You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender. This week, Dan continues

talking with Abby Wong Hefter about the costs and demands of leadership. Abby and Dan help us

unpack the inverse tendencies to idealize or scapego, inviting us instead to allow room for leaders, including ourselves,

to be more fully human in all the messiness and complexity that entails.

We're addressing the question of how to care for leaders and how to do so in a way in which you don't separate yourself from the fact that you as well are a leader.

And so how do we care for those who are in more formal leadership contexts,

but how do we as well care for ourselves as a leader of a family, of friendships, of influencing others?

And so, Abby, thank you for joining me again as we address this question of what comes to you and to your life as a consequence of some of the

effects of being a leader. Things that come to mind that you know to be true, I will speak for

myself to say I know that part of the result of being in leadership, I

handle often the stress by simply working more. And so, you know, I've had friends who have

legitimately said you're a workaholic. And I defend against that because I'm really good

at resting and playing, which isn't actually true that I'm not good at it.

But nonetheless, you know, I see lots of my own addictive structures

in terms of planning and then planning another event and then et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But I also know that I can easily, when I had the capacity

to drink alcohol, I don't now because of stomach reflux, but I would drink. And sometimes I

would drink, a shot of scotch, and then then a second shot and it would ameliorate.

Again, I would never say I was in that full-fledged alcoholic structure, but I'm drinking every night

and eating. Oh my God, eating. As I look at the cupcake that's in front of me right now.

And it's not good for me to eat this, but I do intend to devour that before we go back to do some of the other work we're doing today.

So there are realities that seem to be how I self-soothe in the context of the betrayal, crises, conflicts,

...