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The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
When I was a kid, I had the original toy of transformation. I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. I'm talking about Lego. Santa brought me a Lego spaceship which I built, but then my sister and I could take it apart and build a different spaceship, our own creation. And then we could take that spaceship apart and build anything.
Marcus Goodyear:Even spaceships for my Star Wars figures and a little jail cell for my sister's princess Leia figure. And she has since told me that most of our Star Wars play involved her waiting for my Luke to rescue her Leia from a LEGO box. As a boy in the 1980's, I couldn't transform those LEGOs beyond my childish understanding of masculinity. I don't see my sister that often anymore, but I understand now that we are equals. That is, I try not to put her in a box of my own expectations and make her wait for rescue.
Marcus Goodyear:I like to think transformation is always possible. Little boys and little girls grow up. Tadpoles transform into bullfrogs. Caterpillars transform into butterflies. People turn into better people, communities into better communities.
Marcus Goodyear:But transformation takes work. Those Legos don't build themselves. Those little kids don't raise themselves very well. And change can be scary, sometimes even painful. When we face deep change, it's easy to pine for the good old days, you know, before everything changed and we could just go play with our LEGO.
Marcus Goodyear:But change is required, and a good leader helps people navigate that transformation. From the H.E.Butt Foundation, this is The Echoes Podcast. On today's episode, we welcome Tod Bolsinger. Tod is the founder of a Sloan Leadership Incorporated with his wife, Beth, and author of Canoeing the Mountains and the Practicing Change series. I'm Marcus Goodyear, here with my co host, Camille Hall-Ortega.
Marcus Goodyear:Today, we're going to talk about transformation and how good leaders help us navigate the pain of change. Tod, welcome to the podcast.
Tod Bolsinger:It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Camille Hall-Ortega:We're glad to have you.
Camille Hall-Ortega:In your work on leadership, Tod, you say that there is no transformation without trust, but you also say don't rely on trust. So can you please explain that those two things seem opposed to each other?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So when you talk about leadership, I always say leadership is about transformation. That's why leadership is not about a title. It's not about having a heavy heavy furniture in a corner office. It's about how do you lead a people through a kind of transformation so they can accomplish the mission that's in front of them.
Tod Bolsinger:That's what makes leadership leadership. And so and it's also what makes it different than, say, management. Management is a really important skill set. I'm not a person who thinks that leadership is more important than management. But management is about taking chaos and bringing order and control and taking care of the things entrusted to your care, as my colleague Scott Cormode says, and handling them as good stewards, handling them over to other people.
Tod Bolsinger:That's all really important. But leadership is where it requires transformation. So when Moses is standing on the other side of the Red Sea, the manager would say, "Hey, we checked the map, and it's gonna take us 6 weeks of hard hard walk to get to the promised land." The leader knows it's 40 years, and not everybody's gonna get there.
Marcus Goodyear:Are those skill sets mutually exclusive?
Tod Bolsinger:They're not mutually exclusive, but they oftentimes get confused. Right? So many times, people who have been good managers get asked then to become leaders. And this is when the trust and transformation stuff works. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:So I always tell people, there's no transformation without trust. And good managers build trust. Like, they're technically competent. They care for you. They do what they say they're gonna do.
Tod Bolsinger:They hit their deadlines. They, you know, they accomplish the the things that are on the to do list. Right? But trust is not transformation. Transformation requires people to go through change.
Tod Bolsinger:So you need there to be high trust, but you can't rely on trust if you're gonna lead people through transformation. It actually you have to get comfortable with the fact that when you take people through transformation, people who go through transformation resisted. Right. You said it, change is scary. That's the thing.
Tod Bolsinger:You're taking people through. You're taking them through the scary part, through the metamorphosis, through the, you know, the chrysalis stage. You're taking through all those things that are scary. That takes a lot of trust, but usually the trust goes down at that moment, which is why you need a big wellspring of trust.
Marcus Goodyear:So is this why the our culture is experiencing a a lack of trust overall? Are we just going through a major transformation as a culture?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, I think in some senses, yeah. So one of the things that I have to tell people is remember that the root word for family and familiar are the same root word. So when you go through something unfamiliar or you ask someone to step into something unfamiliar, or all of a sudden the world around you changes in such a way that it feels unfamiliar, what most people feel is not just disoriented. They feel unfamlied. They feel abandoned.
Tod Bolsinger:Right? They they feel and when they get highly anxious, and then what they want is someone to say, don't worry. I'll manage this chaos. I'll take care of it. I'll do it perfectly.
Tod Bolsinger:I know exactly the solution.
Tod Bolsinger:Matter of fact, I wanna promise you that I alone, I'm the only one who can solve it. Right? And people want that, and, unfortunately, that keeps us from transformation because real leadership requires us to change. It invites us into a a collective or communal experience of transformation.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That just reminds me of something that I thought about when I was reading up on your work was that I wondered how much expectations come into play that we we hear about change being painful and change being difficult. And I wonder if a lot of that has to do with expectations or I thought of, expectancy violation theory that maybe it's maybe it's just that folks need to know that there's a lot of uncertainty in that change and that maybe a good leader is one that's telling people what to expect even if it's it's gonna be really hard or we're gonna have times where it looks like it's getting worse before it gets better. Or what what does that look like to sort of set expectations in a way that might help with the pain of change?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, you're exactly right. Good leaders do set expectations, and they will tell you the truth. The problem is most of us want either consciously or unconsciously a leader who's going to exceed our expectations and make this change painless for us. They want us to make it easy. So what we do is we end up in this thing.
Tod Bolsinger:And this is actually one of the things that's really interesting. A lot of research is that men get asked to take on roles oftentimes beyond their competency because they project confidence.
Marcus Goodyear:Do you think that our culture has a bias toward male leadership because of that?
Tod Bolsinger:Oh, a 100%. That's not even clear. That's because we have we have decades, centuries of assuming that leadership is, masculine. Almost all the traits when you ask people, what is a trait of a leader? What does a leader look like?
Tod Bolsinger:It starts with tall. It's it's usually right? It starts with tall.
Marcus Goodyear:It's like King Saul. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:Exactly. Exactly. Right. Right.
Tod Bolsinger:King Saul is like the quintessential I mean, for anybody who has ears to hear, has a biblical imagination, you better realize we have these images of David as this great king who brought down to Goliath. But he was the one the runt of the litter who was not picked because he didn't fit the mold of leadership. So, yeah, the most biggest bias of all is that. And what's interesting is Christians fall into it even though our sacred text literally tells us the opposite, right down to Jesus, who was the man of sorrows, who did disappointed because he didn't look like the leader, came in on a donkey rather than a stallion. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:All those things. So, yeah, we have these expectations of leadership. And I think unconsciously, our expectation of leadership is they're gonna solve our problems so we don't have to change. And that's the big disappointment.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's so important. I'm I'm very curious about what you've what you've said about men and women because I think it begs the question, what do we do about that? Is it that we need to adjust our expectations that we we don't need to be looking for a tall male leader, or or do women need to be more confident even if they're faking it? Right? What what do you how do you weigh in on on the solve for that?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, the first thing for almost every one of these solves whenever you get a gap like that. So the place where my leadership stuff is built is on adaptive leadership, which is always in the gap between espoused values and actual values or the gap between what we say we wanted to be about and what we actually do. The first thing we gotta do is we gotta name that gap. We just gotta name up front. We have this bias.
Tod Bolsinger:What if you can't name it, you can't navigate it. And then what we gotta do is ask ourselves, so what do we get out of keeping that bias? And mostly what we get is to live with the illusion that our leaders are gonna make our lives are gonna fix our problems. They're gonna be our quick fixes. Instead of our leaders are the people who are going to empower us to collaboratively fix them together so that we can be transformed.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Really good. Really good.
Marcus Goodyear:So leaders, you you have said leaders need a willingness to walk people through the disruption of change, this transformation process you're talking about, and that they have to be willing to disappoint people at a rate that people can absorb. And then just a moment ago, you were talking about Jesus. Would you say that Jesus is a leader who disappointed people at a rate they could absorb?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, it's so interesting because that quote, disappointing people at a rate they can absorb, comes from Marty Linsky, who is a person who I've gotten to know. He wrote the foreword for my little Practicing Change books, and he's a really remarkable leader and scholar and consultant. And what's interesting is I know Marty personally, and he wouldn't have been thinking about Jesus because he's actually Jewish by background. And he would tell me that he's unreligious. But he asked me, why do Christians like adaptive leadership?
Tod Bolsinger:Like, that's the stuff that I do. I work with faith leaders. And I told him, it's because what you're describing is what we really believe we found and saw in Jesus, a person who's willing to take people through the disappointment. And at times, they could absorb it. At times, it took them it took them a while.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. At times at times, they couldn't. They did crucify him.
Marcus Goodyear:I feel like it's taking us 2000 years to absorb it. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. Exactly.
Marcus Goodyear:We're still not there.
Tod Bolsinger:Right. Right. And even the even the power of the Holy Spirit, in Pentecost is really about convincing a group of people that have an experience that says that thing you thought was the kingdom of God, which you thought was a military overthrow of Rome, is actually a radical transformation of all the earth starting with you. It's not about us and them. It's starting with me first. That's the that's the whole Christian understanding that it starts with my own confession of my own faith, my own sin, my own need to, be forgiven of my sin.
Marcus Goodyear:So you've made it very personal. Right?
Marcus Goodyear:And yet leadership is about transforming communities, and I I've heard a lot of people, commenting on how personal Christian faith has become, in recent decades, maybe the last 100, 200 years. How do you think about transforming an entire community rather than just the individuals within that community?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. I often say that if we had taught all of our children from the minute they ever went to Sunday school, that the most important verse was, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth. Before you taught them John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son." It's really important, the world, but we take that as me. So I say Christianity is personal, but it's not private.
Tod Bolsinger:It is personal so that I take personal responsibility to say yes to something that is gonna transform me in in a community. That's why I believe we are baptized into a people of God for the sake of the world. It's for the sake of the transformation of the whole world. What happens very often, and I think this happens in a lot of our singing and a lot of our prayers and our programs, is it becomes not just personal, Marcus. It becomes private.
Tod Bolsinger:Becomes just disconnected from the community. And I'll tell you one place. I'm I'm a pastor by training. I was taught how to work with individuals to go through loss and grief and transformation. But most of us were never taught how to to take a community through loss and grief and transformation, let alone an organization through loss and grief and transformation that we would choose so that we might be able to participate in God's transformation of the world.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Well, you're talking about change, and you're saying change is painful. Is it always painful? Is that true to is that fair to say that change or transformation is always painful?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, sometimes it's chosen, but I think that so I do really believe that change is experienced as loss. And I guess maybe it's because, you know, I'm I'm 60, and I know what it's like to have children who are adults who no longer play Legos with me. Right.
Marcus Goodyear:Right. Right.
Tod Bolsinger:Who are not home.
Marcus Goodyear:That's what grandchildren are for. That's what grandchildren are for.
Tod Bolsinger:And and who are taking their own time to give me grandchildren.
Marcus Goodyear:Oh, no.
Tod Bolsinger:But, I mean, like, it's like I love my kids, but I I miss the heck out of them. And so, like, part of it is wanting them to flourish as adults means I don't get to have them under my own roof. Like, there's always loss.
Tod Bolsinger:There's always but that loss is good loss. It's good grief. You were letting go of the things so that we can step into the new into the new. But it is a it is a kind of loss.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so what are what would you say are some top ways that or maybe you wouldn't say that. Maybe maybe not accept this premise, but some ways to kind of deal with the pain of that of those Feeling of loss.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. Well well, one of them is just to acknowledge the need for it. So, like, so, like, like, the book that I'm probably most well known for Canoeing in the Mountains is really a book that says, it uses the story of Lewis and Clark to say that there was this European mental model of the world that became the European mental model of the continent that assumed everything was just a continuation of the past. Eighteen months of traveling in canoes upstream, and they got to the Rocky Mountains. They realized the world in front of them was nothing like the world behind them, that the geography of the west was, like, unlike anything people of European descent had ever seen before, and that they couldn't just keep canoeing their way forward, which means that they had to actually, at that moment, drop the canoes and become hikers.
Tod Bolsinger:They had to become mountain climbers instead of canoers. It it required a transformation
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:And they had to look to a different leader too. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, the probably the biggest transformation of all was that they began to listen to Sacagawea. So they never paid attention to a teenage native American nursing mother. They didn't write it down a single word she said until they needed her to be the person who we can who was the relational bridge with the Shoshone that actually helped them get through the mountains. And so so it required even so think about this. Meriwether Lewis was tutored by Thomas Jefferson in the White House.
Tod Bolsinger:But when he got so far off the map, he needed to listen to someone who probably up until that moment, he barely acknowledged her humanity.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Woah.
Tod Bolsinger:Now he had to be willing to. And not only did he willing to, he did. And they were remarkable. And when they were off the map, they were this remarkable community of people. And the sad part of the story is when they finally when they went back home, they basically reverted back to their old ways.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Okay. So I I would imagine then that, and I've I've always pronounced it Sacagawea, but you're pronouncing it correctly. I'm sure. So help me with the name here. Sacagawea. Is that right?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So this is interesting. We all learned her name as Sacagawea. Yeah. But they actually wrote her name down in the journals with k's Sakagawea or g's Sacagawea. And so, I think it's good to give her back her name, personally.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes. I think that's great. I'm imagining that she perhaps had some moments where she was leading some reluctant folks. Right? That maybe they didn't see her as competent until they really needed her.
Camille Hall-Ortega:How do you lead people who are reluctant?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. Well, one of the ways okay. So let's circle back to where we started. Yeah. She was incredibly trustworthy.
Tod Bolsinger:Like, she was competent. I mean, like, actually, they they have in their journals stuff like Charbonneau, who's who's or her husband, was completely incompetent. Like, they tolerated that guy because they needed her. Right? She was the competent one.
Tod Bolsinger:But because of the way that the the way the 18th century, you know, European men thought about Native American people, you know, they needed that they needed to bring the husband, and the husband literally brought his wife. And and they've only brought one of his wives. We don't know what he did to his other wives he had. So what we realized is we actually live in this place where what she did is demonstrated her confidence over and over again, so they trusted her. And that led to their transformation.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Okay.
Marcus Goodyear:And and what what it the transformation came when they were able to set aside their old world assumptions about what they expected to find and what what had been built up in their mind. And, you know, they dropped the canoes like you said. So but that that I always wanna come back to the present. What old world assumptions are we carrying around with us that people, you know, a 100, 200 years from now are gonna just shake their head?
Marcus Goodyear:What what do we as individuals or Christians or Americans need to let go of, in your opinion?
Tod Bolsinger:So one of the things that I work with leaders almost every single day is that as my new little books, the Practicing Change series, are what I call the 4 big mistakes good leaders make. And one of the mistakes that almost every good leader makes is believing that at the moment of crisis, they will have what it they need to rise the occasion. And what they actually do is default to their training. And if we were trained well, great. We'll respond well.
Tod Bolsinger:But if we were trained for canoeing and you're facing mountains, you'll tend to double down on paddling harder. And then next thing you know, you've just burned out your rotator cuff, you've exhausted yourself, and you haven't gone anywhere.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
Tod Bolsinger:So one of the things we have to give up is, I would say, is the expert expectation. I think the single biggest thing to give up in a changing world is that you the expert will take you forward.
Tod Bolsinger:It's not the expert. It's the learner.
Marcus Goodyear:And that requires trust. Right?
Tod Bolsinger:It requires trust and humility. Like, I mean, Eric Hoffer said, you know, "In a changing world, learners inherit the earth, and the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."
Camille Hall-Ortega:Wow.
Tod Bolsinger:And what we have is a lot of leaders who want people to trust you because I was an expert. And what they need to learn is to trust you because I will lead us through the learning. I'm humble enough to say I need help. We're gonna do this together. We're gonna collaborate.
Tod Bolsinger:We're not gonna leave out voices. We're gonna bring in voices we haven't listened to before. How about diverse voices like Sacagawea, who is on home territory, and we're and we're not listening to her. Right? That that's what good leadership looks like today.
Marcus Goodyear:So good. The idea of trust is one that I get a little stuck on. I mentioned earlier that we don't have a lot of trust in our society, or maybe it feels like we don't have a lot of trust in our society. I don't know. There's 2 little studies I read recently.
Marcus Goodyear:One of them said only 22% of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. Period. And I read another study that said only 32% of Americans said they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion and churches. And I was, reading The Righteous Mind over the weekend where he talks about just the the the failure of people's ability to trust institutions and how our institutions are losing our trust.
Marcus Goodyear:How do we rebuild trust? I know I know for leaders, you've said we a leader rebuilds trust through skills, through earning that trust. How does an institution earn trust? How do we as a culture earn trust with each other again?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. It's so we talk about trust being built through technical competence. That's the credibility of doing the things that are the most important. But it's doing what you said you're gonna do. It's doing what you're entrusted with.
Tod Bolsinger:Right? So I always say to to pastors and religious leaders, like, if you if people can't trust you with the texts, the sacred texts, and they can't trust you with the traditions, they can't trust you with souls, they can't trust you with meetings and money. They can't trust you with all those things. They're not if they can't trust you on the map, they're not gonna follow you off the map. So it starts with competence, but it also requires relational congruence.
Tod Bolsinger:And I think right now, what we have is a giant trust issue in credibility and authority. We have so much cynicism. It's so high that people actually don't trust news reports. They don't trust any of the the markers in our culture that we used to look to for to be wise brokers. Now everybody's on a team.
Tod Bolsinger:And, you know, Jonathan Haidt's work on this has been so powerful for me. Even even data. You know, Jonathan Haidt and Adam Grant and others have said, people don't use facts anymore like scientists. They use facts like lawyers to argue their case.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Mhmm.
Tod Bolsinger:So until we name that we are actually trying hard to win and hold on to power rather than actually make things for the common good, we're gonna we're gonna have just a deficit of trust.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah. I'm hearing a lot, I think, of probably some misconceptions that our society has adopted about leadership, and you're kind of turning some of those things on their heads. What do you think are some top misconceptions about leaders and leadership?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, one of them is that I so I have a couple things we work on a lot. One thing we talk about in one of our little books, we have a book called The Mission Always Wins. The Mission Always Wins. So until we're all agreed on what is the mission, what's the purpose, what's the highest value, so even the Lewis and Clark story is interesting. They were sent to find a water route that would a navigable water route that would be part of the economic plan of this new country, the United States of America, a water route that people have been looking for for 300 years.
Tod Bolsinger:What they got to is the reality of the mountains that there was no water route, but they didn't go back because they had a deeper value. It was an enlightenment value. And I could sit here and argue with you whether it's at the right value or not, but they had a deeper value. And the enlightenment value was the growth of human knowledge will lead to the growth of human happiness. So we're gonna keep exploring.
Tod Bolsinger:Even though it's not gonna be good economically for us, we're gonna keep exploring because there's a deeper value. Until we get clear on the deeper values that we all agree on and until we get clear on the mission that we're all put in front of us, work is gonna be very hard. So the values I would say values are more important than vision right now, and mission is more important than any person, any leader. What is the mission? The mission wins.
Tod Bolsinger:Not the leader, not the stakeholders, not the donors, not the people with the money, not the people who are the loudest, the mission. And until we're clear on those things, it's gonna be hard to move forward.
Marcus Goodyear:Well, one of the reasons, Tod, that we invited you here is because our mission is to cultivate wholeness in people and institutions for the transformation of communities. And it was the we kinda latched on to that idea of transformation, began looking who can help us think about this? Do you think of wholeness as part of leadership?
Tod Bolsinger:So I always say, the precursor to transformation is health. Right? So organizational health is mostly clarity. That's what I mean, the simplest way to think about organizational health is clarity. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but we're really clear.
Tod Bolsinger:So when we when we get asked to work with organization, we always start with, okay, so health is clarity. What's the most important things? What is the things that are not gonna change? What are the values that have been that have been, that have anchored us?
Tod Bolsinger:And the actual values, not our aspirational values. Let's get clear on those things. And then once we're we're aligned and we're living out our our values and our behavior, now we can start talking about how we move forward together.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm wondering about I think our tendency and maybe this is about us not wanting to feel pain or feel lost, but I think for a lot of folks, when we're going through change, we want our uncertainty to be reduced. But it sounds like maybe you're saying there might may maybe there's a a need to lean into that uncertainty. Because it sounds like you're you would challenge a good leader to own uncertainty. Can you talk more about that?
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. So adaptive leadership, which is the leadership's mature work I do, starts when there are no best practices. Right? There's no best practices. We don't know what to do.
Tod Bolsinger:It literally, for me, the biblical text in second Chronicles, lord, we don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. Right?
Camille Hall-Ortega:Oh, wow. That's great.
Tod Bolsinger:Like, so the hardest part about that is it starts then when somebody looks at the leader and says, Camille, you're our leader. I trust you. I'm following you. I'm here on your team.
Tod Bolsinger:What are we gonna do? And because you're a good leader, you gotta look them in the eye and say the 3 hardest words for any human to say. Like, harder than I love you.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Right. Right.
Tod Bolsinger:Right. People think I love you. I forgive you. I'm sorry. Those are not even nearly as hard as standing before someone who trusts you and is looking for you for leadership, and you got to say I don't know.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Wow.
Tod Bolsinger:And it is still ours to do, so we're gonna figure it out together.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. So it's looking beyond yourself. And and that's that's a good word.
Tod Bolsinger:And we and we work we do this with churches and organizations. We say to them I mean, we ask this question, how might your charism that's a kind of a Catholic word, your gifts, your values, the uniqueness that is you. How might your charism address the pain point of the world as an expression of what God wants to do in the world? How might your cares and make the pain point of the world? It's not just how might you get to be the organization or church you wanna be and ask people to support it.
Tod Bolsinger:And it's not just no matter what we gotta do, we gotta take on the things of this world that are painful. Like, I would think Jesus didn't take everything on. Right? There were people he walked by.
Tod Bolsinger:Right? He healed one person at the pool of Bethsaida. Thank God he did. We got a great story, but a lot of other people he passed by. So what is it for us?
Tod Bolsinger:And that's the discernment work. That's why I say the spiritual gift that every leader has to cultivate and every community has to cultivate is discernment. His discernment helps us to say, what is ours to do? What is the transformation we need to take on? What is the thing we need to be willing to lay down?
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm wondering we're talking a lot about kind of what a leader brings to the table and how that affects the folks that they're leading. But what about the leader themselves? What if they have been hurt or betrayed in some way? How do they trust, and how do they how how do they have to adjust from those past hurts for themselves?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, my first answer is every leader has been betrayed or hurt in some way because we are humans. Right? When we're so the the most important thing for me then is don't fake that. Like, I don't believe fake it till you make it. I really don't.
Tod Bolsinger:I understand the the the mindset of that. But I really think that what you were actually doing is telling the truth. Like, so when I walk into a room if I like, I'm aware of this. I rarely struggle with whether or not people are gonna like me if I'm working with them. For some reason, I'm pretty freed from that.
Tod Bolsinger:But what I'm not freed from is I actually wonder whether or not they're gonna respect my work. Like, I will be aware of everybody when I'm speaking. Anybody who closes their eyes for a second because it's the late afternoon and they've had a, like, a a sugar low, like, I will think in my head, I will have that person's face, and I'll think later. They're thinking, well, there's 2 hours I'm never getting back. Right? Like I struggle with people doubting my competence or whether or not I get a bad value. Now once I say that out loud, I realize, okay. That's usually me. I mean, sometimes I gotta do a better job, but that's usually me being overly insecure. I just have to let go of and Yeah. Ask, I just got to let go of and Yeah. Ask and look for healing and recognize that leaders are formed in the leading. You're actually formed in the process. It's not like you get it all worked out and then you get asked to lead.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's really good.
Marcus Goodyear:All this talk about kind of the pitfalls of leadership and and the trust and the mistrust, it it makes me think of something I read something I heard, sorry, at Laity Lodge many, many years ago, 2011. So several years ago now from Linda Roberts. She was speaking there. Laity Lodge is our adult retreat center operated by the H.E.Butt Foundation here in the Texas Hill Country. And she was talking about trust and mistrust and how it feels like everything's at stake, but God can use it all for good. So I'd like to play this clip. It's a little bit old and scratchy, but I think you'll be able to hear it.
Speaker 5:So much of what happens to us in growing up is about trust and mistrust. And one of the things that we know is that when we're raising children, we do the best job we can, but we blow it. Right? What we have to trust is that the mistrust they get from what we do wrong because we're not perfect, that that mistrust God will use.
Marcus Goodyear:So, Tod, when you hear that, does that set you free as a leader? Is that hard to accept?
Tod Bolsinger:What Linda is really saying here is as a leader, just like as a parent, you have to trust that you're gonna be imperfect. And that that literally our active that I always think my active leadership or our active being a person who steps in and lead, into a leadership position is an act of service. I put it on the altar. God's gonna use it.
Tod Bolsinger:I want God to multiply it. And I had somebody say to me, God works through us and in spite of us. That's an important thing to remember. It keeps me humble, and it keeps me from thinking that I'm the person with the solution. But it's also when in times when I have been the person with a leader who has hurt me or who has not who has failed me, It's helped me to realize, I can what I often can learn at this moment is to look beyond that leader to what I want from God.
Tod Bolsinger:And I think it's really important. You know, people say you learn the best from really gifted leaders with obvious flaws. And when you start thinking about that, it gives you the opportunity to then take responsibility for yourself. Right? So, I mean, I come from a family of really, really great people, but to be honest, we were not good listeners.
Tod Bolsinger:I did not learn how to listen in my family. We learned how to talk over each other. I need a lot of people in my life who said, Tod, you're a good talker. But you know, brother, what you need? And I needed to hear that a lot.
Tod Bolsinger:And I didn't learn that from the leaders who were my models. I had to learn that from people who confronted my leadership problems. And I'm better I'm a much better listener today than I used to be.
Marcus Goodyear:I just feel like that is a common problem in our culture, that we are all good at talking. We're good at posting. We're good at commenting. We're good at thinking somebody wants to hear our take instead of listening. It's just just the world needs more listeners.
Tod Bolsinger:One of the ways I found myself to getting into that was by saying, I'm gonna learn to listen as deeply as I need to until I completely understand what the other person's saying.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's so good. I love that. We we heard from another guest that we spoke with that you want to be able to share someone's story in the way that they would share it. That you wanna be able to listen to them so well that you could share their story in the way that they would they would share it themselves.
Tod Bolsinger:Oh, that's beautiful. See, I'll take that. That's good. I'll I'll practice that. That's beautiful.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's awesome.
Marcus Goodyear:Which is a lot of what we try to do in Echoes. We're trying to to share other people's stories in partnership with them in Echoes Magazine. And often that means we do the journalism no no of the subject gets to review the story. We try to we're we're not looking for puff pieces, so we're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna bring in somebody who's just gonna spread their agenda.
Marcus Goodyear:But at the same time, we wanna make sure that they feel honored and that they feel that the story is representing them well.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:Todd, any any last thoughts or last words for us? Anything we didn't think to ask you?
Tod Bolsinger:Well, you this is a great conversation because it was so far ranging. I would say that maybe to circle back to the whole part about trust. Whenever I say to people there's no transformation without trust, I always say, if you need to, stop right here. Like, if you doubt that, stop right here. Because trust is a sine qua non.
Tod Bolsinger:Like, you're right. The fact that our country doesn't trust each other, it's going to be very hard for us to be transformed into the nation we want to be or the culture we want to be. So you're right. It starts with that. What I just want people to get though is stockpiling trust, especially if you're a leader that everybody trusts me and I don't wanna lose anybody's trust and I don't wanna do anything to make anybody mad at me.
Tod Bolsinger:Stockpiling it's like building a big barn filled with seed, and everybody's starving because there's no fruit. You're gonna have to figure out how to build that seed and plant that seed in such a way in a healthy soil that will bear fruit. And that's that's the that's the work that's the work that has to be done.
Marcus Goodyear:So a a leader uses the trust that they've built up in order to address the pain people are going to feel as they're transformed.
Tod Bolsinger:Yeah. Yeah. And one of my little books is called Invest in Transformation, and it's Invest Trust in Transformation. That's what it's about.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. In fact, that book is one of the ones that guided this conversation, and it's part of a 4 part series that you can get right now by Tod Bolsinger. And there's an illustrator as well whose name is, I think, listed as an author. It's very good. And, of course, Canoeing the Mountains, as well.
Marcus Goodyear:Thanks.
Tod Bolsinger:Thank you.
Marcus Goodyear:Tod, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It's been great to talk to you again. It's been too long. And, I'm grateful for all that you're doing out there, for leaders, for Christians, all that you've done for Laity Lodge and the H.E.Butt Foundation in the past. It's been great to talk with you.
Tod Bolsinger:Thank you.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Thanks, Tod.
Marcus Goodyear:The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It's edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Tod Bolzinger. The Echoes Podcast is a production brought to you by the H.E.Butt Foundation.
Marcus Goodyear:You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.