Good Limits vs. Bad Limits: How Wise Leaders Know the Difference

The Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Newlifefellowship, Religion & Spirituality, Leadership, Richvillodas, Petescazzero, Emotionallyhealthyspirituality, Christianity, Faith, Peterscazzero, Churchleaders, Spirituality, Emotionallyhealthy, Newyork, Pastor

4.8 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After 30 years of wrestling with the tension between vision and limitation, I’ve come to see that how we handle limits can make—or break—our leadership. In this episode, I explore the subtle but powerful difference between good and bad limits. Bad limits are driven by fear, faulty thinking, and self-protection. But good limits? They’re gifts from God—meant to ground us, guide us, and grow us.

You’ll hear how ignoring God’s limits nearly cost me everything: my marriage, my leadership, my soul. But when we stop trying to be God and instead embrace the limits He gives us, we begin to see Him in ways we never could have imagined.

I’ll share practical ways you can discern the difference and walk in the freedom of wise, Spirit-led boundaries. This episode is both personal and pastoral—meant to help you lead from a deeper place.

Listen now—and rediscover the God who meets you right in the middle of your limits.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. My name is Pete Scuzaro. I want to welcome you today to the emotionally healthy
0:08.5	leader podcast. Our topic today is good limits versus bad limits and how wise leaders know the difference.
0:18.2	Now, I've been thinking about this theological issue of limits,
0:22.8	nuanceing it, deepening it for now almost 30 years. So my thinking has, in a sense, grown over
0:30.4	these years. And actually, it began, when I began this whole journey, we call emotionally
0:37.3	healthy discipleship.
0:38.5	Actually, it was one of the foundational theological themes that shifted my whole life.
0:43.8	Because I realized that so much of my life was about ignoring God's gift of limits.
0:48.2	And I was actually trying to be God, make everything happen.
0:51.0	Because I was raised just like probably many of you listening in Western
0:54.8	culture in one of the major cities here in the United States, New York, my parents, my grandparents,
1:00.1	the United States. Basically, the message was, you can do anything, go for it, and reach for the
1:06.0	sky, which I did. Then I came to Christ, and the Christian subculture was actually not very different.
1:11.7	It was all the models were going it, going forward, making it, working hard.
1:17.5	The Great Commission was burnout for God to reach the world for Jesus.
1:20.7	In fact, the examples that I studied throughout history, I think of my training as a leader
1:25.4	and seminary and all that.
1:26.8	So many of the leaders were folks that ignored any kind of theology of limits
1:32.8	and conferences, books, leadership training, all of that.
1:39.5	And add to that that I was a visionary, a dreamer.
1:42.5	I see opportunities.
1:46.9	In fact, I've been told more than once that I will probably die with five or ten new creative ideas. So I've got lots of vision
	...

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