Welcome, everyone, to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast. My name is Pete Scazzaro. I'm the founder of New Life Fellowship Church.

Richard Villalotis is the senior pastor. I'm now a teaching pastor there, but I also lead as a ministry out from our church called Emotionally

Spirituality, and we equip the church around the world and a discipleship that deeply changes lives. That's our mission.

This podcast is specifically for leaders on the integration of what we call emotionally healthy

leadership spirituality into your leadership. I've said my best writing on that's found in a book

called The Emotionally Healthy Leader, which many of you have read, and I recommend you

pick that up. But our topic today is dealing with

elephants in the room. Dealing with elephants in the room. So let me begin by just defining

what does that even mean when we talk about elephants in the room. If I had, if we could be visual

here, if you imagine a boardroom, and there's actually eight, ten people around a table,

your team is there. But actually, behind four of the team members are these massive elephants

with their, you know, trunks over on the table. But no one's, everyone's functioning and talking

as if there are not elephants in the room. So our topic here is how do you deal with

them in the room? So I'm going to give you an example. Some examples. A friend of mine calls me

this past week and he's a lawyer and he's in a church and he's really angry. He said, I talk to

my pastor if he can I get some advice? So I said, sure, you know, they talked to him and he basically

say, you know, the pastor doesn't lead. He doesn't lead. He basically comes and he preaches and he

leaves. And we're all sitting there. Church is stuck. People leaving. But it's just he doesn't think

about it. He just wants to preach and be up front and verse by verse in scripture. But everyone knows it's a big problem. But no one says anything. That's an elephant in the room. Another one would be, you know, a person on your team is very defensive and cannot take critique. You can't disagree with them in a meeting. That's an elephant in the room. And so you don't.

Or you have a person in a small group that maybe that is narcissistic, but they're always

taking up way too much space and you spend mostly half your time trying to shut them down

to have a normal conversation.

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