Hey podcast family I'm Mark Cole welcome to the John Maxwell leadership podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders who multiply values to others.

This week we are in part two of our series on players versus pretenders. In this lesson John is talking about how we can determine if we're a player or a pretender.

Today John's going to be talking about integrity, making hard choices and yes finishing strong.

You definitely want to remove all distractions and join John and my co-host Tracy and I as we unpack this lesson. Now when John is done teaching Tracy, Maro and I will come back and dive into how we are applying John's principles in our own life and in our own leadership.

We're also going to give you some application to help you make this lesson a reality in your life and in your leadership. Now if you would like to download our free bonus resource for this lesson, it's a free fill in the blank worksheet.

You can go to Maxwell podcast.com forward slash player and click on the bonus resource button. All right that's it for now. Here is John Maxwell.

The sixth difference between players and pretenders is players value integrity and pretenders value image.

You show me a player and integrity is so important to him or her. You show me a pretender and their integrity or character is not important in their life. It's their image. They want to come off looking good.

In your notes the rules of navigation are what's under the service should carry more weight than what's above the surface.

The ship is going to make it through the storms without capsizing integrity is like this. What's under the service better be greater than what's above.

You cannot give what you do not have. We travel within before we travel without.

Number seven. The seventh difference between players and pretenders is that players make the hard choices and pretenders make the soft choices.

And I'm going to explain soft and hard choices in just a moment. But what I have noticed is you can distinguish between a player pretending by just watching their decision making.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it. There's a decision maker. You see the problem with the soft choices that pretenders make is, here's the problem with the soft choice.

You all have the power of choice. But once we have used that power of choice, then our choices begin to have power over us. That's a lesson that I think everyone of us want to constantly work on in our own life.

Now, why are hard choices that players make? Why are those hard choices so hard to make?

Everyone of us in this room, whether it's a leading a business, an organization, a company, an army, a church, anyone that's in a leadership position understands that probably the deciding difference between a leader and a non-leader is the willingness to make the hard choices.

In fact, I've always said that people that don't lead are not people who don't know the right decisions. People who don't lead are people who are unwilling to make those right decisions. We want to make palatable decisions.

We want to make decisions that people are agreeable with. Peter Drucker was right. When he said, whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

I would take that great quote by Peter Drucker and I would extend it. For he said, whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision, I would say whenever you see a successful business, someone is continually making a courageous decision.

You cannot live off of one courageous decision. I can tell you success is making one tough hard decision after another. In fact, on decision making, I love to teach on decision making. In leadership conferences sometimes, I'll do a whole session on nothing but how to make decision.

Especially the timing of decision. The timing of a decision, leader understands this is important as the decision itself. When to respond. When to move. When to act. When I do decision making seminar sometimes, I make this statement that 95% of all decisions can be made by any intelligent sophomore high school kid.

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