Chris Lesner
Todd, thank you so much for joining today.

Todd Henry
Chris, I am so excited to be here. This has been a long time coming. I know you emailed me a long time ago about we're thinking about maybe doing a podcast and I was so excited when I finally got the invite. So congratulations.

Chris Lesner
Well, I heard you speak at a major conference, and I had pages of notes. It was unbelievable, and just your perspective was fascinating. So I guess that gives away that you go around speaking. What people probably didn't know is you've written a lot of books. How does somebody even get into writing books and becoming a speaker? What does that background look like?

Todd Henry
It was purely accidental, which is a little bit maybe ironic if I'm using that word properly, given the title of my first book was The Accidental Creative, but I was a creative director, leading teams of creative people, and this was in the early 2000s. Think pre-YouTube, pre-podcasting, pre-everything. I was really struggling to find good advice about how to lead talented creative people in the midst of what I was kind of calling the create-on-demand world. I started asking people and sharing things I was learning as a creative director. This new forum called podcasting had just launched in 2005, so I thought, "Well, hey, I'll do that. I'll start a podcast."

I shared a couple of episodes, put them on what was called iTunes at the time, and kind of forgot about it, honestly. A month later, I was looking for podcasts to listen to and came across one called The Accidental Creative. It was one of the top podcasts on iTunes. In that moment, I thought I had stolen someone else's name, but it was my podcast getting thousands of listens. I realized I had stumbled into something. I continued the podcast for years and was contacted by several companies asking me to speak about episodes. Then, I was offered a book deal from Penguin Random House for The Accidental Creative. That book came out in 2011, did very well, and led to my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and now seventh book. I didn’t intend to be doing this; it just found me. I worked my way into a niche that was valuable to people and where I had insight. I'm really grateful to be doing what I do, but it was purely accidental that I ended up in this place.

Chris Lesner
I love that. People might think of you as the creative guy or someone who's extremely creative. That might be an extreme blessing, and it might be something that's like, "Don't want to be branded there." As you think through it, there are creative people everywhere. Some feel more creative, and some feel less creative. How does somebody grow their creative skills from what you've seen over the years?

Todd Henry
I think first definitions are really important. As a writer, it's no surprise that I'm a word guy, and I love making sure we use words properly. When we use the word "creativity," often people think we're talking about art, like music, painting, or design. Those are certainly creative things, but creativity, as I define it, is problem-solving. If you have to solve a problem—whether it's an engineering problem, a managerial problem, or a strategic problem—you have to be creative. You have to resolve uncertainty.

Many creative professionals don’t think of themselves as creative because they're not "artists." So, the first step is recognizing that if you work with your mind, chances are you have to be creative every day. The second thing is that most people are shooting from the hip. They don't have practices, systems, or structures in place to prepare them for the moments when they need to be brilliant. A lot of my early work was about discovering that if my team had certain practices in place before we needed a breakthrough idea, the odds of having that idea increased significantly.

I also saw creative pros who relied solely on their talent. They thought creativity was like a water spigot you could turn on and off. But one day, it doesn’t flow. The people who had long careers were the ones with practices around focus, defining problems, and managing energy. They sought inspiration in unique places, prioritized their time, and invested in things that didn’t have immediate payoffs but would later. Talent alone won’t get you there; practices keep you at the table. My advice is to have systems in place to prepare for those moments when you need a creative breakthrough.

Chris Lesner
It's interesting because I've heard you talk about how brilliant ideas and brilliant things often feel accidental and like people are shooting from the hip and whatnot. And really a lot of what you've shared over the years, stuff that I followed at least, is talking about how do you repeat things, how do you scale things in building those practices. When you share that with people, that success, these like one-time crazy successes and these one-time brilliant ideas can be repeated and scaled.
Do they believe you? How do people take it?

Todd Henry
Well, some people are offended because they're, mean, let's face it. There are people who like to build walls around their expertise and pretend like only a select few of us are capable of creative thinking and creative thought. we're, you know, we are the, we are the experts who can do what we do and nobody else can do it. Right. And, and I understand that I do. There are other people who think that, you know, talent is the whole game. That if you just have enough talent that everything else would take care of itself.
And I just, simply do not believe that I have met too many people who may lack a little bit in the talent area, meaning like they're not the most brilliant designer in the history of the world. And they're not the most brilliant writer in the history of the world, but their practices are what have separated them from the pack because they're always ready at the moments. Notice they always have the energy. They always have the clarity. They're able to see clearly what we're trying to do.
they're able to articulate that clearly because they've spent time ahead of time thinking it through and getting to a place where they're able to articulate those things. So people who are offended can be offended by it. I'm just telling you that you are probably not performing. If you're shooting from the hip, if you're relying solely on your talent, you're probably underperforming your potential. And that's fine if that's a life choice. You can do that if you want. But I'm telling you that if you really want
to know what you're capable of, if you really wanna understand what is potentially in the cards for you, then you need to be disciplined. You need to have some practices in your life. You can't just wing it. You can't just rely on those. And by the way, I mean, I've shared this with, and it's funny because I have people come to me who are at the absolute top of their industry. mean, people who top of the music industry, top of the advertising industry, top of like name any sort of traditionally creative field.
And every single one of them who are these ultra top performers, yeah, they're very talented or you wouldn't get to the very top of your field. Every single one of them have conveyed to me what you talk about when you talk about practices is a hundred percent true. And many of them had to crash and burn at some point early to mid career before they realized, oh, I can't just, this is not an infinite resource for me, right?

Todd Henry
I have a finite amount of energy to spend on behalf of what's important. I have a finite amount of time. We all know we have a finite amount of time, right? But we think about our time in terms of spending, not in terms of investing. So I need to be investing some of my time in things that may not pay off today, but will pay off tomorrow. Things like developing my skills, things like trying to generate ideas proactively for my work, as opposed to waiting until I have to have an idea to try to generate an idea, but getting ahead of it. You're building those practices. Things like going out and seeking stimulus in my life.
Dedicating time to reading and study and looking for patterns in the world around me. These are the kinds of things that people just don't, they don't do because they're never convenient and they never show up on some kind of organizational priority list or people are jaded because so many of the gurus out there are saying, know, get up at 4 a.m. and do a cold plunge and eat seven eggs and run 10 miles and then read seven chapters of a classic.
and then, you know, swim a couple laps and, you know, run a 5K and then you can fire up your laptop and write your thousand words for the day. You know, people just love to lay these burdens on our back. And that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is just having some structure within your process that helps you to clarify your priorities, you know, helps you to seek inspiration in your own world and sort of cultivate big thing. So I'm going on here, but big things come from small things.
You know, we tend to think that like, it's all about the big idea. It's all about, these, these giant, you know, once in a career kind of things that make your career. But the reality is for many of these people I'm talking about who are at the top of their game, that big project, that big idea, the big public thing that they did was the culmination of a lot of little things that they've done. And so that just felt like the next step for them. It wasn't like, okay, now I'm going to just go, you know, I'm just going to go, you know,
make this giant leap into the unknown. No, that was just like the next logical step, the next logical risk. So it's those daily regular moments of practice and ritual and immersing yourself and then getting out and getting your reps in. mean, that's really what makes great creatives great over time. And then punctuated by those occasional big moments, right? Where you saw me, Global Leadership Summit, right? Like,

Todd Henry
I don't speak in front of 400,000 people every day. I mean, I'm more often speaking in front of 500 people or 300 people, right? At an event or a couple thousand, like usually is a big event, right? But because I'd done that so many times, you know, I was able to step on the stage and do what I did in that event. And so it's the same thing for all of us in our work. It's the daily practice that prepares us for those big inflection points.

Chris Lesner
I think that's so key because it means that it's attainable for your average person, right? And I think a lot of people are looking for the shortcut and seeing somebody else and seeing, wow, look at where they are. I wish I was there next year. And there's a lot that happened between there and where they want to be.

Todd Henry
Yeah, you know what's interesting is, so I spent my early 20s in the music business as a performer actually. So I sang music, this was, and that was 30 years ago now for me. So pre-Google, so do not try to Google it because it doesn't exist, because Google didn't exist back then. But we opened for a lot of really big acts, right? I had the chance to really share a lot of time with some artists who had really become household names in many cases.
And what was really interesting was over time, you started to see patterns. Just as a student of human nature, I could see patterns in some of these really big acts. And some of them were lovely to work with. Some of them were just, you know, like a delight. They absolutely welcomed us. They would like willingly share the stage. They would stand in the wings and watch us perform and would be really encouraging. And some of them were just really like bitter and angry and
you know, really protective of their turf. And I started to notice over time, the ones who were very welcoming and very warm and very encouraging were the ones who had like really worked their way up through the clubs. The ones who had sort of spent years and years toiling in obscurity playing like little clubs, probably in the same place, you know, like opening for people like we did, right? That kind of thing.
The ones who were less accommodating were the ones who sort of had that really fast J-curve trajectory where like, either they just like got discovered and then suddenly were put on stage in front of a bunch of people or, you know, maybe like they moved to Nashville and got discovered within a couple of months and now they're like this artist. And it's really interesting because when you look in the eyes of seasoned creatives,
who have been around for a long time. It's like, and Steve Pressfield said this to me in an interview one time, it's almost like when you look in the eyes of someone, it's almost like when you're looking in the eyes of someone who's been to war, like two veterans, when they look in each other's eyes, like they just immediately recognize the look of someone who has sort of been around for a while. And I feel like the same thing kind of happens in the creative industries. Like you can kind of tell when people have kind of been through it.

Todd Henry
they've put in their time, they've put in their reps, like their season, their pros, they understand what it takes to sustain versus those who are sort of like shooting from the hip, the sort of like young kind of like talent is endless, I will always be talented. And so I think to some extent, all of that is to say, the biggest, I think the biggest responsibility we have, especially as young leaders and young creative pros is to simply get our reps in.
to simply go and learn as much as we can, commit ourselves to an organization, commit ourselves to the work, get our reps in, do the daily practice, just become as seasoned as we can possibly be, see as many things, solve as many problems as we can, and try to become as seasoned as possible so that when our moment comes, A, we're prepared to leverage it, but B, we're also gonna be gracious toward all of those who we also need in order to help accomplish our.
goal because we understand what it feels like to be in that position. When you finally have authority as a leader, if you've been the person who has served under bad leaders, if you've been the person who's, you know, sort of been felt like you've kind of been used and abused by an organization, by the time you get to the place of being a leader, you realize like, oh, I know what that feels like. I don't want to be that kind of leader. I want to be the kind of person standing in the wings, encouraging the opening act, right? I want to be the kind of person who's creating space for them to.
to be brilliant, not trying to control them so that it feeds my ego, but I want to create space for them to be unleashed and do what they do well. That all comes with just experience and getting your reps in and becoming seasoned over time. So that's my encouragement to people is just like, listen, it's all useful. It's all valuable. Everything, every experience is useful. Every experience is valuable. You just have to apply it to opportunities when they come.

Chris Lesner
I think that example and those examples play perfectly into the concept of servant leadership. And you get to work with so many corporate teams, so many executives. How do you see them typically acting out servant leadership? Or is that more rare?

Todd Henry
Uh, I don't know if I'd it's, I don't know if I'd it's rare, um, but it's very noticeable when you come across it. Right. Um, so I think, so here's the thing. People think leadership's about being on top leadership's not about being on top leadership's about being in the middle. Every single leader is in the middle. I don't care what level of the organization you're at. If you're a mid-level manager, it's obviously, you know, you're obviously in the middle. Um, if you're a senior leader, you're still in the middle because you're reporting to someone.
in the organization. And if you're the CEO of the organization, you report to the board. If you're on the board, you report to the shareholders, right? Everybody reports to someone in leadership. And the hardest part of servant leadership, servant leadership would be easy if you were on top, because then it's all about just, you know, oh, well, I have no pressure. just have to, you know, do what's, what's, I just have to serve the people that I'm, that I'm, that I'm leading. The problem is you have pressure coming from both directions.
So you feel the career squeeze, you feel the personal stake in every decision that you make because somebody above you is judging your decisions and determining what your next career path might be based upon your decisions. And so you feel that squeeze while at the same time you're trying to create opportunity and serve the people beneath you and trying to be a servant leader to them and help them have a platform to show how gifted they are, how brilliant they are.
And so I think that's really sort of the challenge for a lot of leaders is that pressure of being in the middle, the pressure that's coming down from maybe somebody who's not playing the role of servant leader for them. And yet they have to turn around and play the role of servant leader for the people below them. But at the end of the day, that's what our job is as a leader. Our job is not to do the work. Our job is to lead the work. Our job is to create bounded autonomy, freedom within limits.
for the people on our team to be able to do what they're capable of doing. So many leaders, Chris, hire bright, sharp, talented people, and then they spend the entire time leading them, trying to turn them into little versions of themselves, right? Because they want to control the work. Because as a manager, how do we prove we were here? By the things that we did, the systems that we created, right? By the projects our team did. And so we want that work to reflect well on us. The problem is when we move in and we try to control...

Todd Henry
talented people, shut their brain off. They stop thinking because they're like, well, you're just going to tell me what to do anyway. So why should I put all the time and energy into trying to figure this out? I'm just going to wait till you tell me what to do because that's what you're going to do anyway. Right. And so the servant leader recognizes it's not about them, but it's not about them in the sense that their job is to lead the work, to create a space, to carve out the protected space for the team, the protected resources for the team to be able to do the things that they're being tasked with.
And then to challenge them, to speak courage into them, to encourage them to take risks, to encourage them to grow, to develop their skills. That's really the role of the leader is to create the space within which the team can actually do the work and to point them in the right direction, of course, right? But not to control them. I think that's the hardest thing for certain leaders is that is resisting that impulse to control.
because everything reflects back on the leader. And at the end of the day, you feel a little bit at the mercy of the team when you're trying to play that role of servant leader, it's much easier just to control, because then you can control the outcome, but that's not what leadership is about.

Chris Lesner
And I think so many leaders are so worried about the metrics and the productivity, and they don't leave room for the creative problem-solving. They don't leave room for others' opinions necessarily because they're so focused on, well, it's all up to me, so I need to make sure that people do what I want, because then I live and die by it. You talk a lot about burnout in some of your content, too. And how do you see productivity and burnout play out?
together and how do people not burn out and how do you not burn out your teams?

Todd Henry
Yeah, it was a really big question. But I think, you know, a lot of the burnout that we experience is not the result of being physically exhausted. It's the emotional, mental, sort of existential overwhelm of being in a space where you have to solve problems all the time. Because the challenge for creative people, for problem solvers, is that your work goes with you everywhere.

Chris Lesner
you

Todd Henry
You know, if you're working on a factory line at the end of the day, like you're, you're not, you cannot physically take the factory line home with you. Like it just, you know, you have to leave it where it is. You know, you show up, you do your job, you clock out, you're done. Like you can't take the factory line home with you. When you do creative work, you go home and you're sitting at dinner with your family or you go to your kid's soccer game or whatever. And that problem that you're trying to solve is always on your mind. And so I think.
A lot of the burnout and the overwhelm people feel is the result of the always on nature of creative problem solving work. There are always uncertainties to be resolved. There are always stresses. also, many of us, not all of us, but most of us don't have clear edges for our work. Meaning I'm doing a little piece of something that's contributing to a much bigger piece that's contributing to a bigger piece. That's the final thing, but like,
My work is never really done because there's always something more to tweak or there's a new thing coming along. And I never really get this, put a stamp of, I'm finished. Okay, project's finished. Let's move on to something else. It's always this kind of like constant maintenance mode that many of us are in where we're solving little problems, out little fires, but we're not really ever finished. And so I think just the, again, the existential overwhelm of creative work can weigh on us. And so,
The way that we deal with that is by creating, this is gonna surprise you based upon what I've been saying this entire time, creating structure in our life, space to be alone with our thoughts, right? Creating some punctuated rhythm in our work so that we aren't, it's not just a never ending cycle of tasks to be done or problems to be solved, but that we have sort of some structure, some punctuated rhythm to our life and our work. You're carving out space.
to be alone with your thoughts, carving out space for study, carving out space to have conversations with other people about the work. And instilling those rhythms in our life makes a big difference, especially when we're in the midst of sort of equal input, equal output, we're always kind of a little bit on, even when we're supposed to be off. Creating that rhythm in your life makes a huge difference emotionally, but also in terms of the quality of the work.

Chris Lesner
Yeah, that's so interesting. My mind is racing with examples from our team of just how to help people be better problem solvers. One thing that comes to mind, too, is that with our kids from an early age, I'm not sure many kids think about themselves as problem solvers, which probably helps. They might think of themselves as creative or athletic or whatever, but not necessarily problem solvers, the way you talk about creativity.
And I wonder how much that plays into later how they're viewing their work life and other things. How much goes back to even just helping kids figure out that they're problem solvers?

Todd Henry
I think that's a huge issue, especially we're seeing this. So have three kids, have a senior in college, sophomore in college, and a senior in high school. When our kids were younger, and this is largely my wife's influence, she was the one who kind of pushed us. Our kids would come to us with a problem. We'd say, huh, that's a real problem. What are you gonna do about that? You probably should go figure that out. My instinct, and think the instinct of lot of parents is to just jump in and try to solve the problem for them.
And I think that's been a real issue culturally is that we have too many parents stepping in and solving their kids' problems instead of letting the kids figure them out for themselves. So I think that there is to some extent, like when I was growing up, I think a big part of the reason I'm wired the way I am is I grew up in the middle of nowhere, like out in the country. We had to invent stuff for fun and we did some things that were just, mean, ridiculously dangerous, like
Um, we tried to build a, a helicopter with the lawnmower engine, you know, I mean, literally like the blades were going around and we're sitting on a piece of plywood with a pipe and an engine over. I mean, just dumb stuff that we did, um, tried to build a Ruby rod laser in my garage. today, if I seriously, if I ordered some of the chemicals that I tried to order back then that were shipped to me, I would be on some kind of like terrorist watch list right now, you know, but like we did crazy stuff like that. And our parents were just like, Oh, okay.
All right, you know, so I think to some extent that sense of like wonder and mystery and, you know, sort of openness to letting kids solve their own problems and figure things out and play with ideas, I think it's so important. And I do think that that a lot of the sort of guardedness and inability to think abstractly about problems comes from.
having your problem solved for you your entire life, right? Or having a prescribed path in front of you and there's a right answer, there's a wrong answer, you better get the right answer. Well, no, there might be 17 different right answers, right? Maybe answers that there may be one that's more right than others, but there could be like 17 right answers. So I think, I think it is a big issue. I think, and that's part of why as managers, we have to provide the same level of freedom, bounded autonomy for our.

Todd Henry
for the people on our teams. Let them try and fail and experiment and learn things and sometimes surprise us with answers that we didn't expect. Because we probably have an idea of what we think would be best. But if we've hired talented people, why not let them come up with ideas that will surprise us and delight us and send us in new directions? I that's really when teams become special. That's when impact becomes multiplied.

Chris Lesner
So you've talked a little bit about structure, talked a little bit about mindset, and even just mindset throughout life. I know recently-ish, you've been coming out with the brave habit. Talk about that process and why you wrote it, what it is. Yeah.

Todd Henry
Yeah. So, so this is a book I've been working on since 2016. So interestingly, I was working on the concepts of this book. Um, and I still had like three, three other books to write for my publisher. Um, because it was, it was a topic that I was starting to really have an interest in. And it really started noticing in culture, some, what I would consider both in the, in the business space and in the political space, but also in, know, just in culture in general, just some decisions being made that to me.
were under the guise of what was being called bravery, but really was more like bravado and not really in the interest of others, really more in sort of a self-protective kind of space. And so I thought, man, somebody needs to write about this nuance between bravery and bravado. What is bravery and what does that look like? And what does it look like to make brave decisions?
Um, and so I was working on this book in the background for a number of years. And finally in 2022, kind of had the space to be able to think about it a little more and actually write it. So the book just released, um, earlier this year, the brave habit. the premise of the book is there are two primary things that tend to be present when teams, people in teams, leaders in teams make brave decisions. The first is a sense of optimistic vision.
meaning that we can envision a better possible future. So we have a vision that we're navigating toward it that we can see that would make it a better possible future. And then the second thing is a sense of agency versus powerlessness, meaning, and I believe I have the capacity to do something to help bring about that better possible future. Doesn't mean I will bring about that, but I can contribute to bringing about that better possible future. When those two things tend to be present, you tend to find brave decisions happening more consistently.
And the interesting thing is that we can do things again, surprise, surprise, there are habits we can build rituals. can build into our life to help us develop that sense of vision in our own life for the work that we're doing. And also to develop a sense of agency or to cultivate agency in our life so that we're able to act in the service of that optimistic vision. So that was really the, impetus for the book was just sort of trying to encourage people.

Todd Henry
to consistently on a daily basis make bravery a habit. Not something that they do every so often, not something that just happens when a big event comes along, they rush into a building to save a bunch of people, but something they can do consistently, having the right conversations, introducing the potentially dangerous ideas into their team.
dynamic, you know, doing things that other people might shy away from, but that they believe it's the right thing to pursue the optimistic vision that they have for their sphere of influence.

Chris Lesner
Bravery is one of those concepts that I'm not sure people think about for themselves. Maybe it is, but I think often when we think of brave people, or I think of brave people, I think of other people. The first thoughts are not, what can I do that's brave? So much of what you've worked on with all the creativity shift to be about problem solving, and now bravery to be, how can you be brave, is retraining our minds a little bit differently.

Todd Henry
Yeah.

Todd Henry
Yeah, I think that's very true because I think that how we, again, words are important and concepts are important. And frankly, identity is important. How we see ourselves is one of the more critical things about how we spend our time on this planet. And, you know, we wear all kinds of labels and all kinds of names that are not meant for us. You know, a lot of people go through their life wearing the name coward. That's just something that they wear as a name because somebody once upon a time convinced them that they
They were the kind of person who wasn't up to the task or whatever. They shied away one time from doing the right thing. And so, for the rest of their life, they wear that name coward. And so I think in some ways, we have to retrain ourselves to think differently about our lives, our responsibilities, and our

Chris Lesner
So I know that you're helping people retrain their mind and go through that at a corporate level. You're helping with your books. You're helping with your speaking. What our audience might not know is that you're also doing it through your podcast. about your podcast a little bit with us.

Todd Henry
Yeah. So the podcast started in 2005. It was originally called the accidental creative. Um, we just this year, um, speaking of making brave choices, uh, we got rid of, uh, 18 years of back catalog and started over with episode one in January. Um, which is kind of crazy actually. Um, now that I think about it I'm saying that out loud, but, um, yeah, it's called daily creative with Todd Henry. Uh, we're on like episode 34 now, uh, of, of the podcast.
And it's really a podcast that explores what it looks like to be brave, focused, and brilliant every day in your life and your work as a leader and as a creative pro. And that's really what we're trying to help people be every day is to be brave in their work, to be focused in terms of how they approach their work, and then to be brilliant, to do great work, because that's what we're all hopefully here to do. So yeah, Daily Creative with Todd Henry is the name of the podcast.

Chris Lesner
click just to touch on that brilliant because you brought it up earlier. It has to do with what your podcast is about. Can you explain at a high level the brilliant engine?

Todd Henry
Yeah. So the Brains Engine is really a seven part process. It's funny, you know how sometimes you can work on things for years and years and years and you don't realize that you're working within a system. And then suddenly all of a sudden one day it's like click. my business partners and I were over the course of this summer, we were really sort of looking at what is the Marvel universe of Todd Henry's work, right? Like, as you look at the last like 15 years, 20 years, and you look at the seven books I've written.
And we realized that there are these seven core gears, these seven parts that kind of all play together, starting with like, you know, finding order in your life and igniting drive in your life. And then, you know, learning to stand out and learning to play nice and learning how to get clear with the people you're collaborating with. then leading well, which is like herding tigers and being brave, right? Which is where you have it. We realized that there are these seven gears that all kind of play together. And when they're all working well in concert with one another, then
it produces inevitable brilliance in your life and your work or in your organization. And when one of the gears is out of whack, just like if a gear is out of whack in a car, right, you're gonna struggle, you're gonna have problems. And so that's really what, that's the concept of what we've been calling the brilliance engine, which is a way to kind of make brilliance inevitable in your life and in your work is if you get these seven gears functioning properly, then you significantly increase the likelihood of a brilliant outcome.
You make brilliant inevitable as opposed to accidental, is, think, in many organizations, it's kind of, like, hey, we had another brilliant outcome, great, you know, and okay, let's hope it happens again. So the goal, again, is to kind of systemize that and try to make brilliance inevitable.

Chris Lesner
And I could be totally off on this, but I think you obviously have a lot of great books and books that I've enjoyed. One thing that makes this one a little bit unique, if I'm right, is that there's a workbook that people can actually work through alongside. I think that's so important because one of the things that I've loved about you over the years is...

Todd Henry
Yeah.

Chris Lesner
You're all about action steps. And you've got a lot of action steps. And it's not like burdensome action steps, but it's so what, right? And it's the do this. The workbook takes it to whole other level. How did that come about?

Todd Henry
Well, that was something I really wanted because this is such a highly personal book. I wanted it to feel personal, like a journey, like a personal journey people were taking as opposed to just, okay, it's an interesting book I read. It got some new concepts, things I can go share with my team and kind of move on. I wanted it to be transformative and to form habits. And so that was kind of the impetus for doing the workbook and also had some flexibility I haven't had in the past because the Brave Habit specifically I decided, which again,
another act of bravery, right? Cause we had some opportunity to traditionally publish the book, but I wanted it to be short, 150 pages, actionable, easy to read. And I wanted to be able to use the material, the content, wherever I wanted in whatever form I wanted, because this is really a missional book for me. As much as any of my books have been, this is probably the most missional book that I've done in the sense that I feel a real need to get this message out into the world.
And so I was able to create a workbook because I was able to use the material wherever I wanted, right? And do whatever I wanted with it. And so I had some flexibility and some freedom this time as well that I haven't had in the past, which is, is encouraging. So yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad that you found that useful because that was kind of the whole purpose of creating a workbook was to make it very actionable for people and to really make people sit with the ideas and the questions and the prompts and the concepts a little more deeply.

Chris Lesner
Yeah, I think the whole Brilliance Engine piece where it really is like cogs, the way you kind of portray it, is so key. Because yeah, you can easily tell when one is removed, everything else is going to struggle or just totally stop. And they all need to be functioning well to keep momentum moving forward. just, yeah, the whole concept, I love it. I want to ask you 10 rapid fire questions, if that's OK.

Todd Henry
Right? Right, right.

Todd Henry
Okay.

Chris Lesner
where you just say the first thing that comes to your mind and there is no right or wrong. Who's the first? Yeah, whatever you say goes. Who's the first person you think of when I say servant leadership?

Todd Henry
OK, so you say, OK.

Todd Henry
The first person I think of when you say servant leadership. Boy, that is a really tough question. Because so many actually so many people come to mind.

Todd Henry
I want to say the right person. I don't have a good reason, a good story behind it.

Todd Henry
So I'm gonna, I'm probably gonna take the, I'm gonna say I'll probably take the, mean, well, okay. Let me talk through my thought process here, right? The first person who comes to mind is John Maxwell because John Maxwell has been like talking about this concept of servant leadership for years and years and years. And so that's probably the first person who just kind of like immediately comes to mind because he's the one who sort of in my mind is sort of like popularized.
You know, the idea of, you know, and then sort of has been speaking about it for so long. Um, but I would say probably, um, in my life, um, I've had, so I had a, uh, a leader in my life who, um, I significantly failed at one point, um, in doing an organizational restructure and. They pulled me aside and they said, all right, you failed. You failed. Let's talk about what that means. Right. And let's talk about how we get you through this and get you to another.
place, um, help you learn from this and go to the next place. And to me, that was a tremendous act of servant leadership because the easier thing to do would have just been to say, okay, you failed. Let's, let's move on. Let's put somebody else in charge of this and, and try to figure out, you know, how we move forward. But instead the, active servant leadership was to pull me aside and to have that conversation, um, to help me get better.
which was very inconvenient for this leader to do that. And so I think on a personal level, that story really sort of illustrates for me what servant leadership actually looks like, which is doing the inconvenient thing for yourself in order to help the other person become better in their own right. So sorry, it took me a while to get to that answer, but like I was trying to think of like, okay, the first person I think of, and I think of the phrase, but then really in my own life, the, that,
was probably one of the most impactful moments of servant leadership in my own life.

Chris Lesner
Both of those are great. right, what are the five words that most describe you?

Todd Henry
Arms dealer for creative revolution.

Chris Lesner
that favorite author or book

Todd Henry
My favorite author is Thomas Merton, who was a mystic and monk who was cloistered outside of Louisville, Kentucky. wrote a book called New Seeds of Contemplation that was, this probably had one of the more, probably has had as much impact on me as any book in my life. My favorite business author is Seth Godin. And Seth was one of the first people I had on the podcast back in 2007, I think was my first interview with him.
And he's had a tremendous impact. As a matter of fact, Purple Cow is one of the reasons why I started my podcast to begin with, which was a book that came out in 2004.

Chris Lesner
Favorite movie.

Todd Henry
My favorite movie of all time is probably the movie Cinderella Man, which is a true story of a boxer during the Great Depression who went through a lot of ups and downs. I am a sucker for a good redemption story. I'm a sucker for a good underdog story. And it is both of those.

Chris Lesner
Favorite food.

Todd Henry
My favorite food is probably, there's another tricky one. My favorite food is probably, I'm not gonna lie, it's probably steak. I love a good steak, actually.

Chris Lesner
Favorite thing to do in your free time.

Todd Henry
I love to read, have a stack of books over next to my chair. So that's one of my favorite things is to read or to watch my heartbreaking Cincinnati Bengals play football.

Chris Lesner
Oh boy, that has been hard. Surprising fact about you.

Todd Henry
Um, I mentioned it earlier, but I was in the music business, uh, as a performer for a number of years in my early twenties, uh, which is kind of funny now looking back on it, but, um, spent a big chunk of time trying to, uh, make it in the music business. And as I like to say, it was as successful as I could be without being successful in the music business. That's basically the way I describe what happened and eventually met a girl and decided, uh, maybe it's time to move on from this living in a tin can going up and down the road kind of thing.

Chris Lesner
favorite place you've ever been.

Todd Henry
Um
I loved Istanbul was absolutely beautiful. Um, and then my wife and I love park city, Utah. We, we think it's beautiful. We love the mountains. love to go when it's warm, warm ish in the summer, not so much in the winter when it's ski season, but we love to go and like hike in the summer.

Chris Lesner
where somewhere you want to go that you haven't been.

Todd Henry
Oh, I've not been to Italy, which is kind of surprising because I've been all over the world, but I've not yet been to Italy. So I would love to go to Italy.

Chris Lesner
Okay, and finally, what's the best advice you've ever gotten?

Todd Henry
Uh, the best advice I've ever gotten is get your reps in. had a, a, a leader early on, um, when I was first teaching actually in any capacity who said, you just need to get in front of people whenever you can. Um, if it's a group of five people get in front of them and treat them like it's 5,000 people, but you need to get your reps in, just go in and, and do the thing that you think you want to do. And that's really what podcasting was for me from a teaching perspective. I
done hundreds of podcasts before I ever stepped foot on the stage and taught any of the concepts that are in my podcasts. And because of that, I practiced speaking so much that, you know, and teaching so much by the time I just stepped on the stage, it was like, oh, I've talked about this stuff a million times, right? So, you know, get your reps in is probably the best advice I ever got.

Chris Lesner
Wow, well Todd, I'm so excited for people to be able to listen to this, hear some of your background, be able to go check out some of your work, and thank you for being on. What a pleasure.

Todd Henry
Yeah. Thank you so much and congrats on the great work you're doing and congrats on the arc of the podcast. It's really exciting.