Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast Reverb, a conversation designed to help leaders go even

further faster by digging deeper into this month's topic. I'm your host, Susie Gray. Last week,

Andy sat down with Kate Bowler to talk about joy and the role it plays in a healthy workplace.

And today, we're leaning further into that topic because while joy can sound like a soft topic,

a growing body of research suggests that it's tied to things that we all care about, like

resilience, engagement, collaboration, innovation, and trust.

In fact, Andy, I was actually reading an article from entrepreneur that put it this

way that really stuck out with me. It said, the true power of joy is that it reminds leaders

and teams that even in chaos, goodness is possible. Joy reorients us toward kindness, integrity, and mutual respect. It actually goes on to say

joy is not optional. It is essential to a life well lived, a team well managed, and a company well run.

Woo! That's a big promise, isn't it? And when we first talked about having Kate Bowler on to talk about

her book, my initial response was joy, really. And in Entrepreneur Magazine, this is a topic that is bubbled

at within the context of leadership and corporate life. And to your point, it sounds soft,

but anybody who listened to last week's podcast, you get the impression, though, it's not at all.

And hopefully it elicited or helped some of our listeners think about creating space for joy

or recognizing it when it happens and then asking the question, what just happened.

Right.

And how do I get more of that?

How do I create that?

And I loved, love, loved the idea that joy is found in the storyline of our lives, not in the busyness of our lives.

And when we take time to pull out and sort of re-center around the storyline, not just the

task in front of us, that really is where joy is found.

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