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Special Guest Jack Shitama: Leading With Courage · The Church Renewal Podcast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Church.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Renewal Podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: I'm Matt.
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: I'm Jeremy.
• 0:07
  Speaker 2: When Jeremy and I pondered this season and we thought about guests to have on with us, the very first guest that came to mind is the one that you're going to hear from today.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: More than anyone else that I'm aware of, Jack Shatama has popularized and put the cookies on the bottom shelf for us beginners about family systems theory.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: So take a ride along with us today as we talk with Jack Shatama.
• 0:36
  Speaker 3: Jack Shatama.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Speaker, author, coach.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: Thanks great to be here.
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: We're thrilled to have you, man.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: This is something that Matt and I as we're here in season four and we've been talking through family systems theory we've been excited to get to talk to you.
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: Both Matt and I have been long-term listeners and readers of your work and we have been affected deeply by the clarity that you've brought to this field and specifically in the context of working in a church.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: So very grateful for your work, thank you.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: I want to just open up the floor.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Tell us a little bit about your background and how the world of family systems theory opened up to you.
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah Well, first of all, I didn't grow up in a Christian household.
• 1:21
  Speaker 4: I was baptized at the age of almost 27 in 1988.
• 1:28
  Speaker 4: And within three years I was a pastor in a church, in a United Methodist Church.
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: Wow, it was a fast.
• 1:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, god was working hard and, thanks be to God, I was open to it.
• 1:40
  Speaker 4: So in the United Methodist Church you can do something called being a student pastor.
• 1:45
  Speaker 4: So they assigned me to a small part-time church and I started seminary in the fall of 1991, and that's when I encountered Generation to Generation Family Process in Church and Synagogue, which is the seminal work really for Christian leaders, and I immediately knew there was something there.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: And in that course I did my own genogram, or genogram, you know, I just realized I've been pronouncing it wrong all of these years.
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: I looked it up, genogram is the preferred one, anyway.
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: So I did that work and I started to understand what was making me tick and obstacles to becoming fully myself, and I love the Soren Kierkegaard quote.
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: You know now, lord, with your help, I will become myself, because to me that is the essence of the grace of God, right, it is allowing God's grace to work through you and to become the person God calls you to be, and so I realized that personally it was helpful, but also as a young and new pastor, it was like gold understanding how relational systems work and congregations work.
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: It was like seeing things with different eyes, and I think the biggest thing that at least I found, and I think others find, is that once you start to see things that way, you don't take things as personally.
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: It's not as if people are out to hurt you or they're out to get you.
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: It's just people are uncomfortable, they're not dealing with their own anxiety, they're not dealing with change very well and they're just looking for a place to put it.
• 3:19
  Speaker 4: And when you stop taking it personally, it actually gives you a chance to be an instrument of grace, and so that's kind of the back story.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: You can take a heartbeat and not react right away, absolutely.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: Look what you said about people becoming their kind of their full self.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: I talk about with the pastors that I coach getting comfortable in their own skin, that I coach getting comfortable in their own skin.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: And then it takes you a while to sort of take off other people's expectations and your expectations and your mentor's expectations and your congregant's expectations and just get back to what does Jesus expect of me?
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: And that if you live there, that's a place of peace and joy and it's reasonable.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: Pete, absolutely Pete, because he's not a harsh taskmaster.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Right Pete?
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: No Pete, I will be, other people will be Right, but not Jesus, I have to say.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Jack, other people in my life know this, but your talking about that has been helpful in my own parenting.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: We have a kid who's challenging as we've.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: My wife and I have read your stuff and now it's all through our family my brother's working with his son-in-law right now, through Everybody Loves and Unnext to His Presence.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: But as my wife and I have matured, our son has matured and it's been a great test ground because I think that the same thing happens in churches.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: If the leaders mature, then it can help everyone else mature, but if you don't take responsibility for yourself, no one will ever mature, which is ironic that it would work that way.
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: Right right.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Explain that.
• 4:57
  Speaker 4: Well, it's the idea that when you do that and it doesn't, if it's a leader, that's the ideal situation, but it doesn't even have to be the leader in a system.
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: If anybody differentiates, it starts to change the system, and it's because it gives people permission to do the same.
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: What differentiation does is, first of all, creates healthy emotional space.
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: So I'm no longer in your face telling you what to do, or I'm no longer distancing from you because I can't handle my relationship with you.
• 5:29
  Speaker 4: No, I'm going to be with you.
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: I'm going to be who I am, but I'm going to accept you as you are too.
• 5:34
  Speaker 4: Friedman calls that knowing where I end and where you begin.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: I like to say being a self and allowing others to be the same.
• 5:41
  Speaker 4: And as soon as that starts to happen, it actually encourages other people to mature.
• 5:48
  Speaker 4: They no longer feel like they have to push back or they no longer feel like they have to move away.
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: I had a listener email me once, clergy, and he was saying that every time his mom comes to visit, he's anxious for weeks because she's always so critical of him.
• 6:06
  Speaker 4: He had just moved into a new apartment and he just knew that she was going to criticize everything there.
• 6:12
  Speaker 4: It was a whole new field of things to criticize, right, and all I wrote back to him was well, criticism is a push for togetherness.
• 6:20
  Speaker 4: When people are critical with you, they're just saying I want more of you, I want to be close to you.
• 6:26
  Speaker 4: And the opposite occurs.
• 6:28
  Speaker 4: When people are critical of you, you pull away, right.
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: So the paradox is move closer.
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: And what he was able to do is he was able to move closer as a non-anxious presence to show interest in her life, and all of a sudden things change dramatically, and so whenever anybody differentiates, it creates this healthy emotional space for people to do the same.
• 6:53
  Speaker 4: It doesn't always happen.
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: The less mature somebody is, the more emotionally dependent they are, the less likely they are to respond to that.
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: But there are a lot of people in a relationship system who are right in the middle they're going to go whichever way the system goes.
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: So if the system goes in the way of hurting and everybody's got to agree they're going to go in that way or fight back loudly and clearly, just like a teenager does, right?
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: A teenager just does not want to be people who are maturing who will do that, and that's the difference that one person can make in a relationship system and especially in congregations.
• 7:39
  Speaker 4: I've seen that happen in congregations.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: Matt, I want to underscore what you said there, because Friedman talks about this and he says that when you have a system, if the leader in that system and Jack, you've talked about this, you've said the leader doesn't have to be what Matt calls the paper leader, the guy at the top of the organizational chart, but this is anyone who is taking in hand their own development to differentiate, to know who they are, what their values are, what's important to them, and is able to say that while staying connected.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: Friedman says and I'm paraphrasing here but when you have a system that doesn't have a leader who has done that, the system is not able to be healthy.
• 8:18
  Speaker 4: Yes, Leaderless systems are anxious Because that's in fact.
• 8:23
  Speaker 4: Systems are anxious because that's in fact um, he says it in a lot of different words but in a failure of nerve you know he talks about.
• 8:30
  Speaker 4: The most important thing a leader can do is cast vision, and that is because people just want to know what the leader thinks.
• 8:36
  Speaker 4: It's not that they're going to agree.
• 8:38
  Speaker 4: And especially if the leader says this is where I think god is calling us, this is where I think we should go, you don't have to agree with me, it's okay if we disagree.
• 8:47
  Speaker 4: I may be wrong.
• 8:48
  Speaker 4: When the leader does that, the leader creates healthy emotional space for people to decide themselves.
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: They just want to know.
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: And when the leader doesn't take a stand, it makes everybody else anxious because they have no idea.
• 9:03
  Speaker 4: You know, I don't want to upset the leader or you leader, or I don't want to be a bad congregant or whatever it is.
• 9:09
  Speaker 4: That leaderless system makes it even more difficult for the rest of the people in the system to function in healthy ways.
• 9:17
  Speaker 4: So that's the same with parenting.
• 9:19
  Speaker 4: In parenting, the parent is the leader in the system, and if the parent is not present, that's going to be a problem.
• 9:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, same as if the parent is overbearing.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: So this is something that, jack, I think you and I can connect on more than Matt, because Matt is an atypical in terms of pastoral personality.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: Matt is a type A say what he thinks without you know he's learned how to care over the years.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: I don't want to hit too hard, but I'm much more the people pleaser, and you've described yourself as being the people pleaser and you know, when we look at these statistics for people who enter ministry, they tend to be very strongly towards that caring, nurturing, parenting, protective side, which I think sets us up for over-adaptivity.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: Would you talk to us and unpack the idea of adaptivity as reactivity, because we've talked about reactivity and adaptivity earlier in the season here, but would you just unpack that for us, the way you think through what I think a lot of pastors are going to face with the internal impulse to be adaptive.
• 10:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so reactivity is just responding to any stimulus in an unhealthy way, not as a non-anxious presence.
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: And the classic form of reactivity that most people can understand is when we get defensive or aggressive, we snap back.
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: What do you mean?
• 10:44
  Speaker 4: How can you say that about me?
• 10:46
  Speaker 4: That's reactivity.
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: Adaptivity is actually a form of reactivity.
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: So adaptivity is also a response that's not healthy.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: It is giving in without standing up for yourself.
• 11:00
  Speaker 4: You may have heard me say before that I like to define self-differentiation as the ability to self-define while remaining emotionally connected.
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: So there's two components there, and reactivity in the classic sense is all about self-definition.
• 11:13
  Speaker 4: It's all about what do you mean?
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: No, I know what I'm talking about, right, you don't?
• 11:18
  Speaker 4: That's all self-definition.
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: There's no emotional connection there.
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: Adaptivity is all about emotional connection.
• 11:24
  Speaker 4: It's all about oh, I care so much about this relationship that I'm not going to say anything.
• 11:29
  Speaker 4: I'm just going to go along, I'm not going to make waves.
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: And going back to your comment, jeremy, a lot of people who go into pastoral ministry.
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: They're caring people, right?
• 11:43
  Speaker 4: They don't want to upset other people, and so there's this natural bent towards adaptivity, towards people-pleasing and people-pleasing.
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: That's the recipe for burnout in pastoral leaders.
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: Because if you've served a congregation for any amount of time, you know that you can't please them.
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: The demands will never stop, and so the most important thing a clergy leader can do is to be able to set healthy boundaries, to be able to say this is what I'm willing to do, and I don't think I can do this right now.
• 12:16
  Speaker 4: And that's where Generation to Generation helped me so much, because we have four children.
• 12:22
  Speaker 4: They're ages 42 to 33.
• 12:24
  Speaker 4: And so in the 90s they were all young and doing all kinds of things, and I learned that well, I just can't do everything, and especially I don't want to do things that are going to take me away from what's important with my family.
• 12:38
  Speaker 4: So I would tell the church that I can't come to that meeting.
• 12:41
  Speaker 4: I'm going to my kid's Little League game, you know, or they have a play or they have a concert, or you know there are all these things that if we're in people-pleasing mode, then we go ahead and we do it, and then our family suffers and we get resentful.
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: And I think the difference between adaptivity and just choosing to be connected is that we take ownership of it, we take responsibility for it.
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: So my wife and I we kind of laugh because we used to ask each other do you want to?
• 13:12
  Speaker 4: She likes to garden and me not so much, but sometimes she needs help and she's do you want to help me in the garden?
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: Well, not really, but I will.
• 13:22
  Speaker 4: I love to listen to podcasts.
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: Recently we were in the car.
• 13:28
  Speaker 4: Can we listen to a podcast?
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: Do you want to listen to a podcast?
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: No, but I will podcast.
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: No, but I will.
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: And so the difference is when we choose emotional connection over self-definition and we own it.
• 13:41
  Speaker 4: We're saying I'm doing this because I care about this relationship, I'm not going to get resentful because I don't have to have my way all the time, and it's just having that kind of self-awareness that moves us towards maturity.
• 13:54
  Speaker 4: So, going back to the people-pleasing thing, I think the people-pleasing thing is something that we do without even being aware.
• 14:00
  Speaker 4: We just keep saying yes and saying yes and saying yes because we believe that if we stop saying yes, people are going to get mad at us, or people are going to feel like we let them down.
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: And if we've been a people-pleaser for a long time, when you first start to do that, yes, they will feel that way, but over time, if you show that you really care about them still, but you're setting healthy boundaries.
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: They'll learn to live with it.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: It's fascinating you put it that way, because I have a book I'm working on on burnout, because I've had the privilege of coaching some pastors through burnout and I think that you're dead on.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: It is the accumulation of expectations, whether internally driven somebody like me or externally driven, like a people pleaser.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Either way, an accumulation of unfulfilled expectations leads to burnout.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: It's inevitable.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: Right On the other side of it, if it's just your own stuff, you can just say, oh, I'm just going to lower my goals and not be crazy with myself, right, so that's a little bit easier for somebody like me not to get burnout, I can just lower my goals.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: But for someone who's externally driven, whose tendency is more towards people-pleasing, and you begin to say no, that destabilizes the system.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: Jack, what do you think, as we talk about what it means to be well-differentiated in a non-anxious presence?
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: What do you think most leaders have a misunderstanding about in terms of what that looks like for them?
• 15:28
  Speaker 4: Well, I think the first thing is people think they have to not feel anxiety, and that is not what a non-anxious presence is.
• 15:34
  Speaker 4: A non-anxious presence is.
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: A non-anxious presence is about how you present into the relationship system.
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: You're feeling anxious inside, but you are able to regulate it in a way that it doesn't make a challenging situation worse.
• 15:46
  Speaker 4: That's the first thing, is just understanding that anxiety is a natural thing and it's okay to not feel good about what's going on, because as soon as you accept that, then you actually can decide okay, what am I going to do about it.
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: I think the other thing and it's really impossible to be a non-anxious presence all the time you may have heard me say somewhere along the line that and I think this is apocryphal I've never seen it in writing, but I'm told that Murray Bowen said that the best you could hope for is to be self-differentiated 50% of the time.
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: That most of us are more like a third of the time, and so that means a half to two-thirds of the time.
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: We're either being reactive, getting defensive or aggressive when somebody does something that triggers us, or we're being adaptive, we're just giving in without standing up for ourselves, and that's not being self-differentiated, that's not being non-anxious and present and bringing ourself into the situation.
• 16:45
  Speaker 4: And so when people start to understand they're going to get it wrong more often than they get it right, and they start to give themselves some grace, they start to say, okay, I didn't get it right that time, but what am I going to do next time?
• 17:02
  Speaker 4: One of my colleagues, bill Selby, who founded the Center for Pastoral Effectiveness in the Rockies he's been doing this training since the early 90s and he says a sentence never ends with a period, it always ends with a comma.
• 17:15
  Speaker 4: And what he means by that is just because you didn't get it right this time, you can go back.
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: You can go back and say to somebody you know, I really reacted strongly there, I didn't want it to happen that way, and let me just share with you what's going on with me.
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: Or, you know, I just said yes too soon, I didn't really think about what I wanted to do, and here's what I'm thinking now.
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: So that's the difference between a calm and a period.
• 17:44
  Speaker 4: So if we realize that we're not going to get it right all the time, number one, it takes the pressure off, but number two, it means that we're playing that long game instead of that.
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: Oh, I've got to get it right every time.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: We work in a lot of environments where the churches that we work with proclaim a belief in grace as a primary thing, flowing out of Reformation theology.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: But what I find is that churches at this point and leaders with themselves they end up graceless towards themselves.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they end up in graceless environments.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: We've written churches where it's hard for them to get apologies out.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It's terrible because if you can't apologize, you can't do this and go back.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm sorry.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: I'm a creature.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: I'm limited.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: When I look at my schedule, I actually can't do that and I'm really sorry because I know that was important to you and that act makes a system more mature because it gives everybody permission to do that at that point.
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: But it takes a system that's actually gracious, not just professes to be.
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: You know, yeah, it's people taking responsibility for self instead of asking others to be responsible for their issues and challenges.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: We were talking about this.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: I have a fellowship we do among our transitional pastors and I was talking about this yesterday that if you read people's grief and many times those transitional pastors were coming in or introducing change, which is loss, which puts people into grief, and people respond to grief variously If you read grief as rebellion, or you won't follow leadership or you're against me, you miss it and you miss an opportunity to step into someone's life and to connect with them, instead of just telling them to get in line.
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 19:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it helps foster compassion for them.
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: Instead of getting into.
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: You know that what Friedman calls a conflict of wills, where you know you're trying to convince the other to agree with you.
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: Instead you just understand something's going on there, and it's not about me, it's about them.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: A lot of the work that Flourish does is we place transitional pastors in churches and so we are the embodiment of loss, usually the loss of one long-term pastor and we're in the anxious middle on the way to another long-term pastor, right.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: So we represent that loss and we want our people to exercise differentiation.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: Well, but it's destabilizing.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: Could you talk just a little bit when you know you're destabilizing, but it's destabilizing?
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Could you talk just a little bit when you know you're destabilizing but it's for good, and not be reactive?
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: How do you keep your head when you know that's actually what you're there for?
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Does that make sense to the question?
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we talked about before not taking things personally right Understanding that there's pain, sometimes deep pain.
• 20:41
  Speaker 4: If it's a beloved pastor and they're leaving, there's going to be a lot of pain.
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: Or if there was some kind of conflict or failure where they had to be removed, that's pain.
• 20:52
  Speaker 4: And I guess the way I would look at it is, if I'm going going in there, my primary role is to help people work through their grief.
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: If I don't help people work through their grief, the person who comes in behind me is going to get nailed because they are just, they haven't gotten through it and they're going to be looking for an outlet for their pain.
• 21:13
  Speaker 4: So when you start to think in those terms, outlet for their pain.
• 21:20
  Speaker 4: So when you start to think in those terms, when people unload their grief on you, if it's in a blaming or hurtful way, going back to that idea that this is not about me, this is about them and what's going on with them and I've said before, the way I'd like to think of it is when we're face-to-face with somebody and all of their stuff is coming at us in whatever way, the key is to not respond and get into this conflict of wills, but to try to move alongside them and walk with them.
• 21:46
  Speaker 4: That's what a non-anxious presence does.
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: Is a non-anxious presence stays present, doesn't fight back, doesn't give in.
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: The way I like to describe it is let them vent and then enough about me.
• 21:56
  Speaker 4: So what else is going on with you?
• 21:59
  Speaker 4: How are you doing and I've just seen it happen multiple, multiple, multiple times that when someone is able to do that, that person goes from being one of your worst enemies to being one of your best supporters Because, first of all, you didn't react to their pain and, secondly, you helped them walk through their pain.
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: So when a transitional pastor is able to do that, that's a gift.
• 22:23
  Speaker 4: That's a gift to the congregation, it's a gift to whoever's coming in for the long term.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Good.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: One of the quotes that we've pulled from last season we were talking to Ken Quick was that he says trust is the coin of the realm.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: And what you're describing I'm hearing this way.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: I'm hearing you say that when someone comes to you with their pain, they're asking you do you care about me?
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: Can I trust you with this?
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: Whether it's criticism, anger, fear, even resentment, if they're saying it to you, they're asking implicitly are you going to care about me?
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: And one of the concepts I was wrestling with back when I was in seminary was the idea of love Having an opposite.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: You know the antithesis of love through much of my growing up.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: I always, you know, if you poked me, I'd say, well, the opposite of love is hate.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: But as I got to thinking about it, I came to the position where I think the opposite of true love is actually apathy.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: I don't care about you, I don't care what's going on, I don't care if it hurts you, I don't care what happens to you as a result.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: You make the wrong choice.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: That's no skin off my back, I don't care.
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: Go, hurt yourself Doesn't matter.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: What I'm hearing you say is that's really the fundamental question that people are asking, from where I'm sitting, if I can put myself in the position where I can say okay, number one, I'm not responsible for the outcome.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: We're in a church setting, right, you're here because you know that Jesus died on the cross, not me.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: And if I died on the cross, you know it's probably not going to be very effective anyway, right?
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: So there's someone else here who can take care of this issue for you.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: I'm here to help you walk to them and I'm feeling whatever the intensity or the emotion or the outrage is towards me.
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: But if I sort of reframe that for myself, going into this, I can say this is about you asking me do you care enough about me to listen, to be present and then to speak the truth while staying engaged?
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: Because the other options one is to get defensive or aggressive, and I don't know if you've ever picked a fight with a loved one.
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: I've not done it on purpose.
• 24:42
  Speaker 4: I've never done it, jack.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Never We've heard about it from other people, but never having done it ourselves.
• 24:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you've seen it happen, I've seen it happen.
• 24:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, when you're looking for a fight, that's what you want.
• 24:54
  Speaker 4: It helps relieve you of whatever's pent up inside you and you get to blame the other person because they fought back.
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: And that's exactly what we're looking for.
• 25:05
  Speaker 4: If you respond to their pain with that type of defensiveness or aggressiveness, they're going to stay focused and remain angry at you.
• 25:12
  Speaker 4: The other end of that is, if you disconnect, if you say, well, why do I want to be around them?
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: Because all they want to do is criticize me, or all they want to do is vent on me, and you remove yourself emotionally, again they're going to say, going back to what you said, jeremy, they don't care about me, they don't care about me, they're a non-person to me.
• 25:32
  Speaker 4: Now, because I gave them a chance to trust me and for me to trust them and it let me down gave them a chance to trust me and for me to trust them and it let me down.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: In family systems theory we talk about sabotage.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Right, you're a leader, you're beginning, you're differentiating yourself, you're beginning to lead in a direction.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: It destabilizes the system and sabotage happens.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: And many times for a lot of people-pleasing pastors that happens through powerful leaders and they end up frustrated.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: We get a lot of sabotage in our situations, as you can imagine.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: How do you pick up on the fact that sabotage is happening?
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Is that part of your reflection?
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Because you've talked about in your podcast starting and stopping programs, I'm sure, letting staff go, hiring staff, right, there's all kinds of those sorts of opportunities in what you've done and generally what pastors do.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: How do you pick up on the difference between maybe sabotage and the right, good kind of debate?
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that you took a prompt and did Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions and Family Systems Theory, did Len Choney's Five Dysfunctions and Family Systems Theory.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: You know Len Choney talks about.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: The goal here is to actually have a conversation and not be guarded, but there be space to put all the pieces out on the table.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it might be a mess to start, but without all the pieces we can't make the picture.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: So how do you distinguish between the healthy, good debate you need in order to get a good result and sabotage.
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: So there's one simple question who are they defining Are?
• 27:02
  Speaker 4: they defining themselves, or are they defining you or somebody else?
• 27:07
  Speaker 4: That's great, because the way Freeman said to do it in Generation to Generation preach a sermon on a controversial topic, take a stand and tell people it's okay if you don't agree, but this is what I believe right and stand at the door and see who defines themselves.
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: Oh you know, pastor, I heard what you said, but I'm not sure I can go there with you.
• 27:31
  Speaker 4: That's healthy, right?
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: They're defining themselves, or, oh, you're going to lead us to hell, or and this is this is the one that we miss.
• 27:43
  Speaker 4: Oh, you are so wonderful.
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: I just I can't believe we have a pastor like this, right, because the way I like to say it is the people who put you on a pedestal, they're the ones who are going to turn around and kick it out from under you when something changes, right, but anyway, yeah.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: So when they're defining themselves, they're usually doing it in a less anxious way, not always, but sometimes it can be emotionally intense.
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: But if they're defining themselves, then I think that's the opening to engage.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: Tell me more.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: I hadn't thought of it that way.
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: What more should I be thinking?
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: Have that conversation, because we don't always know, we think we know and we're doing our best to follow God's leading.
• 28:26
  Speaker 4: But if somebody has something to say to us, it's worth listening.
• 28:31
  Speaker 4: They say stuff, and it's still stuff we might need to hear.
• 28:37
  Speaker 4: So we might want to process that separately and just say you know, what's the truth in that?
• 28:43
  Speaker 4: What is there that I need to hear?
• 28:45
  Speaker 4: But in terms of sabotage, it's sabotage when they're not defining themselves, they're uncomfortable with something and sometimes it's the change, sometimes it's something else going on in their lives and it's coming into the congregational system.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: They're importing it in, but they're bringing it with them, right?
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: Things are anxious at home, so they bring it to the elders' meeting, right that's right, yeah, right yeah.
• 29:10
  Speaker 4: Great place to put it so a quick story.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: This literally happened yesterday.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: I'm taking a walk with my nine-year-old daughter and she says to me how can I tell someone you're stupid without saying you're stupid?
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: Because I don't want to be hurtful and I don't want to be mean, I said oh, that's a great question and we talked specifically.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: I said essentially what you said.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: I said you're defining them, you're defining yourself.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: If you say to them you're stupid, you're defining them.
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: If I say to that tree, that's a tree, that's just recognizing what's real.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: But if I say that's a sturdy tree, I make it a judgment and I'm defining that tree.
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: So when you say you're stupid, you're defining that person.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: But you can say instead I don't think that's a good idea.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: You can even say I think that's a really dumb idea, I think that's a stupid idea and I think it's going to hurt.
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: And I'm not going there with you.
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: Fast forward like six hours.
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: We've got a number of changes going on in our family, a lot of different stresses, and my wife comes home and we get into a tiff and I say, thinking I'm being very differentiated.
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: I said I'm angry because you X, y or Z, and she pushed.
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: I mean she immediately pushed back.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: I mean she's like number one.
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: You do this, number two, you're under a lot of stress.
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: And it hit me in that moment.
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: I said I just said I'm angry, I'm defining myself because you I'm not defining myself.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, right, that's right, you're blaming her, which means I can either listen right now or I can get defensive.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: And I said I'm literally reading through Invisible Loyalty right now and just finished Anxious Church, anxious People a day ago again.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: Okay, you're right, that's probably a me issue.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: And including in my vocabulary regularly that's probably a me issue.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: You're right, that's probably a me issue.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: That's probably a me issue.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: You're right, that's probably a me issue has not only helped me to remain engaged, but it's also built the confidence of the people around me who depend on me.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: And you use the word paradox.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: It really is a paradox.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: The more I can own where I'm feeling uncomfortable, the more someone else is who's depending on me can feel safe to lean on me.
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: I can own where I'm feeling uncomfortable, the more someone else is who's depending on me can feel safe to lean on me, which is it's counterintuitive.
• 31:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, the paradox is we think that's weakness and it's actually strength to be able to own what we do, especially when it hurts somebody else or when we've we've misinterpreted or we're downright wrong.
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: That's strength.
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: You wrong, that's strength.
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: You know that's not weakness.
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: I think we've been trained somehow to think that's weakness, and your story is a great example of the comma right, it wasn't a period, and even in that moment you can turn right around and say you know what?
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: That was a me thing.
• 31:57
  Speaker 4: I love that.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: We're going to hit pause right here.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Listen to next week's episode, where we'll continue this conversation.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them.
• 32:11
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• 32:19
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• 32:26
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• 32:52
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• 32:57
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• 32:59
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• 33:04
  Speaker 1: The Church Renewal Podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati, in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called Bye for now.