{"id":29120,"date":"2022-10-15T11:34:17","date_gmt":"2022-10-15T18:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=29120"},"modified":"2022-10-15T11:34:17","modified_gmt":"2022-10-15T18:34:17","slug":"unstuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/unstuck\/","title":{"rendered":"Unstuck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leadership over the past few years has been in the spotlight from leaders in the home, public office, churches and schools (to name a few) because of our unique challenges in an ever-changing landscape. One thing is for sure there will always be challenges in leadership. In fact, Kouzes and Posner in their book “The Leadership Challenge” say that “The opportunities for leadership are available to all of us every day. Yet today’stoday’s challenges seem so daunting. They make us wonder: ”Are we up to the task?<\/span>[1]<\/span><\/a>\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I can only ask that question from where I sit as an executive pastor of an organization that is growing but not without growing pains. I have been able to help lead our organization through a tough few years, starting back in 2020 (as many leaders had to). When I look back, I used to think those years would be the most challenging years of leadership I would ever have to face, and I couldn’tcouldn’t wait for things to get back to “”normal .” ” That idea of normal never came, and that dream of returning to pre COVID leadership responsibilities has faded. We are in our normal and if this is our normal, what is it about leadership today that seems so hard? I know leadership. I read about it constantly, am certified in it, read all the blogs, listen to all the podcasts, go to all the conferences, and even my undergraduate degree is in leadership, yet I’ve been stuck.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Friedman’sFriedman’s work has helped me to start the process of getting unstuck. His book “A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix,” presents a fresh understanding of leadership that hinges on the idea of leadership being an\u00a0<\/span>emotional process<\/span><\/em>. In his view every family and institution has an implicit emotional\/relational environment and a way of operating within that environment. He presents us with this idea that good leadership has less to do with external items such as skill, data, technique, or knowledge and more to do with internal, the leader’sleader’s ability to discern and navigate the emotional and relational climate of a family or organization.<\/span><\/p>\n

He identifies three emotional barriers that affect genuine leadership in our own day:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Belief that data is more important to leadership than the capacity to be decisive (The fallacy of expertise).<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Belief that empathy for others will make them more responsible (The fallacy of empathy).<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Belief that selfishness is a greater danger to a community than the loss of integrity that comes from having no self (The fallacies of self).<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    While reading this book it helped me identify what I lost during COVID and why leadership has been so hard for me these past few years. I lost my integrity. Now, not integrity in the sense of morality but integrity in the sense that Friedman speaks of “”integrity in the sense of wholeness\u2026<\/span>[2]<\/span><\/a>“” I have been pulled in so many directions since 2020 both internally and externally that I am not leading from a place of self or wholeness. A place that prior to 2020 was no problem for me to do but something happened these last few years that I am just now starting to understand. But to put it shortly, I lost myself while trying to keep everyone and everything else afloat. My ability to be differentiated. Friedman defines differentiation as “the lifelong process of striving to keep one’s being in balance through the reciprocal external and internal processes of self-definition and self-regulation.<\/span>[3]<\/span><\/a>” He goes on to say that differentiation can be difficult to focus on objectively “for differentiation means the capacity to become oneself out of one’s self, with minimum reactivity to the positions or reactivity of others.<\/span>[4]<\/span><\/a>”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Becoming a self differentiated leader is going to take time to master, but it is probably one of the most important “skills” for me to hone and develop and find myself again along the process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/span>[1]<\/span><\/a> Posner, Barry Z., and James M. Kouzes. Essay. In The Leadership Challenge<\/i>, 18. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [2]<\/span><\/a> Friedman, Edwin H., Margaret M. Treadwell, and Edward W. Beal. Essay. In A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix<\/i>, 166. New York: Church Publishing, 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n

    [3]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Ibid 194<\/span><\/p>\n

    [4]<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Ibid 194<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Leadership over the past few years has been in the spotlight from leaders in the home, public office, churches and schools (to name a few) because of our unique challenges in an ever-changing landscape. One thing is for sure there will always be challenges in leadership. In fact, Kouzes and Posner in their book “The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":156,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2347,236],"class_list":["post-29120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp01","tag-friedman","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29121,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29120\/revisions\/29121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}