Why True Leaders Confront the Elephants in the Room (Part 1)

The Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Newlifefellowship, Religion & Spirituality, Leadership, Richvillodas, Petescazzero, Emotionallyhealthyspirituality, Christianity, Faith, Peterscazzero, Churchleaders, Spirituality, Emotionallyhealthy, Newyork, Pastor

4.8 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

📝 Free Church Culture Assessment: How is your church doing in these 6 core areas? https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/churchhealth

—---------------------------------------------------

Leadership is hard. And confronting the elephants in the room—the inappropriate behaviors, unhealthy patterns, and unresolved tensions we all want to ignore—is even harder.

In today’s episode, I’ll share why true leaders must resist the temptation to avoid these challenges, and why doing so is essential for real discipleship and healthy leadership development. You’ll hear stories from my own failures, lessons from decades of ministry, and biblical wisdom that calls us to courageous, loving leadership.

We’ll talk about why confronting elephants is messy, time-consuming, and uncomfortable—but why it’s also the only way to build a spiritually vibrant, emotionally healthy community. You’ll walk away with hope, a greater sense of purpose, and practical first steps you can take right now.

If you want your church culture to reflect Jesus instead of toxic patterns, this episode is for you.

Don’t miss Part 2, where we’ll go even deeper into why this work is critical for your joy, peace, and lasting fruit.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, my name is Pete Gazzaro. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader
0:08.5	podcast. Our title today is why true leaders confront the elephants in the room. Why true leaders
0:16.7	confront the elephants in the room. Actually, this is a part one of a two-part series in this podcast.
0:23.6	So this is so important that the more I worked on it and thought about it, the more expansive
0:30.0	it became and now it's two parts. Now, the reason it's so important is because it's time-consuming
0:34.9	to acknowledge and expose and confront and deal with elephants in the room.
0:41.0	So we do need some compelling reasons. I'm actually going to give you six, three today and three in the next podcast.
0:46.8	It's also potentially messy, in the short term, at least. It's really messy in the long term if you don't deal with them.
0:53.6	And it also requires a lot of
0:55.9	self-confrontation or self-reflection and inner work on our part who are actually doing
1:01.6	the addressing of the elephant that's in the room. So again, let me just begin by defining
1:07.8	what an elephant in the room means. It's referring to it obviously inappropriate or immature behavior that remains unacknowledged and unaddressed.
1:19.6	So it's some kind of inappropriate, immature behavior that nobody's addressing.
1:24.6	So again, elephants come at all different sizes and shape. So we have small,
1:29.3	little elephants that grow into mid-sized elephants that grow into really big elephants. So let me give
1:35.9	a couple examples of what it looks like at an elephant in the room. So Jacob, well, I just got to be
1:41.1	careful what I say around him because he's very sensitive to criticism.
1:45.2	Now, if I raise any questions about the way that he's overseeing the children's ministry,
1:49.2	I'm afraid he'll quit. And the truth is, it's really hard to get a volunteer to oversee the
1:53.4	children's ministry. And I'm afraid I won't be able to find anybody else to run it as a volunteer
1:59.5	nearly as good as he does.
2:01.6	So I just basically dance around it.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.