Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast.

My name is Pete Gazzarro.

It's great to be with you today.

I've been working with leaders for well over 30 years now.

And most of everyone I've been with is kind and generous and compassionate, but also tired and overwhelmed and overworked, with neither the time nor to space

to really listen to the deeper voices inside from God

that can really speak to the essence of the problems before them.

And so what happens is so often we as leaders rush into solutions,

and we kind of hope the problem solves itself or goes away,

but without the essential nutrients of rest and silence and wisdom,

that's really so critical for a deep solving of the problems that are in front of us,

our quick fix solutions often become just the seed of a whole new problem.

And that wisdom that comes from the quietness with God just is not available to us.

So today I want to talk to you about two keys to creative leadership, Sabbath and silence.

Both are countercultural, they're radical, they're prophetic, and I've had my own journey over the years with them.

In fact, it wasn't until 1996 when I began my whole journey into emotional health, that I actually began to slow down and experiment with Sabbath as a spiritual practice and begin integrating silence into my life and had a lot of ups and downs and

starts and stops over the next seven years until 2003 when I did a four-month sabbatical

into monastic spirituality and its applications for the active missional church today in an urban center like

New York that I actually got it.

Both silence and Sabbath began to get integrated into my life as practices that were core

to my leadership.

And it changed everything, the integration of rhythms.

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