What is it that’s drowning us, as leaders? What is it that’s taking leaders out of the picture when we desperately need good leaders? Last time I talked about identity and how the most dangerous destructive force on earth is a man who doesn’t know who he is.
Another huge issue facing leaders is burnout—the condition in which we find ourselves when we’re just out of energy and we’re still trying to lead on empty.
Leadership burnout is underestimated in terms of what it can do to wreck the trajectory of a good leadership pathway. I want to get into some solutions, but I want to talk about the problem first.
When I was the editor at Pastors.com, we would sometimes publish articles about how to recover from emotional burnout. And those were always the most popular articles. They got the most clicks, they had the most people reading them, they had the most people sharing them and they had the most comments. They had the most people opening up in discussion on Facebook and elsewhere about, this is me, I needed this, I’m going through this right now.
I believe burnout is epidemic. And I want you to understand it’s an issue I’ve walked through personally. When I go back close to a decade ago in my own life and leadership, I go back to a time when I was taking on too many things, too many projects—partly because I didn’t know who I was.
I don’t think that taking on projects is the problem. In fact, I think that can actually be a good thing if you know who you are and why you’re doing it, if you understand the why. But I was in a phase of life where I was no longer certain of who I was.
I was no longer comfortable in my own skin.
I had gotten discouraged. I had let the approval of others become a driving force in my life. I was very concerned about keeping everybody happy and getting everything done right.
I was treating my own life with a legalistic mentality. It was a big checklist, and I was failing. And because of that, my attention was all over the place trying to fill that void, trying to measure up.
Meanwhile, as a result of all of that, I was hurting in some relationships. I was distanced from friends. I was distanced from my wife, emotionally speaking. I began to isolate and to burn out. It was a downward spiral.
One of the things that changed was, we moved to California and got into a healthy church and healthy community and into a good small group and into lots of situations that really helped me to recover. To get back on track. To regain focus and clarity, and just to cultivate a new passion for the things that mattered the most in life.
Out of that came a big emphasis in our church that we’ve been planting for seven years, Grace Hills Church, on reaching out to people who are broken, who are hurting, who are walking through problems and issues like that and need help.
I love pastors. I love leaders. I love people who are in leadership and are suffering and going through a hard time. And I just want to give you some practical wisdom as well as some personal encouragement today.