342 - Transforming Complacency into Significance: A Leadership Blueprint with Maxwell Leadership's Chris Robinson

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Chris Robinson, I am so pleased to have you on the show today. Welcome to Listening with Leaders.

Hey, thank you so much for having me, Doug. So excited to be on here with you today. And I can tell you, I just love your heart, your heartbeat for helping add value to people and just always grateful to be able to have just insightful conversations to help other people grow.

Absolutely. I do, as you, as we all do when we're podcasting, you, I do a lot of, I do research and I look back and you started today, you're a coach, but that you didn't start that way. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, so I didn't start that way. I really got into the coaching space because I fell in love with the 10% of the job that I wanted to do 100% of the time.

Working with the people.

Working with the people. And so I actually got my start many years ago, probably 20+ years ago working inside of a call center. And this was an opportunity of a lifetime for me as a young kid. And I just, I took on this opportunity like it was the greatest gift that had ever been given to me. And in fact, it, it really was. And I wanted to stand out on the job. I was a top performer. I was always in the top. 3, 4 salespeople and was doing well, but I wanted to get to that next level. I wanted to get promoted on the job. And so what I began to do is I began to seek out how can I set myself apart to stand out from the other salespeople? All things being equal, I really didn't have anything else to stand out to say, hey, this is the guy. So I began taking a course by John Maxwell in the basement of a church. So I was going into the basement of this church, watching a VHS video of John Maxwell, and then I was coming back into the workplace. And applying these principles that I was learning about leadership in the workplace. And because of applying these principles, I began to get promoted on the job. And then something really shifted. I figured out from John's book, The 21 Laws of Leadership, it's the Law of the Lid. And there's a graph in there, and on one side it shows your dedication to success. You can work dedication to success, and we all do that because we're working for us. And I wanted to get promoted. And what happened was on the 6th page, there's another graph that says if you can add leadership ability to that. And it showed this exponential growth. And then something clicked, Doug. I went from trying to be the star and really made the shift to trying to be a star creator. And then everything shifted for me as my only focus wasn't in being the top sales manager, it was being the manager that could promote the most managers and create the most leaders. And so that built a reputation for me inside the organization. Of course, as a result of that, I had top sales teams.. And I've really helped a lot of people recognize their leadership ability and helped them grow. And through that, I continued to really follow personal growth and development courses, conferences, and events. And then at one of them, they said those magic words, Doug. They said, these people get paid to speak. And Doug, it was like fireworks went off. It was that magical moment in the movie where everything just came alive. And I said, what? These people get paid to speak. And from that moment, every sales meeting became a motivational seminar. I began to do workshops inside the place. I began to take more courses, read more books, and eventually just realized that, hey, my gift, my calling, my passion is to develop people. And then that's when I began to move into the space of leadership development. Now, I'd love to say it was not this nice linear path to greatness and, and just this great arc, but it wasn't. I grew right there inside my job where I was at. And then I went out to start other, another company and those two companies failed. But then I found myself in a place where it was like I was chasing dollars and not chasing purpose. And so when I made that shift and that decision that, hey, I'm gonna chase my purpose, that's when I went all in on really leadership development, helping other people and business coaching. And that's when begin things begin to take off.

Wow, we are so aligned in how we think because I always tell people that I work with, I said, if you're not, if you're not developing your people two levels down and developing people to take over when you leave, you're not doing your job.

That's correct.

You know what's amazing is how few leaders get that, right? They don't understand that their job is to coach.

That's correct.

Not to do.

Not to do. That's correct.

They totally don't get it, right?

I think that's the society that we were brought up in. And then there's that, I want to gather it, I want to do it, I want to be the person. You have those leaders that gather all the roles and never let go. But here's the thing: if you hold on to what you already have, you're going to always get to keep what you have. But if you give it away, you have the capacity to go and do more.

That's right. Don't put new wine in old wineskins, right?

That's right.

So what gets you— you've been doing this now for a long time. You've been with Paxil for a long time. You have your own firm. What gets you motivated to get excited and get up in the morning Oh man.

Oh my goodness. It's adding value to people. Now I know this sounds cliché and I live in this Maxwell bubble, but that's the reality. But that's the reality of my life, Doug, is that every single day I wake up with the desire to add value to people. It's realistically, who can I help today? Just today, not only do I do, I'm in the midst of doing several podcasts every single day. I teach coaches, speakers, and trainers every single week. I do one-on-one phone calls with people to help them wherever they're stuck or get going. And I just came off of a 4-city tour, which was 4 cities in 4 days. I got in at midnight last night. We saw over 200+ people in 4 different cities in small groups. And told my assistant this morning, I said, ah, I'm so thankful for a full schedule today because if I didn't have anything to do today, I would've just collapsed. So it truly is adding value to people that really fills my soul.

You said you're— before we got on, you said you got a back-to-back schedule podcast. Are you promoting a new book?

Yeah, we got a brand new book called From Drift to Drive. It's a high achiever's guide to break the chains of complacency.

So tell us about that.

Yeah, so this book is really a book for the high achiever that you've accomplished the things, you've done the things, and now you're really comfortable. And if we look at the word complacency, what I was really trying to solve for, Doug, in this when I set off to write this book was I really wanted to talk about underperformance because that's a common thing that all leaders gravitate towards. But then we began to really look at the root cause of what causes underperformance, and that root cause is complacency. And I fell in love with the research of complacency and how success-induced complacency is really the greatest threat to organization's culture, to organization's success or failure. And we really went into a deep dive on it. So Not only do we help you define areas of complacency in your life, but then I take you through a 7-step framework to help you break out and get into that growth mode in any area of your life that you want to.

It sounds— I don't know, complacency. Yeah, complacent, especially if you've been successful. I guess it's easy to get complacent. A lot of people who've made a lot of money and they're not very happy. Yeah, yeah, they don't have any meaning in their life, right?

Correct, correct.

And it seems to me that that if you've got meaning in your life, then you'll never become complacent.

That's correct. That's correct. It's about meaning. And this is really the shift from success, which is about me, to significance, which is about others.

I love it. Success to significance.

Yes. And that's what we're really after is significance. And when it comes to complacency, a high achiever, somebody that's done well, they often shake that off. And I too, if you called any of my friends, Doug, anybody that knows me and said, hey, is Chris Robinson complacent? 99.9% of them would say absolutely not. But that's not true because the way that I redefine complacency in the book is it's a secret place of satisfactory success. Now think about those places in our life where, oh, it's good, it's comfortable. And if we go back to the root meaning of the word complacency and its origin, it means careless security. And so those are the places that we begin to drift, is in places of complacency. And we think that, hey, they're secure, but they're not. So Although we may think that, hey, we're good in this area, if we're not sharpening, if we're not honing, if we're not going back to the things that got us to where we were, where we are today, we're going to slowly see ourselves losing that through a drift.

Yeah. Interesting. I'm curious, what is it, do you think, about— what is it about yourself? Yeah, you've gone through a lot of self-development. About yourself that you think makes you successful today?

If I had to boil it down to one thing, it's not because of any special talent. In fact, I often say I don't really have any incredible talent, but nobody could do what I do when I walk in a room.

Wait a minute, that doesn't work for me. That's a talent all by itself, right?

That's not a talent, Doug. That's a gift. That's a gift that's been given to me. And, and, but if I had to boil it down to one thing, it would be consistency. Because again, feeling like I don't have any great specific talent, but what I can say is that my ability to be disciplined, my ability to be consistent once I set after to do something, that skill set is tremendous and has really been the gateway to everything that I've achieved.

It sounds like discipline and persistence are also— yeah, go right along with that.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Huh. Let's turn to listening for a second. This show is called Listening with Leaders for a reason. I teach people how to stop fights and arguments forever in their lives, and the way you do that is by listening to emotions instead of to words. I'm curious, how do you learn to become a great listener?

I think I'm working on it. I wouldn't say that, hey, I'm a great listener.

I don't know. I have a sense that you're probably pretty good.

I work at it. And here's the thing. I think that John Maxwell has been a great model for me in that. And I've had the opportunity to have many dinners, many lunches, see him sit with some incredible people and thinkers. And one of the things I noticed very early with having these opportunities with John Maxwell, with the front row proximity to see is that if you go and have dinner with John Maxwell, you would think that he's going to be doing the majority of the talking in most of the rooms. And what I found with John was that John is rarely the greatest talker in the room. He's the greatest listener. And I've seen him model that and just see him pull out of it. I've seen him have lunches and dinners where he's just asked question after question, didn't get a word in edgewise, and people walk away feeling, oh my goodness, that was the greatest that I had ever experienced. And so I've picked some stuff up from proximity, some things that can be caught but not necessarily taught. Now, we can teach people these things and give them some tactical things to do, but some things have to be caught by proximity and seeing someone model that for us. And so I've had a great model in that, and I think that's attributed a lot to me helping, being able to do that.

How can you run a— sounds right on.

Yeah.

When my wife and I go out to social gatherings we compare notes at the end. We're both really good listeners. And I say, anybody ever ask you what you do? Nope. Anybody ask you what you do? Nope. Nope.

I love that. I actually had that happen to me at a baseball game here just recently. My son plays Little League baseball and we have gone the entire season and all I do is I ask people questions. I don't do anything. And then finally this dad comes up, he goes, we've been here for 6 months and I finally just Googled you. He goes, I never thought to ask you what you do because I had no idea what you do, who you are. And he was just so elated. But again, that's just me going, oh, I just want to find out about people and add value to them.

That's exactly right. So what do you, what do you, how, what do you do when you run across people who don't listen or they're poor listeners?

What can you do? You listen to them. You listen to them. Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

Sometimes if it's really critical, yeah, that they hear instructions or directions with them.

Yeah.

Have them repeat back what they've heard to make sure they got it.

Yeah. And that's the thing though, is that when you become, and when you become a great question asker, that really helps out because you can redirect those conversations of those that don't listen, which creates that space. Because at some point in time, they're gonna take that breath. And then you can insert and ask another question, which can redirect that whole thing. And oftentimes, hey, they'll run the entire way.

You have to— I think, though, that asking questions is tricky. I was a trial lawyer for 22 years. I can ask questions. I don't have a problem asking questions. But I've heard a lot of people who don't know, they're not asking questions to learn. They're more focused on what's their next question or what's the next thing they're going to say. So they're really not listening. And they're not really interested in what. What the other person has to say. And people will often go into lawyer mode and try to use questions to make an argument, right? And all of which is nonproductive.

The other thing, the other side of the two that I hear, Doug, is that people that listen and then they turn a conversation to a competition.

Yes.

And the way that looks is the one-up scenario where it's, hey, we went to Disney last weekend. Oh hey, we went to Disney 6 months ago. We went to this restaurant. We went to this restaurant.

Exactly.

We did this excursion.

That's right. And nobody is listening. Nobody is listening.

Not at all.

What I've discovered, and part of the reason why I teach what I teach today, is because almost all con— almost all interpersonal conflicts between spouses, for example, or with kids, it's because somebody's not feeling heard.

Right.

That's 90% of the— that's the problem. And when people feel heard and validated, they calm down.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so that's why this stuff is so important. 'Cause I get called in as a mediator, I get called in these high-stake conflicts with a lot of money involved and I gotta calm people down.

Right. Yep.

Get the problem. So listening becomes, becomes a really critical skill. What's the future hold for Chris Robinson?

Yeah, the future for me is exciting. When I think about what I get to do with the Maxwell organization, I get to represent the largest leadership coaching training company on the planet. And John is coming of age. He's 78 years old now, but he's hard charging more than ever. And, but for me, I've spent more of my life learning and living the principles that he's taught than I've actually been alive. I made that shift as I turned 45. I started when I was 20. And I'm going, and I look back and I go, man, I've been learning and living these principles more of my life than I haven't. And I want to continue to do that. So what I I want to do in the future is exactly what I'm doing today at a larger scale, impacting more people, working inside of more countries and more organizations to really help people grow. Because life can be better for everyone out there if they're intentional. And I want to help people go not just for success, because all the stuff is great, but all that stuff requires maintenance and— here you go— but what doesn't require maintenance and keep up is significance of helping other people. You do that and that will continue to run.

How do you use all of this stuff in your personal life with— yeah, your wife and your children and all that? Yeah, that's the crossover.

Yeah, the crossover. There's really no crossover, it's one and the same. I've got 6 kids, I've got triplets.

Oh yeah, triplets, twins, and I was thinking— talk on that. Okay, let's slow down so the audience gets it. Go ahead and give it to us. You've got kids?

Yes, yes, I've got kids. I've got 16-year-old triplets, I have a 12-year-old, and then I've got 9-year-old identical twin girls and they've grown up hearing Maxwell principles, personal growth and development. And so the first place that I always try to implement anything of what I'm learning or anything that I'm picking up that I think would be beneficial to them is trying to get it to them. Now, as the kids are becoming teenagers, there's some drift that happens there where they're learning their own. It has to, but, but they have been avid readers since they were very young and these kids have read more personal growth both in development books than 99% of the world, I promise you. And so that seed, I believe, will reap a harvest. And so I try to model it, I try to live it for them. And then again, I don't think there's a crossover. It's got to be one and the same.

That's right. You live your life and you live your principles and values. Doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in the boardroom or at home.

That's correct.

So it sounds like you're really proud of those Yeah, I am indeed.

They're incredible kids and just love who they're becoming.

And you have 3 teenagers, 3 16-year-olds.

That's correct.

Take me out back and shoot me, right?

Let me tell a funny story here, Doug. And one of them— again, this goes to listening. This is a great listening story, Doug. My— one of the triplets was— had just failed his driver's license test. He had hit a cone. So according to him, he had only failed the test because he hit this cone. Everything else was And so we're back out practicing again and I'm literally holding my seatbelt in this moment and I'm talking to him saying, hey, what are you thinking career-wise? What do you want to do? Are you thinking college? Are you thinking you want to do something else? You want to start a business? What do you want to do? And I'm literally grabbing this seatbelt, Doug, because I'm on edge. And he says, I think I want to be a helicopter pilot. Now in my head, Doug—

I fly helicopters, so I totally get that.

I am a helicopter pilot. Yeah. I had a very hard time in that moment seeing how we go from here to there.

First of all, you got to get the two-dimensional stuff down first, then you can go to the three-dimensional.

And so I held my tongue, Doug.

I—

it took everything of me, it took every fiber of my body to go, what in the world are we talking about here? But I held it and I continued to ask him questions, and the conversation eventually led to him allowing for me to buy him some books on what that path would look like. He's began to dig into that. But yeah, a great example of listening when I really just wanted to give him the, what in the world are you thinking? This is crazy right now.

Did he pass his driver's license test?

He did pass the test. So he's out driving on his own. I'm at other people's risk right now.

And so you triplets, you got a boy, how many? And two girls?

Yeah. Two boys and one girl on the triplets.

Triplets.

Oh my God. Yeah.

And they're all, they're all in high school together.

Yes, that's correct. That's correct.

They must drive people crazy.

Crazy.

One more question, Chris, and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh, um, if you've listened to any other podcast, it's something that would be revealed, but the average person probably wouldn't pick it up. I'm actually a certified pickleball teaching pro.

No kidding? That's correct.

Pickleball hasn't been around that No, it hasn't. It hasn't. I started playing back in 2020 or 2019, just before it began to really hit that boom. And I dove into it headfirst, fell in love, and eventually went through the route to get certified as a teaching pro. Again, not because I'm going to go out and go teach pickleball, but just because I love the learning process. And I said, man, there's probably something I can learn from learning how to become a pickleball teaching pro that I can use in other areas of life.

And I bet there were.

And there were. So the average person probably wouldn't pick up.

No, professional pickleball coach and trainer. And Chris, thanks so much for your time today. I know you got a book tomorrow. What's the name of the book again?

Yeah, Drift to Drive.

And when's it coming out?

Is it out? September 2nd. It's September 2nd. It's up for pre-order now on Amazon. Barnes Noble.

Everybody buy the book. The most— I, as my 5th book is coming out in September 26th. The most important thing you can do for an author is the pre-order.

Yes.

The more pre-orders you get, the better off you are. One, you can maybe make the New York Times bestseller list, but more importantly, all the bookstores look at pre-orders and that's how they decide where they're gonna buy their books.

Absolutely.

Drift to Drive. Buy it, everybody. Chris, thanks a lot.

Hey, thanks a lot, Doug. Bye-bye.

Bye. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #List Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasE. Doug Noll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.