Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leadership Podcast.

Great to be with you today.

Today is really a part two of the leader spouse with Jerry Skazaro, my lovely wife, who, as I said in the first podcast, she to me has modeled over three decades the kind of qualities and integrity of a leader's spouse that

really could be such a gift to so many of you around the world on how do I function with a leader,

whether it's a corporation, a non-profit, a church, how do I function as a spouse of a high-powered

leader or a leader in general with all the stuff coming at me?

So we're going to pick up from our last conversation on a term Jerry used,

Jerry you used, called secondhand smoke. Why don't you tell us where that term came from and

how a leader spouse gets the secondhand smoke? Yeah, it's one of my favorite images for being

the spouse of a pastor. I had a neighbor growing up who developed emphysema,

which is a lung disease from smoke. The thing is, though, she never smoked. But there were

other smokers in the house. So she developed emphysema from second-hand smoke. And I said, man, that is such a

powerful image for what it feels like to be the spouse of a pastor. As most people know, pastors

have one of the most hazardous professions known in terms of mental health, physical health, emotional health, et cetera.

And by nature of being married to a pastor, the spouse then, it's a hazardous profession as well.

Because they're internalizing a lot of the pressure that comes at the spouse directly, their pastor, husband or wife,

but they're also getting a lot of pressure and invisible stuff coming at them, like, for example,

people's expectations, et cetera, et cetera. And so just really, really important to be aware of the secondhand smoke that you are getting

via your spouse or via people's expectations as one example.

In our case, Pete is a very big external processor. And so I'd get a lot of secondhand

smoke because he just processed everything kind of that was happening at church out loud.

But over the years, we actually learned how to create boundaries around that because I did not

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