys doing a lot about layered thinking and John's like, we don't think enough. We don't keep thinking on the problem and we don't dig in enough. Well, in the book, he talks about several different ones. And I pulled out two that I want you to kind of teach us and work on as your leadership has grown. I told Mark, I've had the opportunity to ride shotgun with him for so many years. And over the last five years as an owner and as a leader in a different way, I've seen his focused thinking grow.

improve the way that he thinks, which is great. I love that because I, in our organization, we don't have enough focus because we're always have different opportunities.

Another one that frustrates me like crazy, I'm just going to be candid, is his possibility thinking. But in his seat as a leader, he has to have that. And it's a great gift. It wasn't always there. There may have been a little bit of hint, but I've seen it just grow. And you come into meetings, as you're talking about some adjustments we've made in the team, you're like, hey, what about this? And is this possible? And what about this? And your possibility is at a different level than the rest of us, which I love. So we're going to dig into that. So let's start with focus thinking. Yep.

Your personal growth journey as a leader, our CEO, as an owner,

Talk to us about the way that you think around being focused. How do you go about doing that? How have you learned to do that in the way that your schedule is so crazy and so busy to be able to carve out time to do that? Well, so thank you for the kind words about growth because, boy, I'm just so passionate and hungry for growth. And so thanks for that. That's a real reward for me. On the idea of focused thinking, I believe that

I've worked for John. He's constantly adjusting. You alluded to that in the meeting that we, the event that we just had. We land, we just had some conversations and then boom, it's time to change some things. And our team is wonderful and they adapt. All of that still comes from a place of focus. It comes from never losing what the real point is.

And so you get into the moment. As you were literally just talking about that, you know why I don't focus on the details of an event anymore, the minute-by-minute, the program? Because I will lose the sense of reading a room or looking at a situation or hearing something new immediately.

And having the ability to create a focus on a bigger picture than the focus on the agenda. And over the last five years, I have learned that what I was doing 10 years previous in my CEO of knowing all the details before I got to John and so that I could keep us anchored, I have found that those anchors really need

the next focus that we're going to talk about, which is possibility. So what do I do? The focus is we need to have a good event that connects with the audience, that makes them want to come back. We need to have a good event that allows the different players in this particular event, that's the content creators, the thought leaders, to really have the greatest experience.

I stay focused on that, not focused on how to have a good event. I stay focused on how to have a successful event. So the focus is still there. It doesn't feel like it to our team who's done all this work to the minute by minute and all this kind of stuff. I just don't focus on that. Because they're in the details. They're in the details. You are focused on the outcome. Our outcome is we want to add value to leaders who multiply value.

Are we adding the most value is what's going through your head. Now I'm starting to get this right. And you go, man, we could add more value if we just do that. We're doing that. That's exactly right. And the team that's pulling it off for us is not doing that because they're trying to deliver on logistics and how do we do this? And so they're down and they're focused on the weeds. You're saying, hey, my focused thinking is on the outcome of what I want for our business. Not how we're going to get there.

And it's a change for me. But focused thinking is not a change for me. Just what I am focusing on in my thinking has changed. And I had to learn that from John because John says, Mark, I learned the art of how to push back on John or to condense John down to an agenda item or a logistical item that had to happen. I had to wait until he could get his processed mind.

bigger vision process of thinking out and then I could tweak it according to you. But I'm watching you guys do that with me because at first when I started doing this focus thing, I would look at you guys and the dejection in your face and the disappointment and the pushback

Push back immediately. Here we go. All that. We had a meeting just the other day that we debriefed that before I could think possibility, we were already thinking problems. Right. And y'all drove me crazy. Remember, we just did that. Now, it didn't occur to me until after I went and debriefed that in a mentorship session with John. John went, Mark, you used to do that to me all the time. Yeah. Until you learn, you got to let the possibility thinking go and then you can deal with the problem thinking.

Otherwise, you shut off so much of your creative thinking, innovation thinking, and what we'll talk about a little bit, possibility thinking. Well, and so my vision now, I've had to stay in a vision thinking mindset. I just had to change what I was focused on, what the vision was, which is on outcomes, not on the process to get to the outcome. So this is a conversation right here that Mark and I are, again, organically having. Here's what I want to challenge all of our listeners and our leaders out there to do.

If you feel that tension that we were just talking about, about what some of our team feels in that moment, I want to challenge you to have that conversation. Like talk to the leader. Hey, Mark, what are you focused on in regards to this event? And when you started to explain that, I was like, well, that's what we all want, right? Isn't that what we are all in this in alignment with? We want to add value to people. And now hearing the context of that, you go, I'm in. Like, yeah, it's going to be a little inconvenient. We're going to fix it. But the focus is,

is not that for us at this level as we're implementing and rolling out.

two hours before we started. But I just want to encourage those to have those types of conversations because when there's not clarity, there's confusion and that's not going to be a good outcome between the relational experience there as a leader. And so hearing you talk about that makes total sense. And so I just want to encourage you to be able to do that as leaders. Now, this one, I think you always bring energy and thoughts and ideas you always have with different things that could be.

Your shift in leadership and your personal growth when you became the owner, became the CEO, like you were the CEO, but now it's your baby and we're running it. It really seemed like to me the possibility thinking. And I remember you talking about John's mentoring me on opportunities and connections. And am I thinking big enough? And what does that look like? And I don't know if that's what fueled the flame, but your possibilities of what could be in any situation, right?

We were having a meeting the other day about an event that we're going to do. That's going to be amazing. Yep. More information to come on that exchange. 2026. The final chapter. Yeah. The possibility of thinking when it's something final for John, it will not stop, but it's going to be over in London. You're not going to want to be a part of it. But even then you're like, Hey, here's what about this idea? And I was like, Hey, do you know that's gonna, and you're like, let's not talk about the cost right now. Yep. We're in possibility thinking. So you've completely shifted that as you went from the,

kind of the guy, right? John's right-hand CEO to now the owner and CEO. I just, I got to learn a little bit more about what did you learn from John in that process that got your mind thinking? Because remember what we're talking about. We're talking about how do we,

increase our thinking the way we think to close the gap for us to be more successful individually, personally, and professionally. So you got to unpack this a little bit for us because it has definitely, definitely grown. One of the ways or one of the people that have influenced that is a guy named Jesse Cole, Savannah bananas. And they just told me yesterday that he's doing an event with us in August in Orlando. Did you even know that news to you? Cause I just found out yesterday. Oh, so excited. So excited. And,

And so, well, we just told you about two events. We don't have a link to help you go to. So we got to do better than that. We're not even supposed to promo anything on this. Exactly. So the way that you challenge and grow yourself to possibility thinking is you challenge yourself to do possibility thinking.

Everybody says, well, I'm not naturally gifted at thinking possibility. But in the areas of your strength, in the areas of your gifting, oh, yes, you are. People say that about intuition. I'm not intuitive. Yes, you are in the area of your strengths. I think you're a possibility thinker in the area of your strengths. In the area of your passion, just give somebody a problem. Give somebody an opportunity, and they will think possibility in the areas of their strength. I've watched very introverted people.

loves their family. They get home and the mama bear comes out and they solve a problem even as an introvert if something's affecting their passion. That's right. That's good. So first, stop excusing yourself that you don't have a possibility thinking mindset because you do. So,

I had to develop that in every phase of my leadership. I've had to give myself permission to think possibility. I've had to give myself practice to think possibility. And I've had to give myself a promise that I was going to be productive with possibility thinking. So I come in now, and if I know there's a problem,

And we weren't as stuck in that meeting as I thought we were. We just didn't have the setup on that meeting like we wanted to. But once in my second meeting, I realized, boy, I've got to come in with possibility. I went and just started practicing. What is some possibility thinking? Where's some possibility thinking? So I want you to know that

I'm glad that you see the results of that as a peer, as somebody that's working alongside of me. I'm glad you see that, but I also don't want to overplay that that has just happened. I've had to work at it. Yes. I've had to put it into practice. 100%.

Possibility thinking first comes with an idea of practice. It comes in the area of your strengths. You have some possibility thinking in you, and then it comes when you put an expectation on it. When you say, I'm going to have to put a promise to myself that I'm going to become better. As the leader for about three years in this new dimension, I was leading with scarcity thinking.

Why? Because one, I had to do that with John. He's so opportunistic. He's so possibility oriented that I had to be a balance to him. I had to be the tension to his leadership because untethered, tethered.

Unconnected, he would take and run after every possibility because I've always had to balance him. I had to free myself up if that's not my responsibility anymore. That's your responsibility. That's other leaders on our team's responsibility. I'm going to let myself go from thinking how much this is going to cost. Can we even pull this off? I've got to let myself go that somebody else has got to do that to what could be.

Because you can't think possibility if you're thinking probability. You can't. You've got to think possibility. And so I had to get away from probability thinking like completely away from it so that I could think possibility.

The second thing, so I freed myself up from the weight of possibility thinking. The second thing that I do is I put an expectation. I now put the weight back on. Mark, nobody else in this room has better come up with better ideas, better possibilities than you. I need to start it and then watch the team lift it. And that's exactly what happened in that meeting with you guys a couple of days ago. I just threw a couple of things out there before I knew it. Whoa, that's a better idea. I freed them up to invite and then the best idea wins.

The final thing that I do now is on ideas that I brought to the table. You watch me. Now it's getting ready to make sense to you on any idea that I brought to the table. I come back and say, give me the numbers, give me the numbers, give me the numbers, because now I'm holding myself accountable to my possibility thinking, you know why I want to get better. Yeah. You're testing it better. And I'm measuring it and I'm holding myself accountable to it. And I'm going, that was a good idea. That was not a good idea. That way I'll know the next time, which way to go. I think that,

One of the other things that I've seen you do in this area that completely has lifted it as you surrounded yourself with bigger thinkers. And no matter where you're at in your leadership and where you're at in your thinking, there are people that are thinking a little bit better, a little bit bigger than you. And I would challenge you to get into conversations with them.

Get into meetings because I know that your conversations and your meetings are at a different level of thinking. And then you add value to the team when you come back with this possibility thinking the way you're thinking is different because you're growing through that because you're forcing yourself as a fourth or final point of where you're at on the possibility thinking. I want to encourage our listeners to do the same thing.

The other thing I was thinking about was it's interesting on how you're wired. If you got to understand that if you're wired to a way where you're very kind of concrete thinker, sometimes you have to have something to launch off of to make it better. Mark mentioned this.

sometimes you're an abstract or, or maybe you're wired as an abstract thinker. And when you do that, you can come up with ideas out of nowhere. And so you got to know where you are, where you're wired. You got to know what your team is in order to be able to, Mark said, one of the things he knows is that if he brings an idea to the room, he has a team that has that as a foundation and they're going to lift the level of that. And so just another thing of,

The way that you're thinking also can be benefited by understanding those that are thinking around you. Now, one of the things I want to talk about here is the way that you're thinking when we have to make adjustments. Yeah.

In our year this year, you came in and you're like, hey, we're doing these things and these are our focus. And I want everybody focused on this and this is what we're going after. And oh, by the way, now every other week I'm going to get in a room and if we're off, I'm bringing some possibility and adjustment thinking in.

Give us a little bit of that from you, because I think that is key as a leader. And anybody that's, again, leading a family, a team, doesn't matter, volunteer group or an organization. You have to make adjustments versus going, okay.

Well, that was what I thought in the beginning. Here we go. And you don't make any adjustments. You always got to be thinking and you got to be pressing the team to adjust. So talk a little bit about that from your perspective as a leader. You know, we probably may use for some of you that view the podcast or listen to the podcast. We may use too many sports analogies, period. But Chris and I have a huge passion for sports. And then you you played sports at every level and you had some kids that played a lot of sports.

So, but in and of itself, whether you like sport or not, there's so many movies and so many opportunities to see how teamwork really works. Right. And so I'm going to use a couple of things that really have sparked how I'm leading this year. And then for all you business leaders that are leading, I think I'm going to give you something that's really working for us that may work for you as well. All right. Thanks for that, Mark. I want to wrap up when we talk about thinking on something that

You and I happen to be in an incredible event, one of John's big bucket lists as we're recording this the other day. And we had the opportunity to spend some time up at High Point University. I'll let you talk about Nito and just the thinker that he is, right? Like, listen, I'm telling you, if you want a different way of thinking, read some of his stuff and you're going to learn it.

He talked about this. He said, how do you think differently when it comes to solving problems? And then he said, what I mean by this is don't just think to solve the problem. Think to find the solution. He goes, there's a difference. And I leaned up a little bit. I'm like, he goes, the solution is this.

so that it never happens again. And I was like, oh my gosh, how many times have I solved a problem? I've spent some time thinking to solve a problem, but my way of thinking was not right because I solved the problem. I didn't come up with a solution. So then we're dealing with the same thing again. I want to give you a little bit of an example as I lead you into this and your solutions thinking kind of thing.

So we've referenced in here a meeting that we've had before just recently where we were disconnected a little bit and we started solving problems before we even cast the possibility of what we were talking about. And so you're thinking, you don't even know that you did this. And I'm gonna bring this out. Your way of thinking was,

man, that just didn't go right. I don't want to have meetings like that again. I'm going to talk to John about the way that I'm thinking about this and we're going to process and I want to make sure my way of thinking is right. And then I'm going to come back and I'm going to communicate my way of thinking to the team so that we have a solution that that meeting never happens again.

You came back and we had a conversation about, hey, team, here's where I'm at. Here's what I thought about. This was the way I thought through it. And I want to make sure that we don't have this problem again because it was a waste of time for both of us and we can move forward. And that whole process right there was your way of thinking about a problem that we had, not just because why you didn't feel good about the meeting. We didn't feel good about it either. But it was like, how do I think in order to let them know here's the solution so that we never have it happen again?

again. And I think as you have grown in your leadership, you have changed your thinking to be about the solution side of things. So I want you to dive into that before you do, don't forget. I want to talk a little bit about Nito and just his relationship with John and the way that he thinks, man, I'm still, I mean, I've, I've read three or four comments to you today going, and this is what I learned yesterday. And this is what I learned this. And most of it's much bigger thinking that I'm currently doing. Yeah. You know, I think that leadership malpractice

is not failing. In fact, I think you need to check your leadership if you haven't failed recently. Catch that leader. Catch that podcast listeners. If you can't articulate something you failed recently, you haven't tried something big enough recently. You need to be doing that. So leadership malpractice is not failure. Leadership malpractice

is the same failure again. Yeah. That's malpractice. Because leaders should constantly learn, and learners should absolutely constantly be improving. And improvement means you don't make the same mistake twice. And so back to your illustration of me and that, I haven't heard you say that, but it pleases me greatly. Because I didn't want to come in and say, we had a terrible meeting. That was a terrible meeting. Okay, now let's have a good meeting. No, I want to go, why did we have a terrible meeting? Correct. Because I don't want to have another one.

And I wasn't disappointed with you guys. I was disappointed that we didn't have what we needed. We didn't get the outcome that we wanted. That's right. And so we literally, literally, I love how you said it. We wasted each other's time. And that was just as much me. I wasn't angry. I wasn't frustrated with Tim. I was just going, why did I miss that? I went and talked to John. As I began to position the whole meeting experience to John, he began to do the same thing I did to you guys. He began to move me way off the point. I mean, he moved me. He moved me continents.

He was way off the point. I'm going, hold up. This is not even working the way that I'm supposed to. And so I stopped him in the middle of the conversation. You wouldn't know this. And I went, hey, we're trying to solve the problem and we have not agreed on the problem. So let's stop what we're doing. And the problem was I've got very competent people. How many years have we done this thing effectively? I got very competent people.

So, and we've done, we've got a very great opportunity here. So the problem is not the one you and I are trying to solve today. And the problem was not what I was trying to solve with the team. What's the problem? And it arrested him, Chris. And we began to dig into something and realize what proved to be the problem. We didn't set ourself up with where we were going correctly. We were in the possibility world, not in the problem solving world.

So as he began to unfold that, I did what every leader should do. You should never come in with a solution to a problem and not explain the context of how you arrived at the solution.

We teach contextual leadership around here. Contextual leadership is where I take a little bit more time in my leadership and I show someone the context of solving the problem so that they solve the problem the next time. The next time, the reason I don't like multiple mistake failures is two reasons. One, I don't like to repeat the same challenge. Two, I don't like having done a poor job of empowering somebody else to solve it so we don't have a meeting about it.

And that's why it's malpractice. It's malpractice because we're repeating something that we shouldn't be. We're better than this. But it's malpractice. I didn't empower you so that you can solve it at a different level than me the next time. And that's where the malpractice comes in. And so contextual leadership is incredibly important, which now let's go to Nito. Because I've never seen somebody in all of my years lead an organization the way that Nito Cobain leaves his. Why?

He would say it's not because he was an incredible communicator before he went to the educational world. John affectionately says this. We have a lot of educators that listen to this, but let me pick on you for a moment. Because John says that educators are people that likes to take something simple and make it complex.

educators are not happy unless you're asking a question, unless you're trying to go further, unless you say, I need more text on that right there. I need to go work a little bit harder. I need some homework. I need to go figure this out. They want to stump you so that they can enhance your intelligence. That's an educator. They want to take something simple. They want to make it complicated. A communicator wants to take something complicated and make it simple. So first of all,

Nito Cobain is an incredible communicator. He takes it and all day long he simplified education. He simplified message. He simplified what makes High Point University one of the best educational communities in the world. He simplified, simplified, simplified. It's down to four things. We only do four things around here. And he gave us a list of four things and it was just like,

I do that too. How's that working here? The reason it's working is because he has simplified the point. God, family, country. That's our values. And if that's your values, we're going to get along fine. If it's not, we need to get you somewhere where you are in alignment with your value. He is passionate about aligning people on the simple.

The second thing that I would tell you that makes Nito and High Point incredible is he's a business guy. And he has come in and he said, there are principles of running a good organization that I learned in the business world that will apply to the educational world. By the way, it'll apply to the religious world, too, if they want to do it. So he came in and he used very simple and repeatable principles.

that he learned in the business world and ran it in the educational space and has one of the most financially solvent educational communities in the world. He has one of the most passionate alumni groups of anyone in the world, and he continues to grow that and expand it. We saw the map of what it was 20 years ago when he got there and what it is now. There's been no other educational program

institution that has grown at the level with the financial solvency of the level without going into debt with keeping passionate there than what Nito has done. And that's because he's learned how to make things simple and keep it to where it's repeating. And for me, it just stood out. All of that happened because of the way that he thinks the possibility of things being different and

and focus on what he wanted to accomplish for the students. And it goes back to change your business, change your life, change your environment because you changed the way you're thinking. That's what John has teach us. So wrap this up. - It's Henry Ford, another great leader. It's Henry Ford that says, "If you think you can, you can. If you think you can't, you can't."

And again, that just sounds so simple, but it is so profound. It's so layered. It's so deep. Let me share one last. I wrote this down too. A dear friend of ours, dear friend of yours, longtime board member, dear friend of John's, Colin Sewell said yesterday that his phrase and his thinking for the year is that the more impossible that he does,

the less impossible he finds. Yeah. Think on that for just a minute. Right? The way he's thinking about that in regards to the quote you just shared. I wrote that down and I was like, hmm, yeah, well, the only way to...

do more impossible is to think differently, to change the way that you're thinking, to dive into that. So we could talk about thinking for a long time, but it truly would change the trajectory of your leadership. Yeah. Yeah. So I hope this lesson, this episode is helpful for you. It has for me and how we can really, truly close, shrink the gap between

And our thinking and make our thinking turn into action, our action turn into positive results. We around here want to bring powerful, positive change to the world around us. Veronica, you listen to Courage to Continue. And I love that episode. I remember it extremely well. And Veronica, after listening to it, said that was so good. Comparison is a fear that is hard to get rid of.

Taking a step to start is hard, but this is encouraging to start by taking the step to start. And I agree with you, Veronica. We'll put that podcast in the show notes. We'll give you a link to go listen to that. Hey, thanks for being a part of this. We want you to go lead well because everyone deserves to be led well.