Hi, my name is Pete Zazzara. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

podcast. And our topic today is the emotionally unhealthy leader. I've realized more and more,

as I talk with pastors and leaders around the country and the world and receive emails that so many are studying

the emotionally healthy leader book chapter by chapter. Actually, there's nine chapters in the book.

And so I've really wanted for some time to create nine podcasts to go along with that systemically to move through the content of the

book so you could actually use this perhaps not simply with yourself and a podcast but between

meetings share that with people on your team as you talk it through so there's a free

discussion guide that's available on our website just Just go to Emotionallyhealthy.org.

And you can download that if you like as well as listen to the podcast. So I want to begin by just defining the problem, which I do in the chapter called The Emotionally Unhealthy

Leader. And I want to get at what's underneath this. And I know it well because I've lived

it. I mean, when I think about my own formation, I became a leader within one year of coming to Christ.

And then I ended up on a parish church ministry staff, helping start Christian fellowships on different university campuses, eventually became an elder in a church within a few years, seminary, began preaching as an associate pastor.

Then really actually only in, when I was 11.5-year-old Christian, did I plant our church,

New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, New York City? I look back now and I say, what was I thinking?

I mean, I had gifts. I had a certain level of anointing. I had a lot of knowledge. I was leading

people to Christ. And we'd actually planted three churches, three other churches, actually four

churches in seven years. That's a lot. And I was actually pastoring two of them, one in English and one

in Spanish. But the reality was that my foundation of my inner life couldn't support what I was building and eventually

began to crumble.

And the illustration or metaphor that I use in that really kind of is a controlling image

for what I would call emotionally of the leadership is that of a skyscraper in New York

in that when they built skyscrapers in New York

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