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

podcast. And our theme today is revisiting the dark night of leadership. Revisiting the dark

night of leadership. And actually, this emerged out of a conversation I had with two young

leaders, two young pastors from Bulgaria after the conference.

Now, again, we had a summit last week.

We called the Emotionally Healthy Global Discipleship Summit.

And we'd made a decision to shift the way we do a leadership conference each year to focus on discipleship.

We had prerequisites for people to get in.

And we limited the conference to people sitting at tables to 208 people.

And it was a huge decision and a great one because we recognized finally that without solid discipleship,

we're not going to develop leaders long term.

And if anything, leadership development is an intensive discipleship applied at a high level. Now, many of you know the emotionally healthy leader book, and I've read that. And what we're really doing here with

these discipleship courses is moving people to live out their discipleship on a very high level.

And so what was so instructive for me is I met with different leaders from around the world,

when I met with these two young men from Bulgaria, Kayla and Alexander, I met with them

and I answered the conference, I said, how's it going?

What questions are you holding around leadership and your following of Jesus?

And they just started to talk. And what was so

fascinating about it was we had spoken a year earlier. Now, I've known these guys for a few years,

but a year early, we had in somewhat a similar conversation. And their questions were slightly

different, but really in the same vein. So I listened for a while and just took notes

as they shared. And actually, I'm sharing this with permission with you. And so I'm building this

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