I wrote The Emotionally Healthy Leader slowly – very slowly. Like good wine, it aged over an eight-year period. During that time I carefully chronicled my mistakes, my struggles, my successes, and my new learnings of applying EHS to the building of a growing church, organization, and team.
After twenty years of leading at New Life, I grew tired of relying on unmodified business practices to navigate key leadership tasks. I discovered that simply grafting secular branches into our spiritual root system often caused us to bear the wrong kind of fruit.
The Emotionally Healthy Leader breaks new ground in practically applying a deep inner life with Jesus to key leadership tasks as planning, team building, boundaries, endings, and new beginnings. It offers the opportunity to revolutionize the way we lead others.
To actually make such a paradigm shift, however, requires we create space to wrestle with the content. For this reason, I dedicated additional time to write The Emotionally Healthy Leader Study and Discussion Guide that is available free at https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/product/the-emotionally-healthy-leader-study-guide/
This study guide will guide your team into the practical application of the core concepts from The Emotionally Healthy Leader. Each session is limited to 55 minutes so that you can integrate the discussion as part of your staff, team, or Board meeting. Each begins with a summary of the chapter’s highlights and then follows with five simple, but thought-provoking, questions.
The following is a sample from Chapter 6 on Planning and Decision Making:
- Briefly share what impacted you most from this chapter on “Planning and Decision Making.”
- Review your “How Healthy is Your Practice of Planning and Decision Making” assessment on pp. 179-180 of the book. Then, share one or two things you learned about yourself.
- Our goal, when planning and making decisions, is to remain in a state of indifference—meaning we are completely open to the will of God, having let go of our attachments to any particular outcome. How do you think you could better prepare your heart—both personally and as a team—to be more open to the will of God?
- In what way(s) might the limits of your particular ministry or team actually be a gift from God that he is using?
- As you look at these four characteristics of emotionally healthy planning and decision-making, which do you think God is inviting you to embrace more fully today?
- To define success as radically doing God’s will
- To create a space for heart preparation
- To pray for prudence
- To look for God in our limits
Take time this summer to read the book yourself, taking notes along the way when God speaks to you. And then, prayerfully consider who the people are you would like to invite to discuss the implications of the material to your ministry or organization.
