Now, that means you have to be good at and prudent about risk. And prudent doesn’t mean that you’re being risk averse. On the contrary, the cardinal virtue of prudence means doing what should be done. Sometimes that’s running into a house on fire and giving your life to try to carry somebody out. Sometimes that means not saying that thing that’s gonna get you beaten up. Those are both prudence. So you gotta figure out what that is. What’s the right amount of risk, and what is the outlandish reward that we want?
That’s a life technique, but that’s also a technique for all kinds of leaders. Church leaders are not trying to get rich, I hope. That’s not a very dignified goal for a church leader. I got nothing against getting rich, but that’s not exactly what we’re doing. We’re trying to save souls. And maybe that means a lot of souls, or maybe that means some souls thoroughly, or whatever it happens to be.
So thinking about what it means, I want to get to heaven and take as many people with me as I can, or I want to make sure that this group of people that’s really, really hard up and at risk is going to get to heaven—understanding those outlandish rewards require a certain amount of risks, and that’s what entrepreneurship is all about.
So one of the things that is a pretty significant problem, you talk about relationships and community. [For] pastors, clergy, church leaders, this is an area of struggle. Help us think through that so we can have those kinds of relationships that are deeply connected to thriving and happiness.
The beginning of the way to understand this, of course, is in the words of St. Paul, where he said, in my weakness, I find my strength. Now that’s a really, really important thing. And the reason for that is that Paul was … I mean, we don’t quite know what he was referring to. Maybe it was terrible temptation. Maybe it was frontal lobe epilepsy, which some people think that it was some other affliction. But the truth of the matter [is] he recognized that he was going to get converts and connect with people not through his unbelievable mental acuity, but rather through his physical feebleness. That it was his weakness that connected [to] other people.
So, I got [sidetracked] onto the weakness and strength business, but the truth of the matter is that you need real friends, not just deal friends. And leaders tend to have lots of deal friends and not that many real friends. It’s very important. It’s actually critical for leaders more than anybody else. The reason that leaders don’t have a lot of real friends is because deal friends are more efficacious. You’re super busy. They help you; you help them. People treat you differently than they treat other people because you have a lot of standing in your community. Your ego gets stroked a little bit by people who actually need things from you, and the result is you become quite isolated. You like being special more than you like being happy, which is what happens to a lot of people. It’s human frailty. I mean the devil is good at his job. And one of the ways that the devil works on leaders is by isolating them. That’s how he does it, by making them actually lonely.
That’s why this is so important. That’s what Benjamin Franklin had. He called it his Junto (Club), which was a group of men of standing in Philadelphia who were all pretty high up, and they could talk about real things, intimate things, and real problems with each other. That’s what the YPO (Young Presidents Organization) forum thing is for business owners. There’s complete secrecy.
That’s what church leaders need as well. If you’re isolated, and you don’t have any real friends [with] whom you can talk about real things, it’s not going to go well for you.
The isolation seems to lead to a sense of entitlement, which leads to bad decisions. And there’s a whole process here that I’ve seen blow up far, far too many times.
And a lot of sin. One of the things that I recommend is that leaders across professions, but especially religious leaders, that they have somebody who’s holding them accountable All. The. Time. In the Catholic world, there was a famous group called Opus Dei, a very deeply Catholic organization in Spain. And the leader of Opus Dei was always being accompanied by two regular priests—one who is correcting his theology and the other who is correcting his morals.
But I do find that for me, as a pastor and a church leader, you know, I’m on staff of a church now as a pastor, but my deepest relationships are not necessarily with congregants or people, partly because I need to be able to share some of the struggles with peers and be able to say things that I might not say: (e.g.,) “Man, our church is really wearing me out.”
That’s absolutely the case. I mean, there are all kinds of things that you and your wife talk about that you don’t talk about in front of your kids. It’s not the appropriate audience. You know, it’s like, “My kids are just bumming me out.” You say that to your wife; you don’t say that to your kid, because it’s not the appropriate audience for that truth. This is the funny thing about truth. You should always be honest, but you don’t have to say all the true things to everybody all the time.
That’s good. You wrote about the importance of managing your emotions. If you’re a pastor or church leader and you’re speaking, you’re emoting in ways that are remarkably unusual for any other [speaking] role. We are intentionally emoting and drawing people to think on these things or be transformed by these things. So how do we in general, in life, practically manage those emotions well so that ultimately we thrive and we can walk through the day to day?
Well, we have to, those of us who are in the business of managing other people’s emotions—pastors, professors, people who are doing that all the time, public speakers. You have to start by managing yourself. I mean, that’s your most important employee in the enterprise of your own life. And that starts by actually understanding the science of emotions. Emotions are not there to give you a nice day. Emotions are not there to do biologically much more than to give you signals about what you’ve perceived around you.
What are we perceiving around us? Threats and opportunities. The result of perceiving a threat is negative emotions. There’s only four: fear, anger, disgust and sadness. Everybody has those four basic negative emotions. We have organs, miniature sub-organs, inside our limbic systems that govern each one of those negative emotions. That’s how God created us. That’s the onboard hardware. And he did it for a reason, I have to imagine.
Our positive emotions work the same way. They say that we have perceived an opportunity. We get positive emotions so that we’ll approach it. But emotions are liars because all they are are talking to us about are things that we’re seeing out around us. We’re given a prefrontal cortex, which is an executive decision-making console inside our heads, precisely so that we’re not being managed by our own emotions.
“You need real friends, not just deal friends. And leaders tend to have lots of deal friends and not that many real friends.”
So one of the things I have to talk to leaders a lot [about] is getting a repertoire of ways to manage your emotions so they don’t manage you. A whole bunch of techniques. You know, prayer or petition is a classic technique that moves the experience of emotions into your prefrontal cortex, as is walking with a spiritual director, as is journaling, as is any sort of spiritual practice where you’re examining yourself along these lines. These are things that clergy have to be especially good at and especially disciplined at. There’s spiritual warfare going on. And if you’re the Dark One, if I were, I know who I’d go after. I’d go after guys in the pulpit.
If a pastor were on the edge of burnout and asked you for one place to start, where would you encourage that pastor to start?
One of the great things about the evangelical church is that most of the pastors are married. And I believe that marriage is a sacrament and it’s a holy thing. I believe that very few people are meant to be alone. Now I understand that my church has a different teaching on that. And I believe that some people have a charism to celibate life. They really do. Many Protestants have a charism to celibate life as well.
But many clergy, who have the benefit and the gift of being married, that’s your antenna to God. When you need consolation, that’s when you must not be alone. Now, if you’re celibate it means you need your closest friends. And when you’re married, you need your spouse. That’s where you turn. And that’s why clergy must be ultra, ultra serious about maintaining a good marriage.
So good. If you were addressing room full of young pastors, what single theme, message, idea from The Happiness Files would you want them to carry into what we hope would be six decades of successful ministry?
Don’t be afraid of your suffering. Don’t believe the propaganda from the modern culture that your suffering means that there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with your career, there’s something wrong with your faith. On the contrary, that means you’re fully alive as a human being.
And that leaders suffer more than non-leaders. They just do. I have the data. That’s just a natural part of what it means to lead other people. You know perfectly that if you’re a good pastor, then you’re gonna suffer more than your sheep. That’s what it means to be a good pastor. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing unnatural about that. That is a gift to you, and you have to see it as such.