Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.

I'm Dr. Dan Allender.

And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen.

We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.

And restoration for the heart.

Thank you for joining us.

Let's get this conversation started.

Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. Well, Rachel, I really enjoyed being interviewed. That was actually fun. And I'm sorry.

I'll just say, I'm sorry for my little defensive beginning, talking about your driving, which is worthy of a lot more conversation, but not in that context. So all to say, to jump into what we're going to engage today is that question of how the intersection of healing and leading have been played out,

not only in my work, but in the Allender Center. And at least to begin with, healing was not

really the central part of my thinking, my work was as a therapist in one realm and as a professor of counseling in another realm.

And as crazy as this sounds, I just didn't see the linkage.

And so probably Larry Krabb and I began a counseling program in Indiana at Grace Theological Seminary in 1982.

I came, or actually 1983, and I came to start my doctoral degree in 1982.

So I had a year to teach.

And during that year, it became incredibly clear with the students I was interacting with.

They didn't have a clue about some of the factors as to how their lives have been shaped and actually

was affecting their ability to work with others. It was a dawning reality. To start with an obvious,

but heartbreaking point, very few counseling programs today, but even then,

almost none, had that notion that you needed to engage your own life in order to be able to work with others.

And that's when I came up with the phrase, you cannot take anyone any further than

you have gone in your own life. And that was said somewhere in that 1981, 1982 basis.

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