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Dan Duckworth is a changemaker, teacher, and community-builder. He founded Crux Central to facilitate his mission to make deep change accessible to the masses—not just to executives. He writes and podcasts at danduckworth.net and hosts high-intensity leadership workshops at cruxcentral.com. He’s also a member of the Leading Saints Board of Directors.

Highlights

7:30 The struggle with virtual church: Dan’s experience as a youth Sunday School teacher moving to once-a-month teaching opportunities, then to no church, and then to virtual church 10:00 The realization that came from creating an online transformational learning community: This can actually work 13:10 Switching your mindset into humility, self-awareness, and acknowledgment of your own mediocrity: “Broken but Brimming” 14:30 For an individual to intentionally have a transformational experience, it requires connecting with others 15:25 Current You has to go into the refiner’s fire in order to transform into New You. What we want students to do is want to go into the fire, and feel safe enough to do it. 18:00 Do the people need the leaders or do the leaders need the people? 19:10 Dan’s experience

• Learned from his previous teaching experiences that community is key and leads to people wanting to leap into the fire
• 21:00 His key belief that was wrong: You can’t develop authentic community virtually. He enrolled in an online workshop and realized he was connecting with strangers.
• 26:15 Creating his own workshop and struggling to get past the focus on the content and getting it “right”
• 27:30 “You’re giving me content. What I came for was the conversation. The magic was the community and the conversations that we had. That’s what changed my life.”
• 29:45 The conversation started to change and people started to care about each other
• 31:30 Of the people who participated, 100% has a transformational experience

32:50 Experiment with his Sunday School class

• Texted a video inviting them to class, including one principle and a story
• 34:55 The error was his investment, not the students

35:45 Principle 1: Curate people

• Let people self-select
• 37:50 Get the right people into the room in the right mindset: it’s your job to protect your guests from the “party spoiler”
• Your goal is to get people to want to be there
• Set the expectations of the group: turn your cameras on no matter what you are doing, so we can be ourselves
• 42:28 People want to be part of something awesome. Focus on creating something magnetic, not on controlling them.

45:08 Principle 2: Connect people

• What am I doing to connect them to each other? (not to the lesson content)
• 46:50 Stop the “lesson” and get one person to share their story
• 49:30 Start with your own authenticity: share your truth without being plastic because everyone recognizes plastic
• Break the rules and show others that they can, too

53:20 Principle 3: Create arguments

• An argument is making a claim that can be proven wrong
• Inspire them to engage in the wrestle: let go of the need to be right and create cognitive dissonance, planting questions (not about the doctrine) about our experience
• 56:10 It’s never appropriate to be a devil’s advocate in the church setting; this is an argument for the sake of arguing, which only entrenches beliefs instead of creating transformation
• People should walk away having shared their truth, heard the truth of others, and looking to change

59:30 Principle 4: Ground it in real life

• Why Gospel Principles class is better than Gospel Doctrine class
• 1:01:00 Share a principle, what it means to you, and a story from your own experience

1:03:30 Experience teaching in elders quorum, talking about the Sharon Eubank talk, By Union of Feeling We Obtain Power with God, and creating a powerful discussion

• Stepping into the fire when you try to do something positively deviant
• Go find people to listen to this interview and ask their opinions

1:13:10 Observing Bob Quinn’s Sunday School class: I am here to create a School of the Prophets—a masterclass of an expert and a group of advanced students, receiving revelation 1:16:30 Concern that we have to be teaching doctrine, not wandering off into stories

• The most important part of leadership performance is your character, then your psychological/emotional state of being, then knowledge and skills
• Teaching doesn’t necessarily mean what we’ve been thinking it means

1:21:30 Core beliefs:

• Your students want to grow and get to the other side of the fire
• The “School of the Prophets” community is possible
• You have to learn how to unlock that: Help them want to do it

1:24:20 The value of knowledge is how you apply it, grounding it, moving into wisdom 1:24:46 Dan’s purpose to bring powerful change to individuals, enabling people to give more of themselves to the world, to become changemakers

Links

danduckworth.net cruxcentral.com The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Pria Parker