Thinking for a Change: An Interview with John Maxwell John Maxwell is one of today's premier authorities on leadership. Through his best-selling books, conferences, and organization (INJOY), John is sharing practical insights and tools with thousands of leaders and potential leaders. LeaderLinks editor Michael Duduit recently visited with John to discuss his latest book, Thinking for a Change (Warner Books). (Click here for more information about the book.)

LeaderLinks: In your book Thinking for a Change, you make the statement that successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. In what ways do successful people think differently?

Maxwell: In the book I identify eleven thinking skills that successful people have. Those are the eleven ways that they think differently. For example, successful people think very realistically. Unsuccessful people don't. Unsuccessful people just think that something will happen for them or something will happen to them. It's just a matter of time. It's kind of a lottery feeling about life. Successful people look at life very realistically and say I am going to have to make some changes here or I am going to lose my family or I'm going to lose my job or my kids. Successful people have a sense of realism that unsuccessful people don't have.

That thesis — that the greatest gap between successful and unsuccessful people is how they think — really came from my father at his 50th anniversary, when he and Mom were having a big wedding anniversary in Kauai and we were with them. He's been such a positive thinker and such an encourager and I said, "Dad, did you always think like that?" And he surprised me. He said, "No, when I was a senior in high school" — he grew up in Georgetown, a little town in southern Ohio — "there were only a couple of families in our town that were successful. Only 800 people in the town. In my senior year I asked myself, 'Why are they successful and everybody else here so average and I came to the conclusion that they thought differently.'

That was the seed to that book. For the next ten years I just watched people, listened to people. And I found that there were certain ways that they thought, certain thinking skills that they possessed. I began to write them down and clarify them. That really is the heart of the book.

Successful people think big picture. Unsuccessful people are just consumed with themselves. What is going to happen to me? They are almost living moment by moment. You know what I'm saying. Never looking at life in context.

Successful people think creatively. Therefore because they're creative thinkers, what do they have? They have options. Unsuccessful people don't have options. Everything is a dead-end street. Lost their job — what will we do now? Never get out of themselves, never get out of their comfort zone, never think out of the box.

Successful people are very reflective. They evaluate everything. They understand that experience is not the best teacher — it is the hardest teacher, it's not the best teacher. Evaluative experience is the best teacher. So they understand that they have to reflect because reflection gives insight into experience. Without reflection you get no insight. Some people just move from experience to experience to experience. Never grow from it. What causes another person to go from experience to experience and grow? It's the reflection. So successful people reflect, unsuccessful people have a tendency to not reflect. Those eleven thinking skills are the eleven major differences, I think, between being successful and unsuccessful.

The greatest limiting factor in a person's life is their thinking. If I don't think or if I don't think good thoughts, I am only going to be a recipient of what is given to me.

John Cotter has written some great change books in leadership. We were talking about some of this stuff and he said, "John, the vast majority of people don't make their life — they accept their life." And I thought this is so true. People with no thinking skills or limited thinking skills, they just take what is handed to them. They have no other option. When I limit my thinking, the smallness of my thinking is going to always determine what I receive from it.

LeaderLinks: You talk about the importance of being a big picture thinker. How do leaders develop that skill?

Maxwell: First of all we often equate vision with leadership. We say, "Man, he can cast a great vision, therefore he is a great leader." I don't think so. I think the ability to cast vision is the skill of the communicator, not a leader. I have known a lot of very good communicators that could cast vision but really couldn't take the people there. When the sermon was over it was over. So I think that the ability to cast vision is not a leadership skill.

The question is being a big picture thinker. The ability to see the big picture — whether it's your vision or not — the ability to see the big picture is definitely a leadership skill. The ability to see not only what is happening but what probably could happen, what has happened, to have an appreciation for the past, to have a grasp of the present, to have an intuition of the future. That big picture thinking, I think, is definitely into the realm of what I would call a natural leader. I'll give you the difference. If I cast visions but I don't see the big picture, half the time we don't go there because the people are not ready. The context hasn't been set. A big picture thinker is a person who understands the context of things — whether he or she likes it that way or not — and then understands what is necessary to make this vision happen. If you are a big picture thinker, the vision will become a reality. If you are a visionary it doesn't necessarily mean you see the big picture. And the big picture allows the good things to happen.

I've got weaknesses, I've got strengths. I do some things good, I do some things very poorly. And I suppose this is a gift. I have always looked at people around me and been amazed at their inability to see the whole picture. They will make decisions and I would think, "Don't they see what is going happen? Don't they understand where this is?" And one day it just hit me that perhaps that it's more giftedness that anything else. When pastors get in trouble — as they do in churches all the time — it's almost always because they didn't see the big picture.

I think for the best ones it is probably innate and natural — that is what you call the natural gifted leader — but I think it can always be cultivated. Oh my goodness, so much of the stuff that I do today I learned. It was learned behavior from watching someone else. And I believe somebody that hangs with me a lot, I think that there are so many ways that they think differently today than they would have thought. It is not because we have gone to school and sat down and had classroom session 101 but you get in that environment. And that is why I am so grateful I had an environment as a kid that was very privileged. We didn't have any money but we had a positive, encouraging, affirming home — all the stuff that you need to have to get you started off.