Ep 201: Call & Response Book Tour: Fireside Chat w/Rev. Stephen G. Brown — feat. L. Michelle Smith cover art

Ep 201: Call & Response Book Tour: Fireside Chat w/Rev. Stephen G. Brown — feat. L. Michelle Smith

Ep 201: Call & Response Book Tour: Fireside Chat w/Rev. Stephen G. Brown — feat. L. Michelle Smith

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Episode Summary: What if the most sophisticated leadership training you ever received happened before you turned 15 — and it happened in church? In this powerful conversation recorded live at Greater Life Church in Dallas, L. Michelle Smith joins Pastor Stephen Brown for a fireside chat that is equal parts sermon, scholarship, and strategy session. Drawing from her bestselling book Call & Response: 10 Leadership Lessons from the Black Church, L. Michelle traces the origins of her own keynote career back to a Sunday school floor at Good Street Baptist Church, where she learned to stand in front of a room and deliver — or get coached until she could. This is not a nostalgia trip. It is a leadership masterclass grounded in neuroscience, positive psychology, and the lived wisdom of Black excellence. In This Episode: L. Michelle walks us through the moment a 25-million-impression keynote made her trace her gifts back to a 14-year-old junior deacon. She unpacks why community is her favorite leadership lesson in the book — and why it has nothing to do with pizza Fridays. She shares the science behind social cohesion, oxytocin, and why teams that have never truly failed together have never truly bonded. She tells the story of Trudy Bourgeois — former Fortune 500 executive, mentor, and one of the book's featured leaders — who was deliberately left behind at the Kentucky Derby by her new senior leadership team. What Trudy did next is a clinic in dignity, resilience, and showing up when you have every reason not to. L. Michelle also breaks down what resilience actually means — it is not about being strong, it is about being pliable — and introduces the name-it, tame-it, reframe-it framework that turns adversity into a passport for growth. From her grandmother in Louisville, Arkansas playing records beside the railroad tracks, to the science of hope theory and neuroplasticity, L. Michelle connects the hush harbor to the Harvard research and makes the case that what the Black church has always practiced, science is only now catching up to name. She closes with a challenge to the room and to every leader listening: the interpersonal and communication skills forged inside the Black church building — the junior usher boards, the choir loft, the adult Sunday school — cannot be replicated on a screen. And if the generations who need them most have left the building, the work now is figuring out how to bring those lessons to where they are. Key Concepts Covered: Social cohesion and oxytocin — why real team bonding requires going through something together Resilience as pliability, not strength — the skyscraper model Name it. Tame it. Reframe it. — a three-step framework for processing adversity Hope theory (positive psychology) — goals thinking, pathways thinking, and agency thinking Neuroplasticity and the leadership intelligence hidden in the music ministry What Gen Z and younger millennials leaving the church building means for the future of leadership development Featured in This Episode: Cynt Marshall, former CEO of the Dallas Mavericks Trudy Bourgeois, former Fortune 500 executive and leadership mentor Books Mentioned: Call & Response: 10 Leadership Lessons from the Black Church by L. Michelle Smith Available now wherever books are sold. Book signing available at Pan Africa Connection, Dallas. Connect with L. Michelle: Website: lmichellesmith.com The Circle private leadership community: lmichellesmith.com/thecircle Podcast: Her Next Power Move + The Culture Soup Podcast® Coaching: cal.read.ai/coachlmichelle/30-min
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