1KHO 879: Should Parents Trust Their Gut More? | Andy Stanley, What Great Leaders Do

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000Hours Outside. Before I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to your daughter and wife about their book. It was called Meet Me in the Middle.
They wrote this book together and it was so precious. It's like mother and daughter conversations. Now the father is here, Andy Stanley. Welcome, welcome Andy.

**Andy Stanley** (1:26)
Well, I'm glad you know about their book. Then Sandra and I have a parenting book that we did together.
Our kids are all in their 30s. They're married. They all each have one kid. One of our daughter has two kids. We have been there and done that and we love talking about this. Not because we did it all right, but because we did it and you learn a lot in the process. Our responsibility is to just pass along what we learned.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:49)
Yes, I loved it. I got to talk to Sandra and actually they both were on. They both came on to talk about the book right about when it came out and it was like, and Allie was on into these mother daughter conversation. So I've had a chance to talk with them. You have more than 20 books, your own podcast called the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. I'll make sure I'll put all the links in the show notes. But today is an exceptional day because you have a brand new book out. It is called What Great Leaders Do, Seven Essentials for Enduring Impact. It's fantastic. I took nine pages of notes. One of the things that you talk about to kick this book off is that leadership kind of shows up in a lot of different realms. Some people are natural leaders. That's what you talk about. You're like, I would contend some people. You even talked about it. In your own childhood, people called that out in you. There was a lady named Mary. You went to church with Louis Giglio. You're like in middle school together. Mary sees something that you are natural leaders. This book is about leadership, but there were so many things about it that reminded me of parenting. Obviously, parents are leaders. I wanted to kick it off there. No matter what situation you're in in terms of leadership, if you're leading a company or if you're leading a church or if you're leading a family, this is a book about things that great leaders do well. I want to kick it off with this. I never heard of it and I wish I would have read this when I was a younger mother. It's actually going to help now.
But this concept of tensions, I never heard about this, Andy. Tensions are things you manage.
It totally reminded me of the early years of being a parent and coming from things being very controlled.
Like you control your life. I'm going to work now, I'm going to not work now, this is what I'm going to do. Then children enter the picture and it's very uncontrolled. I spent years trying to get back to where things were before, trying to solve that problem, but it wasn't something that could have been solved, it's actually a tension. This is something you talk extensively about in the book. Can you explain it?

**Andy Stanley** (3:52)
Yes.
The contrast is between problems to solve and tensions to manage.
The book is primarily written to organizational leaders, but you're exactly right Ginny, and especially this particular principle from the book. So when somebody tries to solve attention, they create a problem, and if you manage a problem, then the problem never goes away. So you solve a problem, but you manage attention. And all of your parents listening, all the moms listening, here's the classic, the tension is work-life balance. You don't solve work-life balance, you manage work-life balance. And it's a good illustration to understand this principle. The only way, if you try to solve work-life balance, that means you just go to work and don't go home, solved. Or you just stay at home and don't go to work, solved, which creates a big problem either way you go. So work-life balance is just that, it's a balance. It's a tension you manage and you steer a little bit left, you know, left on some instances, more to the right in some instances, it never goes away. That's just one example, but in our lives, our personal lives, our family lives, organizational life, organizational leadership, there are problems to solve, intentions to manage. So this is language we created in our organization. And we'll be in a meeting talking about something and somebody will say, you know what? I think this is a tension to manage, not a problem to solve. And as soon as we're able to make that distinction, then we know, oh, this is something that's never gonna go away. It's gonna continue to be on the agenda and that's okay. We're not gonna try to solve it. We're just gonna get better managing it. And there are so many of these at home, whether it's your kid's diet, it's your kid's schedule, it's your kid's bedtime. And again, as every season of life comes along and changes, there are new tensions to manage. The friendship thing, you don't solve your kid's friends, right? You manage the kids that are in and out of your kid, the friends that are in and out of kids' lives. So just having this language as parents and looking at each other and are looking in the mirror and say, wait a minute, am I trying to solve a tension? Because you can't solve a tension. You manage the tension and it is maddening. And depending on your personality type, where you just like to put everything on a shelf and get it all buttoned up and all organized, you just can't do that with tensions to manage. And anything that's relational is generally a tension to manage, not a problem to solve.