Mingo Palacios:

Welcome to the Purpose Driven Church Podcast where we sit down with leaders in and around the church to discuss current trends and challenges and how the five purposes of the local church matter today, more than ever.

Mingo Palacios:

What’s up everybody? Welcome to the PD Podcast. My name is Mingo and believe it or not, this is the first conversation I have had Jim Gray in the RV. He knows this. Sorry airstream. I’ve intended to have like eight episodes under my belt by this moment, but this would be combo number one today, number three at large, and it’s the first time I’ve seen Jon since we left each other at midnight the day before conference.

Jon Allen:

Third day of the conference.

Mingo Palacios:

On the third day. So Jon, good to see you, my friend. Reunited.

Jon Allen:

Good to see you too, this feels right.

Mingo Palacios:

It does feel right. It always feels right. And then today, super excited for the hookup with Alan Briggs, author of Everyone’s A Genius. Now I didn’t know Alan coming into this. I was connecting with Jim. We were anticipating coming together and he goes, “You know, you need to have a conversation with my friend Alan.” And I hear Alan, you are a fan of creatives. You’re a fan of the local church. You’re a fan of the entrepreneurial spirit that rises amongst so many young leaders today. Why don’t you say hello to our audience and give some people a little background on who you are, where you are, and what you’re up to.

Alan Briggs:

Absolutely. First, maybe foremost, I love tacos. So I’ve been eating a ton of tacos the last few days.

Jon Allen:

Which is the most important thing.

Alan Briggs:

I thought that’s what we’re here to talk about, but I guess if you want to go deeper-

Jon Allen:

We can talk culture or collaboration today.

Alan Briggs:

If we’re going to shift gears and talk about something deeper, I guess we could.

Jon Allen:

We could apply tacos to any of that.

Alan Briggs:

Exactly. That will preach as they say,

Mingo Palacios:

Threaten me with a good time as they say.

Alan Briggs:

But there are a few other elements, really for our family, that context of neighborhood has been where a lot of creativity and innovation has kind of flown out, maybe leaked out of us. Serving mediocre coffee with amazing people, and so being around a school and just the madness of our kids’ lives, innovation has to come out of that because of the chaos of family. I’m a pastor as well and my heart for our church plants that I get to work with is ultimately that they would become the people God has designed them to be. We use the word design a lot. Life design, ministry design, impact design. Living your life instead of your life living you is what we ended up talking about a lot. And then church planters, how do we launch them into the church that they were designed to lead? Not just the church everybody else is doing. You’re going to stick their sticker on it. It’s going to be a patchwork quilt that we see so much that feels so inauthentic. So that’s so much in my heart for the church. You guys are certainly likeminded, like-hearted, and I do hope we get to surf tomorrow morning as well.

Jon Allen:

We’re going to try.

Mingo Palacios:

First thing Jon said before we hit record is like, “Hey, you know, so I think what we should do tomorrow, we’re having a strategy meeting.” And he goes, “I think we should surf in the morning.” I was like-

Jon Allen:

Like a mobile meeting. I’m here for you guys.

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah, we call it board meeting board meeting. We have a board meeting.

Alan Briggs:

Totally. We’re going to do that. Absolutely.

Mingo Palacios:

So give me a little, because I think we probably love spending time with the same kinds of people, right? Kids who are hungry to come to the table with something that’s been burdening them and they’ve probably been working in the shadows on something they’re really excited to share about. But if they are anything like us when we were younger before we kind of like hit the lumps of reality, there’s a lot of navigating that needs to happen between genius and like the expression of whatever that genius is. As, as bold as it is to declare everyone a genius, what do you have to say for that audience, which is a large part of our segment, a lot of them in ministry too that would help them maybe get through this season or maybe even this day as it pertains to what it is that they are cooking up in the lab, wherever they’re at.

Alan Briggs:

Yeah, absolutely. Not all of your creativity is going to be welcomed in every space that you’re in. And so just because you possess that gift, desire, quality doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to bring it into a space. And so we talk about asking for permission instead of buy in. And so just get clear to be innovative or creative to take your next step. Don’t expect people to be as passionate about that as you are. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t felt it yet. They haven’t tasted it yet, you know? And so I think often we want people to take a bigger risk on something, than we’re actually taking. Just do it. Just put your head down. I learned a ton about discipline. It’s kind of crazy. So people say, “How do you find time to write?” I wrote three books in three years. I do not recommend that. It just happened that way. It was like there was a mafia with a gun to my head saying, “If you don’t have us this”-

Mingo Palacios:

Put a chapter in.

Alan Briggs:

It wasn’t that menacing.

Jon Allen:

But this mafia was all in your head.

Alan Briggs:

Yes. Well, it was a publisher.

Jon Allen:

Oh it was. Oh yeah.

Alan Briggs:

But at the end of that, what I realized is that when you put your head down and do work, it’s amazing. Number one, you get better in the process. It’s fulfilling. First, art is a gift to us then to everybody else. Everything else is gravy. If you’re waiting for somebody else to endorse your idea, number one, it’s going to be inauthentic. Number two, you’re never going to get it done. And so people say, “How do you find time to write?” Well, I write for a month a year? And they’re like, “How do you do it?” Well, three hours at a time in the guts of every single week. And so just the discipline that’s needed. It isn’t sexy, we don’t talk about it much, but man, when artists who are creative begin to just grind and just stay connected to it, nobody else is going to wake you up to be able to get out of bed or stay up late to do your thing. Man, when you invest in it, you get better at it. It is a gift to you. It’s life giving to your soul. Sometimes that’s the most life giving thing to my week. If I’ve had a tough at home, tough week in the church stuff doing whatever. And that’s the space that I say airplane mode on my phone, Wi-Fi disabled. This is my time.

Mingo Palacios:

Jon, I feel like you’re a lot like that where when you get overwhelmed with what you have to do, it’s typically what you get to do that brings life back to you.

Jon Allen:

Yes, absolutely. I find that like if you just do like that, you have 80 percent up on somebody that has all the talent. Also that’s where just the act of doing is the therapy. Yeah. The act of doing is what fills you up-

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah. You’re meant to do it.

Jon Allen:

And the excuse to accomplish whatever you are trying to accomplish, but the act of just doing it is what I do it for.

Alan Briggs:

Which is crazy, the more stressed we get, the less we actually will go do it. The more excuses we have, which is when we actually need-

Jon Allen:

Should be.

Alan Briggs:

Doing what we’re designed to do and crushing it in the meantime.

Jon Allen:

And that’s where discipline would come in. For the people that aren’t.

Mingo Palacios:

I heard a really great conversation about fills and drains, right? And they say like that which fills you up is typically not in the same category of the things that drain you out, right? The problem is that as you experienced those drains, somehow subconsciously we keep adding the things that drain us instead of clearly understanding that I’ve got to turn the tide and add a few things that will fill me up in order to continue to have that natural flow, that outpouring of what people are hoping to get out of you. Now that sounds really like transactional, but at the end of the day as a creative, you just kinda have to come to terms with the fact that you and your brains the way God made you and the way God designed you that you’re an output machine, and when you get to come to terms with that, I feel like I’ve rested better knowing, you know what? Inspiration comes on his time, right? I don’t just flip on and go, “Oh, you need an idea. Here it is. When I can surround myself with things that fill me, it’s much easier for me to deliver when somebody comes knocking on the door for an idea or for a project proposal.

Alan Briggs:

And you can even get in the flow of that. Just like with Sabbath, with exercise, with anything else in life, with your eating, you get into flow, a rhythm of that. There’s a writer that said “It’s funny when inspiration hits me exactly at 9 o’clock every morning.” So it’s just that idea that when we clear the space, it’s funny when God shows up, but often it’s just excuses that we have. I think we all do it.

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah. I kind of like that excuse, like I love the vein of that because I have certainly turned off the potential in my world more times than somebody else has imposed it on me. Right? Where I’ve actually disqualified an idea or I’ve disqualified a project because I thought, “I don’t know that anybody’s going to want to engage with this.” It makes me thankful for the ones that when I’m in the company of great friends who just love me, they don’t love what I do but they just love being with me. Jon is one of these activators with me. He goes, “Dude, like don’t squash that. You have no idea. It’s not even up to you whether or not it’s good or not. It’s really the audience that gets to determine that. Now we’re getting into some like crazy Gary V. theoretical stuff, but even with this podcast as an example, we knew that it was conversations like this were needed amongst our generation mainly to be an informational gap cover between those that we serve. We serve a lot of legacy leaders, a lot of seasoned leaders who don’t have the time to sit in these coffee brewing conversations. So, I thought we’ll record an episode or two, maybe one or two listeners and somebody told me, “You don’t get to choose if it’s good or not, your audience does.” And that was a really liberating reality. So then I thought, “Well dude, we’ll just put everything out and then we’ll see what hits.”

Jon Allen:

It goes back to just do the work. Just do it. And we talked a lot about cultivation. Cultivating the creative, cultivating ideas, and creating an environment that really brings the best out of everybody that’s involved and we need each other to be able to feed off of and protect those ideas.

Mingo Palacios:

So good.

Jon Allen:

Because the way you are is so risky and it’s so risky because it’s so vulnerable. It’s so, you’re putting yourself out there and even in any endeavor, whether it’s how artful you create an organization that helps people.

Mingo Palacios:

Expression.

Jon Allen:

Or how the art is so easily squashed in us. So then when we get together like me and you Mingo and we feed off each other and we encourage and it’s like you have this environment that just keeps pushing you up, that’s where we’re able to get. We need each other together. So so good.

Alan Briggs:

You need accountability ideas, freaks like me club.

Jon Allen:

I love that.

Mingo Palacios:

So can you unpack that a little bit?

Jon Allen:

We talked about that.

Alan Briggs:

The original freaks like me club may have been the inklings. I mean, if you think about inklings, who are gathering together, it was on Tuesdays and they say, “How many of the best books you’ve ever read do you think were written on those Monday nights? Because those guys are going to ask about that tomorrow. And you better believe they cram too. They had a lot of work to do as well.

Jon Allen:

They kept each other accountable and their ideas built on others’ ideas. I bet C.S. Lewis wouldn’t be the writer he is if he didn’t have a token.

Mingo Palacios:

Freaks like me.

Alan Briggs:

Yeah, and they wrote so differently and yet there was just enough cross pollination and actually whenever I write there’s some great books, Art and Fear, the phenomenal book, The War of Art by Pressfield. Once you start reading these things, which were ‘research’ it is a war. ‘Research’ for this book. I thought the good news is everybody’s feeling what I’m feeling. So my same internal thing is actually external and oh wait a minute, I’m not the only one. Guess what? It ain’t about you. We all feel that fear, get it out there, and actually that’s when it becomes vulnerability and courage. When you put it out there because mad props, man, you put it out. You think it’s scary to put something on a wall. Try writing a bunch of words in here to go, “I hope. I believe these in 10 years” but I do believe everyone’s a genius.

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah. You know, what’s scary about writing a book to me, and I guess it’s the same anything you put out there for pastors in people who now everything is archived, right? So you have a 10 year ago version, right? And you listen to the stuff that you were preaching or the stuff that you’re recording the stuff that you’re reading 10 years ago and you’re like, “Jesus, I hope the Spirit intervenes for anybody who stumbles upon those words.” Because they were wildly off. So I think there’s a grace obviously that an artist or creative a pastor, a ministry leader needs to pay themselves because I think a lot of times we’re afraid to publish.

Alan Briggs:

What’s excellence? It’s the best you have at that moment.

Mingo Palacios:

That’s great. Say that one more time.

Alan Briggs:

Excellence is the best you have at that moment and people are like, “Oh, are you happy with the first book called Staying is the New Going, you happy with that?” I said, “I wrote the best book I could have in the time I was given right then at that moment.” And so you’re going to look back later. But nobody comes up to you and it’s like, “Dude, your book’s no good.” There’s one gal on Amazon, M3. She gives it like a decent review, but then rips me a new one and you know what I do when I speak about creativity, I read that first and go, “All right, so here we are. If that’s what I feared, I got it. Some random stranger who won’t even acknowledge her name rip me a new one. I still woke up and wrote the next day. Guess what? I was alive.

Mingo Palacios:

You made it. Winning. Hashtag winning.

Alan Briggs:

Yeah. You got to get a couple of those. A couple of punches in the jaw to me and I’m still alive.

Mingo Palacios:

I want to ask about chapter seven in Everyone’s A Genius because the title caught my name, The Church As A Genius Factory. Give me a brief on that.

Alan Briggs:

Bottom line. We need to be the most affirming group, community, family, team to artists in the world because we have more of a reason to take that risk. And unfortunately I see that we haven’t been that freaks like me club. We need to become more graceful. We need to open up expression. We need to challenge people to take risks. And as that factory, and I mean factory obviously facetiously of course in that idea, not that we are producing widgets, but in factory as to like this is what we do is we nurture, we cultivate exactly right as if each one’s the same, but no, we cultivate, we nurture, we tease out what that looks like to be able to take those risks and actually talk about those fears. What’s your next right step? What project you’re working on? Innovation comes from limits as well and so nurturing that out as people, as families, as small groups, as church staff being protected to do what

Jon Allen:

That strikes a chord with me as an artist. I’ve been waiting for a job in the church and I’ve been like just doing art for the church for the last 10 years and applying myself to being creative in it. And I’ve heard it said that like the church is where artists go to die. And I’ve wanted to dig into that and battle that culture because it shouldn’t be.

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah.

Jon Allen:

And I want to ask the questions, how does the church become what it was in Florence and Rome back in the renaissance, right? Like how does it become the forefront in art? How does it become the one that hires the most artists? That is building the craziest architecture? And I feel like the church has become more of a sustaining model that just is trying to put butts in the seats and you know, what? Art’s risky. And really we need-

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah, most churches are trying to mitigate risks at the end of the day, so artists being the like freaks like me, that’s the self identifying badge. You don’t really know what to do with them as a traditional leader. This would probably take us to like those spiritual assessments and also the generic pathway for most people to get involved in a ministry really doesn’t serve a local creative terribly well because inside of you is this like ever evolving color palette and all these wild ideas, all these expression possibilities. But then when you get to the front door of time to serve, they’re like pick children’s, pick parking, pick security and pick hospitality.

Alan Briggs:

Yes. We’re assessing for the wrong end. And so we’ve hurt people in the means and limited by hurt, I mean limited, stifled, silenced. So, that’s the idea, unleashing creativity for the sake of the world. If you feel like all creativity in your community is going to be channeled into your church for the gathering, of course not, no gathering church or not, nothing can handle that but by true creativity, so the reality is we’ve assessed for the wrong things and so we’ve kind of misused some spiritual gifts assessments and not talked about other gifts.

Mingo Palacios:

Yeah, some words of wisdom, I would say if you’re a ministry leader, one of the best things you can do is toss the form. That sounds crazy, but to say like you’re clearly creative, You can typically identify a creative amongst your pack. Right? And you say, “Can I get some one on one time with you? Can I hear your story? Can I hear what you love and what you’re passionate about and can I hear how you ended up here?” Has typically been the big win for me as a pastor to get on the level with an artist with a creative. And then for me to make a specialized, almost like a track or like a pathway that says, “I’m going to treat you not like the others and I want to give you proximity to me and I want to give you the proximity to what it is that I’m doing. Because I believe that what’s going to come out of you is going to actually greatly influence what I’m actually trying to do.” That big risk. That’s big cost, that’s big time.

Alan Briggs:

That’s big reward.

Mingo Palacios:

But the reward is one, validating a creative who probably would do with a great piece of like, “You know what I love for you to belong.” But two, you have no idea what comes out of that partnership, the sacred and that which is to be like to be brought to the surface by way of creativity.

Alan Briggs:

It’s the old idea. What gets celebrated gets done.

Mingo Palacios:

Let’s go. Or what you platform you attract.

Alan Briggs:

Exactly. So if we don’t know what’s going on, we need to be archeologists of story to figure out what are people actually doing and if we don’t know when we’re disconnected from the stories, well then we’ve got to find mechanisms. When I do consulting, I say everybody agrees with that, but then I say, “Well, what mechanisms do you have for collecting out of the box stories?” And we have in the box mechanisms. We don’t have out of the box.

Mingo Palacios:

You’re flipping on some pages dude are we going to do a reading? An authors reading right now?

Alan Briggs:

No, we’re not.

Mingo Palacios:

Come on come on, let’s get a reading right now.

Alan Briggs:

People, you know how to read. Let me just say three things. I’m assuming a lot, but three things you’re talking about where spiritual gifts assessments went wrong. Obviously not saying Paul is wrong or off base, right? Nothing heretical here. I’m just saying three things. Hierarchies when we create greater or lesser gifts then we are always going snuff out the subtle gifts.

Mingo Palacios:

That was just talked about on the platform today about every gift deserves an equal run and that was like such a bell ringer for me because they say oftentimes it’s the most exposed gifts that get the most love, but they’re like there’s no ministry or no gift that out prioritizes another or there shouldn’t be.

Alan Briggs:

Absolutely.

Mingo Palacios:

But we live in a flawed world, flawed leaders.

Alan Briggs:

And sometimes we need to rename those gifts because someone was like, “I don’t know what that looks like.” Hospitality’s always been in the top three for me and so when I look at it, I’m like hospitality Martha Stewart.

Mingo Palacios:

Hotel industry, you’re the hotel industry.

Alan Briggs:

Or, I grew up in the south, so it’s like, well it’s got to be nice long table dinners and that’s awesome once a year right?

Mingo Palacios:

Sweet tea. A lot of sweet tea.

Alan Briggs:

Oh, of course. Tacos. But it all comes back to tacos. But I have four kids, so sometimes hospitality is kicking toys aside and be like, you grabbed the little Caesar’s pizza, come on in like the midst of my mess. So hospitality is not about the full table, but the open life. Yeah. And I can’t all that time. Also spiritual gifts when they’re more about us than how we can serve others we’ve already lost.

Mingo Palacios:

Boom.

Alan Briggs:

And so here’s that.

Mingo Palacios:

I would say more about us as in more about the thing I’m leading.

Alan Briggs:

Me validation, affirmation. And then the last one really quickly, gifts are only organized as ways to serve the church body, not the community, we’ve already lost. If it’s just to serve us, to prop us up. They’re subtle, right? And if we’re going to see a creativity revolution we’re going to have to affirm things and trust in ways that we, we made good.

Mingo Palacios:

It’s a long investment. It’s an investment for sure. And that’s the probably the biggest detriment to seeing this come to life is that people are looking for very short term returns.

Jon Allen:

Gosh, yes. So good. I think we, as we try and wrap this up, I remember we were talking about some of the things that you are creatively putting together to cultivate community and put the right people in the right room with the right surrounding to get some really amazing things done and curating connection well. You said something about free coffee Fridays.

Mingo Palacios:

Shot gun some of those ideas.

Jon Allen:

Tell us about some of the things you’re doing that are connecting people well and your endeavors to apply that.

Alan Briggs:

Awesome. Cool. So let me start with concentric circles close to home. So in our family, we’re talking through the creativity of how are our kids wired and how do we release them into those giftings. I’m about to spend a couple days with my daughter releasing her into high school. What does that look like?

Jon Allen:

That’s going to be a ceremony.

Alan Briggs:

Prayers are appreciated.

Mingo Palacios:

We’re all praying for you right now.

Alan Briggs:

How do we do that? This is a rite of passage and almost the commissioning and in that sense. Secondly, our neighborhood, our neighborhood is where we’re placed physically. We’re making a scene. That’s what we say. How do we make a scene in this place and space? And so we do a lot of that with our family, our kids, we want them to grow up saying, “That’s just what we do, how we do it.”

Mingo Palacios:

That’s what we say in my family. We say, “This is what we do in our family.” And then when you come across something that’s counter cultural, it’s easy to say by circles, bravery in our family qe don’t necessarily do that, you know, in Dad’s family, this is what we do, this is what we believe, this is how we do it.

Alan Briggs:

Absolutely. And that obviously spreads out from there. And so kind of the next circle of city. City for us, a connection of neighborhoods and creatives and all of that. There’s so much more brewing in our cities that we can ever put a finger on. But space for us has been a game changer. We have a space we call The Commons and so this common space has been coworking and events and networking and not networking in a weird way. Taco Tuesday. It’s invite only. It’s not thrown out there to grow rapidly and be weird because it always is when that happens, it’s slow cultivation. You said the word curate because really, we like to think about ourselves as the artists, but truly the real artists, I think of community are the curators, the cultivators saying, “Yeah, I could make this myself.” Great creatives, yes, can make something. But yet they’re putting a bunch of other people’s art on the walls to say, “This is the experience of that.” So it’s been beautiful brewery owners coming in and saying, “I found my tribe.” Coffee shop owners, people who have taken massive risks. We see it more about what risks have you taken than what art have you produced that brings hearts together.

Jon Allen:

I love the word curate. I’ve been using it so much lately because the curator is the one that celebrates all of those artists. He picks and chooses and goes, “You know what? I’m going to put this person in front.”

Mingo Palacios:

On display.

Jon Allen:

“I’m going to give them legitimacy.”

Alan Briggs:

Yeah, so practical. Church leader who’s listening, who are you celebrating? Hopefully they’re younger than you. You’re finding people who are younger than you. Hopefully they have diverse gifts that you don’t fully understand, but who you lay a hand on, you are saying something about.

Mingo Palacios:

And hopefully it’s not your own playlist of your best messages because you’re grossly misleading at that point. Your best applause should be reserved for those that are inside your camp, like raising a platform for others constantly.

Alan Briggs:

Yup, and there’s not like a magical age that you hit and realize that. It’s not like, “Okay, now I feel like I’m old and it’s time.”

Mingo Palacios:

Oh, time to give somebody else the-

Alan Briggs:

No. There’s not a magical age. No one informs you like, “You got your AARP card now it’s about somebody else.” Legacy is a mindset and a heartset.

Mingo Palacios:

I actually think that you track faster to influence as an early adopter of celebrating and platforming others. I mean, that really was the win for us in the young adult ministry that Jon and I co led when we set our sights on lifting up every artist that we could get our hands on, we never had to beg people to come to an event because people knew when they got there they were going to get mad shine from just showing up. So, I would tell people if you’ve got an attendance problem, it may be that you’re not giving enough people love around you.

Alan Briggs:

Yeah, that’s great. What stories are we choosing to tell? So real quickly, I don’t share this much and certainly not to be like, “Hey, look at me.”

Mingo Palacios:

Exclusive. Here we go.

Alan Briggs:

At the beginning of this year, um, I felt that God put a certain amount of people on my mind and heart or a certain list of people that I was supposed to put my hand on their shoulder and pull creativity out of them. And I had already had some conversations, whether it be writing or just something I got in them that they needed to continue to happen to be 12 just happened to be a dozen. Nothing spiritual about it.

Mingo Palacios:

So holy.

Alan Briggs:

Wrote notes to them and said, “I’m for you. How can I help” I have right at my desk I have a list of people. And literally I’m thinking, “How can I help them win? How can I help them win?” And so ironically, as they win, you win. And so of course, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do it for that reason. But Truett Cathy, Chick-fil-A dude always said, “The more you help other people get what they want, you get what you want.” And so there is that. Suddenly there’s the blessing that flows backwards. As the wave hits, the energy is transferred into another wave, right? We are in Southern Cal.

Mingo Palacios:

The holy backwash.

Jon Allen:

We’ll experience that tomorrow morning, if you will.

Alan Briggs:

I hope we do if I could get the wetsuit on.

Mingo Palacios:

The holy backwash. Hey boys, we have a little bit of a live studio audience here. Make sure you grab something out of the swag box, the swag bucket. We love you. We’ll catch you for New York. Just like that.

Alan Briggs:

I dare you. I dare you.

Mingo Palacios:

But tell your mom to buy it on Amazon too so we can afford tacos. Alan, such a solid perspective. I feel like this will be a highly circulated episode because too many young people are trying to figure out how to wrap language around that which they’re wrestling with inside. So the fact that you’ve done the due diligence to-

Alan Briggs:

One more thing.

Mingo Palacios:

Aw come on dude, I tried to toss you kudos dog.

Alan Briggs:

Did you say gouda? Thank you Lord. So the idea of genius, we see it as something I do the pressurized. When you hear genius, you hear obviously someone else, not me. There’s that kid that got a pluses in everything growing up. Yeah, there’s that kid, right? Obviously not me, but way back in the day in antiquity, Greek and Roman times, they wouldn’t say you are a genius. They’d say you have a genius. So the genius of the Living God literally blows through us.

Jon Allen:

It’s not ours.

Alan Briggs:

Exactly so what is creativity? It is opening up the window of our soul and letting the Spirit blow through us.

Mingo Palacios:

(Sound effect noises). That’s my trap horn right there.

Jon Allen:

That is how we don’t get all tore up when the next day you don’t have genius.

Mingo Palacios:

And you release the pressure. The pressure is released.

Alan Briggs:

(Singing) It’s not about you, Jon or Mingo. It’s not about me.

Jon Allen:

Oh my gosh. That just blew my mind and I’ve heard it said before it came from the word genie that would float around and it would bestow upon you genius and that’s where we get that word and then it would leave you and you wouldn’t the next day be upset about it that like, oh, you’re not writing or something’s not coming to you the same way it did that day because it just was imparted.

Alan Briggs:

Because we like to take credit, but there’s that one in a million time when you go, “I don’t know man”. You read it later and go, “Dang, that’s good. Who wrote that? Oh I think I did.” Because it’s literally flowing through us so we ain’t as bad as we think and we’re certainly ain’t as good as we think.

Mingo Palacios:

I’m a believer in that. That’s a solid word.

Jon Allen:

Divine impartation.

Mingo Palacios:

Alan, if people want to get a hold of you, how do they do that?

Alan Briggs:

Grab this on Amazon. What I say to folks is go to stayforth.com. If you cannot afford it, I believe you. I trust you. Send me a message and I will send you an old school paper copy, which I still think actually matters to touch pages. So I would love to send you. I trust you. I won’t check your bank statements but connect with me there. We’re doing all kinds of coaching with leaders, starting some writers cohorts, just exciting stuff that has just developed.

Mingo Palacios:

Are you on social?

Alan Briggs:

Yes, @AlanBriggs. A-l-a-n B-r-i-g-g-s.

Mingo Palacios:

Hey, so for all of our listeners, because you love this episode, I’m telling you, tag somebody in who needed to hear this and get a fresh word. If you can share it, grab it and share it through your own personal networks. And if you’ve listened for a while and you haven’t subscribed or left a comment, man that helps us out a ton. So on behalf of Saddleback, Purpose Driven and the PD Casts, Alan Briggs, we are so thankful for the sweep of genius that God has put on you for this moment. Thanks for sharing with our audience what it’s like to lead through the chaos and to really own that which God has gifted us with. I really appreciate you bro.

Alan Briggs:

Awesome. Keep it up guys. Love it.

Mingo Palacios:

We’ll talk to you guys soon. We hope today’s insights left you feeling inspired and propelled towards your greatest potential. Thanks again for joining us for another episode of the PD podcast. Until next time.