Todd & Brooke Tilghman

May 26, 2021

Welcome back everyone! Today on the Thriving Beyond Belief podcast is our guest, Todd & Brooke Tilghman!

So often we hear “Just keep your eye on the prize!” and “focus on the ‘big picture!’" Todd and Brooke Tilghman offer this counter-cultural advice: look for the small things, not the big things––relish each and every small step/moment.

When Todd Tilghman, pastor of two decades and father of eight from Meridian, Mississippi, auditioned for NBC’s The Voice, he counted it as a win simply to sing in front of an audience other than family and church members. Despite no music or vocal training, he not only made it through the blind audition––with all four celebrity judges vying to coach him––he also won the show's entire eighteenth season.

In their forthcoming book, Every Little Win: How Celebrating Small Victories can Lead to Big Joy (Thoman Nelson, June 22, 2021), Todd and his wife, Brooke, share how decades of unrelenting challenges have taught them a joyful mindset of embracing not only winning NBC’s The Voice, but also “every little win” along the way. This is the first book ever written by a winner of The Voice.

Fans were drawn to Todd's tremendous joy on stage, giving them much-needed inspiration during the hard challenges of a global pandemic. In Every Little Win, Todd and Brooke discuss how their focus on joy and celebrating every little win has helped them to overcome numerous challenges over their twenty-plus-year marriage. Todd and Brooke share the lessons they've learned and the strategies that have moved them from fear to faith to ever-present joy.

They share in the book, “We win as we discover that in God’s economy, brokenness leads to beauty, and scarcity to abundance.”

• Relationships––from being a young dating couple breaking up (for the sake of Christ), to getting married, to being at the brink of divorce, to reconciling, to facing the negative aspects of social media on relationships.
• Parenting––from adopting two girls on a pastor’s salary (which is practically impossible without an act of God), to parenting a critically ill child (and wondering why God doesn’t answer all our prayers for our children), to having to check one of their sons into a facility to get treatment for depression following bullying at school, to helping that same son later navigate “going viral” for his artwork.
• Handling adversity and cultural stressors––pastoring a church during times of adversity.
• Mental Health––from Brooke’s own battle with anxiety/depression, to how Todd learned to support and care for her in her darkest hours, to both Brooke and Todd parenting one of their children through depression.

Together, Todd and Brooke explain how to find special moments in the middle of ordinary days––from their childhoods to winning NBC’s The Voice and “every little win” in between. Through it all, Todd and Brooke count their blessings. This book isn’t sugar coated. It’s real. It’s honest. It’s intimate. And it’s hopeful.

Related Links:

• YOUTUBE: Todd Tilghman
• FACEBOOK: @toddtilghmanmusic
• INSTAGRAM: @toddtilghman