What does it mean to be an emotionally healthy leader?

Best selling author Peter Scazzero shares practical advice and insight from his personal journey in leadership through his book The Emotionally Healthy Leader. 

Every leadership position requires a certain level of demands. Peter shares ways that leadership culture can actually affect someone’s emotional health. He offers advice on becoming an emotionally healthy leader in the church.

“The demands are enormous on any size church. So to live out emotionally healthy spirituality, as we call it today, requires you to slow down. It requires you to be reflective and it requires that you look at yourself. These are hard thing to do.”

We don’t have to work in a church to have influence, Peter adds. We come to find out that we are all leaders in some way, and we all carry the responsibility of influence in our lives.

“In some sense all Christians are leaders. We all have influence over others whether we are parenting at home or a carpenter leading a team on a construction site. We are all bringing influence wherever we go.”

Peter explains the spiritual disciplines that are required for emotionally healthy leaders.

“To be an emotionally healthy leader, it requires prayerful reflection. One is on an inner journey of growth as well as an outer journey of seeking to bring Jesus to every situation.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the demands as a leader, but we are encouraged to continue working on areas in our life that will stretch our ‘spiritual muscles.’

Peter shares a personal story of when he had to face the challenge of having difficult conversations in his life.

“I was in a situation where I needed to have some difficult conversation with some folks who are in leadership and I kept avoiding them. The question is: Why was I avoiding it? I realized the church was stuck, until I led.”

It even took a kind reminder from his wife to reevaluate the importance of having difficult conversations as a leader.

“My wife saw it more clearly than I did initially and said, ‘Pete, there’s something going on here inside of you because it’s so obvious. A couple of folks need to move on from leadership and you’re not doing anything. You’re kind of doing their job rather than having the conversation.’

After seeking counsel and spending time understanding why having difficult conversations was so challenging for him, he came to a place where he decided to make some internal changes.  

“I came to the point saying, ‘Either I’m going to lead this church with integrity or I need to resign.'”

Highlight: Leadership culture

Becoming an emotionally healthy leader