Hey everybody, welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I'm Andy Stanley and I have been looking forward to this month's podcast for a long time because today for the first time, John Maxwell is joining us to talk about a topic we have never discussed before.

In fact, I think John's probably the only person I would ever invite to even talk about this topic. John is here to talk about how to get a return on failure.

And the reason John is talking about this, I was with John Odessa earlier this year and I heard him give a talk on this topic and you know how it is, you're listening to, you're listening at, you're taking notes and I thought, you know what?

I just need to have John come redo all of this on our podcast so I invited him to do that and he graciously agreed so John, welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.

Thanks Stanley, good to be with you and all of your listeners and I have one of your listeners also Andy, I can tell you, you have taught me so much over the years and I learned so much from you.

And so thanks for what you do for so many of us and I'm one of your listeners. Well, today I get it beyond the show. Well, that is an intubate in fact just so our listeners know years ago, John and Margaret lived in Atlanta and they attended our church.

And so just you know, for those of you who are communicators or pastors, so you know, I'm, I was usually five, seven minutes into my message and there's John and I'm preaching and thinking at the same time, oh am I quoting him and my stealing something and I am and suddenly it was just hard not to see John Maxwell as the filter for the entire message and but he was always so gracious and he a Margaret always so complimentary.

Now, you don't need to know this, but I just feel like I need to say it in case you didn't know John Maxwell is a number one New York Times best selling author has been for years.

He's a leadership coach, speakers traveled all over the world. He sold more than 30 million books. He's been called the number one leader in business by the AMA and the world's most influential leadership expert by ink, which is absolutely true through the John Maxwell company, the John Maxwell team.

Equip is nonprofit and the John Maxwell leadership foundation. He has trained literally millions of leaders in every nation in the world and he has in fact for sure trained me.

So again, John is a dear friend and I'm just so grateful that he took the time to be in the studio with us today. So John, let's just jump in and I'll set up the topic this way. Maybe this is more personal revelation than it should be, but nobody wants to fail.

I certainly don't honestly, I don't even like to talk about failing, but you actually suggested in the talk I heard you give that anticipating failure and reaping a positive return from failure is actually a leadership skill.

In fact, you call this a critical leadership skill, leveraging success from failure and learning to just leverage it at all. I'd never thought about this. I've never heard anybody talk about this, but five minutes in you had me. I thought this is absolutely true and this is something I need to think about.

So just jump in. What does it mean to reap a positive return from failure? Well, first of all, to be able to talk about the subject you have to have some failure under your balance. Let's just begin right there.

Yeah, okay. When I was a young leader, I feared failure. In fact, when I was a young leader, Andy, what I thought was that if I failed people look at me, say, well, he's a lousy leader. I mean, after all, he's trying to take us somewhere and he can't even do it. So I looked at failure in a very, very negative way. And so what I caught myself doing is young leaders. I caught myself not attempting things I should attempt to do.

Yeah, because I feared failure. And so I sat down. You know, you knew Robert Schuhler. He'd be friends with me when I was about 30 years old. And so we spent some time together and one time at dinner, he said, John, what would you attempt to do if failure was not possible?

And when he asked me that question, I said, oh, my gosh, there's a lot of things I'd attempt to do if failure was not possible. And that question really helped me kind of get, I don't take more risk and attempts. But it really wasn't a great question because failure is always possible.

So this is that question. I told you, yeah, here we go. Whoops. I found it again. I found it again. So it was kind of a set up question. And so I changed it after about about a year because it just didn't quite work for me.

It encouraged me to start something, but it didn't encourage me when failure happened. And so I turned it around. So what would you attempt to do if you knew you would fail? But in failing, there would be a positive return from it.

So let me say that again. So the question was, what would you attempt if you knew that failure could give you a positive? What would you say the question again? What would you do? What would you attempt to do if you knew failure was possible? In fact, I'm going to say failure is always possible and usually it's probable.

So, but what would you attempt to do if you knew failure was possible, probable, but you knew that failure could give you a positive return. So now all of a sudden, you're not trying to avoid failure, but you aren't realizing that there is a positive return from failure.

If you have the right attitude perspective and the right type of thinking, does that make sense?

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