Episode 1533: Interview with Christian Muntean About His Book "Train to Lead"

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Thanks for joining us on episode 1533 of the Inspired Stewardship
Podcast. I'm Christian Montine.
I challenge you to invest in yourself,
invest in others,
develop your influence and impact the world by using your time,
talent and treasures to live out your calling.
Having the ability to recognize that great leadership doesn't happen by

(00:22):
accident is key.
And one way to be inspired to do that is to
listen to this the Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend Scott
Meader. It was kind of shaking to my own theology to

(00:42):
find God leading me more into very,
very businessy type things and things that look less overtly like
ministry, but feeling like my experience is much more like high
traction when it comes to ministering to people' welcome and thank
you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

(01:04):
If you truly desire to become the person who God wants
you to be,
then you must learn to use your time,
your talent and your treasures for your true calling.
In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast you will learn to invest in
yourself, invest in others,
and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

(01:33):
In this podcast episode,
I interview Christian Montine.
I asked Christian about why leadership is a skill you can
train. I also asked Christian about the common challenges leaders face
and what we can do about them.
And Christian also shares with you how leadership training can become
a daily habit.
I have a great book that's been out for a while
now called Inspired Living A Assemble the puzzle of your calling

(01:56):
by mastering your time,
your talent and your treasures.
You can find out more about that book [e-mail]
it'll take you to a page where there's information and you
can sign up to get some mailings about it as well
as purchase a copy there.
I'd love to see you get a copy and share with
me how it impacted your world.

(02:18):
Christian Montine is an advisor to owners,
executives and boards.
As the founder of Vantage Consulting,
Christian has empowered owners and executives of small and medium sized
businesses to boost their top line revenues by over 500 million.
Even more valuable,
they've achieved this while expanding their bottom line margins and reclaiming
precious time for their loved ones and passions.

(02:41):
He is also an author.
His most recent book,
Train to Lead,
is a tested and proven 90 day leadership development guide built
on athletic training principles.
Welcome to the show Christian.
It's good to be here Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
So I talked a little bit in the intro about some

(03:02):
of the things you've done and are doing now through Vantage
Consulting through your book,
Train to Lead and others.
But I always think of intros and bios and those sorts
of things as just showing.
It was like the Instagram photos.
Right. It just shows the good stuff.
It. Or shows the real story.
Unpack for us a little bit more about your journey and
what brought you to the book and putting this out and

(03:25):
what brought you to where this is the message you want
to put out in the world.
Yeah, I guess there's two different stories there.
I'll try to be quick with it.
My journey really came from work in early in ministry and
missions and then in disaster relief work in both places or
both contexts.
I began to see that when I used to do international

(03:50):
disaster relief and then in the missions work I was doing.
I was in the Middle east for part of that time,
so I was in,
you could call it austere environments and.
And do a lot with very little.
Right. But sometimes you had a lot.
In some dynamics,
in some situations,
there actually was a lot of resources that you had available.
And what I saw is that you could be in a

(04:10):
very well resourced,
relatively secure area.
And if the leadership of the team struggled or the team
dynamics were not healthy,
it was very hard to be effective.
And it was also very.
You couldn't be.
It was hard to be happy or hard to be like.
It gnawed away at your spirit,
so to speak.
On the other hand,
if you were led well and your team worked well,

(04:34):
and if our community partners the same thing,
if they were led well and so on,
we could be in an active conflict zone with very little
resources and get an amazing amount done and enjoy ourselves.
And for it to be a very positive experience and being
one of the leaders that didn't always do things right and
wanted to,
I just felt like our work was too important to not

(04:56):
understand this key dynamic that it seemed like not many of
us understood.
And cause people went into those professions not planning on leading
anything, but they were planning on doing something different.
And they found that their job was leadership.
And we didn't understand that part of the jobs.
Most of us didn't.
And so that became a real passion of mine and a

(05:16):
real pursuit.
And I think part of my calling,
the book itself,
Train to Lead,
it's my third book and part of my motivation in that
is I also have a background in athletics and fitness.
I was a strength and conditioning instructor for about 12 years
as a kind of a side hobby.
But I was wondering one day as I was driving home
from the gym,
like, why is it that I can train an athlete or

(05:37):
a soldier to the day to peek out to the day
before they needed to use whatever they're,
whatever they're being trained for.
And if you know how to design a training regimen,
you know how to do that.
But for leaders,
if you get any training at all,
it's usually you're handed a couple of books or you're sent
to a conference and you're fire hose with information and it's

(05:59):
good luck.
Now don't goof this up.
And I just thought,
I think we should be able to do better with leadership.
There's a lot of great leadership research and conversation and topics
out there and books.
I'm not inventing anything new,
but what I found is that most people don't know how
to approach the content or concepts of leadership in a way

(06:22):
that they can absorb and apply.
And so they start just grabbing things that sound good and
hoping that they work and finding that it's difficult to make
them work or they're not working well on their own.
And so I wanted to create a book that was similar
to a fitness training program.
If you wanted to run a marathon or you wanted to
start strength training and you wanted to buy a book that
guided you through,

(06:43):
these are the basic things you need to know.
And this is the,
here's the training plan for actually like incorporating this.
And so I wanted to make it very almost like a
self coaching guide for folks that wanted to grow in their
leadership capacity regardless of what level they're in right now.
A new leader or an experienced leader,
definitely some things there I want to dig into and follow

(07:04):
up. And also for point of making sure that we're all
on the same page.
Leadership is one of those things that we talk about,
but not everybody always means the same thing when they say
leaders or leadership.
Sure. For you,
when you're talking about leaders and leadership,
could you define,
put some framework around who are you speaking to in that
capacity? Yeah,

(07:24):
I'm speaking to.
I view leadership as something you do in the sense of
it's somebody who can align a group of people and motivate
them towards a shared purpose or a shared goal.
So that's the working definition that I use.
Obviously you have people that are in positions of leadership and
they're in the role of the leader and they have varying

(07:45):
levels of awareness and capacity in terms of being able to
do the action of leadership.
And oftentimes,
and I think you're.
This is probably part of your framework as well,
is that many people end up in the role or the
position of leadership.
Assuming that means that they're a complete leader because they now
have the title and not understanding that the title and the

(08:08):
actual responsibilities or skills that go with the title are.
They don't.
You don't inherently absorb it just because you're given a promotion.
If I give you a title,
you don't magically get the skills of.
Or a business owner.
If I'm working with a business owner and they're a great
foreman and then they were a great tradesman foreman,
became a general contractor and they're running a company and they're

(08:30):
successful, then at a certain point they find that their job
is people and it's not getting out there and building whatever
there was that they were building.
And for many of them,
that's very confusing and can be frustrating.
Not understand,
like, why do I have to deal with all these people?
And I often remind them,
if you didn't have to deal with all these people,
there'd be no need for leaders or managers.

(08:52):
So be grateful that they need some of our help.
Yeah, I've seen it both ways too,
where I've seen folks that are given a position or a
title or a position of leadership and yet don't necessarily yet
understand the verb of leadership,
the leading part,
or have the skills sometimes,
or the training or the support even.

(09:13):
I've seen leaders put in that position.
And then basically they're told to lead the exact same way
as every other leader.
But if every other leader in the group isn't doing a
good job,
what do you have to model it off of?
Exactly. Yeah.
And I've seen the opposite.
I've seen sometimes,
folks. I was in the corporate world for 11 years.
I've been a schoolteacher.
I've done a lot of different things in my life,
run my own businesses.

(09:34):
And I've seen people step up and become leaders and be
leaders and yet technically not have a title or a role
or responsibility.
So I love the idea,
like you're saying,
of there's positional leadership,
there's the skill of leadership.
In the best case scenario,
the two get married together.
Sure. Or in my role as a consultant and an advisor,

(09:57):
I never have formal authority in an organization,
but I definitely am providing leadership.
And. But it's not the kind of leadership that can ever
really be directive because everybody can always opt to just ignore
me. And so the.
I think,
like something that I talk about with people who are in
that informal role and they're frustrated because they're not being listened

(10:20):
to or whatever.
I often say that's actually the best possible place to learn
leadership because all of the skills that you can use to
be able to learn to exercise,
influence and focus people are all skills that once you've learned
it here,
you'll be able to exercise it much more easily when you
have the formal position to do it.

(10:40):
And then you won't be relying on whatever power or authority
mechanisms you have,
you'll be relying on actual leadership skills,
and you'll actually just be that much more effective.
And yeah,
I think it's leadership's interesting.
I think it's this broad field of scenarios that people find
themselves in.
And I've been in that.
Again, I've been in those positions too,

(11:01):
where I had an informal leadership role just because of the
nature of skills that I had and the ability to pull
a team together and do things.
And then I've also had formal leadership roles where I was
given a title or position or that kind of thing.
And it is interesting that there's this sort of belief sometimes
it's almost,

(11:21):
oh, the people that can figure it out,
the natural born leader kind of philosophy.
And yet you're taking this approach of this is something you
can learn,
you can study,
you can train.
Yeah. Talk a little bit about that.
Con. Conflict's not the right word,
but that different way of looking at it and why you've
taken the belief that this is something you can learn,
you can train.
Yeah, the.

(11:41):
As I,
I use the.
The framework of fitness and training as the,
I guess,
kind of the paradigm that I'm working with to translate for
leadership skills.
And so one of them is that in fitness,
anybody can become more fit,
anybody can become healthier and be able to move their body

(12:04):
more, have a greater sense of balance,
be able to build some strength,
be able.
Any of those things,
anybody can do that.
I have a friend right now who tragically broke his neck
a couple of months ago and was paralyzed from the neck
down. So he's working hard,
he's a fighter,
and he's out there.
He's regained his ability to move much of his body and
he's working on his fine motor skills.

(12:26):
And so I think that's an example of how anybody can
go back and retrain themselves physically,
even if you're coming from an extremely disadvantaged position.
That doesn't mean we're all going to become Olympic athletes.
And so I think there's some people who have a talent
mix a skill,
mix a gifting,
mix whatever you want to call it,
and they're just going to be able to lead highly complex

(12:47):
organizations under extreme stress and challenging scenarios and be incredibly,
almost effortlessly,
it appears influential and inspiring and all those kinds of things.
And not everybody will necessarily have that.
But I do think that everybody can grow to a healthy
level of fitness or learn to provide a healthy level of

(13:08):
leadership. I believe that if the world were subjected to only
the people that had the right genetics to provide leadership,
then back in the day when you didn't have the Internet
or have cars or have telephones and you're in a village
somewhere and you're stuck with who you got,
how would those people ever learn or ever grow?

(13:29):
I think there's this,
there's got to be an understanding that you can improve from
where you're at right now.
And how far you improve,
I think has a lot more to do with the effort
you put into it than it does with any natural charisma
or anything else that you have.
Even Olympic athletes.
I think there's going to be almost no Olympic athlete who

(13:52):
doesn't train incredibly hard for an incredibly long amount of time
to make their natural gifts appear.
Like, wow,
how do you do that?
It's because they spent thousands and thousands of hours learning it.
And I,
my thought is if you're leading something that you think is
important, then maybe we should put as much time into it

(14:12):
as a tennis player would or a baseball player or something
like that.
Yeah. Into learning how to do it.
And that idea that you're talking about there of again using
athletes. So I,
I have a degree in genetics and so I approach.
Okay, so a background from genetics and you know what I
question I used to ask people is,
okay, there's a six foot four gentleman that marries a six

(14:36):
foot three woman and they have a baby.
Predict for me the height of the baby when they reach
adulthood. And everyone's going to give me a very large number.
They're going to give them an above average number.
And then I say,
oh, but I forgot to mention,
I actually raised them in an austere environment.
They didn't get enough food,
they didn't get enough water,
they didn't get enough sunlight.

(14:56):
They were really deprived.
They're still going to be taller than an average person in
that situation,
but they're not going to reach that full height of 6
3, 6,
4. They're not going to reach their full potential because you
change the environment.
And I think leadership is much the same where if you
change the environment,
you change the approach,
you change the ideas.

(15:17):
Obviously people will be able to thrive better,
but if you've got the skills,
you could still do okay even when things are struggling.
Would you agree with that?
I think so.
I really think.
And my book,
part of it is my book.
The first sections of the book really focus on personal development.
I think that's something that is alluded to,

(15:41):
but not always,
maybe as heavily addressed in a lot of leadership talks is
that I can't be a leader who's really like big on
ownership and accountability and responsibility.
If I struggle with those things myself,
I may see it,
I may believe it,
I might get excited about it and I may be really

(16:03):
excited about strategic planning.
And that's my big thing is I'm a strategic thinker and.
But if I have a hard time with the basic disciplines
of doing what needs to be done today and being able
to differentiate daily priorities from the daily urgencies,
then it really doesn't matter how strategic I am because I'm
not going to be able to stay on point.
I'm not going to stay focused on the goal.

(16:24):
And so I think like these basic disciplines and practices are
absolutely critical.
Basically self management practices are really critical for effective leadership and
they're the basis of it.
And I think that's something that's often overlooked is that somebody
who's a very good salesperson,
good at business development,

(16:44):
they're great engineer,
they're great at whatever they're doing and they get promoted.
That's the typical paths of.
Into leadership.
You're good at sales.
So let me make the sales manager now and put you
in charge of the team.
Yeah. And then the CEO.
And so that's a very typical pathway.
Basically you're making us money,
so we want you to run the ship and the.
But that's not really looking at the internal dynamics of what

(17:07):
is somebody who's carrying that kind of load and needs to
be able to relate people differently.
What is the.
I don't know the qualities that person needs to have to
be able to be effective sustainably in that space.
And so I think that's my book.
I refer to that as nutrition and environment,
which are key elements for what you were referencing actually.
But also for athletes,
but then also conditioning,

(17:28):
like how do we prepare yourself for stress and for activity.
And so I think it is important.
Yeah, absolutely.
So before I go too much further down the book and
leadership, because we.
I want to dig back into that.
One of the things I like to highlight on the show
is the intersection that we have between our faith journeys and
our belief systems and our life journeys.

(17:50):
The things that we do in the world.
Share a little bit.
You mentioned doing ministry and disaster relief and those sorts of
things. Share a little bit about how your faith and your
views on leadership and these things.
How have they intersected and influenced each other?
Yeah, I hope it's not just an intersection in that it's
like a path that I'm following.
That feels like such a large question that you just asked

(18:12):
in the sense that there's so many different ways to go
with it.
I'm going to say this.
When I started out,
I grew up in the church.
I grew up in a Christian home and somewhere towards in
high school I made a real serious commitment of faith and
felt called into ministry and into missions.
That's how I understood this feeling that I had to do

(18:34):
something and pursued that.
And. And that brought me to a lot of different places
and which is where I discovered disaster relief.
And I started getting involved in that and that seemed like
the right direction or leading or at least an opportunity.
Now I'm in this odd space like this long story of
that. Then consulting to non profits which became consulting to businesses

(18:57):
and then doing that.
And now I do m a work and I'm working with
exit strategies and secession planning.
And it's interesting now because the work that I do feels
or looks so far removed from where I started.
So if I had Talked to myself 30 years ago,
I would have interpreted what I do now as being way

(19:18):
off base because of the church framework and the theological framework
I had.
Like you can't be involved in mergers and acquisitions and helping
people buy businesses.
And that also be of God.
And what I found,
and this is something I discovered in the Middle east,
what I found is you have to be in people's lives
to be able to speak to their heart.

(19:39):
And when you're working around major transitions or major moves or
risky experiences in people's businesses,
their hearts are very open.
And I just believe that God led me to this place,
at least for now,
for the time being.
And I have amazing opportunities with people that are growing,
companies buying companies,

(20:00):
selling companies,
building their teams out,
trying to figure out how do you work with the team,
how do I lead,
how do I become someone who can own this or lead
this. And it's just over and over again I'm working.
People have referenced me as man.
It's here my counselor,
you're my priest.
And they.

(20:21):
Because I often become the person that talked to them,
often the first person that finds out that outside of the
family that they're having a baby,
that somebody Died that their marriage is on the rocks.
And this is not technically what I do.
But you build those kinds of relationships.
So my.
I guess my point is it was shaking to my own

(20:46):
theology to find God leading me more into very businessy type
things and things that look less overtly like ministry but feeling
like my experience is much more like high traction when it
comes to ministering to people's lives in this very businessy looking
context. And it just a.

(21:08):
It helps me see how little I really understand like originally.
And then it puts me at awe like how God works
because it's something that I was raised to not really even
think was possible because I always had this idea that somehow
not having things and not like some.
Actually I think I was raised with the idea we're going

(21:29):
back to our leaders,
natural or not.
I think I also was raised the ideas are successful business
owners. Is that something God just bopped you on the head?
You're a successful business owner now.
Open your wallet every Sunday.
That's your role in life.
I think that's how I was raised where I believe that
somehow they just had that gifting and all the rest of
us just try to survive life and that's more holy in

(21:49):
some way.
And to find that God actually led me into this place
of business success and then helping people be successful but understanding
it's about the people at the core and about.
And all business is about relationships.
And so helping people navigate those relationships.
To me it's just I guess to use like churchy language.

(22:10):
The fields are white.
Yeah. The interesting thing is I've seen that too where,
where the Christian message often that those with money or those
with businesses or those with.
There's almost kind of two things.
Either they got there by taking advantage people and they're evil.
Right. Or if they're not evil and for some reason we

(22:31):
can see that they're not evil,
then God has blessed them because their faith must be great.
You know,
somehow. Yeah,
there's that perspective too.
Yeah, those two.
And then the other end is somebody without money.
It's almost the same split message in that oh,
look how faithful and holy and spiritual they are because they
have nothing.
Or alternatively.
Oh, the reason they have nothing is because their faith isn't

(22:52):
strong and so God's not blessing them.
And it's weird that you could manage to have those four
messages all exist at the same time.
Yeah, we're comfortable with cognitive dissonance.
Part of my journey to this realization.
When I started consulting,
I was specifically targeting small nonprofits and ministries very small,
like many,

(23:12):
many ones,
ones with under budgets,
under $200,000
kind of stuff,
like tiny.
And that was where my passion was.
I was like,
if instead of starting another nonprofit,
I can help these ones be successful.
And I began to see something.
And it took me 10 years to finally just admit this,
but we did a lot of training,

(23:32):
a lot of coaching,
a lot of consulting,
a lot of support for these little non profits,
little ministries,
little governments.
And what I discovered is that it really came back to
the quality of leadership.
And I'm going to make a generalization here that some people
might not like,
but I would hope most people really consider that the reason

(23:56):
a lot of these folks had really small organizations is because
they weren't being stewarded very well.
And so they were given opportunities.
Basically. I was pretty discouraged one day and I went through
all my client files and let's say I had 100 clients
over however many years.
I only found,
and these are ones that I had given free or nearly
free services to.

(24:17):
And I only found maybe 5% that had actually really done
anything what they had been given.
And I thought my first reaction a,
it wasn't encouraging.
I went through it looking,
hoping for encouragement,
like I'll see,
like testimonials to success.
I went through it and I thought,
I'm not being a good steward.
If this is the sum of all of my work and
labor, I've got like a 5% return.

(24:40):
Not a 5% return,
but only 5% have returned.
I'm not sure that I'm stewarding what I'm supposed to be
doing. Like,
I need to be finding the people who really want to
do something.
And here is the thing is those people didn't need as
much help.
They were already somewhat successful.
They were already motivated towards stewardship,
already trying to learn leadership practices,

(25:00):
management practices.
They were already putting things and pieces together.
And that's this,
this difficult reality is that some of the people that struggle
the most,
it's because they're stuck with mindsets or perspectives that hold them
back and they really allow themselves to be,
I would say,
enslaved by those.
But you can explain it away with some sort of a

(25:24):
martyr story or some sort of other story,
which I've done.
I've, I identify with that.
I've used to.
But I began to see,
like, for me to be a good steward,
I need to work with people who are also stewards.
And because then we get a multiplying effect.
And this is from the parable of the talents I was
really challenged by that.
And at the time,
I was considering marrying my wife,

(25:45):
and I'm looking at Proverbs 31,
and it hit me for the first time.
I don't think I ever heard it preached this way personally.
Maybe other people have,
but I was like,
oh, this woman owns three companies.
She's in real estate,
she's in textiles,
and she's in.
She's venting,
and she's an entrepreneur.
And God thinks that's awesome.

(26:06):
And because she's an entrepreneur,
her wife,
her husband's respected and she's able to take care of all
these people and all these different things.
But that's like a key part of that passage is this
woman is entrepreneurial and not that every woman needs to be.
I'm not trying to say that,
but there's something about entrepreneurialism that gets highlighted in that scripture
that I think we can't gloss over because it's not what

(26:26):
everybody will do or does.
And she's being steward and she's making.
She's being a steward and she's making things grow.
And God,
over and over again,
you see this in the Bible.
God gets a kick out of when somebody makes something grow
and he loves it.
That over and over again.
And I thought,
I think God likes something about the creativity that goes into

(26:47):
entrepreneurialism, where you take a nothing,
an idea and you build something out of it.
And. And I think he.
I don't want to get.
I'm not trying to be weird in this,
but I think somehow he's present in that there's something about
his creative presence which expresses itself in that way.
So, anyways,
in your question about how I see the interaction of faith

(27:07):
and what I'm doing now is I think that I don't
believe in there being a dichotomy between secular and sacred.
I believe God is here.
And I believe that his omnipresence that we talk about in
church is true.
Meaning he shows up at work as much and sometimes maybe
more, not more,
but like his presence can be as much felt on a

(27:30):
work site,
around a board table as it is in a Sunday morning
service. I hope to intersect with him as often as I
can, just as I'm working with clients.
And I think that it is a mindset thing,
like you said,
it's that taking the mindset of you,
are they separate or are they not?
In some ways,
when you view them as separate,

(27:50):
it's almost reducing the power of God in a way,
it's making God smaller.
Where, yeah,
I believe God's Big enough to show up whether we want
him to or not.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it's,
it's. And I just think it's fascinating that he shows up
in this space.
And when you.
When I started to see things from this perspective,

(28:12):
and then I go back through Scripture,
it's interesting when you look at how many of the leaders
that are really identified in Scripture are leaders more in what
we would call classically the secular context,
like many of the heroes of the Bible are,
really would fit in that kind of a context today.
And so I don't like terms.
I'm not making a big deal about this,
but I don't like terms like marketplace,

(28:34):
ministry, or things like.
Like that because I think creates a sense of other as
opposed to this should just be how we live life.
In the same way,
I think that the way I am as a person is
going to unavoidably impact how I lead.
I think if my faith is really part of my life,
then it will impact everything wherever I go.

(28:55):
And when I was doing ministry in the Middle east,
that became very clear because you couldn't.
My first name is Christian.
I'm from America.
Here I am in the Middle east,
and I worked in a lot of different Islamic countries.
I mean,
it wasn't the easiest way to start a conversation or a
relationship. And I realized I needed to be doing something that

(29:15):
made sense to the local people.
If I just showed up and say,
hey, I'm here to give you good news,
they already have an understanding of what Christians are,
what our version of the good news is,
and they've already pre rejected it.
And so that's not the right way to start a conversation.
And the cool thing is I saw the.
And anybody who's worked in the Middle east will tell you

(29:35):
this. The majority of the conversions you ever hear about in
the Middle east ever come from either Jesus Christ or an
angel just appearing to somebody and saying,
I'm the way,
or Jesus is the way.
Follow him.
You hear that story over and over again in the Middle
East. You don't hear it from people going in there,
not often,
I should say,
and trying to do work.

(29:56):
It's like God directly intervening and I think bringing those experiences
back to corporate life and realizing,
oh, God can and does just intervene in people's lives.
In the flooring company,
in the construction company,
in the hospital.
He just shows up and does things in people's lives and
brings about transformation.

(30:17):
And to the degree that he allows me to be part
of that story,
I want to be there.
So when you think about leadership and going back to this
idea of leadership as something you can train,
I actually think I would argue that you have biblical support
for that too.
Because not only were many of the leaders that you could
talk about in the Bible secular at some level,
either before,

(30:37):
during or after their leadership position,
but many of them,
based on the descriptions were given,
did not start as a natural born leader.
Right. Now,
granted, they were given some of those skills,
they were given through faith,
but they also were given them through practice and effort and
learning as well.

(30:58):
I think you can definitely call out examples of that throughout
the Bible stories of leadership.
Yeah, for sure you can have a natural talent,
but that talent still has to be practiced.
I may have a natural ear for music,
but if I don't put in my time on a keyboard
or a guitar or whatever I'm playing,
then I'm not going to be a good musician.
And so you still have to practice it.
You still have to work at being better at it.

(31:18):
So when you're talking to somebody.
Yeah, let's say you're talking to that small business owner or
that new leader,
somebody that's early in taking on some of those roles of
leadership or those responsibilities of leadership,
maybe it's a formal position,
maybe not,
doesn't matter.
But they're,
they've been put where they're having to start to do it.
Sure. And they realize I don't have all of this naturally,

(31:40):
I don't have it all together yet.
I need to grow that.
We're going to assume that they actually had that realization because
not everyone does right away.
What are some of the first things that you would tell
them to lean into and be.
Begin working to start that,
that training regime,
so to speak.
Yeah. So where I recommend that people begin with that is
in surrounding them,

(32:00):
paying attention to the inputs in their life.
So this is maybe a different kind of a place,
but paying a lot of attention.
What kind of news do I consume?
What kind of podcasts do I listen to?
What kind of books do I read?
What kind of people do I hang out with?
There's so much and I talk about it in the book
a little bit,
but there is so much research and studies around this.
And there's scripture that also says that depending which one you

(32:21):
want to be influenced by or both.
But life reflects scripture.
Scripture describes life.
So I think it's or helps us understand life.
So the,
that the environment and the people you are around,
unavoidably, it will impact you and change who you are and
how you relate.
And so the.
My recommendation is to make sure that your closest relationships,

(32:44):
five or six closest relationships,
are people who are on the same journey as you and
they're pursuing that journey in a way that you admire,
or they're just a little bit ahead of you and they
can coach you on how to do that.
Maybe one or two are much further ahead of you and
they're a vision of where you want to get to.
But be careful that if you're trying to become an effective

(33:06):
leader, you're not spending most of your time around people who
are complaining about their boss.
It's not going to help you,
it's going to hold you back.
Most people who want to be effective and anybody I know
who's become highly successful has had at least one,
if not multiple points in their life where they have to
change up their relational mix.
And that's just a reality that you do need to pay

(33:28):
attention to who you surround your with and the inputs that
would be.
The first place I would start is I would marinate myself
in podcasts like yours and books that are supportive for this
and the relational framework.
The second thing I would pay attention to is my perception
at the core.

(33:49):
I can't.
I can only lead people to what I see.
And so how I see myself,
how I see other individuals and how I see the world
around me creates boundaries for the potential for where I can
lead or how I'll relate to people.
If I see myself as limited or under threat,
then that's going to impact how I lead.

(34:10):
If I see myself as someone who has the ability to
learn and to grow and can succeed,
then that's going to impact how I lead.
If I see people as frustrations or as however I see
them in some limiting way,
they'll live down to that expectation.
If I see people as potential,
as people that can be trained,
et cetera.
And so I think those two things are the.

(34:32):
Are broad starting points that surround yourself with good influences,
immerse yourself in that,
and then pay attention to your perception of yourself,
how you see others and how you see life around you.
And to make sure those are adjusted in a way that
allow you to have an expansive view of life and one

(34:55):
that does have optimism or faith or those kinds of things
in it,
that good can happen and that we can grow and change
and exceed and all those kinds of things.
Hope. Hope belongs in there.
Yeah, I think for a lot of folks too,
it's interesting because.
So I was in a senior position when I was in
corporate, had leaders that reported to me and then folks that
reported to them.

(35:15):
And part of my job was to develop the leaders that
reported to me.
That was a good part of my job.
Yeah. And several times I would have the conversation in private,
but we would have the conversation of do you really believe
that person shows up on Monday morning going gee,
I really hope I suck at my job this week.
Because if you believe that,

(35:37):
and usually when you say it that ridiculously out loud,
people go,
no, okay,
then what else can we do here then?
Because if that's true,
okay, we got a different conversation.
But if that's not true,
there's things we can do,
there's, there's opportunities for growth.
But yeah,
that's exactly getting to my point is how do you see
this person?
And that changes all of your options.

(35:58):
It does.
It changes all of a sudden because if you truly believe
they're just showing up hoping they fail,
what do you do?
Other than fire the person?
That's pretty much the only thing on the list.
Most of us are not put.
You're framing the question for them in a way that creates
like a stark contrast around so they actually start thinking about
how they perceive it.

(36:20):
Most of us don't really evaluate how we're perceiving things.
We just have,
we've internalized a perception and now we're reacting based off of
that internalized perception.
And so your question is beautiful in the sense that it
helps people see what is the,
what's going on in there.
And I think that becomes transformative.
That's why you're using the question,
because it works.

(36:40):
Yeah, and it did.
It would work wonderfully more often than not.
Because now we could move to a positive conversation about what
do we need to do to support this person,
help them grow.
Because it's,
it's no longer an adversarial kind of view.
It's more of a.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, they're probably not hoping that.
Yeah, you've probably heard you have a background in education.

(37:00):
So you've probably heard.
There's been so many studies in education where they do things
to manipulate teachers.
Perception, perceptions of a student's capacity,
whether or not they're going to be a early bloomer or
they're going to be successful or they're.
And so on.
And it is consistent that students will live up or down
to teachers perceptions.

(37:22):
And I think that,
I think that's just something to really pay attention to.
So that's one of the topics.
It can become a self fulfilling,
self fulfilling prophecy by nature of the leader's belief can create
the situation,
create your reality.
Yeah. There is a lot of you have.
I think it's John Townsend that says this.

(37:42):
You have the circumstances that you've created or allowed.
And I think that when leaders really take on that sense
of ownership,
oh, I've got this team right now,
that's not great.
It's like,
all right,
but that's the team you have.
And so you're going to be able to get out of
them whatever you create or allow to have happen.
And can there be better or worse teams?

(38:03):
Sure. But more important is what is a leader able to
draw out of even a mediocre team?
There's even research around that,
how it goes back to what you started with when you
were talking about disaster relief.
In ministry,
you can be in a well resourced,
well equipped.
Everything on paper looks like this should be the ideal situation.

(38:24):
Poor leadership,
it struggles.
Yeah. You go to the opposite.
Everything on paper looks like this should be a disaster.
Good leadership,
good communication,
all of those skills are there and amazing things happen.
Yeah. And I think going back to scripture and the disciples,
and we don't know all of what,
how Jesus was processing,

(38:45):
how he chose the disciples and all of that,
and what he was thinking about.
And we don't know all of their conversations or what all
of the training involved,
but he had a very wide mix of people.
And it doesn't look like he was using the same,
like, recruitment profile for all of them.
And clearly he was working with people that many of them
feel very identifiable,
like you recognize that person.

(39:05):
And he was able to take people that appeared and were
described as others,
as just regular folks,
regular fishermen,
people from Galilee,
and turn them into people who change the world.
And so I think that some of that is just divine
power working itself out through people.
And then I think some of that is people who chose

(39:27):
to be responsive to the opportunity and allow themselves to be
molded and changed,
grow in that.
Otherwise there would be no reason for discipleship.
If it was all just like a divine touch,
then you don't have to be discipled because it just is
going to happen.
And so this effort that you put into it is just
being a good steward of the gifting or opportunity or calling

(39:48):
that you have.
Absolutely. So I've got a few questions that I like to
ask all of my guests.
But before I go there,
is there anything else about the work you do or your
book train to lead that you'd like to share with the
listener? Yeah.
As we've been talking,
I think at least the way I constructed Train to Lead.
I. Most people that are interested in this are also too

(40:10):
busy. They're also feeling maxed out.
They got to run in 18 different directions.
They're hurting all the cats and chickens and turtles,
and it's just a lot of work.
And so the.
I wrote the book and the exercises.
Each concept that I introduce has exercises that go with it,
and almost all of them are ones that dovetail into your

(40:33):
normal practices.
So you're not spending an hour and a half a day
working through these concepts,
doing homework separately.
It's not intended to be heavy cognitive exercises.
It's intended to be,
here's a concept.
Here's the actions you can do for most of them to
pursue this concept so that you can integrate it in your
life. My point is,

(40:55):
all of my coaching clients are super busy people,
and they're scared about working with me initially because I don't
know if I can handle one more thing.
And so I.
I learned early on I have to make it.
I have to free up time and energy in their life
so that they can focus on what's most important,
which isn't working with me.
It's the other things that they need to do.

(41:15):
But if they feel too much stress to even be able
to work on improvement,
then there's a problem.
So the book's written to be very easy to utilize the
information. I guess that's the point I wanted to make.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. And I think that's an important point to call out,
because you're right.
Most people that are in a leadership position or wanting to
grow in their leadership,

(41:36):
they've got one or two other things to do.
They're not just sitting around eating bon bons all day.
And I think the other point,
too is in the same way,
if somebody wants to that came to me and wanted to
be trained,
you know,
in their strength or their conditioning,
I'd evaluate,
is this a beginner person that hasn't been moving much in
the last 10 years?
And so we would need to have a different starting point.
Is this somebody who's been a gym rat for a little

(41:59):
while, or is this someone who's an actual college athlete and
they have a deep training?
And I would create different training approaches for each of them,
different training regimens.
And so I do that in the book as well.
So depending on where somebody's at,
there's different training regimens that will give them the right level
of challenge and opportunity to grow as they work through understanding.
How do you engage with leadership concepts?

(42:19):
And material.
So my brand is inspired stewardship.
And I do run things through that lens of stewardship.
But just like earlier,
I asked you about leadership because a lot of us defined
it different ways and I wanted to make sure we had
your definition.
And you've mentioned stewardship several times in our call.
Stewardship is one of those words that different people hear and
mean different things when they use that word.
So for you,
what does the word stewardship mean for you in your life?

(42:42):
Yeah, I think so.
Let's go back to an entrepreneurial perspective.
And I think this ties straight to stuff that I see
that God loves in the Bible.
Any entrepreneur who can find that fantastic employee who just helps
makes things grow and takes good care of the rest of
the employees and the assets that you have.
Any entrepreneur you meet that has somebody like that in their

(43:04):
team, they just love that person and they'll do anything to
make sure that person can be free to be them.
And so that's a steward is someone who's given responsibility or
resources, people,
assets, tools,
and they can somehow not just take care of it,
but they also expand it or they grow it in some
way. I think entrepreneurs,

(43:26):
anybody who's an employer loves to find an employee who can
just do that.
And I think that's also something you see all the way
throughout scripture is God loves it when he gives somebody something
and they make it bigger and they make it better and
they take care of it.
Not like it's their thing,
recognizing it's still his thing,
but they love just the art of doing things and they

(43:47):
love God and they love people and they just make things
grow because that's what's in them.
So to me,
that's stewardship.
Absolutely. So this is my favorite question that I like to
ask everyone.
Imagine for a moment that I could invent this magic machine.
And with this machine I was able to take you from
where you are today and transport you into the future,
maybe 150,
maybe 250 years.

(44:08):
And through the power of this machine,
you were able to look back and see your entire life
and see all of the connections,
all of the ripples,
all of the impacts you've left.
What impact do you hope you've left in the world?
Wow. Okay.
So I hope part of my drive from the disaster relief

(44:32):
background is I began to see I was working in countries
that were absolutely resource rich.
They had every opportunity available to them.
But because of either negligence or a lack of awareness on
part of leadership or full on corruption,
people were severely oppressed or impoverished or being killed.

(44:54):
And if I could do anything,
I think it would be to really be able to make
practical servant leadership philosophy and show people like to have a
message where people understand like this is how leadership and people

(45:15):
are all benefited from this servant leadership approach of how do
I grow them,
how do I make them bigger,
more competent,
more able people and how that actually benefits everything around us.
So if I'm running a country and I want to get
a little piece of the pie,
if I actually approach serving everybody well,
I will get my piece of the pie and everyone else

(45:36):
gets all their pies as well.
I don't have to take mine and at the expense of
them. And I think those kinds of perspectives on a practical
way because we use that terminology.
But it always is so abstract and out there.
A pastor will say I'm willing to go and clean toilets,
but is that even good stewardship of your time?
And it's great that you have the heart to do that.

(45:57):
But what does it really mean practically to serve people well?
And it doesn't always mean what we think it means.
And I think that's something that I would like to put
out. There is a really clear standard of this is what
servant leadership looks like.
And it has a profound effect all the way to the
bottom line.
So what's on the roadmap?
What's coming next as you continue on your journey and put

(46:17):
the book out there?
Right now,
actually I'm on the doing,
promoting the book.
I have other book concepts in mind.
I'm in the middle right now of starting to launch a
YouTube channel just specifically,
it's not up yet,
but just to have another vehicle or another avenue.
I like to teach.
And when you don't have somebody asking you to do a

(46:38):
workshop and I could say whatever I want,
have a freedom to just run with it.
And so I thought,
I think that might be fun to do that and just
put content out there and see if it's helpful.
But because I do want to have that 200 year impact,
I thought we've got to get it out there somehow,
otherwise people don't know.
Absolutely. So you can find out more about Christian Montine over

(47:00):
at his site,
Christian Montin.com
that's spelled Christian M u n t e a-n dot com.
Of course,
I'll have a link to that in the show notes as
well. Christian,
anything else you'd like to share with the listeners?
Yeah, the site has a ton of free resources.
So if you go there and you're interested on an assessment
on where you're at with leadership.
Anything on help you manage your time,

(47:22):
manage your energy.
Lots and lots of leadership topics,
concepts around growing your company.
Lots of free content there.
The books all my books are available.
Train to leads available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and
any of the booksellers.
And yeah,
people should come and take advantage of the free access to
resources. Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

(47:49):
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(48:15):
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