Hi, everyone. Welcome to the emotionally healthy leader podcast. Our topic today is the joy and pain of leadership succession. The joy and pains of leadership succession. The reason for this is last month on October 15th,

2025, I actually did my second succession process. I handed over the presidency of emotionally

healthy discipleship and laid hands on my successor, who is Drew Young, someone I've known

for 24 years. And so he is now the new

president. And I'm going to talk about this in some detail today. Before I do, however,

let me mention a wonderful resource for you that we're going to be talking about a leadership

culture, creating a healthy leadership culture, what that looks like.

And I want to recommend to you, you may not finish this podcast because you're driving or whatever.

There's a great free e-book called Leadership, and where I take the emotionally healthy leader book

and I put it in chart form, each of the chapters, the standard way we do leadership culture over

and against what I call the emotionally healthy way. And it's in this ebook called leadership.

Just go to emotionally healthy.org slash leadership. That's emotionally healthy.org

slash leadership. And it's kind of a quick way, Cliff Notes, to get into the core of the book,

the emotionally healthy leader, which of course I will highly recommend that you read.

Now, I've never seen a great succession prior to my own first succession in 2013.

I seen a lot of bad successions in churches. I actually experienced a couple and the fallout,

the years of wandering in the desert of a ministry from just poor succession processes.

And so after, again, I was a lead pastor for 26 years at New Life. And I remember all the whole

time thinking the most important I can do here, one of the most

important things I can do is hand this over well. So it has a future in the next generation,

the generation after that, because I saw it as stewardship. I mean, here was people had invested

in our case, millions of dollars. We bought a six and a half million dollar building in,

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