As The Leader Grows with Ken Joslin

Erwin McManus | Exploring Human Potential and Creativity

• Ken Joslin

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Embark on a journey with us as we sit down with the charismatic Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Church, and pierce through the conventional veil to uncover a life of profound purpose and potential. Erwin shares his wisdom on accessing the genius of Jesus, empowering faith-based entrepreneurs and spiritual seekers alike to live out their divine design. It's a conversation that promises to shift paradigms and elevate our understanding of what it truly means to embrace our humanity and transform our internal mental frameworks.

Feel the momentum build as we delve into the concept of 'Mindshifts', where the path to personal growth and spiritual evolution is paved. Discover how these pivotal shifts in perspective can either catapult us to new heights or anchor us in stagnation. Erwin and I discuss the pivotal role of character and diligence in achieving success, challenging the idea that talent alone is enough. This episode is a testament to the power of perseverance and the call to action for every listener to cultivate resilience and tap into their true potential.

In our final reflection, the spotlight turns to creativity's critical role in shaping not only education but also corporate landscapes, as we explore the necessity of nurturing this invaluable trait in children and adults alike. Join in as we share stories that celebrate the unique genius in each individual and the joy that comes from unlocking that potential. If you're seeking a life marked by significance, fulfillment, and deep human connections, this episode is a mine of insights to enrich your journey.

Welcome to the ATLG podcast I am your host Ken Joslin, former pastor turned coach & host of CREATE, the #1 Faith-based Entrepreneur conference in America. My mission is to help faith-based entrepreneurs become the best version of themselves by growing in our Core 5: Faith, Health, Relationships, Business & Finances. You can get more information as well as join our FREE Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/676347099851525

If you enjoyed the podcast, come join our FREE GSD Community of hundreds of entrepreneurs & a ton of FREE Content including CREATE Conference recordings with Ken, John Maxwell, Gary Brecka, Ed Mylett & more. growstackdrive.com/free

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of as the Leader Grows podcast. I am your host, ken Jocelyn, and I have one of my favorite human beings on the planet with us today, my good friend, irwin McManus, pastor's Mosaic Church in LA, and he's known for so many more things than that. We spent three days together in Costa Rica back in the summertime and I literally walked away and I shared with him at dinner the last night. Irwin, you have challenged me to love people at a deeper level, the way that you care for and love people. Dude, welcome to our podcast today, my friend.

Speaker 2:

Hey, it's good to be here with you. It's gonna be kind of noisy out here in the middle of LA, but it's good to have a conversation today.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit. We talked a little bit off air about a talk you did at my Create conference this past summer in Dallas had you and Brenda Bruchard and Gary Bracken and a lot of friends out, but you shared a little bit about a verse that Paul wrote I think it's in 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, where it talks about that he gives us the mind of Christ. You shared one of the probably my top two or three talks I've ever heard on how he didn't give us the mind of Christ to stop sinning but to live extraordinary lives. Can you talk a little bit about that to our audience today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if your audience are people of faith. One of the interesting things for me when I came to faith and was really from outside of the faith kind of background, I'd never seen a Bible in my life, I had never been a church really in my life, and then I started hearing all this language about having the mind of Christ. But it's always applied to sin, like how to stop stealing or how to stop lying or how to stop, and it was always like a basic, almost like a 10 commandment kind of thing. Even when I didn't believe in God, I had a pretty good sense of the 10 commandments. I was actually trying to live them out and a lot of times I was wondering to myself it seems like this doesn't take the mind of Christ, this just takes common sense. Your life is better when you don't lie to people. Your life is better when you don't steal. Your life is better when you don't commit adultery. And I wasn't that impressed with the 10 commandments. I thought these are really underachieving goals and what really struck me was that if you have the mind of Christ, you actually have access to genius, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book.

Speaker 2:

The Genius of Jesus was what would happen to us if we actually began to elevate to the mind of Christ, if we actually believed that the level of genius that exists inside of Jesus actually was accessible to us. And if you could apply in different domains. Imagine if you could have the mind of Picasso. Would you choose not to be a painter? Instead, just choose to be a plumber? If you had the mind of Bobby Fisher, would you just go? I'm not going to play chess. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to be an engineer, and the mind of Jesus actually is the mind that helps us become human again. It's the ability to elevate as a human being, to be able to live life at its optimal level. And yet we're treating the mind of Christ as if it's here to help us just stop doing bad things rather than to step into extraordinary things.

Speaker 1:

And why do you think and again, our audience is wide based, so we do have a lot of faith based entrepreneurs that listen to our podcast and we have a lot of people that aren't, that are just kind of on that path towards faith and is it real and asking questions and all those kind of things, specifically, irwin, for our faith based entrepreneurs, why do you think in the church, especially in the Western culture church, why do you think that we don't lean more into what you talked about that day, about living extraordinary lives so that we can make a greater impact for the kingdom of God?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, I think there's still the huge momentum of the dark ages and of the influence of even Catholicism and the early effects of the Protestant movement, where it's all about sin management, it's all about trying to make us good citizens, and it's so focused on guilt and shame and all the things we do wrong that we never get to have a conversation about living in an elevated self. And I think maybe sometimes it is wonderfully to my advantage, having grown up irreligious, because when I read the Bible, I read it without a backdrop of a lot of the baggage that comes with it, and then I read it, I go, wow, this is God inviting us to live an extraordinary life. This is God inviting us to rediscover our humanity. This is God inviting us to have Him paint in our imagination and expand the boundaries of our capacity and to live a life that is beyond what we could live without Him. So I just think it's, in a sense, it's tragic that we settle for so little and expect so little from God.

Speaker 1:

You know, I gave my life to Christ when I was 25 years old very similar to you August 22, 1993. My team just posted a video on Instagram. Like in the past couple of weeks, I was sharing on the podcast a little bit about my faith journey and I remember the first time I went to church with some friends of mine on August the 8th was the first time I really heard the gospel and I literally said in that video if the pastor would have said, turn to the book of Matthew, I had no idea where it was at. The only thing I knew about Jesus was the handful of times as a child I'd went to church on Easter but again, being 25 years old, had no idea, never heard the gospel.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that we do that I love when you walk into Crete, I've got these four stickers with quotes of all of mine all over the building. The very first one that people see when they walk in the door is one that I shared almost every Sunday as a pastor and that's God's love for you as it predicated on your performance. He loves you because he created you as a son or a daughter. Can you talk about that, because we both know a lot of people. I know a lot of pastors, a lot of very well-known pastors, and I'll be honest with you, man, I don't know very many people that I've been around or when that love people at the level that you love people and care for people the way that you care for people. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that really is a picture, and I guess if there's a definition of the gospel, it is that God's love for us isn't predicated on our performance. It is because he created us as sons and daughters.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, I'm not fully sure how to respond to that in, you know, holistically, but I think a huge part of it is our inability to believe that we can be loved or that we are in a sense worthy of love, or that we're unworthy of love and access it anyway.

Speaker 2:

Whatever language you want to, you know to use, and you know, I mean I don't know if I love people more than other people I think that people love.

Speaker 2:

People do different expressions of who they are and, and you know, my wife Cam jumped on a plane and went to Israel to see what was going on in the middle of you know the conflict there, and she jumped on a plane, went to Kiev, the middle that Russia, the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, and I see her love being activated at such a deeper level than than my own, and so I, I would want to claim that I love people more. I just think, you know, I just think that I'm really committed to creating a place where people don't have to perform or work for love and acceptance, and that it's, you know. And even this past week I was just talking to our community at Mosaic and I said, hey, the beautiful thing about the life that we're inviting into is that you don't have to work for acceptance. You work from acceptance and and it changes everything because you're not afraid of failure. You're not afraid of not living up to someone else's expectations now because you're not earning acceptance. You're, you're, you're walking in, working from it.

Speaker 1:

I love that. One of the things we just talked about because I'm a part of your mastermind and spent a lot of time together over the past year is your new book, mindshift, and you kind of go into in that book, mindshift, about really looking at life from a different perspective. Can you talk a little bit about the book and some of maybe a couple of your biggest takeaways or things that you taught in that book?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Part of why I wrote Mindshift is that you know, now, having been a person of faith for 45 years, which is a long time, and and knowing so many sincere people over my life who never made the internal changes that would allow them to experience life differently, and you know the language that we use is, you know you give your life to Jesus and Jesus changes your life, and it it almost falls into the category of magic and or of passive optimism, where you know we believe something good is going to happen to us, and or for us might be a better description and, and I would. I would even see married couples who would both have a what I would consider to be an extremely intense or radical shift in their faith and come to know Jesus Christ, and and one of them would have dramatic changes in their life. Now the ones, their changes are very slow and and and and sometimes they would lose more ground than they would make, and I thought this is interesting. You know these are two people from the same educational background, same economic background, same family backgrounds. They're married, so they live in close to the same environments, but they have completely different outcomes, and I began realizing that there were internal mental structures that people had, and so when you come to faith, you're not the same place as someone else, and we don't really talk about this is that some person, some people, might come to faith in Jesus, but they're. They actually have very, very powerful positive mental structures and so they move fast and and in their response to faith. And other people have very destructive internal mental structures and the process of unwinding that is much more cumbersome, much more difficult and much more challenging.

Speaker 2:

And and and then also on the flip side is that when people, let's say, come to faith, let's say there's a like a from a neutral start, some of them relate to their faith going I believe in God is going to do this, and others relate in their faith to I believe in God is going to change me, and it's, it's the, it's really the people who believe that the journey of faith is internal change rather than external change that make the difference.

Speaker 2:

And so I wrote mind shifts so I could, to help people identify internal limitations, internal structure, mental patterns that limit their lives, and then to help people understand how to change those internal patterns, because in in a very peculiar way, no one else can change your internal mental patterns and and and. Even in that, when you say, well, god, can you go, god will not override your will, right, and? And so your will is, in a sense, the, the, the material from which those mental patterns are structured. And so God will invite you to change your mind, but he doesn't change your mind, and that's why it's command Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed. Be transformed is not a promise, it's a command, and we try to treat some things as a promise when they're actually a command.

Speaker 1:

I love that and he talks about just by the renewing of your mind, yeah, and constantly. What are some things in the book? Or when you teach people on how they can renew their mind, to constantly be moving forward in and take that mind, shift and change their mindset.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean there's, you know, the principles in the book apply to anyone, whether they believe in God or not, and it's because they're just principles that are true to life and and I think sometimes it's hard for for Christians to understand that but gravity applies to everyone, you know. Gravity applies to people who believe in God and people who do not believe in God and, by the way, gravity applies to people who believe in gravity and it applies to people who do not believe in gravity, and I think sometimes we forget that if something's actually a principle, a universal principle, it works whether you believe in God or not. That's the way God's created the universe and is ways created us. But there's one particular chapter that I think it's really important.

Speaker 2:

It's called talent is a hallucinogen, and in that particular mind shift, I talk about how people who build their lives on talent become mentally fragile, and and people who build their lives on character, hard to work, discipline, most people actually develop internal resilience, and the problem with so, the reason so many talented people crash and burn, is that the first 20 years of their life are established on their talent, and because they have so much talent, people create external structures to guarantee their success or to or to facilitate their success. But once that person's talent is no longer valuable to the people who are building the structures around it, they remove the structures and then you collapse because you thought your success was built on your talent, but it was actually built on a combination of your talent and the in the external structures that kept you from collapsing internally, which is, in a simple way, why a lot of great athletes do well when there's high school and college, and then pro football or pro basketball, and then you know with pro football players, within two to five years after they finish the career, 75% of them are bankrupt, drug addicted, dead, divorced and have lost their wealth. And it's because they had external structures all their lives that actually allowed the talent to be accessed. But the moment those external structures were gone, they didn't know how to build a life that wasn't built on talent but built on character. And so those are some of the little principles that are in the book that are, I think, are significant.

Speaker 2:

And there's two conflicting chapters which I think are really important chapters one and three. Chapter one is it's all about people, and then chapter three is you can't take everyone with you, and they're both highly relational chapters, and in chapter one it's really about creating a universe where people are the greatest value in your life, because if you don't do that upfront, you're gonna die alone. You're gonna have incredible wealth, you're gonna have houses and planes and yachts and you may have women everywhere if you're a man, but you will be so brutally alone that you won't have a good reason to live.

Speaker 1:

What do you think the allure is in that Erwin? Why people go down that path, not thinking they need relationships with other people?

Speaker 2:

One I have to tell you again, I think, that a high number of Christian entrepreneurs and Instagram influencers promote the exact same value system as people who don't believe in God, and some of it is because we know that there's something inside of especially the male mind, that believes that the symbols of success are the proof of success and that they are actually success. And wealth or fame, power stuff they're all great outcomes, but they're terrible intentions, and when you confuse an intention, a purpose for living, with an outcome, you end up living a very hollow life. And so can I think it's because we all can be easily seduced to believe that what you can get in the short term is what your soul is looking for in the long term. And if you're miserable, miserable rich is better than miserable poor. Miserable airplane is better than miserable no plane.

Speaker 2:

And I think it's actually like the default mode of I can't find happiness, but maybe I can get it. Finally, I have enough money where I can be happy, or I can have enough fame where I'm happy, or enough power when happy, and we're all just searching for life, and whatever we think contains life is what we pursue, and when it doesn't produce life, making us feel alive and making us want to get up in the morning to experience this beautiful thing. We think, oh, I just need a little bit more of it. The problem is that I'm pursuing the wrong thing is that I don't have enough of it, and so we never seem to reevaluate going. Maybe I'm pursuing the wrong thing, and when we do that, that changes everything.

Speaker 1:

I think that's a great segue into your chapter one and chapter three in Mindshift is then. That's why it's one of the main reasons those relationships are so important, because the hell gets you grounded and the help you see and understand that, again, it's not in the stuff, it's not about success. It literally is about living a life of significance.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and when someone says I don't need the things I've gained or I don't want them, or they just sort of happened, I don't always have a lot of confidence that they are self-aware, because when I work with people, they go. I don't want the fame, and they go. Every choice you make is about your fame. Or I don't want the power, every choice you make is about power. And so sometimes I think it's really important to take time to become self-aware. What's actually driving me? Is it actually a need, a longing inside of me that is being distorted and it cannot be fulfilled because of us? And the beautiful thing is, when you make people your highest value, it actually begins to not only ground you, but it creates a healthy equilibrium to the value of other things in your life, because I'm a person with a lot of drive and there are a lot of things that I have given my life to create, but I've never created them at the cost of my marriage or my relationship to my kids. I've been married 40 years my son's 35, my daughter's 32, and they both live within 10 minutes of me and they both work for me in different fields and we have incredible relationship together and I actually think that the best measure of that equilibrium in your life is the health of the closest relationships in your life. And, by the way, since you have a lot of believers online, a lot of times pastors have been the worst and they use ministry as an excuse to not invest in their marriage or their kids, just like a business guy. And the reason is because we tend to do the things that give us validation and affirmation. We tend to avoid the things that do not. And so if you're going to work and everyone's affirming you and then you go home and your spouse isn't affirming you, you're going to choose to go back to work. And it's the same way with people on platforms. The reason they get on stage is that if they only feel loved when they're on the stage, they're going to actually become addicted to the stage and they're going to hate the backstage and they hate the green room. They're going to hate the silence of going home because they're not being celebrated and adored and worshiped. And so I think it's really important just to figure out what is it when I'm alone that my soul is really begging for? And then it's not about. In a sense, it's almost like you know when people would ask me I was young, how did you stop all the self-destructive behavior? I would say I just ran out of time and I just started doing things that were really good, things that really mattered. I started giving my life to things that were so important that I ran out of time to do all the things that were self-destructive.

Speaker 2:

And you know, I have a little granddaughter now named Juno, and you know it's just like any kid, she can get addicted to almost anything. And so you know she saw the movie Frozen and then she's now like addicted to Frozen and she'll come in and she'll go Frozen, frozen, frozen, whatever, or Nemo, nemo and my wife you're trying to go no, no, nemo, no, nemo. But the moment you say no, nemo, you're talking about Nemo, and I just like Juno, let's go read and we run. And then we're she's looking at 20 books and instead of having a conversation about the thing that she wants it isn't good for, I just began a conversation about something I know she actually will want.

Speaker 2:

That's actually really good for her and I think that's the way that, in the most beautiful way, that God actually transitioned us to the best. He's like he's not saying you know, hey, ken, let's just talk about everything you're doing wrong. He's like, because then we're just going to spend the whole time talking about what you're doing wrong. Ken, I want to talk to you about what your life could look like and just come over here for a minute and it's like the moment he pulls you in the direction of the life he really created you for. You just forgot, you left the life you were not created for.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I love that. What are some things right now? You've actually been married for 40 years, been pastoring for decades. What are some of the things that bring Erwin McMahon his fulfillment right now in his life?

Speaker 2:

You know it's interesting. I just I love working with my kids, you know, I love. I love helping my daughter and when she has a dream she wants to pursue, and helping my son when he has, you know, a project he wants to take on. And I love creating, love creating new things. I'm already working in a new book and and hopefully I'll have it out, you know, this summer.

Speaker 2:

And I love creating, you know, the day, my, my, my son, because we run businesses together. He's like dad. I need you to, you know, to focus on this. And I told him I said, hey, at my stage of life, I love creating. I don't really like organizing, and I said so, good luck, good luck working with me. And because I've always been more of a creator, an artist and innovator and and I implement, because I know that only implementation changes anything and I know that the ideas I have, we have no value if I don't ever execute. And but I just, I just love creating stuff with my family and doing things with them, and it's probably what brings me the most joy in the world. Yeah, it's, it's not really. I'm actually a very like, like, quiet, introverted person who would be very happy just being in my laboratory creating my own stuff, and I go out to see people because people matter.

Speaker 1:

I love that and one of the stories you shared I think it was Mariah would carry her guitar with you places and you would give her opportunities to be able to perform.

Speaker 2:

Well, she would not carry it with her, I would carry it and I would make her perform. And I, when she was probably 14, I'm the only person ever heard her sing or play and write and I knew that we've been writing songs and she was probably four or five years old and her mom hadn't even heard her sing and she was very shy and very modest person and I said I want one year of commitment where every time I ask you to perform, you'll just get up and sing a song. And so she gave me one year and the first person was in the living room I had her sing a song for her mom and Kim was shocked. You know the talent that Mariah had. And then we, mariah and I, flew to Belfast and I spoke at a conference of about four or five thousand men and, right, I didn't bring a guitar.

Speaker 2:

Right before the event, there was a really famous musician there that I happened to know and he knew me and I said, hey, could we borrow your guitar? And it was like probably a $10,000 guitar or at least, or more. And he said, yeah, sure, and I gave him a ride of the car, the guitar. I said, hey, I want you to walk on stage right now because I'm about to speak and I want you to perform a song. And she goes I don't have a song. I said, write one.

Speaker 2:

And so she got up there and created a song extemporaneously that silenced the room. It was breathtaking and she did it without any fear and it just the stage was just very natural for her and I think it helped her begin to discover who she was, and that's, I think, that's part of the joy of like being a parent is that you get to help someone discover their inner beauty and inner greatness, and which, by the way, is what I, it's why I do masterminds, it's why I coach people. I think I have a unique ability to identify and pull greatness out of people. I know how to get inside of a person's eternal world and destroy the self-limiting frameworks and then move people toward, you know, an optimal life, and that gives me a lot of fulfillment.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've seen. I remember in the first or second mastermind we were at it in Hollywood One of the guys in our group had won a big court case and he was still angry. Even though he won, he was still angry. And I watched you walk him through dealing with the. It wasn't he didn't even care that he won, it was the. It was the injustice that they did, what they tried to do to him, and I just watched he's a very powerful, this is a very powerful individual, big time CEO. And I just watched you navigate that with him and literally just I mean I'm sitting over the room I was sitting probably three feet away from you and right across the living room from him and I just watched you navigate and help him kind of have that aha moment of why he was feeling the way that he was feeling. Where, where did you get that ability? Was that something you had before? Is that something that developed as you started to pastor? Is that a gift that you think that God has given you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was a funny situation. That was a person who just made $4.2 billion. Yeah, yeah, and we're all around the room.

Speaker 1:

We're all around the room going dude, you just won $4.2 billion. And then he said, oh, but I have to give my shareholder some of that money. We're like everybody's laughing in the room. He's still angry. He was visibly frustrated and angry because of a relationship and just even the reason that he was having to do the things and I just watch you masterfully walk him through that whole scenario to really connect with probably a part of his heart that he didn't even want to recognize and why he was that angry.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and since that time went in and worked with this company and it's been a really interesting journey. You know, I think it's just something that is maybe an intersection of the way God designed me genetically, but also the experiences I had growing up. I started playing chess when I was three years old in El Salvador and learned multiple languages from childbirth and I think that the languages helped my mind be much more pliable and adaptive, and then chess helped my mind be extremely strategic and understanding the recognition of patterns and cause and effect, and I think God just kind of like made me this way. But it was a real liability. Growing up, to be honest with you, and yeah, I don't know if I've even told this story publicly, but, like when I was somewhere in high school, you know, they made me take geometry.

Speaker 2:

I was a straight D student. I never studied, I didn't show up in school, I was living in another world, but I was reading books that nobody in high school was reading and I self-educated myself and I went to a geometry class that I'd missed. You know, 30, 40 days in it was just happening on proofs, the teacher had lined up the proofs and put lines in between the proofs and I'd never seen a proof in my life. And I looked at them and I got a perfect score on the math test. And the next day I came back in and she called me in front of the class and accused me of cheating. And I didn't. I thought I failed Like I didn't even understand. You know, I remember saying to her why would I cheat to get an F? And she showed me my paper and then they put me in a portable by myself to take the test because they were sure that I was cheating. And she asked me how could you know the answers? And I said I just saw the commonality between all the different problems, so I wasn't solving a problem. I looked at all the equations in the section therein and solved them as a larger equation. And I looked back and I realized that God had given me an ability to see problems and solve them through unexpected pattern recognition.

Speaker 2:

And it was always a curse. No one ever came up to me and told me hey, kid, I think you have like a talent, you know. So instead of going you got a hundred on this and you don't even know how to do the problem we should probably like maybe have you tested or figure out how to move you into some kind of special learning model. They put me in a portable because they thought I was cheating, and a lot of that happened to me growing up and so part of the problem is I always, accidentally, was a divergent thinker and people always say how do you think so out of the box and I go. I don't try to. I try to think in the box as I want to be accepted and loved and I spent my life trying to think like everyone else and I think now, at this stage in my life, it's taken me my entire life to feel somewhat comfortable. I don't tell these stories. I don't think you've ever heard me share you.

Speaker 1:

I have not heard that.

Speaker 2:

I have not heard that story now, and I would always keep that part of me a secret.

Speaker 1:

You know, you shared something on Instagram real, I saw this. I don't know if you shared this with us or I heard this at your conference, but it was a study that they did about children being having genius level IQs A large percentage of them early and then a very few. Can you share that? Because it's almost like that was your journey and because some of the things you had to face and because of how God had uniquely made you, you were able to carry that, that genius intellect with you throughout your entire life.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the specifics of that study are in my book the Genius of Jesus, and really the argument in that book, and also in the book the Artisan Soul which I wrote several years before, is that human genius exists in every human being Actually, I think I wrote about it in Artisan Soul and that the studies that were done through NASA discovered that children at the age of five about 98% of them test out as geniuses, but by the time we get around 12 years old, only about 2% of people test out as geniuses.

Speaker 2:

And so for me, and I think for many others who have looked at this research, the real question is not how do you become creative or how do you become a genius, but how do you make sure that you don't lose it that humans are born intrinsically creative, intrinsically ingenious if not genius, at least ingenious and intrinsically capable of innovation, creation, imagination and creativity. But we educated it out of kids, we beat it out of our kids, we structured it out of our kids. We think it's a liability and in some sense it is a liability Creativity without the necessary skills to materialize that creativity will leave you hungry on the street.

Speaker 1:

So let me ask you this Mariah was 13, 14 years old. You get a guitar from a famous musician which had to be a little intimidating that she's playing this individual's guitar and then you put her in front of 5,000 people to sing a song that she doesn't even have created yet Crosstalk onlarys be head. Why wouldn't more parents put their kids in those situations?

Speaker 2:

Well, it wasn't the first thing I did. I prepared her for that moment. We would write music together almost every night, and you know I, you know I brought instruments into the house. We were, you know, had violin, saxophones, drums, bass, guitars, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, piano organs and I. And then I would find someone that I knew that was a teacher and I'd say to my kids hey, this guy's going to come teach drums every Thursday at, you know, four o'clock. You don't have to, you don't have to take the lesson, it's wherever wants it, and and. So I wasn't a parent that said you had to, and they would end up fighting over I'll do it, I'll do it. And. And I said now, if you both want to do it, he'll stay for both, and and. So whoever had the appetite would do it, and and they just kept kept getting better and better, and and so I just surrounded them.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that human beings consider normative, whatever they experience on a regular basis. So if creativity is around them every day, they're going to think it's normative. If math is around them every day, they're going to consider it normative. If you walk five miles every day, your kids are going to consider walking five miles every day as normative, and so the things you create a part of your normative routine become the baseline for their lives. And imagine if you create a baseline where their their creativity and inventive self and adventure and pioneering and discovering what's normative? The problem with education is what's normative is memorizing information, and so you're teaching children is everything that needs to be known is already known. You just need to memorize it. And and we're not teaching them to solve problems, we're not teaching them to lead, we're not teaching them emotional intelligence where you know, I was going to say again we don't even teach kids when they graduate from high school how to do their taxes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or it's a checkbook or any of those other things.

Speaker 2:

Or how to start a company. We should be teaching every teenager in America how to start a company from scratch and how to incorporate. You know, we teach our children how to be employees at the mercy of someone else's wage for them.

Speaker 1:

I mean, our education system has been the same for over 100 years, yeah, and it literally is to create, to create factory workers. What are you excited about right now? What's in your life that just kind of moves you and just and just gets you catapulting out of bed every morning?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, one of the things I really am excited about is you know the work I get to do that no one else in the world gets to see. You know I really do love coaching a lot of these. You know high octane. You know leaders in the world and and just watching them flourish and thrive and and also helping them in times of incredible challenge where it could have been self-destructive but they made it through, and that's fun.

Speaker 2:

We've been working with Edwin Ariave at Skyline creating inside of his company a personal development mastermind so that all of his executives and sales teams can actually become the best leaders and opera performers inside of the company, so that they don't have to go outside, and I think it's an incredibly new innovation in the way that companies can actually form. You want to get the best talent, you know, don't just offer them a job, offer them a place where they're developed to be the highest level leadership leaders possible. And and I'm working on a book right now called the seven frequencies of communication, and I'm actually really excited about the impact that this framework for communication is going to have on the world. Once you begin to see the world through these communication frequencies, it's pretty hard to unsee it, and so I'm very, very excited about that coming out, hopefully in August.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that and you know, edwin is a dear friend as well and I love watching you guys together. And the one thing that I love about him and the rest of the guys in our group is he's a very successful businessman and entrepreneur and when he talks about the success that the people in his company under him achieve, man, he just lights up like literally his count in his changes and you can see here's a CEO of a very successful business. He's been very successful man. He gets a lot of fulfillment, energy and excitement out of helping the people around him become the best version of themselves and succeed in levels in ways they probably never thought they could.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and so you know one of the things that every Tuesday at 10am I'm in our space called the arena and I do a live session in our mastermind and what's really I love this because we have people all the way from Asia, from Europe, from Latin America who join us every single week and you know we get to talk about the top leadership issues in the world and probably, you know, honestly, I enjoy that almost more than anything I do, and because you know I'll bring up topic like overthinking or you know how to create an organizational culture that works.

Speaker 2:

And then we do 30 minutes of Q&A and the questions are always so, you know, just fascinating and engaging. And we one of the youngest guys in the arena I think his parents must have paid for it because it's, you know, like $4,000 a year. He's probably 16, 17, 18 years old and he comes with questions every single week and he's already working in the business world, like he's already. This kid's probably already making six figures and he's not even old enough to buy alcohol and it just to me it's so exciting to watch like this dynamic. Yeah, you know, I think that a really good place to get to in your life is to find your greatest enjoyment watching other people succeed. There's just something really, really fun about that Huge huge Tell me Arena.

Speaker 1:

where can people find out more about that? Erwin, people find out more about you. What's the best way for people to connect with you?

Speaker 2:

I think the easiest way is just go to erwinmcmanuscom and you can find out about the masterminds I do, the arena, which is our online mastermind, our more, you know, face to face mastermind. That's just a men's group right now. Men's mastermind, the one-on-one coaching, and when we have a conference that you know we do out here in LA, it'll be next October. I picked the dates. I thought the numbers were fascinating it's 10, 11 and 12. October, 11 and 12. And so, and that's going to be here in Los Angeles. So you go to erwinmcmanuscom and you can see the books I've written. You know, pick up MindShift and it's a good place to start.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I shared this with you before, but wide awake when I read that is, I was transitioning from being a mortgage broker back into full-time vocational ministry. I was actually out with Jensen in OCD when they first opened that church. I had flown out with Jensen and Tracy out there and I read that book in about three days and it was one of those things that was. It was a game changer for me. I just want to say thanks, man, for everything that you've done for me your voice, your friendship, your consistency and just modeling just modeling what it looks like to really care for, love people and really leave a lasting impact and a legacy in the lives of those around you, my friend.

Speaker 2:

Hey, thank you so much, Ken. It's great to have this conversation with you. I love you.

Speaker 1:

I can't wait. We'll be at Create in a month in Atlanta, march 14th, 15th to 16th. You guys can get more information growthstackdrivecom for slash create Atlanta. I'll drop a link here. We'll also drop a link down to Pastor Irwin's site. Check out every. Literally everything he's got going on is absolutely amazing. Again, thank you for joining us on another episode of as the Leader Grows. I'm your host, ken Jocelyn. As always, if this show has added value, do me a couple of things. Number one hit the subscribe button. Number two you'll share the podcast on your Instagram. We'll give you a little love on there as well. Thanks, and I'll see you next week on as the Leader Grows.