PETER SCAZZERO: EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY LEADERSHIP—PART 2

from http://www.outreachmagazine.com/interviews/12997-peter-scazzero-emotionally-healthy-leadership-part-2.html

By James P. Long • September 28, 2015

PART 2 of 2 parts 

Read Part 1 here »
You speak a lot about facing your shadows.
Shadow is a nice word because it’s not simply something sinful. We all have shadows. We all have parts of us that involve less than pure thoughts and motives. They’re often quite hidden.
For example, a person has gifts in speaking and mobilizing people. That’s good. But the shadow side of that gift may be a great need for affirmation from other people. It’s insatiable. And it’s subconscious—that need for approval.
Or you value excellence. That’s really good. But the shadow side is becoming an unhealthy perfectionist. You’re short with people. Critical and unloving.
You have a zeal for truth. That’s a good thing. But the shadow is, you don’t like people who disagree with you.
Part of being a leader is the courage to face my shadow continually. If I don’t take the time in my own spiritual formation to address my shadow, I can wind up leading out of my shadow, and I’m not even conscious of it. In the process, I affect the culture of the team I’m leading. As the lead pastor, my shadow ends up affecting the whole church. So facing my shadow is pretty important. I want to maintain vigilance because it can erupt at any time.
There’s a reason that we get into patterns of thinking and behavior that over time come to characterize us. They do something for us. There is a payoff, even though it may be somewhat twisted. So I suppose the challenge is finding a healthy replacement for those old patterns.
Absolutely. So it’s like Ephesians: Take off the old, but put on the new in Christ. Facing my shadow is just part of the problem. Then I have to put on the new.
I’ll give you a personal example. I like to be liked. When I preach and cast a vision people tell me I’m wonderful. So I gravitate to that naturally, right? But I used to do a very sloppy job of supervision of people who worked for me because I didn’t like to say hard things to people. I didn’t want to confront elephants in the room. These are hard conversations, so I would avoid it. Even in doing job reviews, I would lie. I wouldn’t call it lying, but I wasn’t totally truthful, because I didn’t want the conflict. I didn’t want the tension.
That didn’t operate in just leading a team, but in all of life. I had to put on the new. I had to learn how to speak clearly, respectfully, kindly and honestly. I had to learn to have difficult conversations. I had to learn a number of skills—emotionally healthy skills.
If a leader becomes emotionally healthy will that automatically generate a healthier culture within his or her sphere of influence?
No. It helps. You can be emotionally healthy as a person. But to be emotionally healthy as a leader is another, deeper level.
Let me illustrate it like this. Manhattan is an island of granite—hard rock. When they build a skyscraper they have to drill steel beams or pilings into the ground. They’ll spend quite of bit of time pounding them deep into the foundation of the granite so they can build a skyscraper on rock. Those pilings can sometimes go 20 or 25 stories down in the ground before they start building the skyscraper up. If they don’t put the pilings in properly, in time the building may begin to lean, or cracks may appear in the walls.
What I realized in my fourth conversion was that the pilings in my own personal life needed to go much deeper for the size church we were and the complexity of our church and the influence God had given us. I had to do a better job of facing my shadow, slowing down for loving union with God, leading out of my marriage, practicing Sabbath delight—these things had to become deeper in my life. Otherwise, the cracks would develop in the building of New Life Fellowship. If you’re going to be a leader in the church in the name of Jesus, these issues of your inner life have to be deep, because you’re not just leading yourself, you’re leading other people.
Knowing that so much of our growth toward health is related to internal things, what can you as a leader do to contribute to the emotional health of the team, besides paying attention to your own journey?
First, we clarify an expectation that each person is investing time, effort and money in their own personal development and learning. That’s foundational. For me that has meant having mentors, seasons of counseling, reading, going to conferences to learn. Who I am is so critical to what I do. God is speaking to me. I’m not skimming and just riding on the fumes of my past experience.
Secondly, we are resourcing the team for their own growth and development. So I’m bringing in resources, whether it’s books, articles, people who come in and share. I’m making sure people have mentors. We have a nice development budget for people; it’s one of the ways we allocate money. We do staff retreats and team meetings where development is part of the agenda.
And if people are married, we ask, How’s the marriage going? And we know the spouse, we’ll ask them too. If you’re single, How’s your singleness going? Do you have community? Are there people you’re walking with outside the work of the church?
Are you doing good self-care? Do you have good healthy hobbies outside of church? We don’t want you working 80 hours a week. We want you to have rhythms and balance in your life. You’ve got work; you’ve got rest; you’ve got prayer; you’ve got play—a wholeness in your life.
Let’s circle back to success for a minute. We feel such profound pressure to succeed. Ironically, one of the things that makes success elusive is our very pursuit of it. The energy we invest in the chase. So is there a definition problem here? How do you define success personally and as a church?
Success as a follower of Jesus is to become the person God has called you to become and to do what God has called you to do. Period.
So for example, if I grow our church to 10,000 people and I come to God at the end of my life and say, “God, here, I built the church to 10,000 people,” and God says to me, “Pete, I never asked you to do that. You were supposed to grow your church to 500 people or 400 people and be faithful in that and some people were going to come out of your church and they were going to plant churches and do this and that, but I never asked you to build this church to 10,000 people. That was for the guy down the street.” Now, was I successful? No. Because success is doing what God asks me to do.
Here’s why I use that example: At New Life we are committed to bridging racial, cultural, economic and gender barriers. Success for us is that we’re modeling a community that’s multiracial. The measurement’s going to be different. Now, if I were just going for pure numbers, I’d do a church of one race. If success for you is numbers, then don’t do multiracial churches, right?
Jesus had a wider view of success. I think one of the great passages is John chapter 6. He multiplies loaves and fishes, thousands of people follow him, then he gives this sermon and it says at the end of John 6, many disciples no longer followed him. And Jesus is fine. Because success for him is not purely numbers.
But again I want to be clear. We want to grow and reach people and make disciples. I don’t want to be anti-numbers—we have a whole book of the Bible called Numbers. Acts mentions numbers.
Somebody was counting.
But there’s a question of motivation. David counts the people in 2 Samuel and in Chronicles and it’s pride, it’s idolatrous and he is judged for that because he counted his fighting men. His motive was wrong. He was looking for a false sense of security and identity and that was not good.
Am I looking to grow my church so people will look at me a certain way? So we’re back to your inner life. We’re back to motive. We’re back to knowing yourself. Back to having people in your life that have some maturity and aren’t just reinforcing your pathology—which is a great danger. We don’t want to surround ourselves with people who have their own insecurities, so they’re reinforcing things that are not helpful to us—reinforcing the shadow.
I’ve been to leadership conferences where I realized this is not doing me any good in my relationship with Jesus, because it’s feeding ambition.
At one point you list signs of an emotionally unhealthy leader and among them you say that they do more activity for God than their relationship with God can sustain. And you talk about the danger of leading without Jesus.
When you get out of loving union as a leader it’s dangerous. You wind up using your own flesh, your own strength, your own experience, even as you do it all in the name of Jesus.
Some people get into a larger ministry responsibility for Jesus—and they have the gifts to do it—but they don’t have a loving union relationship with Jesus. That’s so dangerous, because you don’t have the life to handle the weight that you’re carrying in leadership.
That’s what makes Christian leadership so different. We do it in the name of Jesus; we do it through Jesus; we do it in Jesus; we do it with Jesus in us. This is not the business world. We’re not just taking the corporate best practices and putting it on the church or Christian leadership. We can learn things from the marketplace, but for us it’s much more about living in loving union with Jesus out of which we lead, lest we do our will and not his will.
And it’s very important you know the warning signs of when you’re out of loving union with God. I know mine. I feel it in my body. I feel pressure. I feel tension. I feel hurried. I’m short with people. My time with God is being cut short. I’m not relaxing in him. My times of silence and solitude are being shortchanged. I can feel it in the anxiety in my life. I see it in my marriage, not having time with Geri the way God intends. It comes out in relationships. It comes out in team meetings. It’s really obvious for me now. I’m so aware of it.
By the grace of God I’m one day at a time—one day at a time, slowing down for loving union with God. To do that and be a leader in Western culture is very, very challenging.

PETER SCAZZERO: EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY LEADERSHIP—PART 1

from http://www.outreachmagazine.com/interviews/12993-peter-scazzero-emotionally-healthy-leadership-part-1.html

By James P. Long • September 28, 2015

PART 1 of 2 parts

If you’ve heard anything of Peter Scazzero’s personal journey, you know the pivotal moment and the two words that catalyzed a transformation of his life and ministry.
“I quit!”
They were a decade into the planting of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, N.Y., when Scazzero’s wife Geri had finally had enough. She knew something was desperately wrong with how they were doing life and ministry. Something had to change, and the change was triggered Jan. 2, 1996, when she told him, “I quit,” and left the church.
That decision, and the hope that in time grew out of it, was the subject of her 2010 book, co-authored by her husband, I Quit! Stop Pretending Everything Is Fine and Change Your Life.
Out of the pain and promise of their experience—and the 19-year journey since that January night—Peter and Geri Scazzero have invested their energy in the integration of life skills and discipleship they call Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It has played out in the church they still serve together, in their writing and speaking ministry, in their personal faith and, significantly, in their marriage.
With the release of his latest book, we explore the challenges and the possibilities of The Emotionally Healthy Leader.
Define an emotionally healthy leader. What does emotional health look like?
They’re operating emotionally and spiritually “full.” Their cup’s overflowing and they have a life with God that is sufficient to sustain their “doing” for God. They have a significant emotional awareness—they have faced their shadow. They know their good sides and their ugly sides, and how they impact their leadership. They have slowed down their lives to have a deep walk with God out of which they lead. And they’ve got some rhythms in their life—how they work and how they Sabbath—so that their life isn’t all work but has a biblical rhythm to it.
You’ve written a lot about emotional health as something that has not always characterized you.
In my first 17 years as a Christian, most of it was spent in leadership. I would say my discipleship was very much focused on biblical knowledge and how to lead. I brought those gifts to bear on planting the church. But what was lacking was an integration of emotional maturity and spiritual maturity. So in 1996, after 17 years as a Christian and eight years pastoring New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, I hit a wall and I didn’t have any theological framework for it—no biblical framework to integrate a healthy emotional component to my spiritual formation. There wasn’t a “slow-down” spiritual component either. Everything was doing—getting it done, building the church. There wasn’t a serious focus on the inner life and how that intersected with the outer life.
When I looked around me for healthy models, I found two extremes. On one extreme you had make-it-happen leaders—they were building big ministries, but were not very reflective. Then you had folks who were reflective, but they weren’t building organizations or churches either. I couldn’t point to and learn from folks who had a deep inner life and were building a ministry, organization or church, like I was trying to do.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but it was that integration that was lacking. So I would learn from people like Henry Cloud, Henri Nouwen and Dallas Willard, but they weren’t building organizations or churches. I was in inner city New York and very much committed to reaching people for Christ and building a healthy church that would multiply itself. In seminaries or leaders’ conferences we didn’t talk about these things—not in any kind of depth.
Oh, and one other thing about an emotionally healthy leader: They also lead out of their marriage or singleness. They’ve got a real integration spiritually of their vocation and whether they’re married or single that’s spiritually and theologically integrated. And that’s not a secondary issue. I didn’t understand the implications of that starting out.
And that’s an interesting point because the closer we are in relationship with someone the more our strengths shine, but those areas of personal liability are also revealed more in deep relationships than in more superficial relationships.
Yes. I mean, basically the understanding if you were married was, Hey, be a great leader and have a stable marriage so that you can continue to serve Christ effectively. And if you’re single, make sure you stay sexually pure so you can build the church and the kingdom of God. But there wasn’t any kind of training or equipping around the fact that if you’re married, your marriage is to be a sign and a wonder for Christ. You have to be equipped to have a great marriage out of which you lead the church. There’s a whole lot more to that than just having a “stable” marriage. And the same thing if you’re single; you need to be equipped to be a single leader in your sexuality, in your relationships, so that you lead out of your singleness—even if you’re waiting or hoping to be married one day.
I mean, I cannot remember any leadership conferences talking about being a single leader, being a married leader, beside the reminder to go on a date with your spouse, be sexually pure, don’t get into pornography. It was all just kind of keep it together versus you lead from a place of such health that one of your loudest gospel messages is your life as a married person or single person. That’s a radical paradigm shift.
And the discussion between you and your wife Geri on these things became a crisis point for your own re-evaluation of what it meant to be emotionally healthy.
Our turning point was 1996—I like to say I was born again again, a second conversion. We made a commitment at that point to lead out of our marriage. So we have spent the last 19 years studying, researching, learning what that looks like practically. That’s why there’s a chapter in the book, “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness.” And it’s actually the second chapter of the section on the inner life because it’s so neglected. I start with “Face Your Shadow,” then “Lead Out of Your Marriage or Singleness” then “Slow Down for Loving Union” then “Practice Sabbath Delight.” Those are four issues that need to be properly cemented in your foundation, then that informs the way you do planning, decision-making, building teams and cultures, and so forth. But that inner life needs to be grounded well.
You sometimes describe your journey as four conversions, presumably because each of these signpost experiences was a profound spiritual turning point. You speak of your conversion from agnosticism to zealous Christian leader; from emotional blindness to emotional health; from busy activity to slowed-down spirituality. In the fourth, you talk about a conversion “from skimming to integrity in leadership.”
Actually, this book came out of that fourth conversion. In 2007, as our church and ministry continued to grow larger, I realized that there were some issues inside of me that needed to be addressed.
You know, you’ve got employees, you’re busy planning, you have a large organization you’re running. It required a level of inner life that was more complex, that needed to be deeper than I had known. I realized I was skimming on some of the applications of emotionally healthy spirituality to the core issues I talk about in the second half of the book, which is the outer life of leadership—the things we deal with every day, like planning, decision-making, power and wise boundaries.
I speak of it as a conversion because I realized I had not brought my theology fully into the way that I was leading our church. I was still picking secular models and grafting them into the tree without doing the hard work that’s required of integration. Not that we don’t learn from good secular models, we do. But you picture a tree that’s got deep roots, the tree is informed by the health of those roots.
For example?
Let’s just take making decisions, strategic planning. I brought in many strategic planners over the years to guide us in the process, each with excellent models of strategic planning. Here’s the problem: They didn’t deal with the issue of how we listen to the voice of God—corporately.
And how do we define success beyond just the metrics of numbers? For most of us it’s just, well, we have more people, more budget. It’s just numbers. But there’s a lot more to biblical success than numbers.
Just because there’s an opportunity for expansion doesn’t mean it’s God’s will either. So how do I sort all that out?
That was like another level for me. So in 2007 I decided that I would become the executive pastor for a couple years. I wanted to dig in to budget-making, supervision of staff, hiring and firing, and really do the integration theologically of the inner life to the outer life. I did not want to just skim in these areas.
It’s one thing to preach sermons and cast vision. It’s another thing to get into the nitty-gritty of building healthy culture and confronting the elephants in the room.
My learning curve from 2007 to 2015 has been very steep. I took notes for six-and-a-half years on what I was learning, and I spent the past 18 months writing the book, addressing issues that I felt hadn’t been adequately addressed in leadership.
Our way of thinking about things feeds our actions and reactions. Those actions through repetition become habits, and they can become rather engrained. From your experience, how do we begin to break some of those unhealthy cycles as we’re moving toward health?
The question is, How do we change? And the answer is, Very, very slowly. I’m still changing. I’ve been 19 years in this journey and I’m still learning. Along the way, I ended up being exposed to a fellow named Benjamin Bloom and his “Taxonomy of Learning Domains”—how people learn. He talks about the five-stage process of how we learn and change.
First, we become aware of something. “Hey, it’s really good to slow down in life.” Then we ponder it. We read a book, listen to some tapes, maybe even preach it. Then we value it. “Slow down for God? Everybody should slow down for God.” But Bloom would say, to really know it, you’ve got to change your behavior and your actions. There’s a big gap between those who actually reprioritize their entire lives—level four—and then level five, where we actually own it. He says most people never get beyond three; they value it. They believe it, but they don’t change their lifestyle.
So I encourage people, Relax. Change is slow. Just make one or two small, incremental steps at a time. You plant those seeds and over time it’s going to bear fruit.
The changes we’re talking about in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality are a whole life change: how you live your personal life, how you do your walk with Jesus, how you listen to God, how you lead other people, how you make decisions, how you build teams. Your whole life. You have to understand, this is a journey. It’s going to take some time.