Speaker 1: 00:00 Hi everybody, this is Lois Sonstegard with Building your Legacy. I am today with Joe Lee. I am so excited to introduce him to you all because he has he’s young, he’s energetic and he has begun his mid level career by already looking at what his 40 year plan is. Where is it that he wants to go? He knows the legacy that he wants to leave and so he has worked his way backwards to try and figure out what are the steps that he needs to put in place in order to accomplish his 40 year plan. So I’m really excited to bring Joe to you and Joe, if you would just share a little bit about your background and how you got to where you’re going and what motivates you.

Speaker 1: 00:55 Sure. I’d be glad to. Thanks for having me on today I really appreciate that. thank you for all you’ve said so far. My journey I was born and raised in the Midwest and then I moved up to Pennsylvania to be my family. And so that’s kind of the, the history where I come from. We came from a, I would say a poor type of part of, we just didn’t have a lot of money. We had enough to meet needs, but that was about it. And so that kind of governed a lot of things for many years. For me when I was, when I turned 18, I joined the military and I served our country for right around 23, almost 24 years. I served in the army both on active duty reserve national guard, and that, that served for a lot of the foundational leadership principles and things that I’ve learned over the years.

Speaker 3: 01:46 I started in the infantry and I became a combat medic and then I became a medical lab tech. And then I ended up my career in the intelligence field. So I’ve done a little bit of everything in the military as, as well as serving our a wounded vets. I did that for a while. So it was a it was people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I, when I worked at Walter Reed, I was very influential there in working with those families and those soldiers. So anyway, that’s all, that’s been a lot of fun. When I left the military, one of my additional passions has always been health and fitness. Since time I was a kid like a 14 year old, I was introduced to alternative health therapies and figuring out that Hey, the body can take care of itself and if you just maintain and do a couple things, you’re probably going to be a little bit better off.

Speaker 3: 02:33 So, so I pursued the fitness arena after leaving the military and I ended up, I mean a CrossFit program if you’re familiar with , fitness ran across the program. And then after after that kind of transition, I transitioned to a management facility capacity with the , ownership I was working with. And from there I through whole time, through that whole story, there’s always been this underlying thread of leadership. I’ve always been reading and studying and obtaining certifications and going to conferences and trying to expand who I am so that I can help other people. And at the end of the day, that’s always been the underlying purpose of my existence is I believe that I live to serve others and to raise them up into a higher capacity. And as a Christian, that that’s, that’s really where the heart of it lies, is I want to raise Christian leaders. And so that’s in a nutshell, that’s the short version. So feel free to ask any details.

Speaker 2: 03:38 Tell the audience about your 40 year goal. Cause I’m fascinated, most people don’t really think through how, what’s the end of their life gonna look like and look backwards from it. So you have defined for yourself what success will be at the end of your life. What is that? What is this vision that you have? Let’s start there.

Speaker 3: 04:02 Okay well I’m a huge, huge John Maxwell fan. I’m a John Maxwell certified coach, speaker and trainer and one of John’s principle teach about teachers a lot about his legacy. And that’s always been, that’s always in the back of my mind there were, I had a lot of struggles when I was really young at home and I made some decisions a long time ago that I wouldn’t have a family on my own based upon those interactions because I knew I didn’t want to perpetuate a legacy that I was seeing. And that meant I ended up in a blended family with four kids. I’m married into four children and a wonderful wife. And so that’s kind of the framework that kind of got brought me to why, why a 40 year plan? And the 40 year plan is I want to bring leadership back to the church. I believe that absolutely everything rises and falls on leadership. And I believe that the challenges that we’re seeing in the world and the challenges that we’re seeing in the churches today are the result of failed leadership. We can’t say everything rises and falls on leadership except within the church because it does. If we, if we see problems in churches, we see people leaving the church.

Speaker 3: 05:21 If we see unethical behavior in a church, it’s because of the leadership and I want to bring leadership back to the church and then I want to reinvigorate, when I use the word reinvigorate, I want to bring passion back to our youth for Christ. I believe that the youth are going are the future. If I if I work with, say I, I coached somebody and they’re 50 or 60 years old, they have, on average statistically speaking, they’re going to live to be about 85. That means that I’ll have somewhere between 20 and 30 years where they’ll be able to take those principles and philosophies and really bring those to the world. If I work with somebody that’s between 15 and 20, I can get 40 60 more years out of that same individual where they’re, where they have a better lens to look at the world through and they have a better message to bring to the world and they can really shape this world for in a much better and much healthier way.

Speaker 3: 06:20 And so that, that’s the 40 year goals. I plan on dedicating the rest of my entire functional life to this mission until the, you know, until I’m no longer here. That’s my, that’s my intent , is to spend the next 40 years working on that mission and, and building an organization of leaders, teaching leaders, so that they can bring that to the church and change what people know the church has today. And we need to get back to the, you know, not necessarily not what would be a new Testament looking church, but a Jesus looking church. So,

Speaker 2: 06:55 so that’s an interesting place to start from, I think. Cause you talk about leadership, bringing leadership back to the church and, and action. And it’s leadership at not only churches, it’s in our businesses. It’s in, it’s everywhere, isn’t it? Because there’s some thing that we’re struggling for that we’re somehow missing but don’t have our fingers on perhaps. So can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that? What is the missing element of leadership that needs to be brought back?

Speaker 3: 07:34 That’s a really good question there’s li I wish leadership was really simple and really straightforward and that everybody just, it was just that simple. You know, John has a program called the five levels of leadership and most people associate leadership with that first level, which is that positional leadership, which is the, the weakest form of leadership. However, that’s where, what most people think of and what most people see. And we arbitrarily know that there’s more to it than that, but we don’t always know what it is. And so we say, we look at that position leadership, we look at, look at things like charisma, natural charisma or speaking ability or going to the right school or having the right friend network. And then all of a sudden we think, okay, that’s, that’s leadership. And it’s just not, it’s, there’s the big huge, if I had to nail it down to one huge component that I think is really at the crux of a lot of our leadership issues, it’s at a personal responsibility or what you can call extreme ownership.

Speaker 3: 08:43 , Jocko Willink has a book out called extreme ownership that I absolutely love and it talks about that just it’s all about extreme ownership. And I think as a leader, that’s one of the things that’s really missing for a lot people. It’s easy for, you know, take for, you know, to look back through my life and see where I have made excuses or blame my circumstances or you know, let’s, let’s use a real common example for everybody. We make a choice every day when we get up, whether we’re going to go or we’re, whether we’re going to execute our day for the very best of our ability or we’re going to let the day execute us. And for many, many people today executes us. And, but you have to be able to step into your life and accept responsibility for that decision. When I get up in the morning and I roll out again, I have about five seconds before my feet hit the floor.

Speaker 3: 09:35 If I choose to lay in bed for two minutes, my whole day is different. And I either own that responsibility for that or I blame the circumstance. I was tired. I stayed up late. I had to be, you know, [inaudible] had to be at the emergency room till one or two in the morning. One morning I was in the emergency room til three in the morning. I can either, and those are really bizarre examples, but I can either, other than that or I can let that circumstance own me and I have to make that choice every day. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of things are just really that simple. When we look at leadership, we can either, I’ll just go back to the framework we talked about originally, the, the, the, the fact that our youth are leaving the churches at greater numbers than ever before.

Speaker 3: 10:20 We can look at that situation and we can say, well, it’s TV, it’s iPhones, it’s the internet, it’s social media, it’s this, it’s that social pressures and all that stuff that’s not accepting responsibility for the problem. Accepting responsibility for the problem is the leaders within the church stepping up and saying 20 years ago, we started this 30 years ago, 40 years ago, we’re the problem now. And these are your, the, you know, these are typically what we would consider elders maybe where whatever your denomination is, how your leadership structure is, these are senior leaders and that we have, we have to accept responsibility for those things and we have to say entertainment hasn’t worked. What’s next?

Speaker 2: 11:05 So, so I’m hearing two things from you. One is that yes, in attainment doesn’t work and the other is what’s happening. The, the issues that our young people are having are our responsibility for whatever reason. And , it’s, it’s knowing what to do about it and being accountable. But I think that accountability requires knowing what, what’s wrong, what’s not working and what you’ve replaced that with, cause you affect him doesn’t work, right?

Speaker 3: 11:41 Correct. Correct. Nature abhors a vacuum and it will fill up with something

Speaker 2: 11:46 Nature abhors a vacuum. Is that what you said?

Speaker 3: 11:48 Yeah. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Speaker 2: 11:50 Yeah. And, and that’s the tendency isn’t it? To just throw something out is because it doesn’t work. But how do we thoughtfully replace it? And I think that’s true at every level. Not just churches. It’s true in our businesses. Something doesn’t work. We get rid of it. And but we don’t replace that thoughtfully and many times because we’re just glad to have that problem gone, but we don’t think about is it creating a vacuum that needs to be addressed? So that’s, that’s very interesting that you speak to that.

Speaker 3: 12:34 Yeah. There, and I think it’s a, a fairly significant a problem. There’s several things that I see as a Genesis for this, particularly in our churches, is that idea of autonomy every, we, we want to be autonomous. We want to be these pillars of of strengths and everything for our community. And as a result, we, it’s, it’s almost like we insulate ourselves from external inputs. Now, I knew that there’s organizations out there, they’re doing a fantastic job of this. However, the majority of though I think the numbers speak for themselves and so we set up these, these, a lot of rules a lot of particularly coming out of many generations back, hundreds of years back, we have a lot of faith based organizations are built on rules. Do this, don’t do that. Don’t do that, don’t do that. Don’t do that.

Speaker 3: 13:31 And so we have a lot of don’t do that and we don’t know really what we need to be doing and all those. Don’t do that. Keep everybody at Bay from our leader. We don’t, we don’t know how to and it closes off our receptivity to new ideas and to doing things maybe new and different ways. And so we have, you can it was here where I’m at, I am local. I had a, somebody told me they were visiting a church the other day when they walked in the door, they stepped back 20 years. You could, you, you could just literally, it’s palpable. The, the environment was somewhere between 20, probably 20 to 40 years old. And you, that’s not how we live into the 21st century. That’s not how we lead into the 21st century. We have got, we have to be able to adjust, not to bring the cultural of the world into the church, but figure out how we can live in that color.

Speaker 3: 14:33 We are, we’re, we’re supposed to live in the world, but not of the world. And we’re trying to live anywhere but in the world. And so it creates a problem for our youth because we’ve lost authenticity. We’ve lost the ability to accept feedback and criticism and learn how to move forward. And so as a result of that, we don’t, we don’t make mistakes and adapt fast enough and so you’re, you’re right. We tend to throw things out, but it’s a, don’t do this. Don’t do that, but we can’t have this. We can’t have that. And we throw that out and, but there’s nothing there to replace it. Nothing there to take it to, to fill that void. That was, you know, who knows what it was that filled that you know, I’ve, I’ve been everywhere and seen, not everywhere. I’ve been in a lot of places and seen a lot of things. And a lot of times you just throw something out, but you have this entire, the minds that we’re trying to work with, our PR are, are built around a different type of model and then we’re bringing them into a 20, 30, 50, a hundred year old model and trying to make that fit. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t mesh up.

Speaker 4: 15:45 So when you say that the model is a hundred years old, the model that you’re referring to specifically is the church.

Speaker 5: 15:53 Right. Yes.

Speaker 4: 15:57 And so what is it about that that is old and stayed and is not modern?

Speaker 3: 16:06 The it’s the dogmatic practices that we have that don’t, it’s without getting into a lot of really in-depth history here. And I’m not a history guy there were a lot of, 150 years ago during the stone Campbell era, there were a lot of decisions that were made because of some infighting in all of the Protestant churches. And that’s where everything has kind of devolved from. So at that particular time, there were some major , just a handful of major denominations in the United States. And there was a conflict between a couple of these very, very prominent church leaders. And the, interestingly enough, their, their, their Genesis was over really small and

Speaker 3: 17:08 insignificant things. But as a result, human behavior. So when we have a conflict with somebody, the regardless of, especially if we’re passionate about that conflict, whatever, for whatever reason, if we can’t resolve that conflict, we will identify a separate trigger and bring that trigger forward and make that our speaking platform because we know it will create a it’ll create the division that we were looking for. So if, if we have conflict and somebody is not willing to fight with us, but it’s passionate to us, we will go find something else to replace that, that they will take a stand on so that we can have our, so that we can have basically have our way. And one of the things that, that one of the stances that was taken very hard during during the stone Campbell era was women in the church.

Speaker 3: 18:03 And I’m not going to advocate for one thing or another right here. That’s not my, that’s not my point. The, the point, that was one of the key issues when, when we couldn’t fight over slavery because we agreed that there were some fundamental truths that were wrong with it. We fought over women in stead and that was something that we could divide the church over. And so massive, massive things took place. And so, but because that history is not known, widely known, and it’s not taught, we still divide over whether or not that practices are okay or not. We have rules about who can serve and who can’t serve in worship that have no, this isn’t a cultural thing. This is a human being thing. This is a, you know, we can go, hold on, we can go back to the new Testament and read through there.

Speaker 3: 18:54 And the examples that were shown in the new Testament are not modeled in today’s church. And I’m not trying to duplicate the new Testament church. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to meet in houses and we don’t want to do some of these things that were common practice. What we do want to do is we want to be like Christ. And if we actually look at what he did, our churches, they’re the, it’s not the same. And so, and, but we continue to live in these old, outdated practices and we continue to March them forward because it’s easier than running the risk of sinning and leading your congregation astray. And, and so there’s, it’s kind of that mantra of what we’ve always done it this way. And you know, that’s one of those big bullets that goes up on people’s walls in their, in their boardrooms is, you know, if we’ve always done it this way, then we need to. That’s the thing. We need to look at the hardest that was a long explanation

Speaker 2: 19:51 no, it’s helpful and I think that’s true of so many things, Joe. We tend to do things because it’s a habit. It’s always been done that way. We don’t think through is that really essential. And one of the things that I have always enjoyed having grown up in Japan is that there are things that are part of American culture that we take as truisms. And because I came here at 19, I looked at them with different eyes and asked the question, is this, is this real? Because I saw it being done differently and it worked differently, right? And but we, we impose our culture and then create a fixation around it that, that that’s the way it needs to be. And so we run our organizations that way. You know, how we treat one another is based on those kinds of perspectives that we, we come with. And being able to have a Frank discussion is really what enables us to take a look at that. But it can be also somewhat frightening to do that because it may mean you have to shift your thought process and changes is hard, isn’t it?

Speaker 3: 21:22 It is I you’re familiar with the disc test and so I, my personality style falls into 3% of the population and I’m high on the spectrum on both ends. So I’m a high D and a high C, which is a interesting and challenging personality to have. However, what it does is it makes it extremely challenging me for me to see things through new eyes. It is it’s always in probably the last five to 10 years, I’ve had my greatest expansion of my ability to see through new eyes. And it is extremely challenging. We, we tend to for, for people to have my personality type, we love things the exact same way every single day. I have 16 things that I go through every morning. I love my habits. I love rituals they give me an extreme amount of comfort and ultimately the word is control.

Speaker 3: 22:27 You know, always, always seeking control over things. And when I’m outside of that, that level of fear just escalates astronomically and it’s, I, I can hold it together because I’ve trained myself how to do that over the years. You know, that was one of the things the military taught me is how do you hold yourself? How are you the, how do you hold yourself together when you’re, you know, walking in fear and we call it courage, but sometimes it’s just fear and you’re just taking one step at a time. But it’s a, yeah, we, I think it’s, it doesn’t just impact our churches. It impacts leadership all across the board in every aspect of our life. My kids have watched me evolve through countless iterations of my life as I left the military I remember when I left the military, I was two years out.

Speaker 3: 23:15 I had been out of the military and I was sitting in my driveway and in my minivan and I had put the vehicle and park and I was going through my head and that literally sitting there, I was going through my head, okay, am I staying today or am I leaving today? Because I was so used to moving every two years. I was so used to having my phone on and having to literally, I could be home for 30 minutes, they would call. And say, Hey, you need to come into work and I’d have to go into work. And it wasn’t something I ever blinked up. And when you bring that into a family, it doesn’t work well. And so learning how to change and see things through, how does my family see me is, is huge. You know, there’s just, there’s a thousand things about change and how that impacts people that I could definitely talk to you.

Speaker 3: 24:05 I’ve been, you know, spending time overseas in Iraq and in Kosovo and in Germany and being all over the United States. Everything is different. Even how traffic lights work is different. I know, you know that from Japan they, the lights just, they function different in Germany. What’s a yellow light mean? Well, my son was in an accident this summer because he didn’t understand what a yellow light means. He understands what it means in America and he got in an accident because of it is in Germany. Hit it, got a much different ticket, a win for that, but he probably would have avoided the accident so yeah, so it’s how we see things.

Speaker 2: 24:41 It is, you know, I always think of that as being the perception gap. There’s a, we have a perception of ourselves, others have perception of who we are. And then you have the environment that has its own perceptions because of the rules that surround it. And it’s, if we’re going to be effective, we’re always challenged to look at how do we diminish that perception gap. But that’s always, that is the challenge because we have to begin with change. And so many times we’re at odds in that process. And I think Joe, when we start looking at building a legacy, like what you’re talking about, that’s really if you’re going to look at how are you going to build leadership techniques and bring something to young people so that they can grow up to be tomorrow’s leaders and disrupt whatever it is that’s going on, whether it’s our organizations, our families, our churches, it’s a whole new set of skills and they have to have a lens that is new and fresh and the comfort to be able to change as what the lens is showing you shifts, right?

Speaker 3: 26:08 Yup. Yeah. It’s in the last three weeks. I’ve been in a couple of environments where I was, I’ve just been floored. I, it was, I was in a, I was in a class the other day and people were sharing about some of the struggles that they were going on within their life. And these are, these were all health related and literally there was, I think there was a dozen of us in there and to the T everyone said, stress, anxiety these are, a lot of them are women. I was just like, I just was like, I was flabbergasted at how significant that pain is for people. And last night I was helping my son in the garage build a catapult and he had a friend there and she was talking about being upset with somebody because they made fun of something. Her costs, it was Halloween, so she had a costume on. They were making, they made fun of the costume that she wanted. She talked about, and she’s 16. She was talking about how much that made her hurt. And I was just, again, I was floored at the how deep of an impact these this change can be and you’re speaking about an environment. How do we take people that are, have such high anxiety, they have,

Speaker 6: 27:25 and I don’t want to lump people into categories, but add ADHD, they have these high functioning learning capacities. They’re very special. And how do, how do we take that environment, people that are wired that way, cause we can’t undo the wiring that was done by video games and TV. It was literally this physiological changes that happened in the brain. And so this is what we have. They’re very high functioning people that are some of the brightest people we have. How do we take those and create an a teaching environment where they want to learn and then they want to learn, they understand the value of the principles, the principles are being taught and then how can they move that forward? Because it’s not about teaching one generation, it’s about teaching them how to teach others what we’ve just shared with them and move that forward. That’s a, that’s a really, that’s a super big challenge that I, you know, I’m kind of looking forward to because it’s, it’s going to pave the way for many, many generations cause it’s nobody’s tackling it not head on.

Speaker 2: 28:29 What that requires is that your life is compelling, right? Because to impact that next generation, our life has to be compelling enough that people want it. And I think so much of what we’re seeing is a rejection of what people have experienced. Joe, it has been 30 wonderful minutes. Time has gone so fast and I appreciate your perspective so much because so seldom do we look from the end and then start building what it is that we need to do. And so I really appreciate that, that challenge that you provide us and also your perspective on leadership and how is it that we can go about really making an influencing the next generations to come. So thank you so much for your time today and for those of you who are listening, thank you for your time. If you would like to have information about Joe or we’d like to get in contact with him, just email me and I will be glad to make that connection for you. So thank you so much for your time, Joe, for your time as part of our audience, and I look forward to our next podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you.