By Allen Haynes • March 17, 2025 Listen to the Podcast. Andy Stanley (00:02): Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, and before we get into today’s content, I wanted to thank Factor for sponsoring this episode. Hey, do you end up getting takeout more than you’d like? Well, factor actually has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy, and that is such a big deal to me. It is such a big deal to Sandra. We are empty nesters, so we’re always looking for that quick fix, nutritional meal and factor is the answer for us. They are dietician approved and ready to heat and eat in two minutes, so no matter how busy you are, factor is the answer. So if you’ll go to factor meals.com/factor podcast, that’s factor meals.com/factor podcast and then use the Code Factor podcast. You will get 50% off your first box plus free shipping on that first box factor. Arrives fresh and fully prepared, perfect for any active busy lifestyle. 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I’m so excited about this month’s episode because I get to be your host and my friend Clay Scroggins is back in the studio to continue our discussion about his brand new book, how to Lead in a World of Distraction. Clay, welcome back. Clay Scroggins (02:06): Thanks Andy. Thanks for sharing your platform with little old me, really Andy Stanley (02:11): Grateful. Yeah, this isn’t your first time, as I mentioned last time, how many years ago? How did it lead when you’re not in charge? Clay Scroggins (02:17): It was probably four years ago on Andy Stanley (02:19): Your podcast. Yeah, it first book, how to Lead When You’re Not in Charge. Phenomenal book, and now How to Lead in a world of distraction. Clay, would you just catch us up real quick? Why is this the, first of all, what do you mean by distraction specifically as it relates to leaders and why is this such a big topic and an important topic for leaders in particular? Clay Scroggins (02:37): Well, there’s a huge implication for the workplace. So when we think about leadership primarily, we think about that at work. There was a survey done a couple of years ago that said three out of four employees admit to wasting or spending two hours or more a day being distracted by things at work. At work, three out of four employees. The idea is that there are certainly more distractions today than there have ever been before. Technology being the primary distraction that all of us are, we’re guilty of being distracted by. But what this book is about, it’s not about a, Hey, quit social media or put your phone down kind of book for one, how would you take a picture of your food if you put your phone down for two? Because that’s not really the problem. The problem is not really the technology. The truth is that as humans, we are wired to make anything a drug. We’re wired to turn up any kind of distraction if it will keep us from paying attention to what’s inside of us. And that’s really, if we’re leaders looking to lead ourselves well then we have to be leaders who are turning down the noise on a regular basis to be ruthlessly curious about what’s really going on inside of us. Andy Stanley (03:47): That phrase is kind of a key. Say that again. To be Clay Scroggins (03:50): Ruthlessly great leaders turn down the noise low enough and long enough to be ruthlessly curious of their emotions. Andy Stanley (03:57): Yeah. You talk about it being emotional detectives. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that. Clay Scroggins (04:02): Well, most people either let their emotions drive the car, which is not a good idea. Letting your emotions be a passenger is a good idea or they just lock emotions out of the car and neither of those options is a good option. Your emotions were designed to be a part of you, but they were designed to be a passenger in the car. And so instead of just accepting our emotions like most of us do, too many of us treat our emotions like a mare D at a restaurant. Oh, anger, I didn’t know, I didn’t realize you were coming. How can I help you? How can I help you? What do you want a table for? Two? Oh, it’s you and jealousy. Come on, both of you. Come on in here. I’ll get you a seat. That’s the way most of us treat our emotions. Instead, we should, well, you remember 24, the show with Keefer Sutherland where he played Jack Bauer. Most of us should treat our emotions like Jack Bauer would’ve treated emotions who sent you, why are you here? What’s the point of your arrival? How long are you going to be here? What do you want to do while you’re here? That’s what we should be doing. And so to be an emotional detective, to be more curious of our emotions will ultimately help us become healthier people because the best leaders of the most emotionally healthy people, Andy Stanley (05:10): And the only way to do that is to turn down the noise or to turn down the distractions or to identify the good things that we’ve accumulated around us in terms of habits or whatever it is that actually distract from the things we need to be paying attention to. Clay Scroggins (05:26): The simple pathway for us is to just identify your distraction, to identify your noise. For all of us, we have something that we go to, and if you don’t know what it is, just ask a friend because they probably would love or ask your spouse, they would love to tell you. In fact, if they tell you and you don’t listen, they might just text it to you, which I think in and of itself will probably explain what your distraction is. But as there are some distractions that are specific to leaders, the appearance of success, the allure of progress, the appeal of certainty, those are things that leaders are just more naturally drawn to, but they’re covering something up and whatever it is that they’re covering up, you just won’t know what it is until you turn it down. So being able to identify it, being able to turn down the noise by experimenting with the noise and then being able to pay attention to what it’s masking is really the habit that great leaders have to be able to not just eliminate distractions, but to be able to figure out what the distraction is masking. Andy Stanley (06:23): So moving ahead though, you urge leaders to adopt what you call the four noise canceling habits. In fact, this sort of makes up the bulk of the book, the four noise canceling habits. Give us a little kind of a high level view of what those four are, and again, how they interface with the routine of a leader. Clay Scroggins (06:42): I like the term noise canceling habits. I would assume you’ve used noise canceling headphones. There’s two different kinds of noise canceling headphones. There’s the kind that just, they’re just made of a dense material and they just block the noise. But the more sophisticated, more expensive version, the ones Andy Stanley (06:58): With batteries Clay Scroggins (06:59): Exactly made by companies like Bose and Sennheiser, those are really fascinating because they have a microphone inside of them that listens to whatever it is that’s making noise. Then they apply the inverse frequency to that noise and it cancels out the noise and creates silence. As humans, we’re not actually able to live in perfect silence. We would go crazy if we actually had zero decibels. All of us live, we would all say silence or quietness is about 30 decibels. Anything below that would send us into some kind of Andy Stanley (07:35): Really, Clay Scroggins (07:35): Yeah, that’s true. And there’s a lab in Minnesota, I think it’s in Minneapolis that goes lower than that, but no one has ever been able to stand for 45 minutes inside of that lab because they start hallucinating and going crazy. So we can’t actually tolerate perfect silence, but we can turn down the noise and we can only do that really through noise canceling habits. So there’s some habits in our lives that if we would apply them, they would act as those headphones. They would seek out the noise, they would find the inverse frequency to it, then they would help cancel it out so that we can discover what’s inside of us. So there’s four. Yeah, so there’s four that I’m trying to apply, and again, I’m not claiming to be any expert on this. This is just my own journey. Well, you wrote a book which makes it seem like you think you’re an expert. Andy Stanley (08:20): No, I mentioned last time when I heard you teach this, I immediately said, I want you to take this and apply this specifically to leaders because I just think you’re spot on and it’s so helpful. So anyway, no more stalling. Let’s talk about these four. What’s the first one? Yeah, Clay Scroggins (08:36): The first one is finding your why. It’s the skill or the discipline of consistently finding your why. It’s really about simplifying your life. It’s amazing how the why that drives you or the spine that we all have that causes you to make the decisions that you make. Simplicity works hand in hand with it, that the more simple your life is, the more able you are to find your why. And the more able you are to find your why, the better you’ll be at saying no and saying no to the wrong things. Saying yes to the right things and the white noise is what gets in the way of discovering that. Exactly. Exactly. So the noise of whether it’s, again, all the common ones like alcohol or Netflix or shopping, those things, we just turn up because we don’t like the silence sometimes or we don’t like what we’re going to experience on the inside of us, and it keeps us from really finding what is that reason that you’re alive? (09:31): What’s the purpose for your life? What’s the mission statement for your life? What’s the thing inside of you that really drives you? And the more simple your life is, the more able you are to find your why. They really do work hand in hand. And so the habit is not only finding your why, but the way to get to your why is to simplify your life. So it’s Steve Jobs saying, Hey, I’m going to only wear the same clothes every single day so I don’t have to make those decisions so that I can be driven by the thing that I want to be driven by Andy Stanley (10:00): So I can discover my identity or that’s not part of my identity is I’m going to find it somewhere else. Clay Scroggins (10:06): That’s exactly right. Then Andy Stanley (10:07): Everybody decided I’m going to dress Clay Scroggins (10:09): Like Steve Jobs so I can find myself, right? That’s right. But really he was driven by this why of, Hey, I’m going to make extraordinary technology that helps people. And he didn’t want the constant decision of what am I going to wear get in the way of that? Why? So your why might be to be a person that helps other people. Your why might be to be a person that is an influencer or that has power or that has money. It doesn’t need to be necessarily positive or negative, but you owe it to yourself to find it. And the habit of finding it consistently, finding it is really driven by how simple you are in all of those decisions that sometimes get in the way. Andy Stanley (10:48): So looking for the unnecessary clutter. Clay Scroggins (10:51): That’s exactly right. Andy Stanley (10:52): Whether it’s sound or a habit, clutter’s a great word, eating whatever it might be. Clay Scroggins (10:55): Right Andy Stanley (10:55): Now you have five children, right? A lot of clutter. Yeah. Well, no, I was going to say, so the person that’s listening, they’re thinking, oh yeah, well, you don’t understand my life. Well just want you to know the author of this book, clay, you have a very, very busy life. You have five young children and a very demanding job, and yet you have found the space or you’ve created the space or the margin to apply all of this. So what do you say before we go to number two? What do you say to the super hyper busy person? I don’t mean they’re just busyness. They got a lot going on. Clay Scroggins (11:27): Yeah. Well, oftentimes the way to find time to do this is found in eliminating some of that clutter. (11:34): And so that’s interesting to me about this first habit is that it really does work hand in hand. The simpler you are, the more able you’re to find your why. And the better you’re at finding your why, the better you’ll be at regulating your own life. And so instead of continuing to be driven by that schedule and all the demands of your life, the sooner the better you are at turning down the noise and figuring out what is the thing that is the reason why you’re awake today? What’s the reason why you’re alive today? It helps eliminate some of those distractions that do get in the way. And so for me, the probably worse than having five kids is I’ve been given this temperament or personality of I’m an Enneagram seven, I’m a flaming extrovert. And so my tendency is to say yes to everything because I think it’ll make the other person happy, or just because I like the joy of getting to do a lot of things and determining my why, which coincided with me getting married, determining my why has really helped me create a more sustainable pace in life. Number Andy Stanley (12:34): Two, you said it’s speaking to yourself. That’s right. Speaking to yourself, which kind of sounds, well, we think crazy people do that, Clay Scroggins (12:44): Right? Andy Stanley (12:44): Speaking to yourself. Clay Scroggins (12:45): Yeah, talking to yourself is really the, it’s the conversation that happens all day long. We all have this running conversation with ourself, and unfortunately, too many of us pay almost no attention to the messages we are sending ourselves. And great leaders learn to pay attention to what they are saying to selves, but the only way you do that is by turning down the noise and listening to what it is that you’re saying to yourself. So for me, leveraging self-regulating questions to help me determine what’s a self-regulating question. Yeah. So my calendar gets too busy, and I try to use the question, why am I saying yes to this? Or is there someone who can do this better? Those questions have helped me discover the message I’m saying to myself, which too often is I think I owe this person, or I like the perception of being busy because of what it says about me. Some of those self-regulating questions help me send the right messages to myself, which is my worth doesn’t come from how much is on my calendar. My worth doesn’t come from my position that my worth transcends. That goes far beyond. And your Andy Stanley (14:01): Why as well. Your why isn’t any of that. Clay Scroggins (14:03): Yeah, and it really goes back to that first habit. I would say, if the first habit is getting in the car, the second one is getting out on the driveway, getting out on the road, and actually driving it. So learning to find your why and then learning to speak to yourself is they’re powerful habits that we have to pay attention to on a regular basis. Andy Stanley (14:21): And the third one is one that we both dislike maybe for different reasons. The third one is getting quiet. Let’s just get real quiet here for a moment to make everyone on the other end of the microphone uncomfortable. Clay Scroggins (14:37): I mean, that’s surprising to me that you don’t like solitude or, Andy Stanley (14:41): Well, it’s a different kind. I know you and Ton, I think I know why you don’t like this one. You told me you didn’t love this one. Clay Scroggins (14:50): Hate Andy Stanley (14:50): It. And our producer goes to a monastery Clay Scroggins (14:55): On a regular basis, Andy Stanley (14:55): On a regular basis, and fortunately she doesn’t get to speak onto the podcast, so we can talk about her, but we can see her through a glass window. Clay Scroggins (15:03): That’s right. Andy Stanley (15:03): And she’s laughing, but when Susie, who’s brilliant, she’s smarter than both of us put together. So when she talks about going to the monastery, how does that make you feel claustrophobic? I’m like, what? But again, this is a powerful, powerful discipline. So anyway, I’ve already Clay Scroggins (15:22): Talked too much about it. Well, I have a friend who, he’s a CEO of a small company, but he started this company and it’s growing and it’s doing really well, and he’s just a constant learner. And I’m sitting down at breakfast with him about a year ago, and I just randomly asked him, Hey, so what are you learning right now? And he said, oh my goodness, I forgot. I meant to share this little survey that I did. But I sent a little survey, a couple questions to 30 CEOs that I know in the Atlanta area, and some of them were larger companies, mid-size companies, smaller companies. And he just asked them, Hey, tell me about your routine in the morning, your routine in life, but particularly in the morning that helps you be successful. And of course, all of them mentioned some of the same things like waking up early, which unfortunately for a lot of people, I hope that doesn’t discourage you from being successful if you think that you’re a night owl and you can’t be successful. (16:14): Obviously there’s exceptions, but most of them mentioned getting up early. They mentioned some kind of exercise routine in the morning, some kind of habit of gratitude in the morning, and then some kind of silence or meditation in the morning. And when I heard that, I thought, oh gosh, that sounds horrible. Which one? The silence of the meditation. Because I just immediately, I just want to go as soon as I wake up and or turn on a podcast or an audio book and listen to something to make me feel like I’m learning. But the idea of just sitting there quiet, and then even worse, he said, almost all of them mentioned that they did this on some kind of routine basis, like a quarterly day offsite with themselves, or a yearly offsite where they just silence retreat, a silence retreat, which I’ve never thought about how it makes you feel claustrophobic, but it makes me feel just bored. Or there’s something that is deafening about the silence. But I think we all know that though, that if you never take time to listen to what’s in there, you’ll never really know what’s in there. And that’s the cost, is that there’s something on the other side of this habit. And it’s discovery. It’s learning something about yourself and the healthier you are as a leader, the more able you are to do that. And you can’t get healthy as a leader until you do that. But it’s just, doesn’t sound fun to me, Andy Stanley (17:34): But it’s necessary. And everybody listening, and some people of our listeners are like, yeah, you guys are just late to that party. And for the 99% of us who are like, Ugh, we know there would be extraordinary value in that. So I make fun of Susie going on these silence retreats. But every time I make fun of her for doing that, there’s something in me that says, you know what, Andy? That’s a terrible, I know there’s something in me that says, you know what? I would probably, I’m sure I would come out on the other side of that saying, I am so glad I went. Clay Scroggins (18:05): And one of the things that I try to do in the book is to say, Hey, if this scares you, I totally understand, and you can be guided. There’s a way that you can actually guide that time that would make it more profitable. Well, that’s the advantage of a retreat like this. It’s a guided, they guide it for you. So for those listening, a simple way to practice this tomorrow morning would be to just start with an empty notebook. Open up a page if you want to type fine, but I’ve just found it, as soon as you open up the laptop, your email is like the most powerful magnet in the world. It’s really hard to resist it. But if you can open up a blank notebook and then just write down three things, write down, I want, I need and I surrender, and just start there and just write down what is it that you want? (18:47): What are the things that you know want? And then what are the things that you find yourself writing down that you go, oh, wow. Is that okay to want that? Am I allowed to want that? Is that wrong to want that? And then I need is just an exercise of really listening to yourself of finding out what it is inside of you that is in need. And then thirdly, I surrenders a powerful concept because it usually gets you to a place of admitting the areas where you need help, which might drive you to ask someone for help, or it might drive you to fix a problem that you didn’t even know was there because you had never sat quietly long enough to realize it was there, Andy Stanley (19:20): Or to put down the success oriented books and magazines and pick up something that you read that’s more for your soul. That’s right. That’s not going to contribute overtly to your progress, but may ultimately have more to do with your longevity than anything else. And so for me, as I kind of kidded about the silence retreat, I have a morning routine that includes that because since I was a kid growing up in church, I was taught to have a quote, a quiet Clay Scroggins (19:43): Time. Andy Stanley (19:44): So that prayer time and the things that I recite, because I recite some of the same things, Clay Scroggins (19:49): Which is self-talk. I mean, Andy Stanley (19:50): That’s you telling yourself certain things. That’s exactly right. And it’s very recentering. It makes you small, which is always appropriate no matter how successful you might be. So there is that routine. And when I get out of that routine, I feel it. I know it, and I don’t feel, it’s not like God’s mad. It’s nothing to do with that. It has everything just to do with that recentering that we all need. And silence and quiet is part of that. We could talk about that again sometime. And so the four noise canceling habits, the fourth one Clay Scroggins (20:24): Is pressing pause. All of these habits for me are rooted in, they’re really rooted in spiritual disciplines. They’re disciplines that are not uncommon to the church world. They’re things that the church talks about a lot, but unfortunately too few of us practice them on a regular basis. And pressing pause is really about two specific habits, the habit of Sabbath. There’s something powerful about a weekly rhythm where you’re working six days and taking a day off. There’s something powerful about really, another form of Sabbath is taking a vacation. We live in America. We’re fortunate to be able to most, a lot of people have either paid or even the opportunity to take vacation. And to be able to press pause on your job for three days or seven days, or even maybe two weeks, does something really powerful. It lets you know that your work does not revolve around you, that it will keep going even without you. (21:18): It reminds you that you have a life outside of work, which is really important as well. Another of those habits is really fasting. That’s another habit of pressing pause. It’s saying, Hey, I’m going to press pause on something that I think might have too strong of a control on me. And until you press pause on it, you don’t know what you’re missing out on. And so for me, that does not come natural to me, but my wife does a great job of this beginning of every month, just about as soon as the first day of the month comes around, she just picks something in her life to press pause to. Andy Stanley (21:51): Wow. Clay Scroggins (21:51): And it’s not because she has to, it’s discovery, Hey, I’m going to give up sweets, or I’m going to give up social media, or I’m going to give up, whatever you would call spontaneous shopping. Any purchase that you make that you didn’t plan on making, giving up, something like that, it just teaches you something about yourself that you Andy Stanley (22:10): Wouldn’t, well, we don’t know how much control that stuff has on us until we give it up. And when you find yourself tempted to open a browser, so I mean, it’s like it’s driving you crazy or to go to a particular website, then you realize, wow, it wasn’t that many years ago. This wasn’t even possible. These words, you opened a browser. That’s not even good grammar. So wrapping up, I just want to encourage all of our podcast listeners to purchase the book. You did the audible version. Clay Scroggins (22:41): I did. I read the book. So if you hate my voice, then get the book in print. Andy Stanley (22:46): But if you don’t have time to read it, listen Clay Scroggins (22:48): To it. Andy Stanley (22:49): Yeah, I’ll read it to you. That’s right. Clay will read it to you every night till sleep. Anyway, how to lead in a world of distraction, how to lead in a world distraction wherever Find books are sold. But as we wrap up the discussion, give us our homework assignment. What’s one specific thing we can do? Clay Scroggins (23:03): I would start by giving yourself some advice. This is a powerful tool. I met with a coach for the last couple of years, and great coaches don’t give you advice. They just ask you great questions, which is painful because you think I’m paying you and you’re just asking me these questions. I’d rather you just tell me what to do. But I think great coaches know that people don’t respond to direction, they respond to self-discovery. And so he was so good about just asking me, well, clay, what would you advise yourself in that situation? Yeah, if you met you, you, what would you tell yourself to do? And that really is a powerful concept. So I would just offer the same to you. I would just say, Hey, if you were to advise yourself as to what your most threatening distraction is, what would you tell yourself? What advice would you give yourself about that distraction that unfortunately comes to your mind probably too quickly? What would you tell yourself to do with it? And maybe you would tell yourself to press pause on it, to give it up for a day or for a week or for a month, just because Andy Stanley (24:13): It is possibly white noise. Clay Scroggins (24:15): Correct. Andy Stanley (24:15): That is not only eating up time, it’s worse than that. It’s distracting us or distracting them from the self-discovery that will ultimately allow them to go further faster in really every arena of life. Clay Scroggins (24:26): Correct. That is exactly right. And so I would just say be fearless. Be as courageous as you can be in identifying it, but also in giving it up for a moment just to see what’s on the other side. Andy Stanley (24:38): So I want you to close with that fascinating statement that sort of runs throughout the text of this book to be, Clay Scroggins (24:44): Yeah, great leaders turn down the noise low enough and long enough to be ruthlessly curious of their emotions, ruthlessly Andy Stanley (24:51): Curious. Thanks, clay. This is a fantastic book. Again, the name of the book is How to Lead in a World of Distraction. You can get it wherever you purchase books. In addition, make sure you go to andy stanley.com where you can download the leadership podcast application guide that goes with today’s content, and you can keep the conversation going on at work all month long. We will see you right back here next time for another exciting episode of the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. We’ll see you then. Comments are closed.