Hi, my name is Pete Cazaro.

Want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcasts and our title.

The topic today is four words to anchor your leadership in the wilderness of uncertainty.

Four words to anchor your leadership in the wilderness of the uncertainty in which we are living today. COVID-19 pandemic now is in month five.

It looks like it's going to be going on this uncertainty

for at least another six or seven months or longer.

So there have been multiple waves of grief and loss coming over people's lives, sadness, bewilderment, confusion, just so much upheaval so quickly.

And it's a great sense of vulnerability and lack of control.

And yet for you listening and myself, we're leading ministries and nonprofits and teams

and people and families. And the question is, how do we lead through what seems like a wilderness

of such uncertainty and a long wilderness, actually? So as I've been pondering this and thinking

about what's really served me and as I've been talking with other leaders,

I have four words that I'd like to leave you with to ponder that might give you a bit of a structure to come back to as we're in this long wilderness period.

The four words are anchor, season, surrender, and invitation.

Anchor, season, surrender, an invitation. But before it begin, let me just share with you a

Native American truth that Sherry shared with me that a couple of weeks ago, that's also a biblical

truth as well. It simply goes like this, that nothing grows from the outside in, everything grows from the inside out. In other words, think about trees or plants or people. We gestate in the womb of our mothers and trees and plants start from seeds and grow upward and that's true that nothing grows from the

inside out everything grows from the inside nothing grows from the outside in it grows from the

inside out and i shared this with a a leader uh recently and i i texted i said how's your building

project going because they're in the middle of a building project and i said said, if you remember, the building project is not the physical building, it's you.

And if you let God build you from the inside out and go upward, the outside building, stuff will just take care of itself.

And so we'd like to say in emotionally healthy discipleship, you can't give what you do not possess. You can only give what you do possess.

...