Category Archives: emotional health

Transitions & The Art of Letting Go — EHS Leadership Podcast

Transitions and letting go are critical leadership tasks every leader must master if we are to do God’s work, God’s way, in God’s timing. If we don’t discern the endings God has for us, we will surely miss his new beginnings—both personally and in our ministries. In this podcast Rich and I will talk about the 2 questions I consistently ask myself: What is it time to let go of in my personal life and leadership? And, what new thing might be standing backstage, waiting to make its entrance? Then, we engage in a robust discussion around the interior blockages we carry that hinder us from letting go (e.g. fear, loss of control, power, unbelief). Click on the video below to watch or click on the button to listen. LISTEN HERE Save

The 25 EHS Truisms

The following are 25 powerful Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (EHS) truisms that have stood the test of time. They capture, in a memorable way, profound biblical truths about EHS as a discipleship paradigm. I use them often in my teaching and invite you to do the same. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. Jesus may be in your heart but grandpa is in your bones. We cannot give what we do not possess. What I do matters. Who I am matters much more. Limits are often God’s gifts in disguise. As goes the leader, so goes the church. For an expectation to be valid, it must be conscious, realistic, spoken, and agreed upon. If you skim on your inner work, your outer work will suffer as well. You can’t separate knowing God from knowing yourself. We cannot change what we are unaware of. Loss marks the place where self-knowledge. Read more.

10 Reasons Successions and Transitions Go Poorly

Robert A. Caro’s towering biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, offers a penetrating insight about power and leadership: Although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins. (xiv). Nothing reveals our character like succession and transitions. It reveals not just the character of the Senior Pastor or CEO, but the Board, the senior staff, and the congregation. Why? Power always reveals.. Read more.

Limits and Leadership

The principle of limits as a gift from God is one of the most profound and important truths in Scripture. It touches the core of our relationship with Jesus and the core of how we lead our ministries. Limits ground us so we don’t hurt ourselves, others, or God’s work. While Pete discovered this truth 20 years ago and wrote about it in The Emotionally Healthy Church (Zondervan, 2003/2010), he has continued to mature in his understanding of this truth in significant ways. In this podcast, Pete talks with Rich about these learnings, offering specific ways we can befriend the rich gifts that come from the hand of God through His limits. Click below to watch the video or on the link to listen. LISTEN HERE Sa FREE Webinar – October 18th @ 2 PM ET – REGISTER TODAY Save Save

The School of Discretion

I have invested my adult life in studying and understanding Christian leadership. I’ve attended conferences, earned advanced degrees, and read broadly – for decades. But I cannot recall any discussion of discretion. For the first 500 years of the church, discretion was considered the most precious gift, or charism, for the church (John Cassian’s Conferences). They understood that without discretion individuals and communities could easily be ruined. In fact, all abbots of monastic communities were to be distinguished by discretion (The Rule of St. Benedict). Without it we are dangerous – speaking too freely, giving people burdens they cannot bear, and offering superficial spiritual counsel. Discretion is the opposite of our 21st century leadership culture that emphasizes bigger, better, and maximum impact as quickly as possible. Discretion is the ability to wait to see what unfolds, to not act. It involves the humility and patience to know when to leave things alone, knowing. Read more.

Lose Your Life to Find It

Jesus said we must lose our lives to find it. One essential way we do this is by learning the art of interior silence. This choice to turn away from internal and external noise in order to be with Jesus is work…a difficult work. Externally, we face the unrelenting pressure of our culture– the noise, the clutter, the grasping, the confusion, the distractions, the excessive amount of information – all of which make it difficult to hear ourselves think. Internally, our stillness and silence muscles are weak. As beginners, we have problems focusing attention and facing the normal distractions of body and mind. Just like we cannot simply read a how-to book on running a marathon and run, so we must build up muscle and stamina slowly over time. Maggie Ross, in her Silence: A User’s Guide – Volume 1: Process, argues that the tradition of silence was handed down unbroken from the time. Read more.

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