Andy Stanley

Having compassion is a good place to start, but it's what we do with it that matters most.

Having compassion is a good place to start, but it's what we do with it that matters most.

Having compassion is a good place to start, but it's what we do with it that matters most.

Having compassion is a good place to start, but it's what we do with it that matters most.

Having compassion is a good place to start, but it's what we do with it that matters most.

Janine’s story began with seeing a need and deciding she couldn’t simply look away. What usually moves us from noticing a need to actually doing something about it?

Janine’s story began with seeing a need and deciding she couldn’t simply look away. What usually moves us from noticing a need to actually doing something about it?

Janine’s story began with seeing a need and deciding she couldn’t simply look away. What usually moves us from noticing a need to actually doing something about it?

We missed what social media would do to human flourishing. We can't afford to miss what AI is about to do, especially to the next generation. Andy Stanley and Holly Goddard sat down with Carey Nieuwhof on AI, mental health, employment, and the isolation it's accelerating, and why the church might be the one place AI can't replace. 🔗   Show Notes 🤖 AI and the Future Church - NEW BOOK! 🗣️ Preaching Cheat Sheet 🧠 The Art of Leadership Academy 🎥 Watch on YouTube Follow @careynieuwhof ❗️Connect with other podcast listeners about each episode of my podcast, including me. You'll get exclusive insights by asking questions, sharing insights, and learning how others are applying the content in real life.  Join for free: https://careynieuwhof.com/shownotes AI AND THE FUTURE CHURCH I wrote AI and the Future Church to give church leaders a practical playbook for what's ahead. It's built around three shifts every church leader needs to make, and it's grounded in what's actually happening right now. Learn more at careynieuwhof.com/ai  THE CHOSEN Season 6 of The Chosen begins the powerful journey to the cross. Your church can host a free Early Access screening of the first episode now through November 14. Learn more at ComeAndSee.net/church. GOMPASSION For almost 75 years, Compassion International has partnered with churches around the world to empower the most vulnerable children to become thriving followers of Jesus Christ. Check out Compassion.com/carey and head to the Compassion Sunday section—a great first step for your church to get involved and raise up children to follow Christ and change their families and communities.

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book: The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guests:  Andy Stanley is the founder of North Point Ministries, which he started in Atlanta in 1995 and has grown into 8 churches across metro Atlanta and a network of more than 225 churches globally, serving over 200,000 people weekly. He's the author of more than 20 books, including Next Generation Leader, Visioneering, and Deep & Wide. His newest is What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact. He and his wife Sandra have three grown children and live in Atlanta. Sam Kaufman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Insight Global, a $5.3B talent, technical, and AI services firm. He started as an entry-level recruiter in 2004 and rose through the ranks to lead the company's core sales divisions. He's played a central role in Insight Global's transformation into a global talent and technical services organization, helping the company double in size over the past five years, and in 2026, he was named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Staffing 100 North America list, recognizing the most influential leaders in staffing. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell. Key Learnings Somebody saw it in him before he saw it in himself. Andy and Louie Giglio were the troublemakers in his dad's youth group. One morning after they'd disrupted everything, Mother Mary sat them down and told them they were leaders and needed to lead. Andy's reaction at the time: then I don't want to be a leader. She should have kicked them out, but she didn't. She kept giving them chances they didn't deserve and didn't handle well. She's about to turn 101 years old. She never had children of her own and to this day she calls them her sons. Now Andy does it for others. When he sees someone with a leadership gear, he tries to speak life into it and fan the flame, because that's what was done for him. Leadership is the most wonderful, dangerous gift. Every great thing that's happened in the world had a leader behind it. So did every terrible thing. People followed both for the same reason: the leader brought clarity to a dilemma, made a promise, and people leaned in. Andy thinks leaders are born, not made. His evidence: he's never met a leader who accomplished anything extraordinary who said they weren't a leader, then read two books or went to a conference and became one. Anyone can get better. "But you can make him a better singer and still never hand him a microphone." Problems to solve vs tensions to manage. Work-life balance is a tension. You don't solve it, you manage it. Every industry and every company has its own. "When you solve a tension, you create a problem." You can spot tension by the calendar. If it keeps reappearing on the agenda and somebody keeps saying didn't we just talk about this, you've been trying to solve something that was never a problem. Naming it changes the conversation. Once a team agrees they're looking at a tension, nobody is right and nobody is wrong, and people stop treating each other like enemies. Andy's team asks the question out loud once a month. Sam heard Andy teach this on a podcast and it moved through Insight Global in a week. He listened on the drive in, recognized the pattern live in his CEO's Thursday meeting, and shared it with 40 leaders in the room. It reached a 40,000 person company within days. Sam's read on why: they'd been having the same conversation for years and had never had the language for it. Nobody can promise certainty. You can give clarity. The only way to promise certainty is to know the future in detail. And the greater the uncertainty, the more the need for clarity is heightened. If there were no uncertainty, nobody would need a leader. When COVID made his entire model illegal, Andy redeployed. Rather than doing a half-baked version of the old thing, he pulled everyone together and told them they were hitting pause, building a new plan, and staying busy doing something different. Giving people something to do feels like clarity. You know what to do, you know when you've done it, and the organization keeps moving. Andy pairs it with Jim Collins on navigating fog: put one foot in front of the other and feel your way along. Action absorbs anxiety. Ryan's phrase, and Andy's addition: even when it isn't progress, it usually leads to progress, because there's motion and momentum. Think like a broadcast studio, not a live one. When they knew nobody would be in the room, they didn't film the old service. They rebuilt the auditorium into a television studio and talked to the camera. Sam, watching from home, still can't remember whether he was there in person. They kept the habits. Andy's view is that hitting pause and waiting to reopen the old way would have been an enormous miss. Sam says Insight Global never went back to how they were before and has grown for seven years since. "How long do you plan to stay?" Andy had lunch with John Maxwell carrying demographic research, expecting to be interrogated about how big to build. Andy said he thought this was his life's work. Maxwell said then build it as big as you possibly can. They built 2,700 seats in the middle of nowhere. Three  years later they built another one behind it that seated 2,000. That's what intuition looks like. Maxwell knew the answer without knowing how he knew it. Andy would never have connected his own tenure to the size of the building. Andy's three questions for any big decision: What's considered impossible in our industry, but if it could be done would fundamentally change it? From Joel Barker's Future Edge. The point isn't that you'll answer it. It's that if you don't know the question, you won't recognize the paradigm shift when somebody else answers it. What would the next leader do? From Andy Grove at Intel, who asked Gordon Moore what a new team would do if the board threw them out. Moore answered instantly. Grove said then why don't we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves. What would a great leader do? Not what's expected, not the industry standard. What would a selfless, others-first, high-integrity, world-class leader do here? The second question is terrifying because it produces instant clarity. Andy says it's how he's made the hardest personnel decisions of 31 years. You love the person and they can't keep up, and the next leader would have no emotional attachment and would see immediately what needs to happen. The best leadership decision Andy ever made was going home at 4:00. He'd resigned from his dad's church with two kids in diapers, a pregnant wife, and no insurance. Then he started the church and worked constantly. He asked Sandra what she needed and didn't want her to hold back. She said be home between 4:00 and 4:30, because by then her energy with the kids was gone. So he became the first one to leave the office. When people asked to meet after work, he said before work instead, and ate two breakfasts. He ran that routine for about ten years. "I'm gonna cheat work. I'm not gonna cheat home." The deadline made him better at his job. If you have an hour to do something it takes an hour, and if you have two it takes two. Walking out the door at a fixed time made him dramatically more efficient, and everything still got done. We're supposed to be examples of the rule, not exceptions to it. Andy encouraged his staff to make the same call, and it set the organization's standard from day one. "It's not a sacrifice, it's an investment." What he tells his kids now they're grown with their own families.. Sow and reap, and you only get one shot at it. Parent towards the relationship, not towards compliance. Andy and Sandra had two rules: honor your mother, and don't tell a lie. You can dishonor me, but not her. Lying breaks relationships, and they wanted their relationships intact. Discipline toward reconciliation instead of restriction. When his middle son Garrett was disrespectful to Sandra, Andy made Garrett call his mother, ask her on a date, take her to dinner, and pay for it. By the end of the dinner it was resolved. Don't sweat the small stuff. Andy and Sandra were foster parents for ten years. Their biological kids came over one day and watched a five-year-old foster daughter roller skate across the hardwood floors, and pointed out they'd never even been allowed to run in the house. Andy's regret is that he wasn't that way when his own kids were young. Do the eulogy exercise. From Stephen Covey. Write what you'd want people to say about you at your funeral. Andy spent several mornings on it in his early 30s. Covey's line at the end: you have just discovered your personal definition of success. He reduced it to seven words, and he won't tell anyone what they are. He used to share them until he noticed people writing them down. His view: those are his, and you have to go get your own. The exercise changed what failure means. Once Andy defined success as those values, stepping outside them wasn't just messing up. It was failing, by his own definition. Don't let your identity shift from what you value most to what you're known for. Andy is grateful for the influence, but he didn't want to become the pastor of, or the author of. He says it's especially easy for men to center on what they're known for out in the world rather than who they are at home. "I only have one unique role. That's father to my children." Sandra could get another husband. There will be another pastor and other authors. Nobody else can be the father to his children. "Your ego is not your friend." Jeff Foxworthy's answer when Andy asked what one piece of advice he'd give Andy'

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The fear of what might happen can keep us managing, hiding, and pretending long after we know something needs to change.

Blame has a way of protecting us from an uncomfortable truth: the other person may not be the only one with something to own.

Sometimes what we call “complicated” is really fear in disguise. And until we name it honestly, we'll never find the courage to move forward.

Your greatest victory may not be in getting the outcome you want, but discovering a different kind of win.

Your greatest victory may not be in getting the outcome you want, but discovering a different kind of win.

Leadership isn't just for CEOs, pastors, or business owners—it begins at home. In this conversation, Ginny sits down with bestselling author and leadership expert Andy Stanley to explore the timeless principles from his new book, What Great Leaders Do. While written for organizational leaders, Andy shares why these lessons may be just as transformative for parents. Together they discuss the difference between problems that can be solved and tensions that must be managed, why trusting intuition often matters more than having all the answers, how to pursue clarity when certainty isn't possible, and why the strongest leaders play to their strengths instead of trying to become well-rounded. Andy also offers practical wisdom on protecting family over career, resisting the dangers of ego and entitlement, surrounding yourself with people who tell the truth, and building a life defined by character rather than achievement. Whether you're leading a family, a team, a business, or simply trying to become a wiser, more intentional person, this conversation is filled with practical insights that can shape the way you make decisions, build relationships, and leave a lasting legacy. Get Andy's latest book here. For more on Andy Stanley, visit: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndyStanleyOfficial Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy_stanley/ X: https://x.com/AndyStanle Your Move: https://yourmove.is Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast A huge thank you to our sponsors! Check them out below:  BetterHelp: Visit  www.BetterHelp.com/1000HOURS  today to get 10% off your first month. Quince - Visit www.quince.com/outside and get free shipping and 365 day returns IXL Learning - Head to www.ixl.com/1000hours to get an exclusive 20% savings on your membership Whisker - Take care of your cats while taking an additional $50 off bundles with code 1000HOURS when you shop www.whisker.com/1000HOURS  Muzzle Sleep Tape - Go to MuzzleSleep.com and use code 1000HOURS for 10% off.  Zenni Optical- Go to www.zenni.com/podcast  and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order, plus free shipping on all U.S. orders over $65. Active Skin Repair - Don’t forget to put this in your first aid kit! Visit ActiveSkinRepair.com and use the code 1000HOURS to save 20% on all Active Skin Repair products. KT by Knix - Go to www.KnixTeen.com , and use code 1000HOURS for 15 percent off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone wants people who will show up when life begins to unravel. Far fewer of us are willing to be the kind of friend who steps in before it does.

People may never ask you to defend Christianity, but they may wonder why you've chosen to follow Jesus. Being prepared for that moment could deepen your own faith as much as theirs.

The founders believed liberty was worth risking everything for, but they also understood it came with a hidden requirement. Two hundred fifty years later, that requirement matters more than ever.

Many Christians spend their lives measuring themselves by whether or not they are obeying all the rules. That’s not what Jesus intended.

Somewhere along the way, many of us began treating God's love and approval as something to earn. That assumption quietly shapes our relationship with God more than we realize.

Healthy relationships aren’t built on rules, but they can’t survive without a particular one. And it’s a rule that removes every loophole.

Every conflict feels like it’s about what someone else did, but the real source runs deeper and it’s hard to admit.