Chris Robinson
EVP of The Maxwell Leadership Entrepreneurial Solutions Group
From Drift to Drive
Episode Summary
Join host Eddie Turner on the Keep Leading!® Podcast for an eye-opening conversation with Chris Robinson, author of the powerful new book “From Drift to Drive.”
FROM DRIFT TO DRIVE: When Success Becomes Your Biggest Enemy
Think you’ve “made it”? Think again. Success can be a silent killer of ambition, lulling high achievers into a dangerous state of cruise control. Chris Robinson exposes the hidden trap that’s sabotaging even the most accomplished leaders—and reveals how to break free.
In this must-listen episode, discover:
- The warning signs that you’re drifting instead of driving your success
- What success-induced complacency actually looks like (you might be shocked)
- A powerful mindset shift for leaders who’ve lost their edge
- Practical tools to lead yourself and your teams with renewed clarity and purpose
Keep Leading!® Live
Keep Leading!® Video Shorts
Bio
Chris Robinson is the Executive Vice President of Maxwell Leadership and author of From Drift to Drive. He leads the global expansion of the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team, a premier community of coaches, speakers, and trainers developed by Dr. John C. Maxwell. With over two decades of experience, Chris specializes in equipping leaders across industries with the skills and mindset for meaningful impact. Known for his authentic approach and dynamic speaking style, he highlights the dangers of “success-induced complacency” and offers strategies for sustained excellence. As a dedicated coach and lifelong learner, Chris inspires professionals to transform comfortable success into purposeful growth, empowering them to maximize their potential and make a lasting difference.
Website
https://www.chrisrobinsonspeaker.com/
Other Website
https://www.maxwellleadership.com/
Chris Robinson’s Book
https://drifttodrivebook.com/
Chris Robinson’s Assessment
https://drift2drivequiz.com/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/speakerchrisrobinson/
Leadership Quote
“Treat people like people and adults like adults.”
Subscribe, share, and review on Apple Podcasts!
https://bit.ly/4kPBcZo
Subscribe, share, and review on Spotify
https://spoti.fi/4iOFzlB
Full Episode Transcripts and Detailed Guest Information
www.KeepLeadingPodcast.com
Keep Leading LIVE (Live Recordings of the Keep Leading!® Podcast)
www.KeepLeadingLive.com
Connect with Eddie Turner
Website: https://www.eddieturnerllc.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddieturner
About the Keep Leading!® Podcast
The Keep Leading!® podcast is for people passionate about leadership. It is dedicated to leadership development and insights. Join your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, as he speaks with accomplished leaders and people of influence across the globe about their journeys to leadership excellence. Listen as they share leadership strategies, techniques, and insights.
Share the Inspiration
Inspired by what you hear? Share the episode with your network and help spread the message of empowerment and leadership. Use the hashtag #KeepLeadingPodcast and join the community of listeners who are dedicated to continuous growth and leadership excellence.
Transcript
Eddie Turner:
Hello everyone. Welcome to this live recording of the Keep Leading podcast. The Keep Leading podcast is dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the leadership accelerator. I work with emerging and experienced leaders who want to have an exponential impact on the people, processes, and places where they have a purview. And I do that through the power of masterful coaching, facilitation, and keynote speeches. My goal is to help you stay inspired, stay motivated, so you can keep leading.
Today, I am broadcasting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. I would like to encourage you to join this conversation. Use the chat feature to ask a question. Share your reaction to what my esteemed guest will be saying today. Hit that share button so that your colleagues can have this in their feed and they can join us as well.
So, do you think you’ve made it? We want you to think again. Success can be a silent killer of ambition, lulling high achievers into a dangerous state of cruise control. My guest today, Chris Robinson, exposes the hidden trap that’s sabotaging even the most successful, highly accomplished leaders today. He reveals precisely how you can break free. He does that in his new book, *From Drift to Drive: A High Achiever’s Guide to Breaking the Chains of Complacency*.
Chris Robinson is the executive vice president of Maxwell Leadership and the author of *Drift to Drive*. Chris, welcome to Keep Leading.
Chris Robinson:
Hey, thank you so much, Eddie. I’m so excited to be here on with you today. I couldn’t be more excited. You know, I’ve had the opportunity to watch you online for years and I just love the work that you’re doing, the impact that you’re making, and just how you represent everything so well with excellence and just highly add value to people. So thank you. Truly an honor and privilege to be here with you today.
Eddie Turner:
Thank you, Chris. It’s been years since we’ve seen each other. I remember us meeting that first time with the National Speakers Association’s Influence Conference and I have been a fan of what you’ve been doing and the impact you’re having around the world is simply sensational. So what an honor to have you with us and to celebrate the launch of your new book.
So tell us a little bit about yourself for those who don’t know you and have seen what I’ve seen, let everybody know a little bit about yourself, please.
Chris Robinson:
Well, like you said, I’m the executive vice president of the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team. We’re currently the largest leadership speaker, coach, and training company on the planet. We’ve got over 58,000 coaches worldwide that have been certified through us. And I was a member of that program in its very first beginning. So I became one of the very first 700 to be certified back in 2011, utilized their tools and resources in order to build a business on my own. And then I was asked to come back as a teaching faculty member in 2016. And then 2020 is when they asked me to be the executive vice president of the organization. So I’ve been holding that position for the last five and a half years now. So it’s been an incredible journey from just a person that wanted to add value to people by watching, you know, VHS tapes of John Maxwell, applying those principles inside the workplace and then now getting to fly around the world with him and making an impact each and every single day.
Eddie Turner:
Fantastic. And the work that you’re doing, you talk about working closely with him, flying around the world with him, you know, it’s something I was actually going to ask you a little bit later, but I just have to ask you now since you mentioned it. What impact has it had on you to work with, for those who don’t know who he is, he’s simply an industry titan. What impact has that had on you?
Chris Robinson:
Well, it’s been a tremendous impact and I’d say that it really started, you know, in the basement of a church watching him on VHS. Oh wow. And that’s the beauty of this industry is that we don’t know who we’re impacting. Today, someone’s watching that may be sitting side by side with us one day, you know, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now. We don’t know. But I learned from a distance by watching him on VHS. I got into proximity by becoming part of the certified team. And then as I continued to grow and develop and add value to the organization, I got a chance to know him personally. And he’s been mentoring me personally since 2016 one-on-one. And so it’s had a tremendous impact on my life because out of a lot of speakers out there, a lot of authors, gurus, whatever the case may be, what I’ve learned from John is that the gap between who he is on stage and who he is in person are the closest that I’ve ever seen and I so aspire to be that same type of person because sometimes that, you know, you know, some great authors and like, oh my goodness, I can’t wait to meet them. I love their books and then you meet them and you’re like, I love their books. And so seeing John Maxwell live out the principles that he’s teaching and seeing that congruency on and off the stage has really had the greatest impact on me.
Eddie Turner:
That says a lot, Chris. That really says a lot because you and I know some authors and you’re right. I remember for many years like you, I just would know them from afar, but when you start getting into that space, you go, oh, right. Okay. Like you say, I like the books. Right. I like the books. That’s a good book. So what motivated you to write your own book now?
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, so this one was something that I to be honest with you, Eddie, I was had not had an intention to actually write this book. But I was actually visiting with Rory Vaden. Now, Rory Vaden is another industry giant and a great friend. And I was meeting with him and a couple other authors in one of his boot camps because I was really looking to see, hey, is Rory, does he offer something with brand builders that I could bring to the Maxwell organization? And as I sat through the first day, you know, he kept nudging. He says, Chris, I know there’s a book inside of you. I know that there’s one in there. What would you write on? And I kind of was resistant to it and I really wasn’t set in doing it. But they I played inside the playground. And I said, if you were to write a book, what would you write on? And initially, the thought was around underperformance and how to solve underperformance inside of organizations. And we dug a little bit deeper and kept digging and then we came up with truly the true killer of organizations and dreams, which is complacency. That’s the root cause of all underperformance.
And the next day, you know, we were questioning, well, once you find yourself in this place of complacency, what would you do to overcome it? So I was sitting on the bench waiting on an Uber and sure enough, boom, like a lightning strike, I began to just see all these different areas of my life where I had results and where I had got results and the seven-step framework just unfolded based upon my own experience. And so I go back in and I write the seven steps on the board and they’re like, that makes absolute sense. That’s the book. And so I went to work after that and began writing, began putting stories together, began researching, taking a deep dive into this thought of complacency. And six months later, the book is done and now we are in promotion of it, pre-sales for it and just really excited about how this is going to impact people’s lives.
Eddie Turner:
And tell us the launch date, please.
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, launch date is September 2nd. September 2nd, 2025, this book will be available on all major outlets.
Eddie Turner:
All right everybody. So September the 2nd, 2025. Mark your calendars or you can even head on over to Amazon and get your pre-ordering in right now since it’s out there. This is the book, *From Drift to Drive: A High Achiever’s Guide to Breaking the Chains of Complacency*. And as we said, Chris is a high-powered speaker who’s leading a global team of speakers and really having an impact with his message across the globe.
Now, Chris, the other thing, you use this word “complacency” and that’s one of the things that resonated with me the most because from an early age in my life, one of my mentors, he would always talk about this need to avoid complacency and have a sense of urgency. And that’s a mantra that I adopted. And so when I saw your book, I went and started reading through it. Thank you for the advanced copy. I went, wow…. Now you’ve patented this phrase, you trademarked this phrase, “success induced complacency.” That’s it. Yeah. And I read that and I went, oh. Tell us about that.
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, you know, when we really look at it, when we talk about because most people when they think about the word complacency, the most common phrase or thought that comes to mind is laziness or apathy. And it couldn’t be further from the truth. Exactly. So if you go back to the original meaning of the word complacency, it means careless security. Careless security. So it’s a place of comfort that we may have worked towards in the beginning, but now that we’ve arrived there, we’ve got the skill down, it’s pretty much automatic that we don’t go back and begin to really fine-tune those things. And so I redefined the phrase complacency or the word complacency in the book and I redefine it as a secret place of satisfactory success. A secret place of satisfactory success.
Now, all of us, we have these places in our life, whether it be in our marriage, whether it be in our relationships, in our business, in our health, we have these places where we go, oh, that’s good enough. I can just maintain it. But maintaining does not mean that you’re growing. And so if we have these secret places of satisfactory success, we’ve got to question those, we’ve got to sharpen those because often time they’re in places where we actually have a gift or we’re very skilled or we’re seemed or deemed to be very good at it. So if we can sharpen those areas where we’re secretly satisfied and we begin to move out of just lukewarm or average, oh my goodness, it gets very exciting at it. It gets very exciting.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah, and so when you mentioned that, this idea that it’s not laziness, it’s quite the opposite. I love your definition on that. And that’s a completely different perspective than I had. And so for people who are listening, what is the step that one needs to take if they realize that, hey, that’s me he’s talking about?
Chris Robinson:
Well, hey, that’s the first step. You have to be aware of the areas of your life that you’re complacent in. And what we did was we created a quiz for this called the Complacency Assessment Profile. And what it does, it’s about a three to five minute test that will give you a general idea of where you’re at with complacency in your life. But in addition to that, we give you action steps that you can take to begin to get those gears running again. So the first step is awareness, but then as you move into the framework of the book of now once I’ve identified it, where do I go? The first step is clarity because we cannot have what we cannot see and most of the times complacency happens in our life when our vision gets foggy. And so if we can get a clear picture of where we want to go and what we want to do, be and have, well then now you can really begin to start to make motion towards the direction you want to go.
Eddie Turner:
Alright, now I felt like it was a little Muhammad Ali there. I like what you said. We cannot have what we cannot see. You smash what he said, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. You can’t hear what you can’t see. Yes. Yes, sir. I see what you did. I like it. I like it. No, that’s excellent.
So for those who will listen to and download the audio version of this show, I have on the screen, I’m displaying for those who are watching the live stream, the URL to get the assessment that Chris is referring to. He’s offering his readers. So it’s drift2drivequiz.com. Yeah. Drift, the number two, drivequiz.com. Excellent.
Now, the other thing I wanted to ask you is with this quiz, someone’s taking this quiz, once they’ve done the assessment, what would the next step be?
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, so what we do is there’s an action step guide that we give you right then and there to kind of address your needs. If you’re going through the seven-step framework, you know, the first step is clarity. It’s clarity and again, it’s getting crystal clear on what it is that you want because every time that you’ve been clear about what it is that you wanted, you got it every single time. The evidence of that is the shirt on your back, the watch on your wrist, the shoes on your feet. At some point in time you said, hey, I want that. You may not have had the time to get it, you may not have had the money to get it, but it was crystal clear and you were able to pull that into your life. So if you’re wanting to get promoted on the job, you got to be clear on it. If you’re wanting to start a business, you got to be clear on it.
The second step that we go into is called the gathering phase. And the gathering phase is when we begin to stack information and knowledge in order to go in the direction that we want to go. So this is a gathering of books, videos, audios, courses, conferences that we may attend and getting those all lined up and gathered to a place so that now you can begin to feast on the information and moving in the direction. But you can get hung up right here because a lot of people they love to gather, Eddie. They love what we call shelf help. You know, they’ve got all the books on the shelf, they’ve got all the audios on the shelf, they’ve got everything on there, but we got to move through that. We got to move to the next phase, which is filtering.
Now, this is important because in the past, our success was really dictated by the access to the information that we had access to, right? So it was years early 1900s. Hey, look, certain people weren’t allowed to learn how to read, you couldn’t get into colleges, things of that nature. Today, we have everything that we need, all access right here on our phones to all the information that we need. So the trick now isn’t about having access to information. It’s about filtering access to information.
And so it looks like this and maybe somebody watching, you know, you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed going, why aren’t I moving towards my goals? It could be because you’re not filtering properly. You may be listening to a reading a book on one topic, listening to a video on another topic, listening, you know, going to get a course online on a different topic, going to a conference on a different topic and going, why aren’t I moving anywhere? You’re not filtering properly and layering your learning to all line up with where you want to go. And so if you do that, you know, now you can begin to move and consume content a lot faster.
You know, the next phase that we have that we go to is the guidance phase, which Eddie, you and I, I believe have done this really well by seeking out people that have gone beyond us and where we want to go and getting around those people in proximity. And so we want to have guides in our life in order to help us get to where we want to go, a mentor, a coach in order to help us go in that direction.
The fifth step is relationships. Relationships are critical. Again, how we met at NSA. What was I trying to do at that time? I was trying to get around like-minded people that were moving in the direction I wanted to go. You can be around a great group of people, highly successful people, but you can also be around a group of highly successful people that are not moving in a direction that you want to go. And so sometimes you can be around people, the right successful people, but it not serve the direction that you want to go because they’re not in alignment.
And then of course, the sixth step of the framework is action. You have to take action. You can be clear, you can gather, you can filter, you can have a mentor or a guide, you can have the right relationships, but if you don’t do anything, you’ll be in the exact same place.
And then the seventh step is evaluation. We have to take a look and honestly evaluate what it is that we’ve done so that we can now re-enter again. We re-enter the cycle again with a lot more clarity so that we can gather better, so we can filter better, so we can get guidance, so we can build better relationships, so we can take action again. That seven-step process help you get to where you want to go.
Eddie Turner:
Excellent. So helping us understand how we get moving, getting in the gear with the next step is after the assessment, really applying the seven-step framework. And I like the emphasis you made both in the introduction when I asked you about Dr. Maxwell and following of the framework, you talked about proximity. And the power of proximity. How it moved you to where you are today and now how we can move others from drift to drive.
And proximity is powerful because some things are taught, but then some things are caught. And when you get in proximity of people, no matter how you get there, all right? I teach inside the book two ways to get in proximity of those who are doing what it is that you want to do. It’s either seek to serve or pay to play. Seek to serve or pay to play. And so sometimes you can reach out and you can serve your way into people’s lives and then sometimes, hey, you’ve got to make that investment in order to get inside the room to get some proximity and in that proximity, you see things that have not been written about, you see things that have not been talked about because you’re in the room. Proximity is powerful.
Eddie Turner:
Some things are caught, some things are taught. I love that. And thank you for sharing the two steps that work for people and coming from someone who’s had an experience on both sides of that. That makes so much sense, but I never thought about it and explaining it in that way. So again, you’re dropping a nice gem, a morsel that our audience can benefit from. Chris, I appreciate that.
So I am talking to Chris Robinson, the executive vice president of the Maxwell Leadership Entrepreneurial Solutions Group and the author of *From Drift to Drive*. We’re going to pause for just a moment here to acknowledge the sponsor of the Keep Leading podcast.
If a single employee’s indecision can cost an organization $10,000 to a million dollars, imagine the potential financial impact when more individuals are added to this indecision equation. It can spiral out of control quickly. The solution, Decision X. It’s a bespoke on-demand service designed to help your leaders overcome indecision and move forward with their work. Visit Papillon MDC and discover how you can help your team get unstuck, shift perspective, and advance today. For those who are listening to the audio, that’s p a p i l l o n mdc.ca.
And also, for those who are not watching the video, just the video of this, you’ll listen to the audio broadcast later, a reminder that the Keep Leading program, the Keep Leading podcast is available wherever you get your podcast, but we want to highlight the C Suite Radio. Together, we are turning up the volume on business. Head over to c-suiteradio.com to listen to the Keep Leading podcast and other business podcasts to help you develop as a leader.
All right, I am back with Mr. Chris Robinson, the executive vice president over at the Maxwell Leadership Group. We’re talking about his book, *From Drift to Drive* that will launch on September the 2nd. Let me try that again. There we go. *From Drift to Drive* that launches on September the 2nd, available now for pre-order. And you’ve shared some really nice concepts from the book already for us to think about, Chris.
And one of the the awarenesses I wanted to to tap into just a little bit is you told us why you wrote the book. But at what point did you realize that, hey, I’m seeing a pattern here because you went from leading like 18 people or something like that to like over 700 at one point now if I if I read that correctly.
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, correct.
Eddie Turner:
Yeah, what pattern did you see that allowed you to really tap into this and say, you know what? Here’s where I see people getting stuck.
Chris Robinson:
Right. Yeah. You know, when we take a look at the pattern, you know, now today, I think that I spend a lot more time around successful people. And that’s evolved over the years and so I’m always inside a room of just highly talented, incredible people. And, you know, I think the initial drive that we have is the pattern that I see is a success pattern. What we’re striving for is success. And then we achieve those things. You know, you get the house, you get the cars, you get the watches, you get you get all the stuff and don’t get me wrong. I love the stuff just like the next person, right? I’m looking for that comfort too. But what happens is now once you’ve achieved some success, you know, life becomes comfortable and I begin to see this drift and what’s happening is that people are wanting something greater than success.
And so what we want to do is what we found is that we want to go from success, which is about me, to significance, which is about we. And when you can make the get the jump from success to significance, that fulfillment gets ignited over and over again when you find out that, hey, this world, this planet, this life isn’t about just what I can obtain, but this life is really about others. And I’ve seen that happen over and over again when people have achieved great things and now what’s next? Because the the car didn’t feel the way that I thought it was going to feel after all this time. The house didn’t feel, didn’t do it. The this didn’t do it. Whatever you want to place in there, that’s usually never enough when it comes to material things, but that real fulfillment comes when you begin to shift your focus on helping others.
Eddie Turner:
Wow, well said. And when you talk about moving from success to significance, there’s nothing more significant than those you love, your family. You are a family man. And you got to just— and I don’t say this just to say it. You truly have a beautiful family. We’re going to share an image here for those who are watching the live stream of your beautiful family. There we go. Family—a man of six children, beautiful wife there. I love this scene. It is just stunning. And I’d love you to talk about how this factors in, this ‘drift to drive’ principle in life and parenting.
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, in life and parenting, again, this happens in all areas of our life where we can have these secret places of satisfactory success. And when it comes to family for me, you know, I’ve obviously I have a lot of kids. We had all six of these kids in three pregnancies. So we had triplets, we had the single, and then we had the twins. And so life has been intense, but I would say that the choice that we made very early on that I think that was significant was that I said that as I go out and pursue this business as a speaker, coach, and trainer, I’m going to build this business around my family, not my family around the business.
And so still to this day, I mean, there was something I turned down this week. I—because my son’s got a tryout for a baseball team. Now here I am turning down dollars that should be coming into our family because I want to go and sit and watch a tryout for a 12-year-old, okay? But that’s what we do. We put the family block in first and then now I build everything around it. Now there’s times where, hey, look, the dates just don’t line up and the business stuff was on the calendar first and, you know, we can’t move it. But for the most part, everything that we’re trying to do is we want to build it around the family, not the, you know, the business around the family.
Eddie Turner:
That is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. So I really want to highlight that because what you’re talking about here applies to both and allows us to really take care of the most significant components of our life and truly be driving in every aspect. So, wonderful. What is the most significant lesson you want people to take away from both the book and our conversation that we’ve had here today?
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, the most significant lesson is that there’s more to life than this. Whatever this is for you today, there’s more life available for you. You know, I had the opportunity when I was speaking in Cambodia to speak with the Minister of Education there and it was great because he was telling me the story of how he lives behind this rice farm. He lives on a rice farm and if you know about how they harvest the rice farm, after they harvest it, they burn it down. And I mean, he described how when they burn down these fields, it’s just it looks terrible. He’s got this terrible view out his window. There’s ash everywhere. Everything’s brown, black, and gray. He says, but what happens with this is that seemingly overnight as the fresh rain comes, it begins to almost green up overnight. He said and what that tells me is that despite what the circumstances look like, it may look dead, it may look burnt, it may look like it’s done, that with a little bit of water, a little bit of nurturing, there’s life waiting to be given in your circumstances if you just give it the water of life.
Eddie Turner:
Wonderful. I love hearing that. Thank you for sharing that, Chris. And is there a quote that you use that helps you keep leading?
Chris Robinson:
Yeah. You know, the quote that keeps me leading is one that I deal with on a daily basis and it’s my favorite phrase, which is treat people like people and adults like adults. And if you can follow that simple philosophy in leadership, you’ll go a long way if you treat people like people and adults like adults.
Eddie Turner:
We need more of that today for sure. That we do. We need more of that. I also want to take a moment very quickly. I noticed that here streaming in on Facebook, we have a reaction from Shannon Hogan. Yes. And so thank you Shannon for joining our live broadcast and he’s probably working or whatever can’t say anything. But he did take time to send an emoji through here. Yes. And what’s interesting about Shannon, he is someone who I’ve known since like second grade. We haven’t seen each other in probably 40 years. But met him in second grade and we went to elementary school together. So sometimes my Facebook viewers, it’s always a blast from the past and makes me smile and brings back a memory. So thank you Shannon.
Where can people learn more about you?
Chris Robinson:
Yeah, absolutely. So a couple different places. If you go to drift2drivebook.com, that’s going to share with you about the book and all the different bonuses that we have around it. But then more in-depth information, you can go to ChrisRobinsonspeaker.com. ChrisRobinsonspeaker.com. Check that site out. That’ll tell you more about the topics I teach on and a little bit more about us and, you know, any way I can add value, just let me know.
Eddie Turner:
Excellent. So we put both of those on the screen for folks to be able to see. And certainly, Chris, it’s just been an absolute honor to have you. Thank you for being a guest here on the Keep Leading podcast. And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning more about moving from drift to drive from my guest, Chris Robinson. I’m Eddie Turner, the leadership accelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment that we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.