We’ve covered many topics since we started this podcast, but we haven’t ever had an episode dedicated to intellectual property.

Until now.

Today’s guest, JiNan Glasgow George, is an inventor, entrepreneur, patent attorney, and an author. She also happens to be a world-renowned expert on intellectual property with a history of advising startups and entrepreneurs on the subject.

She joins Henry and Rusty for a lively discussion about who owns ideas, the ethics of patent trolling, and the role entrepreneurs play in transforming ideas to assets that multiply their businesses.

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Give us a rating, share the show with your network, and follow along for more great content every week.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Hey, everyone. You found us once again, Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Thanks for being back. We’re always happy to be here with you. Our guest today is JiNan Glasgow George. JiNan is an innovator and entrepreneur, a patent attorney and author, a holder of a theology degree, which we’re going to talk about. She is also a former United States Patent Trade Office, the USPTO Patent Examiner. She is a world renowned expert on intellectual property. She has spoken at the UN Economic Commission for Europe. She has been at IP conferences around the world and advised the Senate’s Small Business Committee. She co-founded Magic Number, a software company that provides artificial intelligence driven interactive data, as well as neo IP, which provides legal services to help clients maximize their return on investment for their patent assets in 2022. JiNan published the IP Miracle. It’s an essential book on how to capture business ideas and create assets that multiply the value of businesses. Today we talk with JiNan about how Christ following business leaders can practically and faithfully approach intellectual property. It’s a great conversation. Let’s listen in.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m here with Rusty Rusty. Good morning. Good afternoon.

Rusty Rueff: Good morning. You almost didn’t make it today.

Henry Kaestner: I almost didn’t make it today. And, yeah, it was reasonably stressful. So I came back yesterday, and our flight was scheduled to arrive at 8:09 in Charlotte. The next flight scheduled to leave at 8:15. And I did some hiking this summer and managed to tear my shin muscle. And that six minute sprint probably did not help my recuperation. But I’ll tell you, we made it. We made it. And not only did we make it, but both my son and I, both through the glory of God, got upgraded so awesome. And my son was so unused to the whole process that when the woman came and asked what we wanted for dinner, you know, Pasta or Beef or something like that, Graham asked how much they how much the beef costs, which was this kind of really sweet thing. I love the fact that, you know, at age 16, he is going to be a steward of the money that God has entrusted him or in this case, his father. So, yes, I made it. I’m really glad to be here. I didn’t think I’d be able to make it. But yes.

Rusty Rueff: I loved your text late last night. There’s a 98% chance I don’t make it. And then 10 minutes later, there’s a 38% chance I do make it.

Henry Kaestner: That’s right. So we have with us today, Rusty, a really special guest, somebody I’ve met recently in person, both her and her son. Speaking of teenage sons, at event where we brought together a bunch of philanthropist. People are interested in giving in to the broader space of supporting faith driven entrepreneurship ministries. And by that I don’t mean fundraising for our own organization. That’s not what I mean. I mean that there are gosh maybe. I think there are 58 members now of the Global CoLab, which is led by our director of international strategy here, Reuben Colter. These are 58 other ministries that all seek to support Faith driven entrepreneurs worldwide, their members from Brazil and Egypt and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and many of them are raising need to raise money for their budgets because they train high schoolers. As JiNan, our guest for today, has a teenage son as well. The thoughts of Faith Driven Entrepreneur entrepreneurship, all of them are part of this larger ecosystem that we have in this movement along the 12 Marks, which is identity in Christ, called to create, faithfulness versus willfulness and all these things. And so we’ve brought together a group of them this summer, JiNan included, to be able to learn about what’s going on so that we might be able to increase the market share, the market size. So many people for a good reason. By the way, of course, thinking about giving the church plant or clean water or microfinance or youth discipleship, Bible translation, so many great things to give to. Not so many people are thinking about how do I give to ministries that support the work of Faith driven entrepreneurs in Africa and Asia, Latin America, etc.? So this was a mini conference. JiNan came and JiNan, we’re going to talk about intellectual property on this podcast. So just to be clear, that’s what you’re an expert at, and that’s one of the things that I want our audience to learn about. But that’s where we met and I don’t think we’ve talked since. What was your impression about this kind of what’s going on in the global ecosystem, what God is doing? And what did you think.

JiNan Glasgow George: Really resonated with me? Because of work that I’ve done over the last 23 years a lot with entrepreneurs, early stage startups, not only in the United States, but also in Europe, in India, in Ghana, South Africa, Mexico. And one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the number one way to improve the quality of life and generate wealth for people, it’s entrepreneurship. God gives us the ability to create wealth, and this is the way to do it, to solve a problem and then to scale it, to bring solutions in the market. And so I really do enjoy working with entrepreneurs and have for a couple of decades.

Henry Kaestner: Well, it was great to meet you. We got introduced from a friend of ours that’s in Dubai, so it’s fun for us. The guy from Dubai introduces two people have got a North Carolina connection. We get together, we have their conference and I was super encouraged by it. Okay, So we’re going to be talking today about intellectual property. I don’t know, Rusty, if we’ve ever tackled it. Do you / can you remember?

Rusty Rueff: No, no. But yet we have talked about any creation somebody has as intellectual property because it is intellectual property. But we’ve never talked about intellectual property and what it really means and how you should steward and and and take care of it.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah.

JiNan Glasgow George: This is going to be fun. All right.

Henry Kaestner: Exactly. And so, JiNan, I first of all, thank you for joining the podcast. Really glad that you’re here with us. And you’re what I’d call an expert when it comes to intellectual property. And we’re going to get a little bit more into your story a bit later in conversation today. But before we do that, can you provide us with some of the basics to start? What is intellectual property and why is it important?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I love it, your start that everybody maybe has some, instead we maybe don’t always steward it very well. Right. Ideas are an unlimited resource. We know that God gives us this unlimited resource to solve problems, to be creative, to produce art or music or anything else. The way that we generate intellectual property, these are actually a transformation of ideas into something that is more tangible, if you will. So with inventions which are solutions to problems, you can file patterns with names and logos. You can brand those as trademarks or service marks with written content or music or artistic creations. You can generate copyright assets. And the reason that’s important is because they then become literally business assets, things that have value that you can transfer to other people and use as a part of the business. So intellectual property is a way of making more of just an idea, if you will.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, so what advice would you have for any I’ll tell you, maybe a third of our listeners are US tech startups. Just maybe be as Rusty. William and I are based in Silicon Valley. To be clear, our audience is global and includes lots of different industries. And yet my sense is that IP impacts not just the tech world, but just help us to understand what advice would you have for any U.S.? I think tech startup, but really any startup looking to secure its patent portfolio.

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I think even before we get to patterns specifically is think about what do you do when you have the ideas, You have to document them, write them down, you know, and even the word tells us this You get a vision, write it down, make it plain so you can communicate to other people. Because most people having intellectual property, they don’t make the impact on their own. You need other people to connect with it, right? So documenting it, being able to articulate it, write it down. It may be that it’s better to be a trade secret than to be a pattern. So you can’t really manage the idea just in your head. The first way that we transform ideas into reality is to write them or speak them. I mean, just in the way that God created the world. He called it out and we know that we’re creating God’s image and likeness. So our words have power and authority to create here on Earth. And with intellectual property, you’re creating assets. So a tech startup, a scientific based startup, even a consumer products startup needs to document what’s the problem you’re solving, What’s your creative solution to the problem? And then contrast and compare with what’s already out there. These are kind of early steps to take. Once you identify something’s different. I always say, What’s your unique value proposition? What’s the thing that makes you so different that you’re better, that it is an improvement? That’s what you put at the heart of intellectual property and patterns in particular.

Henry Kaestner: So you wrote a book called The IP Miracle. Tell us about that and then and then show it later on the podcast. I want to get a little bit more into kind of the how to and what you’re seeing some of the technical aspects of what you’re seeing over the course, the last ten years, etc.. But before we get there, you’ve actually written on this, right? And it’s not just that you’re a patent expert, but you’ve written on this with a faith lens on it, and you’ve tried something called the IP miracle. What does that mean?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, great question. So I started writing the book of really advice that I give to clients or they’ve been giving to clients, especially to entrepreneurs over the last 23 years, as a patent attorney, intellectual property attorney. Because what I found is that there are a lot of myths and misconceptions. So the first motivation was really to get the word out, get the truth out what’s true about patent trademark and copyright and what’s false? What do you have to do to protect them? What causes a trade secret to be valuable and how do you protect it? So it originated just with kind of, if you will, the deadly sins and how to avoid them. But as I began to work on that and also work with a really extraordinary editor, I realized that considering my audience as entrepreneurs, I wanted it to be more what to do, not just mistakes to avoid because they can be fatal to your company if you mess up the IP or the security stuff, right? So that’s how it started. But as I got into it, I also realized thinking about the use cases and so many clients, this is exciting and it’s extraordinary that you can create probably the most valuable assets of your company as intellectual property. You’re really making these valuable assets out of your ideas and your words. And so that’s where the IP miracle came from. It is an unlimited resource. Literally God’s power working in us, that we just transform into these specific types of very valuable assets in a company, something that goes beyond just the revenue and profit you make. They can have a multiplying effect. We know God multiplies the talents we invest, right? These are those talents. That gives you a multiplier effect on valuation for your business.

Rusty Rueff: It’s very encouraging that you’re talking about us being creators because we are right. I mean, God is a creator. We’re created in his image. Therefore we are creators. And I think so many people, you know, miss the concept because they might be in a job or in a company where it doesn’t feel like, Oh, I have tons of intellectual property because I think we kind of go down the path of intellectual property. Oh, that’s music. That’s something someone wrote. It’s a video game software. Now we all have this intellectual creativity that turns into property. You mentioned a couple of different terms that I’d just like you to clarify for our audience, because not everybody probably understands. so you use the word trade secret. And then you also use the word patent. Can you just tell us the difference?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, there’s a huge difference, right? So, first of all, trade secrets, they have to be something you can keep secret. You don’t just wave a wand and they are trade secrets. You have to document them. You have to have protocols and and procedures in place to ensure that whoever is aware of them or connects them or connects them, they can be made secret. Also, no one can reverse engineer it. Right. So a lot of people think, oh, are software algorithms that those can just be trade secret. Not necessarily if there’s another way to do it to get to the same solution, then maybe it’s not a good fit for that type of IP. So you still have to make an assessment there. A lot of software and tech companies are a little anti padded. I have found maybe especially on the West Coast, even though the largest companies all create IP assets and especially patterns, patents are different in this way from trade secret they publish. The whole point of the patent system is that you have to disclose to teach, to educate and train someone of ordinary skill how to make or use your invention. You’re actually teaching it to the world and it will publish. In exchange for that, the US Patent Office and in every other country you have to file patents if you want them there gives you the right to exclude others and keep them out of your space so they function very differently. Patents only last for a maximum of 20 years from your priority date. Trade secrets can last indefinitely. They’re kind of the opposite ends of the intellectual property spectrum. Does that make sense?

Rusty Rueff: Sure. So the Colonel’s recipe for KFC is a trade secret?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. If they can keep it. Coca-Cola also well known. But, you know, a lot of times it can also trade secrets can include your backend protocols of customer onboarding, even these things that may not seem like they’re very important. If you have a particular ability to deliver value into a market that can’t be detected, can’t be reverse engineered, and it brings return to you that may be trade secret, might be your pricing models, it might be the data that you generate from your app or from your tech company. A lot of times, even hardware companies, maybe everything has a little bit of software, right? But if you’ve got a platform company, it may be that the data that they generate from providing services has more value as trade secrets, intellectual property than the patents covering their platform alone. The combination is the big winner.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, right, right, right. And you mentioned the reticence sometimes of the West Coast tech companies to go after patents. And I understand that coming out of the music space and and entertainment software, because, you know, it’s hard, it’s expensive. It takes a long time, you know, And it wasn’t until, well, probably in the last ten years that even in Silicon Valley we had a patent office. Right. You know, we didn’t have that before. But talk to us about why we should patent maybe when we don’t need to. And then you’ve seen a change over the last ten years. There’s definitely a changing landscape. So many new technologies, whether it’s AI or nanotech or, you know, NFTs, right. Just give us your perspective of the landscape and when should we and when shouldn’t we?

JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. It’s a fair question, and I give the lawyer answer. It depends. Right. It’s that unique value proposition that you have and the context around you. So the big mistake that many entrepreneurs and companies make is just to file everything. Okay. This is important to us. We should file a patent rather than pulling data around it to see how does this compare to everything else that’s out there. So we always want to have that sense of what came before us, what’s in the past, the prior art, and how differentiated we are from it, and can we detect and enforce it. Right? So these are questions that go into making the decisions about what to file and what not to file. So in the IP miracle, I talk a little bit about the mistake of filing everything and filing nothing. It’s really should be a conscious choice about what will we do with it in our business. Know how you will use the asset in your business to generate revenue, increase market share and add value to the business. If you don’t know how you’ll use it, don’t just file. So context data gives you a sense for that. And then really thinking of it as will this be important in our business and in what way, which competitors will it keep out? Because that’s usually the main return on investment in patterns is if you make use, sell the invention and enjoy that exclusively in the market, right then you are bringing the value, your value pricing to market without the competition in that space. So it’s a it’s a business decision about an asset that you create through these legal mechanisms of IP.

Rusty Rueff: And what about people who are out there who just like troll for patents, They want to buy patents and then they just take them and they hang on to them waiting for some day to go and, you know, defend that patent against somebody who might be abusing it. How do you work with those folks?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, So, you know, it’s kind of an interesting thing that a friend of mine was one of the eight people in the room when the term patent troll came into existence. And it was really developed by a big tech company who was being sued by someone else and was told they weren’t allowed to call the company a patent terrorist anymore. So they had a competition internally and came up with patent troll. And it’s such a negative term, it sounds really bad, but all it means really is that someone has the patent and maybe they did R&D, maybe they prototype, maybe their company wasn’t able to commercialize it and yet held on to the patent. And in the future, either they or someone else determined there were large companies perhaps who were infringing were in their exclusive space and didn’t have the right to be there. That enforceable right is transferable to a piece of property. And in a specialization economy like we are in the U.S., you should be able to create an asset with your idea, your invention, and transfer it to someone else so you can have a return on that and someone else in a better position than you to enforce. It can do that. And often times, you know, while there’s much to do about patent trolls, large companies don’t care about small ones. They don’t really care about the patent. They care about their large competition. Think about big patent litigation, Apple versus Samsung. Right. That was not insignificant settlement, over $1,000,000,000, many, many, many millions spent on enforcement. It’s because the profit per quarter is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the smartphone market. That’s what they’re after is exclusivity to that. So if I’m a small inventor or a small company and I invent a solution that’s valuable to Apple or Samsung, I should be able to sell it to either one or to a third party who will help enforce it. Right. Patents actually stimulate invention and innovation because they’re published. This was the point of Jefferson, setting up the patent system is to exchange this teaching document. And so using patent data or monitoring what’s happening, everyone can be aware of what exists and choose to avoid infringement or not. So the only reason there’s something for a patent owner to troll to enforce is because others are infringing, not caring about it. You have to care about what you own. You have a house. We talked about a mortgage at the beginning. You have to care for it. You have to see that your yard has a fence, you have to keep it up. And the same is true with your intellectual property assets. You have to observe, manage, maintain, determine what’s working and what isn’t, and sometimes pivot. This goes from the smallest company to the largest. It’s not about how many patents you have. It’s the quality of the assets you have.

Rusty Rueff: Entrepreneurs. We’re problem solvers, right? So why do so many of us ignore the biggest problems we face? Most of us feel isolated and we feel alone. Our mental health suffers. Our relationships suffer. We get bogged down by the pressures of running a business. But say, hey, it’s just part of the job. It doesn’t have to be that way. You see, we’re not meant to be siloed. God designed us to do good work alongside others, and you can experience that kind of community with other like minded entrepreneurs through our Foundation Group series. This eight week course helps connect you with people who understand your struggles because they’ve been through them too. There’s no cause and no catch. You can meet online or in person. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org backslash groups. Now back to the show.

Henry Kaestner: So, Rusty, is this all coming back and I’m getting this? I mean, because when I talk to an entrepreneur and talk to them about the different things that entrepreneur wrestles with, that talk about customer acquisition, I talk about lifetime value, talking about capitalization, I talk about human resources in recruiting. And it usually in the top six or seven things I mention about what an entrepreneur will wrestle with. I will mention intellectual property, but we’re well beyond 200 episodes and we have talked about it yet. And now I know because just as we’re talking about it, this feeling of conflict and just there’s some things like are just very black and white about being a faith driven entrepreneur. And I’ll tell you what I mean. Here is second, you both are touching at this nuance and I want to expand on and even bring just gosh the scripture, inform us somehow in all of this. But, you know, Rusty, we can talk about and have seven or eight episodes on how important it is to have the mental health of an entrepreneur set, or how important is to love on family or how important it is to delight our customers. Those are great things without controversy, but this topic has some controversy. Let me tell you what I mean. I remember being at church in North Carolina, gosh, maybe 12 years ago, and I met a guy and I’d known him from kind of like small group type of stuff. And he wasn’t in our small group, but just kind of small group planning, stuff like that. And I asked this guy said, So tell me what you do. And he said, And I’ll leave the name of the big company out of it. But I worked for a big company and we have an intellectual property portfolio, and I go around and find other upstart companies there are infringing on our patent portfolio and I tell them they need to stop. And I remember having this visceral reaction of wanting to hit him. I didn’t. That would have been completely inappropriate. And I did. It wasn’t that bad, but I never had that feeling before. Like actually, you know, just being really troubled by what somebody did and just intuitively just feeling that’s just wrong. And yet I was only seeing one part of it. I was missing the bigger picture. So I want to look at it because the other side is gosh I’m an entrepreneur and together with some friends, some business partners are just by myself. God is giving me some specific revelation or some sort of an idea about how to solve a problem or a product in the marketplace. And I’m really good at coming up with ideas, documenting them, trying to figure out how to make them work. But you know what? I’m not great at bringing something to market. Does that mean that the economy doesn’t value me at all? Am I left out.

JiNan Glasgow George: Not at all.

Henry Kaestner: If I do all these different things that I don’t have access to capital? Well, the answer, of course, as you know, is JiNan would say, not at all. Right. Like you just did. Right. So there’s two opposite sides, which is one is, you know, encouraging intellectual property, encouraging the creative element, and on the other side, quelling it, remember. But can you help us? So you get to some of that nuance. You talked about the Thomas Jefferson thing, which is helpful for me because it’s like, no, no, no. It’s not meant to decrease innovation. It’s meant to go ahead and say, I want to teach everybody what’s going on out there. And so instead of it being a trade secret, I’m going to put it all out there. You can study on it and come up with your own new invention off of that, maybe. But help us understand some more of this nuance over this thing that I’m probably still a little conflicted on.

JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. If you think about it, a lot of entrepreneurs and small companies, they’re terrified of someone stealing their idea, Right. That’s the thing that prevents them from raising capital or going into the market trying to get an early customer because they’re afraid if they tell it, they reveal it, then someone else will just steal it. And that is true because ideas are free unless you create intellectual property with them. So by doing, say, a patent instead of a trade secret, if it’s appropriate, then that inventor maybe before they start, a company can go out and tell people about it because they have protected their exclusive right to enjoy that space, to enjoy that solution to the problem, so then they can talk about it and not necessarily have to have an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement, or a confidentiality agreement for every conversation. It lets them see how their piece of the puzzle connects into the bigger picture of the economy to make commercial impact. I mean, that’s one of the things that drives me as a patent attorney in my work and our team is that we help innovators transform ideas into assets to make commercial impact. And, you know, they have the choice of letting them be freely available. Right. So Ben Franklin did this with many of his inventions, patented it so he could decide it’s going to be in the public domain. But it’s your choice, right? The other side of it, this idea of it like it stifles innovation. It’s not really true because most inventions, most patent are improvements to things that are known. So without a patent system, everyone is really holding things confidentially and privately. And then the small companies have no leverage in the market, Right? Because even if they are first to market, the large company is always going to beat them on marketing, distribution, supply chain, anything else. Right. So it’s kind of that miraculous asset that gives the early stage, even the inventor, some opportunity to monetize the idea. And there’s a lot of different ways to do it, just like you can buy up a lot of property and never develop it and you still own it and you can still sell it. You may build something, then you sell the property and someone else tears it down, right? You have the ability to move the asset, to move the property around. So by creating some type of intellectual property asset, you have the ability to be compensated for what you create to tell others about it, knowing that you still have rights that can be monetized. Does that make sense?

Henry Kaestner: So this unfair question may be too provocative and you can push back on this. All right. But is it fair for a very large company? Like when I think about this, when I think about Apple and Samsung, I think about legions of attorneys, and I get that. And, you know, Qualcomm is all built on intellectual property and they’ve got all these attorneys. But I think about this innovative entrepreneur that all of a sudden gets a cease and desist order. He’s been working on something really hard. And you know what? He doesn’t have the legal resources to hire six people and do this kind of like prior art search. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the prior art search, you can comment on that, too. But so I’m working on something. All of a sudden, I get the cease and desist order and I’m thinking, wow, that big company is not even using that technology. And they went ahead and they purchased that intellectual property, or maybe they came up with it, but more likely, maybe they bought it because they’ve been buying a bunch of different companies. They’re sitting on it. They’re not actually it’s not being used. And this small company got a cease and desist order and they just don’t they can’t lawyer up.

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. So I guess first of all, I always say most of the time, most of the time, notwithstanding your encounter with this other person, but most of the time, large companies are not monitoring the market for small entities to enforce IP rights against them. You know why? They don’t care. It’s not making a big enough impact in the market for them to monitor at that. I’m going to say low level, low revenue, low market share level. It’s too small. It’s still a business decision for a company to do that. They have the choice to do it, but they’re not typically going to monitor until it hits a level where it’s on their business radar and then they’ll go for it. If it ends up being, as you provided in this hypothetical, that it is a pattern as that maybe it came through a merger and acquisition and they’ve got a group of patents, maybe it’s not even one, it’s a small group of patents. They’re not using it. What do entrepreneurs do? Solve problems. It looks bad, but actually that’s an invitation to license. Wouldn’t they rather monetize an asset than let it sit there and be a cost to maintain? Absolutely. I mean, Big Pharma does this occasionally. You could approach them and say, I want to work on this really small special disease area. You have patents on it. I’d like to license them. That’s a deal that can be had. So I think turn it to the other side. If you got a C and D letter and you know that the other companies not using the IP offer to license and problem solved. Right. So I try to keep clients out of court. I do think litigation can be necessary at times, but it’s a distraction from a core business.

Rusty Rueff: So I want to go one more time on this, but I’m going to go to another angle for you, because I’ve experienced this in real life sitting on a patent. You’ve got this patent. You’re working really hard on the technology on top of this patent. And then all of a sudden big companies start infringing on your patent and they’re starting to do what you’re doing and you’re a little startup. You don’t have any legal resources and you look at it and you go, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I own the patent for that. And you write the letters, you make the calls, you know, whoever the guy is that’s sitting there doing cease and desist letters, doesn’t have a phone to answer, doesn’t respond to emails, doesn’t do any of that, because that’s a gnat on my ankle and I don’t care about them. But yet, for the young entrepreneur company, this young company, that’s a big deal. That’s my patent that you’re infringing on.

JiNan Glasgow George: I think it’s good news. Here’s why that means that they have impacted revenue from your patent it. So again they might not care about you but they’re going to care about each other. So if there’s a group of companies that are all in this area because that solution resonates in the marketplace and they’re making returns on that, they’re doing product or service operating on it, then go to several of them. And suggest that they acquire your company or license from you. You don’t have to be an enforcement campaign, but you can say, look at what you’ve done. If you’ve made traction in the market, you’ve got something else to offer them. This happens really pretty regularly. That innovation happens in the entrepreneurial venture, not the larger companies. A lot of great innovation happens small, and it’s acquired here. We’ll even think of a case that our company, we use our own patent forecast software to use data to map everything. And we were monitoring Fitbit and the activity of Google and Apple in the market. But Fitbit had invested in patterns, invested in patterns and developed a pretty overtime commanding position there. And neither Apple nor Google had it, but they’re competing with each other. So we were calling that a year ahead of the acquisition by Google, because the patents can stimulate the urgency for the acquisition. They can stimulate the higher value because you can only build your portfolio over time. You can’t ever go back in time if you’re a big company and the small guys started first, you have to buy and build to get that footprint. The timestamp of your filing is really valuable. So this is why acting on it in a timely way to create a valuable asset, you actually want there to be large competitors who come into your zone. I always say, own your zone, right? They come into your zone and you get to decide who plays. If you have good business terms, you can have more monetization. It may even be the door opening to your exit.

Henry Kaestner: I think that’s very helpful. Okay. Tell me as Christ follower being in this industry as you spent time on God’s Word, what are some of the different things that you see in his word that do speak to the space that God has you in?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, well, one thing about creating is I find that people create from a place of joy, right? So you can’t be in a dispute. We’re fighting people and create valuable things. Most of the time the energy comes from joy, and so we actually really have a good time getting to know our clients and work with them in that creative space by stimulating what they have with the data that we put around it. So it’s not then only what they have come up with, but we ask questions. What else could you change? How could you expand this? So we actually work with entrepreneurs and innovative companies to create more valuable IP assets than they would have done on their own. So that’s part of what we do is co labor a collaborate and use our words for the building up for the encouragement. Right. And to add value in. So that’s part of my point of view as a Christ follower being in this space. And then also to help people see the possibility, right, to realize that we are here to be a good steward of this and to see all of the potential, maybe not only that initial piece that we think I’m going to own this, what’s the greater good? How do we use that asset to impact more broadly in the space? I find it delightful actually, to also be able to work from high tech to biotech. So we see all these invention solutions from the science areas, consumer products and, you know, even high tech blockchain A.I. like we work with all types of inventors. And the thing that I see is the joy they get from creating. So we’re helping them with these core assets of their business. I really like that. I use it as an opportunity to minister again, to encourage and to help them see that it’s really an unlimited resource. We do get the calls from our clients where they say we have a competitor, we have this thing, and I always try to encourage that. We look at what’s the resolution, what’s the solution? It looks like a competitor. It may be a greater opportunity to grow. We had actually a client recently in the tech space who’s founder and CEO thought this other company is a big competitor. And I never saw at all of the data and things that we had. And after that person left and a new person came in, what we realized it wasn’t true at all. Right? So sometimes people can have blinders on that prevent them from seeing a bigger picture, to see a bigger impact. And I see that as part of our role is to counsel, to guide and to help people see the whole picture, the possibility.

Rusty Rueff: Hey, JiNan, before we jump to we have a lot of fun when we get to the lightning round. And I know we’re going to do that soon here. But you didn’t just fall into this. You didn’t wake up one day and become an IP expert. You’ve got a background. Why don’t you run us through how you got into this business? You know what fascinate you about staying in it?

JiNan Glasgow George: Sure. Thanks. I always introduced myself as a recovered engineer. I had a first career in new product development and research and development with an industrial company creating new products, literally turning ideas into physical things and doing some patenting. And I enjoyed that in that industry. But I always was feeling like kind of called to do something else. And so I talked to a lot of people, you know, surround yourself by many wise advisors and, you know, pray for wisdom and vision. And I then realized patent law was the right thing. I wanted to help create new impact, but do it with words. And as I was going through that application to law school, I thought, all right, I’m going to take a break from my career, from working change career. What else is really important to me? And I had the opportunity to apply also to study theology at Duke Divinity School. So my engineering from NC State in the Triangle in Raleigh, North Carolina. My law from UNC in Chapel Hill. And then I did study theology at Duke, and it was one of the best things I ever did for myself to really understand more deeply the word spirituality. And I also focused on bioethics there. So it was a true get a gift to help launch what I’m doing everybody said, So how are you going to use that MTS in your law practice? And I thought, How am I not going to use it? Everything we’re doing is spiritual here. It’s just, you know, maybe that goes to my unique take on it. Another way that it kind of affected the route that I took was that as I was traveling, I think I told you the story. Henry, briefly on an entrepreneur organization trip in Japan, I took a week off. I had a lot of stress and things going on. I took a vacation and just meditate, pray, eat well, do yoga, walk, you know, just be in the world, not connected to things. My own things that I owned, my family, people that I was around. And I had kind of an epiphany then and it was go to Africa and help transform economies. And I thought, Oh, Lord, what am I going to do in Africa? I’m a patent attorney. Nobody files patents in Africa and like short circuit that I just started sharing it with people. This is I feel like I’m going to do this. I had a word and less than six months later I was boots on the ground in Ghana helping a fund who was investing in tech companies there. I’m like, I can do that. And I got another piece to the puzzle, if you will, like my own path putting together step by step. It’s a progression, this epiphany of patent data, right? Every patent is an inventive solution to a problem, but it’s country by country. If nobody files patents in Ghana or Mexico or whatever, it’s a very small number every year. That means all of these solutions are freely available for entrepreneurs to use. It’s like free R&D research and development free solutions. It can be for anything like packaging, food processing, water bottling, well drilling. It can also be it for Internet edge computing data centers. I mean, you literally can it can be for sewage drainage. Any problem has all of these great solutions, right? Great solutions that are freely available because of this? Disclose it, teach it. I think I could teach your heart. So maybe that’s the other thing that affected by careers. I love teaching students. I volunteer at High Point University and NC State University and high schools too. I like to stimulate that next generation inventor.

Henry Kaestner: That’s very cool. So I love that. I love that you’ve taken and I guess I would hope that a take away. I think there are a bunch of takeaways from here. I think we have a much more nuanced, textured look at intellectual property and how to look at things from kind of a glass half full perspective. And I spent some amount of my time looking at it from a glass half negative, which is big company, kind of, you know, hold back innovation from a smaller company. And I think that you’ve helped me understand that much differently. So I’m grateful for that. I also but one of the other things that I hope is a big takeaway from our guest is you have this background in intellectual property and patents, and yet you felt a call to go to the nations and it wasn’t completely clear how God would use you, and yet God used you. And I think that that’s an invitation that’s open to all of us. And I love that you leaned into that. That’s super encouraging. Okay, we’re going to do Lightning Round. Rusty is going to finish this out. I’m going to go ahead. I’m going to throw a couple at you. Rusty is going to close out and then he’s going to fill in for William here at the very, very end. Okay. You have degrees from Duke, Carolina and NC State. You teach at a high point. Your son goes to High Point, who I met at the conference?

JiNan Glasgow George: And my daughter. Yeah.

Henry Kaestner: And your daughter to. College basketball. Who you root for?.

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah. Fair question. I always start with my alma mater. Start with state, and then if it’s in the March Madness, you know, once they’re out, I just move on through my list. There’s always somebody at the end. Oh, man, I always have somebody. But NC State is my first.

Henry Kaestner: That makes sense. Undergraduate Okay, I’m with you. Okay. Is it your maiden name is Glasgow?

JiNan Glasgow George: It is.

Henry Kaestner: Have you been there?

JiNan Glasgow George: I have my husband and I have been golfing twice in Scotland and visited Glasgow. But I love the country of Scotland. It’s just so beautiful. Yeah. Good people, Beautiful landscape, good golf.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. My ethnicity is Scottish as well. Okay. As a mom, tell us in your audience a time which you were able to be on mission and maybe just in the house, but what’s a special God moment as a parent where you experience God’s love for you and your family together as a family?

JiNan Glasgow George: Well, there’s a lot for sure, but, you know, most of the times it’s just the daily things that we do that are special moments that accumulate with our children. And I participate in a daily morning prayer call. Like Bonhoeffer says, the prayer of the morning determines the day. And I lead facilitate the intercessory prayer call on Mondays and my kids hear it. They listen. They know that I pray every day. I pray the word. They know that I read every day. And I think that that’s probably the most important cumulative God moment that we have is that when we pray together and that they know that it’s so important to me, I could be making money instead of doing that first thing every day. It’s more important to start the day with the word and praying for other people because God perfects everything that concerns us. So we’re free to pray for others, help them solve their problems.

Rusty Rueff: Amen. So two quick lightning rounds for me and then we’ll go to close. Coolest invention or IP that you ever got a chance to work on?

JiNan Glasgow George: Oh, I can’t say it’s too many. There’s too many because we do high tech, too biotech. But we have done amazing solutions that improve communication. We’ve done things that improve water quality. We have done things that improve how we handle energy. The electric power grid. Inventions that are really fascinating communications, wireless comm, diabetes treatments, it is too many to pull out one. They’re all important in their own way.

Rusty Rueff: All right. And then the book title, IP Miracle. Yes. It’s your intellectual property. You come up with that by yourself or is that a trade secret? Did somebody else come up with that?

JiNan Glasgow George: Well, it’s no secret. It’s out right on Amazon everywhere. No, it’s just reflecting my point of view on the abundant resource that ideas are and that it is miraculous that we create assets from ideas. That’s miraculous. It’s amazing. And usually the most valuable asset. So that’s where it came from. It is a miracle. I think it is God’s power. Working in us does infinitely more than we ask or imagine. It’s a miracle.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, absolutely.

Henry Kaestner: Is a well-known trade secret like the ultimate business oxymoron?

JiNan Glasgow George: Doesn’t exist? I think.

Rusty Rueff: Okay, so, William, if he’s here with us today, he usually does this. This is his own patented question. But I get to do it today, which is always great. So we always like to close out the episode with hearing from our guests, you know, what is God teaching you right now? You know, what have you found in God’s word that just stuck with you recently?

JiNan Glasgow George: Yeah, I’m really meditating on Ephesians right now and the [….], what I pray for capacity that God’s going to give me wisdom and perception of what’s revealed. Right? Because wisdom is the principal thing. And so I’m really meditating on that right now. The Ephesians chapter one and then chapter two, remembering that we are God’s work of art, we’re created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has already designated to make up our way of life. In Ephesians three, that it’s his power working in us that does infinitely or we ask or imagine. Ephesians four that we’re walking up rightly in our calling with humility, gentleness, patience then, and that we have unity, we pray for unity and Ephesians five, that we try to discover what God wants of us. What He wants for us is higher than what we want. And Ephesians six, we’re well equipped with all spiritual armor, I am into Ephesians right now in a big way.

Henry Kaestner: I love it, I love it. So we’re going to close our. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being part of this. We’re going to close out with a quick blessing and benediction and prayer for the faith driven audience. For this reason, we kneel before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. We pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you the Faith Driven Entrepreneur with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And we pray that you being rooted in established and love may have power together with all the Lord’s holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

JiNan Glasgow George: Amen Ephesians three go in for.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed, JiNan and great being with you. Thank you.

JiNan Glasgow George: Thank you. God bless.

— by Rob Tribken

People are worried. Confidence in the economy and the direction of society continues to drop in the face of new threats. Anxiety is natural as we move into an uncertain future.

But worry is nothing new. Our ancestors survived threatening circumstances and created a better world, and so will we. Despite our problems, we can still contribute to the greater good and build better lives, each in our own way. 

For those of us in business, this means working with courage and hope as we identify new opportunities and work to build a better future. Entrepreneurs are uniquely equipped to harness hope for the benefit of our customers, employees, and communities. By unpacking the latest research in psychology alongside the Biblical meaning of hope, we can stand up to the ever-growing presence of worry and anxiety in our lives.

Understanding The Difference Between Hope and Optimism

Our faith and spirituality certainly create a context for hope to grow, but first, let’s examine the nature of hope and its close cousin, optimism.

We often use hope and optimism as synonyms; both meanings involve a positive attitude and an expectation of favorable outcomes. Both justify and encourage moving forward despite setbacks and, in most situations, are more likely to lead to better health and positive results than do negative attitudes.

There are differences, however. I think of optimism as more of a disposition, representing a general expectation that things overall will work out. Hope, on the other hand, usually applies to specific circumstances and involves a reasonable expectation that a specific, positive outcome will occur. 

For example, you might say, “I hope to get that new job.” 

This expectation is plausible even though the outcome is not inevitable. This is how I understand the meaning of hope.

Hope can be either active or passive. It can involve a positive outcome toward which we are working or something beyond our control for which we are waiting. This article focuses on active hope.

A high level of active hope is essential for innovation and entrepreneurship and helps us move forward toward a better future. As entrepreneurs, we work toward a specific outcome, actively pursuing a positive outcome, and the engine behind this effort is, more often than not, hope.

Feeling hopeless on your entrepreneurial journey? Community can help. Reignite your passion for business by joining an upcoming Foundation Group.

Moving Toward Active Hope

Psychologist C. R. Snyder provides a valuable framework for understanding the meaning of hope. In his research, he interviewed high-hope individuals and found their hope consisted of three components: 

• A desired future outcome

• A belief that one has a realistic path to this outcome

• The will to follow this path to success

In other words, Snyder’s definition of hope goes beyond the expectation of a specific favorable outcome and added willpower and a path to get there as critical components.

Snyder’s work provides an important insight: hope is more effective if we identify a path to the desired outcome and then follow it. His framework helps us move past debilitating passivity and reminds us of the powerful role purposeful action can play. Active hope does not guarantee success, but it does make it more likely.

Snyder’s former students and collaborators, Jennifer Cheavens and David Feldman, have used his framework to develop “hope therapy.” Cheavens and Feldman have found that even people not initially considered to be high-hope individuals can learn to set clear and often challenging goals and sub-goals, develop multiple pathways to reach these goals, anticipate and devise solutions for obstacles they encounter, and work towards them with persistence. 

Hope can indeed be developed. This is good news for entrepreneurs who might feel discouraged at unexpected setbacks or failures. Hope isn’t genetic or circumstantial. It’s more like a skill that requires training over time. When we develop hope, we increase the odds of our businesses succeeding over time.

Embracing the Biblical Meaning of Hope

At first glance, the Biblical meaning of hope seems to be passive hope—people waiting for God to act.

In our English versions of the Bible, the word hope frequently refers to trusting in God and often involves waiting for God to do something. The Hebrew words most often translated into the English word hope mean to wait or to wait with expectation, and the New Testament Greek word most often translated as hope originally meant trust. 

This waiting and trusting often seemed to carry a connotation of passivity that we would not think of as active hope.

But this is not the whole story. If we look at the actual stories in the Bible, we see the characters are often driven by an active hope similar to the type of hype that would fit Snyder’s framework. There are many examples of Biblical characters that, often after being informed and inspired by God, pursue desired outcomes by following a clear path and exhibiting considerable willpower, courage, and persistence as they do so. 

Looking at Examples of Hope in the Bible

• Early on, Abraham hears a call to a better life and a message that God will bless all peoples through him and his descendants, and so he and his people set off on a perilous journey through an unknown land, following the direction given by God.

• Joseph anticipates famine in Egypt and goes to work building grain inventories during the fat years so that the people will have food to eat during the famine years.

• Moses returns to Egypt to confront Pharoah and lead his people on a forty-year pilgrimage to the hoped-for Promised Land.

• Nehemiah leaves his comfortable life in Persia to return to Jerusalem and lead the rebuilding of the city and Temple.

• Esther takes the deliberate and dangerous path of lobbying the king to prevent the murder of countless Jews.

• Paul pursues the goal of reaching gentiles with the message of Jesus by following a dangerous path that takes him across the Mediterranean; in the process, he demonstrates extraordinary courage and resilience.

There are many other examples throughout the Bible, most notably the courageous mission of Jesus and his journey to the cross. Of all the individuals in the Bible, Jesus provides the clearest picture of Biblical hope.

In these examples, hope provides the basis for action. The hero in each story believed God was with them, but they still acted with agency and willpower and were not sitting back and waiting for God to fix things for them. With God’s help, they identified a pathway to the desired end and acted with will and persistence as they followed it. 

If entrepreneurs do likewise, our world will be better as a result. 

Applying Active Hope and the Biblical Meaning of Hope to Today’s Entrepreneurs

Developing the skills identified by Snyder, Cheavens, and Feldman will help us develop and act with more hope. In some scenarios, hope becomes essential for our success. But I wonder if there might be something else at work, perhaps of a spiritual nature. 

There seem to be times when we feel empowered or inspired by something deeper than our ordinary experience. Some might say that God or his Holy Spirit is working in us or through us, but however we think of it, this mysterious feeling of inspiration can be a profound source of motivation, especially if we channel it through the components of active hope.

Theological grounding can help cultivate this feeling of inspiration. Theology, by its nature, turns our attention toward the mystery of God and helps us develop a sense of coherence and existential purpose that is essential for hope in the face of setbacks. It can also help us reflect on our unique purpose and values and think seriously about the desired outcomes to which we are willing to commit ourselves. It can inspire us by reminding us of the bigger picture.

We can also study biblical exemplars like those mentioned above and reflect on how they faced their challenges; there are lessons in these stories that can help us face our own challenges.

Most important, at least to my way of thinking, are spiritual practices like prayer, some forms of meditation, worship, and reflection. These help us turn our attention toward God and can be a source of strength and wisdom and help us move forward with a deeper sense of purpose.

Active hope can be a powerful force as we move into the future, especially if it is spiritually grounded. It will be essential for the entrepreneurial renewal our society needs.

Adapted from The Sacred Meaning of Everyday Work, copyright 2023 by Robert H. Tribken, faithandenterprise.org.

Related articles

Steve Cuss is one of the leading voices on anxiety and leadership in the U.S. His platform Capable Life is growing, while his book “Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs” has become a go-to resource for managers of capital in volatile markets and any leader who struggles with anxiety. 

His professional journey began as a trauma and hospice chaplain, where he quickly learned that in order to help people in the worst moments of life, he had to know what was bubbling under the surface in himself: his fears, assumptions, exhaustion, and anger. If he didn’t, those things would infect his ability to connect with people when they needed it the most. 

The counterintuitive life lesson: to deeply connect to God and others, we must connect to ourselves first. Steve joins us today to discuss how entrepreneurs can go from being managed by anxiety to managing their anxiety in health and productive ways.

Remember to rate and follow the show for more great content from leaders across the Faith Driven Entrepreneur movement.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m Rusty. Our guest today is Steve Cuss. Steve is one of the leading voices on anxiety and leadership in the United States. His platform, Capable life is growing while his book Managing Leadership Anxiety, yours and theirs has become a go to resource for managers of capital and volatile markets and any leader who struggles with anxiety. Steve grew up in Perth, Western Australia and came to the United States to study theology. He holds a master of Divinity from Emmanuel Christian Seminary and is a spiritual care professional and the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. His professional journey began as a trauma and hospice chaplain, where he quickly learned that in order to help people in the worst moments of their lives, he had to know what was bubbling under the surface in himself, his fears, his assumptions, his exhaustion, and even his anger. If he didn’t, those things would impact his ability to connect with people when they needed it the most. The counterintuitive life lesson here to deeply connect to God and others, we must connect to ourselves first. Steve has served in a large church in Las Vegas as a chaplain at a level one trauma hospital on a ranch for struggling teens and as a youth minister in the Appalachian region. Since 2005, he has served as lead pastor of Discovery Christian Church in Broomfield, Colorado. He joins us today to discuss how entrepreneurs can go from being managed by anxiety to managing their anxiety in healthy and productive ways. Let’s listen in.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I’m here with Rusty and with William. We’ve got a great guest with us. Steve Cuss with us. And Steve, first of all, welcome to the program. Thank you for making the time.

Steve Cuss: Yeah, absolutely, Henry. Thanks for having me on.

Henry Kaestner: What we’re going to be talking about today. Anxiety and leadership is incredibly important. I can’t say that every single topic we talk about on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast is relevant for everybody in our audience. And yet I know that this is one that is and it makes me think of some of my favorite times on the podcast. We’ve had, I don’t know, 250 episodes or so, but two of my favorite episodes are kind of these bookends to the world of anxiety. And we had Phil Vischer on maybe podcast 18 or 20 or something like that. And if you find that podcast for our listeners, between minute 16, minute 20 he goes through and he talks about anxiety and he talks about the fact that if our identity is really in Christ, that will help us to not be afraid of things and help us to not have a lot of anxiety. And that was just a really brilliant 4 minutes. And then, I don’t know, maybe 20 episodes on, we had Casey Crawford on and Casey like, Dude, I got to tell you the first time on the podcast, but I’ve been wrestling with this Phil Vischer podcast, which I love, But, you know, I see a lot of great leaders in the Bible, you know, with some level of anxiety. I see Jesus, you know, sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. I see, you know, David kind of stressed out. So, you know, what does the anxiety look like? And so we looked at that a bit in that podcast, but he’s not an expert on it. Fortunately, you are. You’ve been a pastor of trauma and a hospice chaplain. I mean, talking about areas of massive stress, you probably actually seen people sweat blood and now you’re an author and teacher. You’ve written in a book Managing Leadership Anxiety: yours and theirs, which sits at this intersection of psychology and theology. And it’s incredibly applicable to lives of faith driven entrepreneurs. And so based on what you’ve included in your book, what are the common patterns you’ve seen for anxiety and leaders? What are the unique generators of anxiety that that you’ve identified for leaders? How do you process this all specifically for entrepreneurs? Please.

Steve Cuss: Yeah that’s a fantastic question. Obviously, it’s a big question too, that, you know, as a general rule, the best thing, first of all, is to realize that that one word anxiety covers so much territory. So you’re talking about Kenya, Nairobi. I’ve been there a number of times. Most of the people who live in the slums of Nairobi who are, just like you said, these entrepreneurial people in Nairobi. Last time I looked into it was like 85% unemployed. So entrepreneurial ism in a place like that is essential. It’s really the only way out. But most of them are dealing with trauma, have a traumatic upbringing and so on. That’s one kind of anxiety. You mentioned Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane clinically he was in acute anxiety, acute anxieties, life and death. When you know that you’re facing a life and death situation. Obviously he knew. But the same experience happens to us when we’re driving on the interstate and we have to swerve and brake to avoid an accident. Our body kind of puts us in what’s clinically called acute anxiety. Most entrepreneurs and most parents deal with a type of anxiety called chronic anxiety. That’s the field that I’m trained in. And what’s fascinating about chronic anxiety is it’s generated by false belief, false need, it’s generated by assumptions. So when Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane, he’s not anxious because he has false assumptions. He’s anxious because he’s facing a painful death. People in the slums of Kenya, their anxiety, they do have chronic anxiety, but that underlying trauma, it has its own rulebook. But entrepreneurs, parents, any staff, environment, Thanksgiving dinner, any time you watch a TV show like sorry, we’re four dudes on this, but Gilmore Girls, for example, would be a great example of chronic anxiety. I get chronically anxious watching Gilmore Girls with my daughter because it just drives me crazy. But chronic anxiety is based on assumptions. So if you think about, for example, my need to be impressive, my need to always get it right, my need to never make a mistake to win over everybody I meet, these would be assumptions, these would be false beliefs. And what’s fascinating about chronic anxiety is the only kind of anxiety that’s contagious. That’s why I wrote yours and theirs, because in any any group Thanksgiving dinner, staff meeting, you know, startup, venture capital conversation, whatever, because I have assumptions and you have assumptions because I have expectations and you have expectations. Any time you break my expectations, I get what’s clinically called chronically anxious. So I appreciate, you know, what Phil Vischer said. But really, chronic anxiety isn’t so much worry and fear. That’s a misunderstanding. It’s reactivity. So the question is, what makes you reactive? That’s how you know you’re chronically anxious. So I was at an airport in Sacramento last week and there was a huge line for the rental car shuttle, like literally 150 others. I’d never been in a line that long for a rental car shuttle. Finally the shuttle shows up and three guys walk out of the airport just in time. And you can see they think they can skip the line. Well, an expectation I have because of my upbringing is everybody waits their turn, nobody gets ahead. And because they violated my expectation, I caught the anxiety. I then got reactive, which in my case makes me look bigger. And I called them out in front of everybody and hey, hey, hey. I actually yelled at these guys this last week. By the way, this isn’t like way back when I was a sinner. This is like recent. And I called a meeting. I made sure that everybody knew that these guys were cheating. You know, none of it ended well. But this is reactivity. And so entrepreneurs, workplace, home place, raising kids, this is the garden variety anxiety that everyone faces. I first learned about it, when I was a trauma chaplain, it’s changed my life. And as a pastor, that’s my vocation. I’m primarily a pastor. It was phenomenal to me when I discovered that chronic anxiety is based on false belief. Then in every real and visceral way, the gospel helps us lower our anxiety. So yeah, that’s kind of it in a nutshell, and I’m happy to chase it wherever you like to go from there.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I mean, there’s so many different places. Max Anderson’s been a frequent guest on the podcast and he talks about the fact that entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to have a mental health condition and two times more likely suffer from depression and ADHD. And so entrepreneurship can be a really stressful environment. And there are a bunch of things I want to work in. I think maybe Rusty and William will take us there about, Gosh, what’s it like to be a trauma chaplain? And what does that teach you about humanity and life and faith and peace? And there’s a lot there. But first, on the entrepreneurship side, as an entrepreneur, you need to fundraise, you need to take on risk, you need to make difficult decisions. And anxiety seems to be oftentimes a signal that something is wrong and something needs attention, but maybe not. How do you process as an entrepreneur these feelings that you’re having and what’s a framework to be able to kind of deconstruct them in the moment? You talked about that with the guys, you know, with the rental car bus. How does an entrepreneur, when they feel these waves coming on, how do you kind of just like, okay, here’s what’s going on? I’m either a new […] because you just said it’s not that you’re afraid of something, you’re reacting to something. Give us a framework as an entrepreneur when we feel these waves come on to help us process real time.

Steve Cuss: A great question. You know, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you need to raise some money. You’re having a meeting with a bunch of venture capitalists. That kind of anxiety is generally healthy. That would be more of a public speaking anxiety, kind of an adrenaline that you really need to do a good job. But then there is this chronic anxiety and it has five markers to it. Five indicators control when you have to be in control. So the difference between that good energy of presenting well versus the need to control every outcome in that venture capital meeting. So one’s control, one’s perfection, the need to always do it perfectly. One is always knowing the answer. When someone has a question, the fourth one is always being there for others when they’re hurting, and the fifth one is people’s approval. So it’s control, perfection, having the answer, being there for others and people’s approval. Every human being is triggered when we don’t get up to any of these five. So if an entrepreneur is in that venture capital meeting, or maybe they’re doing a job interview and trying to recruit someone, whatever the situation is, you know, a lot of anxiety is actually healthy. But when it crosses into needing to do it perfectly, you never get that false need. That’s what makes you anxious, is instead of saying, you know what, I did that well, or instead of saying, for example, an entrepreneur, well, you know, you take your perfectionist, they believe the lie that they’re supposed to get it perfectly right every time, the first time, even though they’ve never done it before. So they don’t get that A-plus. And then what happens next is they end up replaying in their mind, they beat themselves up, they’re in a critic moves into condemnation and they can’t rest. They can’t mentally rest, and then they can’t be present to their loved ones because they’re busy trying to attain that perfection. They’ll never get another one just to flesh out, because this is one of mind being there for others. If somebody, somewhere is hurting, I have this compulsion to rush in, and I think it’s about that person. Even honestly, guys, I even blame Jesus for it. I even claim that Jesus says, you know, love your neighbor, carry one another’s burdens. But what I’m not aware of is it’s actually my incessant need to be needed that’s being like driven rather than God actually leading me by God’s spirit to help someone. So the first step and this is a deeper probably tool that we can do on a podcast, but the first step is to start to get to know which of the Big five is your driver. For some of us, it’s all five. Most of us it’s a few. One of them for me is having the answer. If somebody ask somebody like even on this podcast if one of you asked the other one a question. I will feel compelled. Actually, I did it during the promo when you guys were talking about Kenya. I had to stop myself from saying, I’ve been to Kenya. Like, what is that? What’s that incessant need in me to have the answer? That’s my chronic anxiety

Henry Kaestner: I know that feeling. By the way, that feeling is going to serve you well during the lightning round.

Steve Cuss: Oh, good. Yeah, well, hopefully, Unless I don’t know. And then I’ll get really anxious.

William Norvell: I want to jump in about Gilmore Girls, but that’s a separate conversation.

Steve Cuss: Well, I also host a podcast to my 15 year old daughter. Just joined me and we did a whole episode on Anxiety in Gilmore Girls. So yeah, you can chase that for a good time.

Henry Kaestner: Oh, my goodness.

William Norvell: In 100%.

Rusty Rueff: All right. I am going to stir us in another direction. The best books are those that people write about what they know. And so I’m assuming that you wrote your book on managing leadership anxiety, that it could have had a third title, which is not just yours and theirs, but also mine.

Steve Cuss: Of course. Yeah.

Rusty Rueff: Take us through your journey with anxiety and how it got you to a place to write a book.

Steve Cuss: Yeah, well, great question. Yeah. I graduated from college. I needed a job for a year. I kind of stumbled into chaplaincy because they were hiring and paying and didn’t realize it would change my life. That, you know, I am kind of entrepreneurial and driven. I like innovation, I like a lot of ideas. But what’s interesting about trauma chaplaincy is all of those skills become liabilities in the face of grief and loss. You know, grief and loss is actually about rather than being proactive, it’s actually the capacity to restrain yourself. And so that year, as a chaplain, I attended to, you know, 250-300 deaths in that year, you know, dozens of times a day, people asking me to beg God for a miracle like you think about chaplaincy is so intense, no one ever calls a chaplain in when they’re bored and just want to watch TV together, it’s always at the worst moment of their life. And that’s really I was 24. I was very young, and that’s where I discovered my anxiety. I never would have described myself as an anxious person, especially as an Aussie Australians. We work really hard to look like we’re fine. And so under the surface of my awareness, were all of these expectations, all these assumptions, all these false needs, that when I’m in a room where somebody is actively dying, all of these things under the surface are bubbling up and trying to get me to do something, say something like, Sir, for example, one of my assumptions would be, I believe I’m supposed to make people feel better, but when you’re in a room and someone’s dying, that’s too big. No human being can speak to it or do anything to take away death. And it really taught me how do I actually enter someone’s pain. Then I got really sophisticated. I was trained in a study of anxiety called Systems Theory. That’s what I go around the world teaching people now. And what’s interesting is how when you’re chronically anxious, it actually puts you in a false reality. So when I was in line at the rental car, I was no longer just another customer in line. I’m now judge, jury and executioner. I’m in a whole different reality. And so that’s why I train people, because I have bet my whole life that Jesus sets us free and we relate to God in concrete reality. But chronic anxiety puts us in a false reality. You see it all through the Bible. You see it in Judas. You see it when James and John are bickering to Jesus, this false reality is all in Scripture. But that’s what I noticed most when I was a chaplain, how often I was in a room with someone who was suffering and my chronic anxiety was giving me a false gospel. Steve, you’re got to say something. You’re going to do something. You’re going to make it better and learning to notice it, get underneath it and invite God down to the deep wells of my life. That was profound for me. And so I’ve been a pastor 26 years. That’s how I pastored. What’s interesting for me, as I hand my church over Christmas to a young lead pastor, I’m now an entrepreneur. I now do what you guys are coaching on. I’m traveling the world, teaching anxiety and managing my own financial anxiety, trying to figure out what do I offer all of this stuff because I’m only ten months into being full time in this. So I kind of have a foot in both camps, but that’s really where it started for me.

Rusty Rueff: It had to be tough as a pastor. Just opening up yourself to your congregation and to others about your own anxiety. I’m interested, you know. How did that come about?

Steve Cuss: You know what a great question, Rusty. I have discovered that if I can just be exactly human sized in front of my congregation, if I can enjoy God in front of my people, it relieves me, because I do think a lot of pastors carry a false expectation to be the example. And I guess my question would be, yeah, we are the example, but example of what? And I do think too many pastors and too many congregants kind of expect their pastor to be the example of like this certain model, successful Christian. I would rather just be an example of a human sized follower of Jesus. So I shared my doubts, my fears, my anxieties very openly. Now, as a lead pastor for sixteen years and our whole culture of our church was a culture of openness. Because if you bring your anxiety out to the surface, it kind of dissolves that if you keep it hidden, it grows. It’s a lot like shame and it’s a lot like sin. So my job as a pastor was to create a culture where the pastors like the Chief of Anxiety and now the congregants can share theirs, too. And I was just very fortunate that when I was hired, the elders understood that that’s what I would do, and they welcomed it. It was incredible. So I had an incredible leadership that I worked for that light to this vision of a human sized congregation. You know, what I say is we are humans size followers of a supernatural God. But we get anxious when we think we’re supposed to be supernatural. It just to get theological for you guys, the reason we get anxious is we actually reach into God’s job and we start doing God’s job for God. So that control perfection. Having the answer, these five are actually the five core attributes of God. Anytime we try to be in control instead of just doing something well ordered, like the human size of control is order, the human size of perfection is well, and so on. So anytime we try to cross from human to God, we get anxious. Mm hmm.

Rusty Rueff: So I want to go into your a little bit in your book about group anxiety, but I want to ask you a question that I think you’re probably well suited to answer. So. At least in the United States, it’s almost become fashionable for people to say they have anxiety. Right. We’re just seeing it. You know, William’s in a business now that, you know, trying to get a business off the ground where he’s, you know, chaplaincy and helping others. And while anxiety is real and we know that, you know, sometimes I wonder if we don’t have a health system or other things that are just kind of continually pump in to our culture, you know, hey, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. Let’s let us take care of that. And you know what? If you’ve got it, okay, that’s good. But even more so, let us take care of it. Is that an accurate perception that I’ve got?

Steve Cuss: It’s a big topic. It’s definitely worth longer than we probably have to chat about. My overall take is that culture now is more comfortable talking about what we all always faced but didn’t know we had or didn’t know how to talk about. So if you go back to the Greatest Generation, we often talk about, look, they went and tackled Hitler and rightly named. What we don’t talk about is how many of those incredible men came home and drank everyone under the table and abused people. No, I’m not saying everybody. I’m not making a blanket. But there was this underhanded trauma response because no one in that generation could admit I need help because they tackled Hitler. I mean, why would you need help at home? So I do think each generation is becoming more aware and having more conversation. I’m sure you’re right, Rusty, that there is a pendulum swing. There’s no question like if chronic anxiety is contagious, then social media is the contagion spreading agent. Our reactivity is through the charts on social media. January six Insurrection can largely be described through the science of chronic anxiety. A lot of those people ended up in the capital. They were almost surprised they were there. They just got kind of caught up. That’s because chronic anxiety is contagious, so we are catching anxiety from each other. I appreciate the younger generations vocabulary. I think they’re much more able to talk and help. Like I’m a Gen Xer, help us talk about it. I think the interesting question maybe we could tackle is resilience. Are we becoming less resilient? Because I don’t mind if we’re talking about it so long as that resilience is still intact. And that’s I think that’s the bigger question.

Rusty Rueff: Okay. So talk to us about group anxiety.

Steve Cuss: Right? So if I have assumptions about myself and about you, you have assumptions about me, then our anxiety just spreads freely between us. Any married couple has experienced how anxiety can escalate in a fight, and the general rule is the most reactive person or the most anxious person in any room has the most power. So you’ll often see if a CEO is trying to lead a new initiative and that one person is a skeptic. They’re what we call. A Yeah, but. A Yeah, but what about this? Yeah, but what about that? Then their anxiety can infect the rest of the optimistic team if the leader’s not careful. So I train leaders and actually entire teams how to pay attention to anxiety in a group. Because if everyone’s committed to helping everyone stay human sized, the team health goes through the roof, staff turnover down. And so what you’re looking for is patterns of behavior and certain indicators. So we have again, a bit more than maybe this podcast. We have 31 indicators that a team is anxious. One example would be when this triangulation triangulation happens any time three or more people are in a relationship, that only should have two people. So, you know, Rusty, if I talked about you to Henry and William, I’m triangulating, I’m not talking to you. A lot of people don’t have the emotional maturity to talk to each other, so they talk about each other. That’s a very simple indication that the culture is anxious, because anytime I talk about you and not to you or anytime I talk about you differently than the way I talk to you, I’m going to be anxious. I’m going to make the people I talk to, anxious. And when you find out about it, you’ll be anxious. So there’s 31 indicators like that that we look for in any organization. And then the other thing we’re looking for is recurring patterns of behavior in any team. You take a staff that’s worked together for a year and anyone listening to this can answer the following questions. Who on your staff uses the most words in a meeting? It’s always the same person who’s always the first one to speak up, who never speaks unless they’re called upon and who has their own secret meeting after the meeting. Now, these four questions just indicate that over time, anxiety puts any grew into a predictable recurring pattern of behavior because your listeners already know the answers they already know. Oh, man, John says the most words and Sally has their own meeting after the meeting. That’s because these behaviors become predictable also in marriages or raising kids, parents and children. And husbands and wives fall into predictably anxious patterns together. So your average marriage, what you fight about, might change. But the pattern of your fight, who starts it, who escalates it, Who needs space, who smothers that’s predictable. And so someone with my training with systems theory, we can come into an organization only takes us a few minutes to uncover these predictable patterns. And my job is to help people vow to break some obviously some predictable patterns of very healthy laughter, playfulness, teamwork, encouragement. These are healthy, predictable patterns. But to try to look at the toxic ones and help resolve them. And really the role is you’re trying to put the anxiety back on the person who’s generating it. Oftentimes in an organization, especially with a CEO entrepreneur who’s a big personality and maybe that big personality got the company five years in and now they’re trying to establish what happens is that CEO’s habits tend to generate anxiety on the staff, that maybe that CEO is like, well, you just have to deal with it. That’s the way it is. And the staffs like, well, we wish you deal with it like you’re wearing us all out. And so sometimes they have to come in and help everybody without blame carry the right amount of responsibility and anxiety each.

Rusty Rueff: This episode is brought to you by well, it’s brought to you by us. Faith Driven Entrepreneur is a ministry dedicated to resourcing and connecting Christian business leaders across the world with great content and deep community. You’ve already landed at the content piece, but if you’d like to learn more about how you can get connected to other like minded entrepreneurs with no cost and no catch. Just go visit Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org backslash groups. Until then, we’ll keep the content flowing. Let’s get back to the show.

Rusty Rueff: I want to ask a question, but make a point. At the same time, I think so many times we might not as leaders, have the language to talk about this. Right. We know there’s tension, but we don’t know what to call it and how to get at it. Any easy tricks there for a leader?

Steve Cuss: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I’m not the only person that’s written about this, but I put a whole vocabulary in the book because if you can name it, you can tame it like everyone’s experience, triangulation. But maybe you didn’t know that’s what it was called. Again, to William’s point, why do we love Gilmore Girls? It’s nothing but triangulation. So now that you know that you can look for it, you can invite the people in the triangle to d triangulate, have direct conversations. So on our church staff, we have two behavioral values that dead simple. Value number one, when at all possible, we talk to each other before we talk about each other. So in my church staff, it’s no problem that you talk about me, no problem at all, especially if you need to vent. But I trust that you’re first talk to me. The second value is the way we talk to each other is congruent with the way we talk about each other, because a lot of people vent. And then you get in the room and they shapeshift. That’s anxiety. So yeah, there is a whole vocabulary. It’s very simple. This is not complicated. It’s just about noticing patterns. And I would say Rusty, a lot of people actually didn’t realize that there was another way to go, that they could actually be free of these patterns.

William Norvell: Yeah. Steve, I want to go to, I’m thinking about some people listening that, you know, obviously the number one approach is to read your entire book and take detailed notes. So step one, some people may not jump on that. I don’t know. I’m curious if you’re a leader right now. I’m guessing everyone’s nodding along at some level or two something, right? No one’s saying I have no problem with this. I’m really sad. I tuned in. You’re leading an organization right now. What’s the first couple of questions or maybe first couple of actions that you would say, hey, you need to understand this or you need to ask yourself these questions is where would you start if someone had, you know, hey, I’m taking this seriously, but, you know, I’ve only got half an hour to really think through that.

Steve Cuss: It is a great question.

William Norvell: Where do I start?

Steve Cuss: Yep. And one of the challenges of entrepreneurial ism is the pressure to do, to do and be efficient. And unfortunately, this is not an efficient path. So if you only have half an hour, I would actually say don’t open the door to this. But if you have half an hour a week, then I’d say, yeah, absolutely, open the door. This kind of thinking and approach takes several months, but step one is learn to notice when you are spreading anxiety. That’s it. What are the signs that you are anxious when maybe you don’t even know you’re anxious? The simplest way to know you’re anxious is to ask somebody who cares about you, how they know you’re anxious before you do. And this is especially true for entrepreneurial, mission driven, others focused leaders. We are usually the last in the room to know when we’re not well. But anxiety is like poker. We all have tells and so others can see it before us. By the time a child is nine, they can tell you your anxiety tells. So that’s number one. Number two is deeper is can you commit to not spreading anxiety any more? And not catching it when others are spreading it. If chronic anxiety is contagious, then if the leader can be the one to say, you know what, as much as it’s upon me, I’m going to try to not spread it and I’m going to try to not catch it. So what that looks like is usually I can tell I’m anxious because I’m blaming someone else. I’m irritated. Like those rental car guys. That was just evidence that I was anxious. I’m blaming them, you know, this kind of thing. But in systems theory, system theory has zero interest in blame. It’s another thing I love about it, because I think that lines up with the gospel. Paul says one of the fruits of the spirit is self-control. System theory says your job is to control your self. Don’t worry about other people. And so typically when I’m doing this stuff, people are always saying, Oh, I wish Jim was here. I wish Sally was listening. But really what happens is if your anxiety gets into a pattern, then what are you doing that’s contributing to the pattern? So, you know, I’m always on time. I really value promptness and it’ll be a simple pattern. Maybe John is always late and I tend to blame John, but I’m contributing to the problem because I’m not confronting him. So the problem is John is late. My attempted solution is act like he’s not late. And then five times being late in a row, I’m now having an anger fantasy about John and think about firing John. But I’ve never had the courage to just sit down and say, John, here’s the deal. And so if I take responsibility for myself, rather than blaming John and say, well, what am I doing that might be contributing to John always being late? Well, here’s what I’m doing. Avoiding conflict like I always do. I love to avoid conflict. Okay. I can do difficult things because of Christ. I’m going to sit down with John and I’ve done this a number of times where then I’ll say, Hey, there’s two problems here. Problem number one is you’re chronically late. Problem number two is I’m letting you get away with it. And I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry I’ve been letting you get away with it that does not serve you unreasonably angry at you. And I don’t like that because I actually like you. I’m getting really petty like last time you were late, John. I count it up every minute that you wasted in the room. That’s how petty I’m getting. So here’s the deal. I am not going to let you get away with it any more. If you’re late again, big, terrible things are going to happen. Armageddon is going to happen. What’s that like for you, John? Like I’ve not been leading you. Well, that’s different than me saying, John, John, you’re the problem. So systems theory tells you to really focus on how you’re the problem. Those are be. The two steps I would start with is how do I know when I’m anxious and then how can I commit to not spreading it and catching it? And I guess that was step three. How do I break the pattern where I’m contributing and feeding into the anxiety?

William Norvell: That does not sound fun.

Steve Cuss: Oh, it’s such a great time on the end of it. So much freedom. So much freedom after that.

William Norvell: That stuff is so good and so not fun. Very pastoral of you. I was sitting there remembering. One of my favorite pastor jokes is when they’re giving this hard sermon about a sin. And of course, everyone’s thinking about the five people that need to hear that sermon. Cause they struggle with that now? Like if you’re thinking of those five people, you probably need to pay attention to yourself. You’re probably the one struggling. Don’t send it to other people. Just pay attention.

Steve Cuss: 80 to 90% of systems training is focusing on yourself and you’ll be blown away if you make yourself healthier and more aware and manage your anxiety, you will be blown away. How it can infect your organization. It’s a gospel value Jesus’ health infected ill health everywhere he went. And that’s the same value that systems has. A healthy leader can infect sick people and make them well. And I think if I can just rant as a preacher, what our society is in most desperate need of is healthy Christians emotionally and spiritually healthy Christians. That’s really the best evangelistic tool we have in a culture where people are suspicious about us nowadays.

Henry Kaestner: Amen. You know, you said something earlier on in the conversation that I clearly want to ask you about, which is resiliency. And the way you brought it up made me think that there is a resiliency needed within society, maybe within the church that maybe once existed, but might not as much anymore. But I don’t want to presume what you’re going to say on that topic, but I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are about resiliency.

Steve Cuss: I think resiliency is such a fascinating topic, isn’t I mean, it’s such an important topic. But when I study history and these resilient generations, if we go back to the greatest generation, you know, one of my favorite TV shows is Band of Brothers. It’s such an incredible example that like Dick Winters, he’s actually considered a model of system theory leadership. He did not catch anxiety around him and he did not generate it. He was healthy and he made his people better. Like actually, Band of Brothers becomes a great model. But I think the advantage that that generation had is they had a worldwide outside pressure and that’s how you know your resiliency. We are recording this podcast right on the heels of Hurricane Ian. If we all went down to Florida, we would see that same resiliency at work on a local level. But the difference was World War Two lasted years. It took over the whole world. Hurricane Ian lasted a couple of days and the impact is going to be months. But that’s where you can kind of test human resiliency as these local pockets of struggle and suffering. And then, of course, as a chaplain right down to the micro struggle of one human who is sick and how are they managing, facing death. That’s to me, the only real way to measure resiliency. I was disappointed as a pastor that in America where we live, it did not feel like culturally COVID humbled us at all. It felt like that was an opportunity for us as Western people to get on our knees and seek God. And I didn’t see a whole lot of that happening inside the church or outside the church. You know, a lot of church people love to blame, unchurch culture kind of drives me crazy as a pastor because I think Jesus spent most of his critique on religious people. But I didn’t see a whole lot of that going on inside the church either. We kind of retrenched into our rights through COVID rather than died to self and sort the face of God. So that was disappointing to me. But I think that’s how you find resiliency.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s interesting to me. I had a maybe with some of our listeners. I have a little bit of a different take on that. There are things about Christian culture that deals with resiliency that does get me like there are seven and a half billion of God’s image bears that do not live in the United States, and yet 2 billion of them profess the name of Christ. And yet when major calamities happen to Christ followers around the world, we’re not getting on our knees and we’re not mourning, we’re not crying, we’re not seeing the injustice and seeing what might we do about it. We seem to be much more comfortable and focus on the lives in our immediate periphery, and I think that’s not so bad. If you’ve gotten down on your knees and prayed to God and said, God, how would you have me deal with this injustice? But maybe it’s also that we are maybe you could speak this is that we are anxiety avoidant and we worry that if we get called into the anxieties that are outside in different countries, that it will trouble our lives. But like you, I mourn the reaction of the church at times and wonder why we are seem to all be coasting to our funeral. But is it because we’re trying to avoid anxiety or any thoughts you have on that?

Steve Cuss: I think you’ve nailed it, Henry. I do think it is an avoidant issue. I think one of the massive cultural values in Western culture is comfort and another one is safety, whereas the gospel compels us to discomfort and danger for the sake of Jesus and God’s people and lost people. So, I mean, I do think there is a compassion fatigue with globalization and global news. It’s an ongoing barrage of brokenness. So which of the many broken places in the world do you tackle that’s genuine? But I’m with you. I think as a general rule, Western culture is discipling us more than the gospel in the West. Again, man, that’s a blanket statement. So there are of course, there’s exceptions, but I do think that’s what we’re up against is, yeah, Western culture has a gospel and it says, Make as much as you can, be comfortable, be safe, you know, shop for a school based on the crime rates. But the gospel says, no, no, comfort zone is massively overrated. Not good for your soul. That’s why, you know, I heard you guys talk about Kenya like I’ve been to Kenya, I’ve been a number of developing nations. And you talk about with a gospel thriving innovation, the way I grow being around there, I think that’s where salvation is found. But I do think you’ve put your finger on a big issue there.

Henry Kaestner: With the worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. If we can get through that third level, we get this investment return that at a minimum is 30 fold. I’m an investor, man. If I can get a ten bagger man, I’m high five. And anybody who will hold up their hand to me but 30 fold, 60 fold, 100 fold, but man, that worries the world. It’s difficult. And I tell you, you know, you get called in what’s going in in Eastern Europe or caught in what’s going on in Ethiopia. You can easily not look at that because we’re focused on having, you know, time to fit in nine holes. So I’m just trying to understand if we indeed are healthy, does helping people who are suffering through a financial or spiritual poverty or whatever, they’re maybe not as healthy, Does that make us more healthy or does that make us more weak? How do you think about that dynamic? Because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about anxiety and leadership. You’re saying as we are strong and as we are healthy, we can then engage with other people that are broken and have anxiety and we can help to heal them. Does that make us stronger, make us more healthy, or does that drag us into the anxiety? And actually, while some of us rubs off on them, a bunch of them rubs off on us and we return from that staff meeting we had where there’s some anxiety, a little bit more damage from the experience, or we return from a mission trip to Croatia, a little more damage to the experience. How do you have those type of interactions where you emerge healthier instead of weaker in both instances?

Steve Cuss: And I think the work that I’m calling for, you think about trauma chaplaincy. I would do these 28 hour overnight shifts in the hospital, just like medical residents do with sleep overnight and be on call all night. And typically, not very often, but occasionally you get four or five or six deaths in a shift. What a year of chaplaincy did was deepen my capacity to step into pain and be present to people and present to God in pain and suffering. I think the vision I’m calling us toward is to deepen our capacity. And so the only reason it would make us weaker is if we do have some kind of idolatry that’s unaddressed. Like if you are in a chronically, systemically poverty situation, like the slums of Nairobi, like that’s a tough place to go work. Chronic long term poverty. But if you have this false belief that you’re supposed to make everyone better, it will make you weaker because it’s going to reinforce this false belief and you’re going to then do more and burn out. But you talk about a guy like Father Gregory Boyle, incredible Catholic priest in Compton. He’s put 30 years in Compton, Los Angeles. He’s probably gone to more teenage funerals than anyone has ever. And he is about the most joyful, alive human you can meet because he is there to learn and grow in Christ, not to live out of his false anxiety. So it’s a great question that I wish I had a simpler answer.

Henry Kaestner: No, that was a great answer. Thank you. Outstanding.

Rusty Rueff: And as you said, we’ve asked a lot of complex questions. Now we’re going to ask some really simple, easy questions. Okay. So it’s lightning round time. You answer quickly. We asked you quickly and there’ll be more fun than anything else. So I’m going to kick it off. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi. Is that appropriate for me to say or should only Australians say it to each other?

Steve Cuss: Oh, you can say it. I think what your job is to say Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. And then we get to respond. Oi, oi, oi, I’d be careful doing both. You might end up in a bar fight.

Rusty Rueff: All right, that’s good, good, Good to know. So your preference rugby or cricket?

Steve Cuss: Cricket, but, but they’re not competitors. Those two sports don’t compete against each other. But cricket for me.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, I was going to go. So Rusty took one kind of from me, but I was going to go. Rugby or Australian Rules Football.

Steve Cuss: Aussie Rules Football. Just because the state I was raised in some states play Aussie Rules and some play rugby. But if you’re talking the All Blacks New Zealand with a haka rugby, every time.

Henry Kaestner: I’m reading a book right now on the All Blacks called Legacy, talking about their team dynamic and fighting with a purpose and about how their small country has been able to be so successful.

Steve Cuss: New Zealand is one of the most astonishing countries in the world and New Zealanders. I’ll say as an Aussie we have a big rivalry with New Zealand. They’re incredible human beings.

William Norvell: I have got one that’s complex and I am excited to do it in 30 seconds pastorally. Obviously you just said healthy identity in Christ is the antidote to these things. If you had one thing to pass along to our entrepreneurs that they may not be seeing or they’re missing in the gospel or in in the Scripture that can help them re anchor that, what would it be?

Steve Cuss: John says in one John 3:20 or 3:19 and 20. John actually gives us a way to be at peace with Christ. He says, This is how we set our hearts at rest in God’s presence. Even when our hearts condemn us. God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. And I think what happens is that in a critic condemns us that need for perfection, that need for control. I think Jesus died to release us from these false needs so that we can be exactly human sized in the presence of God. So what I do, I practice daily. I practice containment. With that inner voice of condemnation. I ask God to examine my false beliefs so that I give God the first word in my life and the last one in my life. Because that’s what you do when you’re in the presence of a king. You know, I’m an Australian. We have King Charles now. If he were to usher me to Buckingham Palace, I’m not just running my mouth. He speaks first. I get to speak and then he speaks last. Jesus is my sovereign king, so I’m trying to live my life where what Jesus says about me supersedes what I think about myself. And that’s what I think a lot of entrepreneurs are lacking is this this pressure that God is not calling you to carry and listen. There’s a false belief in entrepreneurs. I have to live under this pressure so he can be successful. You will thrive more and be more productive and more profitable if you are relaxed internally.

Steve Cuss: Wlliam, you’re cheating. That’s a deep question.

William Norvell: Oh, but it was so worth it. I’ve been thinking it for a while and I didn’t see any place else to fit it in, so it showed up in the lightning round.

Steve Cuss: I feel like I should get some kind of credit or rebate. That was not lightning round.

William Norvell: Oh, but it was so good. My body, my whole body think I changed my whole.

Steve Cuss: Oh well you can see, you know I typically do a four day workshop like that would be my typical offer. And you can see why. Because people need time to hear this, talk about it with each other. So this is obviously a deeper process. If people want to dig in more, they want to set a few hours so we can, you know, get them talking to each other about it, because that’s really how we change.

William Norvell: So now we’ve got 2 minutes. I got to end the farm. Most anxious disciple.

Steve Cuss: What a great question. Probably Peter, but his anxiety, his reactivity made him get bigger. So it’s easier to see his anxiety for some people. Their anxiety makes them smaller. They get really quiet. There’s no question Judas would have been very anxious. But Peter’s anxiety is the most easy to see in the gospels. Foot and mouth disease, that whole thing.

William Norvell: Got it.

Steve Cuss: I guess, I got to add John’s anxiety’s more insidious where he he’s like, Hey, Peter and I ran to the tomb and I want everyone to know that I outran Peter. Like, that’s anxiety. That bragging is usually anxiety.

William Norvell: Oh, I love it. Okay, well, speaking of, you gave us a great scripture second ago, but we love to end our show by going back to God’s word. And if you had something to share with us, maybe from today or maybe something you’ve studied, then just coming alive to you in a new way from God’s Word, we would invite you to do that with our audience.

Steve Cuss: Yeah. Yeah. First, John, three, 19 and 20. That’s the main passage I’d want to leave us with. I just think there’s the gospel right there. And the idea that God supersedes my opinion. And that’s how I live by faith. Because I have it in a critic and a voice of condemnation like everyone does. But that’s how I truly relax into the grace of God. And I guess tied with that, I just keep thinking of Psalm 139, just the way David invites God to search him. David’s like, Search me, Lord, show me my ways. And I love that. Even in the Old Testament, David is saying, I may not know myself, but you know me. So show me any ways where I can repent. So when I see the Scriptures teaching us to confess and repent, that to me is just a pathway to freedom. When I hear repent, I think, Oh, I get to be free. And so I’m often praying. Psalm 139 and inviting God to show me where I need to repent. What false belief that I am living for that’s keeping me bound.

William Norvell: Amen. Amen. So grateful for you. So grateful for your work. Thank you for spending some time with us.

Steve Cuss: Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. There’s a good time.

— by

Related articles

We talk a lot about good work as entrepreneurs driven by our faith, but how does rest play into our roles?

In this special episode, author and frequent contributor to the show, Andy Crouch, explains how we have a duty to not just create good work but to create good rest as well. For him, the two go together: “good rest is the fruitful contemplation of good work.” 

Hear the whole talk originally recorded for the 2022 Faith Driven Entrepreneur Conference and don’t forget to follow the show for more great content every week.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to this very special edition of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Today, we’re highlighting a talk Andy Crouch gave at our 2022 global conference on the role entrepreneurs play in creating good work and creating good rest. Andy is a thoughtful leader in the movement and a regular contributor to the show. He’s also a partner of theology and culture at Praxis Labs, a venture building ecosystem with a redemptive imagination. Andy is an author of numerous books, including his most recent The Life We’re Looking For Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Let’s listen in.

Narrator: One thing that we get to do that no other creature on the planet can do is that we get to add value by creating things. And I went from $40 million in revenue to watching everything that I had built for God get sold.

Background song: Come on in. Has it been a long night?

Narrator: You’ve got to make sure that your identity is solidly rooted in who you are in Christ and not in having money. I sold my company and I really had a hard time getting out of bed.

Background song: Maybe been a long year. Maybe been a hard life. Maybe you’re not. All right.

Narrator: Faith driven entrepreneurs to do what they want to do. Have to understand what God has given them. There’s winners and learners, not winners and losers. I feel like I was chosen to be on this show for a reason and I had to do something.

Background song: If it got a little red in your eyes. You’ve come to the right place.

Narrator: And we’re addicted to comfort and he’s called me into really difficult positions. That’s what he’s told me, to walk into.

Background song: People like you people like me. This is where we all find great come out now.

Henry Kaestner: Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. This podcast in the whole ministry seeks to equip you the Faith Driven Entrepreneur to seize the unique opportunities that God has placed in front of you and overcome the challenges that life will throw your way. These are the stories of how he takes broken things and makes them new. Come for the podcast. Stay for the community. Welcome to Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

Andy Crouch: I want to talk today about the basic thing I think that entrepreneurs do, which is create opportunities for good work and good rest. So basically what you are doing as an entrepreneur anywhere in the world, any field or sector, is you are creating good work. I believe from a Christian point of view, there’s never going to be enough work, not ever enough good work, because good work is the fruitful transformation of creation. It’s our image bearing role, taking this beautiful, abundant world that God made, finding ways to explore and develop its possibilities and bring them forth in the world. And in a very real way, I think this work of being image bearers is an infinite game. There’s infinite good work to be done, and entrepreneurs are the people at the sort of leading edge of discovering what the next set of work is for human beings to do in the world. And interestingly, this also creates good rest. Your job is not actually just to create jobs or just to create work. It is also to create good rest because real rest is the fruit. I work and then I, with gladness and delight, contemplate what I’ve done. And you actually can only have this kind of rest after you’ve worked. So if you think about the narrative of Genesis, one was God resting before he was created, and then he got to work. Now, whatever God was doing before he was creating. It wasn’t resting. The resting came after six days of speaking and seeing every day. It’s good. It’s good, it’s good. And then at the end he created his image bearer because he says it’s very good and then he rests because rest is the fruitful contemplation of fruitful work. So the the work that we do as creators of opportunity is make more and more ways for human beings to experience the good work and the good rest that we were made for as God’s image bearers in the world. So this beautiful, beautiful calling. Now, obviously, this is not the whole story about the world we live in because there is an alternative to work and rest, which we live with all the time, and I want to call it toil and leisure. So instead of the work and rest we’re made for, we’ve ended up in the world, we actually have a toiling leisure. So think about toil as excessive, endless, fruitless labor. So you are definitely putting out effort in the world, but nothing of satisfaction is coming back. No sense of goodness is coming back. You end toil rather than sort of grateful and glad and resting in the good work you’ve done, you end up just kind of exhausted. Nothing worthwhile to show for what you’ve done. And when your life is full of toil, you start looking for just something to relieve the exhaustion and that I’m going to call leisure. This if toil is fruitless labor, leisure is basically fruitless escape from labor. It’s when you get home after a fruitless day and you’re like, Oh, I’m so tired. It’s not you’re not tired because it was a good day of work and you’re now just glad to celebrate what you’ve done. You’re tired because there was nothing worthwhile in this day. And what do you want to do? You want turn on Netflix, choose your kind of drug of choice to sort of escape, to sit back, to try to just escape from the disappointment of a day that was not spent in image bearing. And I think we have moved in the whole human story from the original design of work and rest to a very widespread reality of. Toil and then whatever leisure we can eke out as human beings to somehow compensate for the sense that our lives are not actually mattering in the way that we want our lives to matter. Now, let’s take this a step further and recognize that something starts really with the rise of economic wealth in the modern era, when we start to have kind of the production of real surplus in human societies, which is we actually start to develop two classes. And you can think of them as the leisure class and the toiling class. So we actually end up with a class of people whose lives are defined almost entirely by the absence of work in their lives. If you happen to be a fan of Downton Abbey, right, it’s a story of this kind of classic picture of an upstairs of a landed aristocracy, the leisure class, who, as near as we can tell, really never do any work. They sit around talking and having little intrigues and sitting at elaborate meals. And then downstairs is where a huge amount of work happens to create the leisure of the upstairs. So that is a world where toil and leisure are aren’t actually divided in the course of the day. They’re actually divided between different classes of people. Now, you probably don’t feel like you live upstairs that Downton Abbey because it was the product of a very particular time. And in fact, very few people live that way today, although there might still be a few. But the leisure class was the fruits of the mercantile and financial revolutions of the 15th century, combined with the Industrial Revolution, revolution of the 18th 19th century. But we’re living in a slightly different time. We’re living after the next big revolution, the computational revolution that, when stacked on the financial and industrial revolutions, created what we call technology. And technology has generated a new kind of leisure and made a kind of leisure available for a very large number of people, which may well include many of the folks who are watching and part of this event. And let me put it in terms of making dinner. So how are you getting dinner at the end of a long day? So here’s the work and rest way to get dinner. Someone or several members of the family work together, starting with relatively raw ingredients that other people worked to produce, of course. And you actually make a meal together and then you sit down and you enjoy the meal. This probably still happens in your home on special occasions, maybe Thanksgiving in America, where a big a lot of work is done to prepare a meal and then everyone sits down, ideally including the people who prepare the meal all together. And you just enjoy like, Wow, this is so good. We’re enjoying this so much. Well, that’s work and rest at the dinner table. But that’s probably not what a lot of your nights are like at home. What you do in the leisure version of dinner for your family is you just order out and the doorbell rings. Somebody drops off a bag of stuff to eat, you take it in and you and your family sit down. You’ve done no work at all, thank goodness, because you’re so tired from the day and you just enjoy the meal. This is in many ways a delightful experience to just have to have the food show up, enjoy the food without anyone having to work to prepare it. And many of us choose that leisure option any given night of the week two problems with it that we feel. I think one is we do wonder about the people behind the scenes who did work. In fact, all leisure requires someone else to work. This is a difference between work and rest and toil and leisure. Work can be done by everyone and then rest can be enjoyed by everyone. But for anyone to enjoy leisure, someone has to work. And we do wonder about those invisible people who make the meals that we enjoy and who deliver the meals that we enjoy. And we think, Are they getting good work or are they actually experiencing toil? And we’re not sure. And we sometimes wonder and we sometimes fear that behind the leisure that we enjoy is actually a lot of toil. So that’s one problem. The other, maybe more proximate problem is that as enjoyable as it is to just have the food show up and have the leisure of a nice dinner without having to make it. The leisure is actually far less good for us and restorative for us than the rest would be if our family had actually collaborated on making dinner and then sat down and enjoyed it. We would have developed a relationship, we would have developed skill. The kids would have gotten to maybe participate in making the food. They would have seen at least their mom or their dad or both preparing the food. There would be that kind of sense that we are actually doing something together that makes us different and maybe in some way better together. And I would say because we are doing the image of God when we do that culture making, but when we just have the leisure, we don’t actually develop, we don’t become, we just consume. So this is not great for us in large quantities or maybe even in small quantities. Leisure is not as good for us as work and rest. So what we’ve done in a psychological society is to provide a lot of seemingly fortunate people with a lot of leisure of this kind. Not quite the Downton Abbey kind, but the kind of which, on any given day, we can escape from the kind of fruitless ness of our lives and enjoy the work, or maybe the toil of others in ways that don’t really develop us. But I actually think we’ve reached the point, and I think many of us sense this where easy is starting to have diminishing returns, the relief of toil, the sense that often we don’t have to work for the good things we need, we can just buy them is actually not that good for us as human beings. Evident and maybe most clearly in what’s happening to our actual bodies and the physical strength of our bodies, because it actually turns out you need load bearing activity to have a healthy body. And the other really strange thing that’s going on is that at the very same time as we’ve ended up with this view, the seemingly beautiful amount of leisure, our lives don’t feel like upstairs at Downton Abbey. Do you feel like you live a life in the leisure class? No way. You get to the end of any given day, you feel like you’ve actually been toiling a huge amount of the day. So even those who are fortunate in this economy end up feeling like their lives are toil toil toil with a little bit of compensating leisure and all of that, haunted by the awareness that behind the curtain of our modern economy is a huge amount of work that probably is more like toil. We went after the problem of toil at the dawn of the technological era, but we did not try to solve the problem of good work. We thought our job was to make things easy, but we haven’t figured out how to make work good. And if anything, we’ve ended up creating more toil and fewer and fewer truly good jobs that are truly satisfying more toil for both the relatively powerful and fortunate and the relatively poor and unfortunate alike. So. This creates an amazing central opportunity for redemptive, faith driven entrepreneurship in the world. We need to be setting our sights on creating good work, which will then lead to good rest. The question is not how to make toil easier and make leisure abundant. It’s how to make good, hard things possible because good work is a good, hard thing so that good rest will be possible for everyone in the economy that we’re part of. Our job is not actually to make people’s lives easier, to relieve people of difficulty. It’s to help our neighbors take on worthwhile, difficult things and provide the right kinds of support that will help them actually thrive as they take that on in the good work we’re meant to do in the world. So I have two examples for you, two examples from our community of entrepreneurs at Praxis. The first is an app, and it’s called lasting. It’s an app to help couples grow their relationships in healthy ways. To do that through a sequence of often very challenging conversations that invites you and your partner, your marital partner into so that you can actually learn how to make a marriage or a lasting relationship work. Lasting is not going to somehow make marriage easy. Marriage is a good, hard thing, and lasting is a technological offering that, if you take it seriously, will invite you to make possible something that otherwise might be very difficult, which is to have these real hard conversations that are part of any healthy relationship and to grow in the direction of life together. It contrasts so powerfully with, you know, maybe the single largest use of the Internet right now, which is porn. And if you think about it, porn, if I can put it this way, is like the ultimate leisure activity in the sense that it’s it promises us like intimacy without vulnerability or commitment or even physical presence. It promises us kind of this leisure life where we don’t have to exert ourselves in any way and have what we think we want. But all it does is create huge amounts of suffering for its consumers and huge amounts of toil, pure toil for the people who produce it. I love the fact that lasting steps into this world that so easily Click away offers us like the ultimate leisure and the ultimate degradation of human beings and says we’re going to use the same basic technological stack to invite you to actually pursue the real thing. The fruitful thing, the image bearing thing. Second totally different example. We have a real estate holding company in the praxis community called Watch Capital. They’re in multi-family residential real estate and they work exclusively for the moment with refugees. These are people who have had to leave the place they are. And our government has selected them out of our country’s mission to assist those who are not safe where they are and to relocate them to the United States, a place where they can find opportunity and safety that they can’t find at home. And those refugees need places to live when they land. Most multifamily developers will not touch this population. They think it’s going to be too hard. They don’t know how to communicate with people who may not speak English. They worry about whether they’ll take care of the place. Who knows why. But it’s very hard to find places for the governments and the agencies that resettle refugees, the United States to place arriving families in our country. Launch capital. Starting in Louisville, Kentucky, decided they wanted to make that happen. They have created now the largest refugee resettlement single refugee resettlement program in the country, in the city of Louisville that’s run by a single company. And what they’ve discovered is that these newly arriving Americans make amazing talents, make amazing Americans and citizens. If someone will meet them with love and support and presence and give them a good place to live and get their new start in this country. Most of the multifamily real estate industry is moving towards easier and easier ways of doing their business. They’re obviously looking for the easiest clients, the ones with the easiest credit histories and most reliable payment records, and they’re automating all of their tenant relations so that if you’re a tenant in many of these buildings now, you never meet a person connected with the company. You just pay your rent online, submit your maintenance request online. Launch Capital has gone the exact opposite direction in every multifamily development that they build or buy and repurpose. They place a family, a group of people who want to care for and welcome those who are arriving. This is super labor intensive, super time intensive. It’s not easy. It’s great work. It produces deep connection. It produces amazing results in the actual financials of the business. Launch capital has the best financials any real estate investor has ever seen, and they’re doing it not by choosing the easy way, but by choosing the hard way. Not by just saying, Gosh, there’s so much toil in real estate. Let’s just make it easier by saying, let’s use our expertise to make a good, hard thing possible. In our technological world, we have overdosed on leisure and we have no rest. We’ve overdosed on trying to make toil easy. And we have not really developed very much good work. I think this is the great blue ocean of our time. For Faith driven entrepreneurs, there’s so much room for innovation here. There’s so many hard, good things that people ought to be helped to do that if we could help them to do it, both our customers and our employees, we would see incredible fruit come from it. And at the end of the day, they would say this was a good day. And at the end of the week we would say that was a good week. We did good work. Now we can have good rest. And at the very end of our lives and the very end of our story, we can say the whole that was very good.

Henry Kaestner: We were grateful for the opportunity to serve the community and see the listeners come in from more than 100 countries. Entrepreneurship is often a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a group study with other faith driven entrepreneurs like yourself. There’s no cost, no catch in person or online. You can meet for an hour a week with your peers from your backyard or the other side of the world. You can also stay connected by signing up for a monthly newsletter. Faith Driven Entrepreneur dot org. This podcast wouldn’t be possible without the help of many of our friends. Executive producer Justin Foreman intromixed and arranged by Summer Dregs, Audio and editing by Richard Barley. Our theme song is In the House by David Crowder.

Working Genius

Change the Way You Think About Work and Teams Forever

NY Times bestselling author Patrick Lencioni unveils… The 6 Types of Working Genius:

• WONDER

• INVENTION

• DISCERNMENT

• GALVANIZING

• ENABLEMENT

• TENACITY