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

Podcast. And I want to begin by just saying thank you to so many of you who've written me emails,

or just came up to me and approached me by the podcast over the last few months. It's been very encouraging

and wonderful, wonderful. So thank you. Today, our topic is why leadership

matters. Why leadership matters? And actually, my subtitle will be to a discipleship or to a ministry

that deeply changes lives. Jesus said, you know, in the sermon on the mount, you know,

a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear a good fruit. He said it's actually

in Mark 715 as well.

In other words, Jesus says our outside world flows from our inside world. You know what's so

interesting is that for years, I didn't even know I had an interior world. I mean, I couldn't

express it that way. And, you know, if you think about, you know, what keeps folks from

progressing in the inner life or the spiritual life, and as has been said so well, that because we give more attention to the outer world, that is our production, our significance, what we're doing at the expense of our inner world. In other words, we've got an overdeveloped external world of leadership skills, et cetera, and an atrophied or very limited inner world. And when that's the case,

as it was for me, for the first 17 years of my leadership, it's probably like the Titanic. I mean,

we're rearranging chairs on the top of the Titanic, but because our inner life is not in order,

it severely limits what's coming out of us in terms of fruitfulness. And that unawaresness

of what's happening inside of us or deep awareness of it means we're not in reality. And when we're

not in reality, we're not in spirituality. And we're not in spirituality. Our ministries are going to be

very limited. And that's why the wonderful saying is, what you do matters, but who you are matters even more or much more.

Five years ago or six years ago now, I stepped down from being a lead pastor at New Life Fellowship,

where I had founded and led that church for 26 years.

And I done, of course, a lot of thinking over the decades about leadership.

And I saw two extremes.

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