Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast. My name is Rich Velotis. I am the lead pastor of New Life Fellowship Church here in Queens, New York City.

And I'm here, as always, with Pete Skazero. Pete is the founder of New Life Fellowship Church as well as the founder of

emotionally healthy spirituality and we've been talking about content from the

book the emotionally healthy leader we began our podcast series looking at the

inner life last time we we started talking about the outer life as it pertain to

planning and decision making we're going to continue this theme about the outer life now, Pete,

as we talk about culture and team building.

And really the premise of this chapter is that

to create an emotionally healthy culture and to build a healthy team

is the primary task of every leader.

And how do we do that well?

And so you have a story about a tiger that really gives a nice illustration to what we're

going to talk about today.

Why don't you be sure about that?

Yeah, actually, this chapter on culture and team building begins with a story that comes

from Edwin Friedman.

He's a rabbi that kind of pioneered family systems thinking for synagogues

and churches.

Anyway, he tells the story, it's a fable of a friendly forest where there's all these animals.

They're all getting along just fine, but at some point a tiger joins the community. one of the sheep is like this is not good

like tigers like you know and but they said ah it'll be fine we're a friendly forest

like a long story short the tiger keeps threatening you know kind of behind bushes be growling

...