meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Leading Saints Podcast

Disrupting Your Calling | An Interview with Whitney Johnson

Leading Saints Podcast

Leading Saints

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2021

⏱️ 66 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally ran in February 2018. Whitney Johnson started as a secretary on Wall Street while taking business classes at night. She worked her way up to an award-winning equity analyst and later co-founded an investment firm with the late Clayton Christensen, She is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Build an “A” Team, and Disrupt Yourself, and hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast. Whitney grew up in San Jose, California and served a Church mission in Uruguay. She attended Brigham Young University, where she received a B.A. in music and met her husband. They have two children (a son and a daughter), and live in Lexington, Virginia. Highlights 10:35 In her twenties, Whitney asked herself, “Do I believe?” While she took a step back, her husband fasted for her on and off for two years. 13:13 While serving in her current calling she realized, "I don’t need to save them just love them." 18:20 Early in her career she started a blog to help her discover what her dreams were. 19:30 Every man and women needs to learn how to be a ship and a harbor. 21:00 Her first book came out in 2012, Dare Dream Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare To Dream 22:30 She later wrote the book Disrupt Yourself: Putting The Power Of Disruptive Innovation To Work 25:10 A disruptor is a silly thing that takes over the world. When you disrupt yourself you take over your world. 26:10 Disrupting is managing change. 28:00 How do you disrupt yourself or your ward? Seven Levers of Change 28:35 #1 Take the right kinds of risk 29:00 Serve the Lord the way you need to using your talents. 32:00 Ask yourself what you want to accomplish in this calling. 32:40 #2 Play to your distinctive strengths in your calling. 34:40 What am I bringing to the table in regards to my calling? 36:25 Think about the things that make you feel strong. 36:45 Think about what exacerbates you. That is one of your strengths. 37:05 What compliments do you get all the time? That is your super power. 37:20 Read your patriarchal blessing. Look for your spiritual gifts while reading it. 38:30 Are you using your strengths and your superpowers deliberately in your calling? 38:50 #3 Embrace Constraints 39:10 How do we turn those constraints into a tool of creation? 40:20 Elders Bednar's 2017 General Conference address Bear Up Their Burdens With Ease is a great example of how our load is what gets them out. 42:05 Elder Carmack's address about the Powers of the Priesthood is a great example to use your Priesthood Power at its fullest. 42:20 Be prayerful and listen to the Lord. 44:00 Communicate and be open about your constraints with your Bishop. 45:20 Extend callings and invite them to pray about it first. 45:56 #4 Battle Entitlement 47:00 The Church helps battle entitlement by the way it is organized, and callings change. 48:45 #5 Give Failure its Due 48:50 Reframe your failures. 49:30 We believe we can change, but we don’t always act like we believe it. 50:10 Be open about the things that are hard for us. 51:45 Ask yourself, “how can I make meaning of this?” 51:40 Shame limits disruption, not failure. 53:51 #6 Step Back in Order to Grow 54:20 In church we step back to grow as we get new callings. 55:03 #7 Be Driven By Discovery 55:50 With each new discovery, alter your plan. 56:30 We are driven by discovery in our church when new information is shared in callings. 57:00 Deal with ambiguity. Work with the unknown. Alter your plan. 57:50 The sin of certainty: we battle entitlement when we feel like we have it all figured out, when we feel like we have no questions, but the questions are what we need to guide us to discovery. 58:55 Those seven principles move you along the learning curve. 60:00 Heavenly Father helps us jump to a new learning curve. 60:00 Studying the learning Living Christ helps to remind us tha...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Leading LDS is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing leadership ability and capacity of lay leaders in order to accelerate the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ or Latter-day Saints.

0:11.0

Leading LDS is not owned nor operated by the LDS Church and any opinions expressed

0:15.4

on this podcast do not reflect the views of any specific organization.

0:19.3

All donations given to leading LDS are tax deductible and go towards the support of leading

0:23.6

LDS. For more information visit leading LDS.org. A few years ago I put together a

0:30.5

list, a bucket list of sorts of individuals I definitely want to get on

0:35.0

the podcast. And I never did publish that list, but what an individual on that list was

0:39.6

Whitney Johnson. And I'm so grateful for for Neil who's probably listening to this

0:44.8

a listener in the leading eldest audience who sent me an email a few weeks back and said

0:48.9

hey you should really interview Whitney and I said yeah I know can you make a connection and he did he knows

0:54.7

Whitney well and we started emailing and she was coming to Salt Lake and so we'd

0:59.3

lined up an interview with Whitney Johnson now if you're not familiar with

1:02.4

Whitney Johnson you're probably familiar with somebody Whitney Johnson. Now if you're not familiar with Whitney Johnson, you're probably familiar with somebody

1:04.7

Whitney's worked with who is Clayton Christensen,

1:07.5

the Harvard Business Professor who is famous for his books

1:11.7

and research around disruptive innovation.

1:14.3

And Whitney actually worked with Clayton Christensen, who, for those you don't know, is

1:18.8

LDS as well, and they started a fund together to, all based around this concept of disruptive innovation.

1:25.4

And we talked about that in our interview, but she's also the author of some exciting books,

1:30.6

one that comes out here in a few months, but her, sort of her flagship book that most people would know her by is

1:36.2

disrupt yourself, putting the power of disruptive innovation to work. And so in this interview,

1:41.2

we talk about a lot of things and we're all over the place but that's how I like the interviews that I do.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Leading Saints, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Leading Saints and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.