Preparing is Caring
Maxwell Leadership Podcast
John Maxwell
4.7 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How much do you really care for the people you lead—and what does your preparation say about it? In this week's episode, John Maxwell reveals why genuine care can only be expressed through the discipline of preparation, and how your commitment to leading others starts long before you ever enter the room.
After his lesson, Mark Cole and Chris Robinson dive into real-world strategies and personal stories to ensure you can put John's principles into practice right away.
Key takeaways:
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If you only "wing it," you may get by—but you'll never break into the top tier of impactful leadership; true excellence demands intentional effort and preparation.
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Every leader carries both a "best message" (what you share in the moment) and a "big message" (the essence of who you are), and intentional preparation helps you clarify and amplify both.
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Setting your internal standard higher than external applause empowers you to lead with integrity, grow continuously, and serve those you influence at the highest level.
Our BONUS resource for this episode is the Preparing Is Caring Worksheet, which includes fill-in-the-blank notes from John's teaching. You can download the worksheet by visiting MaxwellPodcast.com/Prepare and clicking "Download the Bonus Resource."
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References:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Mark Cole. |
| 0:12.3 | And what if I ask you the question? |
| 0:14.4 | How much do you care for the people you lead? |
| 0:17.2 | How much do you care for the people that you want to influence in your life? |
| 0:23.2 | Maybe it's your family, maybe it's a leadership team, maybe it's a company. |
| 0:29.1 | And then what if I said, how much do you prepare yourself to lead them? |
| 0:34.0 | Would that answer be equal? |
| 0:36.0 | Today, we're going to get to talk about preparing as caring. |
| 0:39.4 | And Chris, you've played sports. You've spoken in front of large, large audience, you've written |
| 0:46.5 | books. Tell us the place you feel like you had to prepare more than any other area of your life. |
| 0:53.2 | Yeah. You know, when it comes to the sports, it comes to |
| 0:56.3 | writing all those different things, I would say the area that I have spent in the most time |
| 1:01.6 | is in communication. Wow. And preparing to speak. I mean, countless hours of just working on |
| 1:08.3 | impromptu speaking, working on structured speaking, sales speaking, |
| 1:13.1 | you know, business speaking, you know, just all these different areas of my life |
| 1:18.2 | in order to be a better communicator. |
| 1:20.3 | And still to this day, I'm still working on it day in and day out because just because |
| 1:25.3 | we do it doesn't make us anything better at it. And so I think that's the fallacy that people fall into is that, well, I do this every day, so I must be getting better. But in fact, you're not getting any better because we're going to fall into a couple of the traps that John talks about today's episode. But for me, it's been communication, been the hardest thing that I've had to work on. |
| 1:44.5 | Well, it's funny that you say communication because number one, you're a great communicator. |
| 1:48.4 | But it's also interesting because one of the best global communicators on leadership is getting ready to talk to us about preparing is caring, about how we prepare is directly connected with how much we care |
| 2:03.7 | about the people that we're leading. And so I hope you'll jump in and listen, by the way, |
... |
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