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Welcome to episode 260 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you that the Friedman's failure of Nerve book study starts on Tuesday, January 16 at 07:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This free nine session book study is going to dive into Friedman's book a Failure of Nerve, which is the one that he actually never finished, and his family members and colleagues finished it for him after he passed away.

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On a side note, I think you know I've been studying family systems theory for many years, but it was a failure of nerve back in 2015 that actually inspired me to write my first book, anxious church anxious people how to lead change in an age of anxiety. So to get you primed up for the Friedman's failure of Nerve Book study, I'm doing a two part episode on the topic. I'll put a link in the show notes with more information about this free book study, as well as how to sign up. So without further ado, here is episode 260. What exactly is a failure of nerve?

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Part one of two leadership involves change. By definition, when you are leading, you are trying to move a relationship system, whether it is a family, a congregation, or an organization, to a better place. You're trying to get better. You're trying to find a new future, a preferred future. And when you do that, that involves change.

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If you are not leading, if you're not trying to seek a better future, then you are managing. There is nothing wrong with managing. We need people to manage things so that we can get things done. But the primary role of the leader is to look into the future. I think I've mentioned this before, but early on in my role as executive director of a camp and retreat ministry, I went to a workshop where they said a leader should be spending 85% of their time in the future.

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This bowled me over because I was thinking, how can I spend that much of my time thinking about the future? I'm spending most of my time trying to get things done in the present. Even so, the concept stuck with me because I realized, as Friedman had said, that leadership through self differentiation is about a leader knowing where they are headed, knowing their goals and values for themselves, and for the relationship system so that they can move towards that preferred future. The challenge here is that because leadership by definition involves change, it will upset the homeostasis of the system. It will change the equilibrium.

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It will make the least mature, the least differentiated feel uncomfortable. They will wittingly or unwittingly, work to restore the homeostasis. And this is what Friedman defines as sabotage. To understand a failure of nerve, one has to first understand sabotage because it is this point where a leader must be able to maintain a nonanxious presence. It is when sabotage occurs that a leader must be able to persist, must be able to stay focused on their goals so that they can move forward.

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When sabotage occurs, knowingly, people will work to undermine what is going on. So, for example, if a leader has decided to start a new ministry helping people in need in the community, those in the system who are uncomfortable and who are at least mature will start to do things like try to undercut the financing for it, or try to reverse the decision that was made, or try to tell people behind the leader's back not to attend, not to help out. They might even go directly to the leader and say that they are ruining the congregation. A more subtle form of sabotage is when the least mature, when the resistant, when the anxious, create triangles. So instead of taking responsibility for their own feelings and talking directly about their discomfort, they actually focus on something else, a third person or issue.

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So in this case, they might focus on the pastor's preaching or the number of visits that the pastor makes. This forum of sabotage gets the leader to focus on other content, on other topics, to try to defend themselves and defend their position. And this actually undermines the energy involved with moving forward with positive change. Friedman says, if you are a leader, then you should expect sabotage. In fact, he goes so far as to say, if you are not experiencing sabotage, you are not leading.

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So now that you understand what is sabotage, we can get into what exactly is a failure of nerve.

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When the inevitable sabotage occurs. In a relationship system, in a family, congregation, or organization, the leader is faced with a choice. Stay focused on their own functioning or react to the functioning of others, especially the most anxious, the most resistant. This is where the two facets of reactivity, adaptivity or reactivity come in. When a leader is facing sabotage, one response is to be adaptive, that is, to just give in, to back off.

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That is definitely a failure of nerve, where instead of moving forward and persisting in the leadership effort, the leader decides it's not worth it and says to themselves, I'm just going to give in to the togetherness pressure. I'm going to let the anxious people have their way. Adaptivity can be more of an automatic response as well, where the leader is just unable to take a healthy stand and finds it's the only way they can keep the peace. It's pretty easy to understand how this is a failure of nerve. The other aspect of reactivity is a reactive response.

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It's getting defensive, it's getting aggressive. It's arguing the content of the situation with the most anxious and resistant. And this is a conflict of wills. If the leader spends time trying to convince those who can't be convinced that they should agree with the leader, then they are going to get stuck in a conflict of wills. It's important to note that this doesn't necessarily have to happen with the actual change initiative.

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Remember that there could be a triangle. For example, somebody is criticizing the pastor's preaching, and when the pastor starts to get defensive, starts to get involved with arguing, well, my preaching is good, and look how many hours I spent on this. That is still reactivity. The challenge for the leader when they are experiencing sabotage is to remain a nonanxious presence, to stay focused on where they are headed without getting reactive or adaptive, and to remain emotionally connected, especially to the most anxious and resistant. I think of Stephen Covey's concept of integrity in the moment of choice when I think of the opposite of a failure of nerve.

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Integrity and self differentiation are essentially the same. If integrity is acting in accordance with your values, self differentiation is doing that in the midst of surrounding togetherness pressure in the midst of sabotage, in the midst of pressure to conform to other people's norms. What is radical about Friedman's approach to leadership is that a leader isn't somebody who's telling others what to do. A leader isn't somebody who's trying to convince other people that the leader is right and they must follow, they must agree. Instead, the leader is somebody who is focused on their own functioning, focused on what they truly believe and where God is leading, and then giving others the freedom of choice to either follow or not.

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He writes in a failure of nerver "I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals, and therefore someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, nonanxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing. It is not as though some leaders can do this and some cannot.

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No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity." Friedman reminds us that this type of leadership, leadership through self differentiation, is not only counterintuitive, it is difficult for even the most differentiated. I think this is helpful because it tells us that we can improve, we can get better at this, that if we pay attention, if we focus on our own functioning, if we do our own work, then we are able to better differentiate in the midst of that anxiety that swirls around us. That's why I believe that we shouldn't do this alone.

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Having a coach or having a group of people who see things from a systems perspective to help you to figure out how you can function in healthy ways in the midst of sabotage is so important. When you improve your own ability to differentiate in your family of origin, you improve your capacity to lead through self differentiation in your family, congregation, or organization.

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I'm going to close this episode with my own experience of trying to lead change in a denominational setting. I took over as the executive director of our camp and retreat ministries for our annual conference back in 2000, and at that time we had two sites, we had a camp and we had a retreat center. And the retreat center was an old georgian mansion that had been restored and had been donated to our annual conference back in 1965, and it had been a cherished place for adult retreat ministry for many years. However, it became clear that this retreat center had many issues, including the fact that it was an aging building that had higher maintenance expenses. Because it was a restored mansion, it had large bedrooms that had lots of beds, and people's preferences were changing to want single and double occupancy rooms along with the lack of meeting space.

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We developed a master plan to try to improve the property to address some of these things, but it became clear that we were going to have trouble with zoning in the county in which this retreat center was located. So ultimately we decided that we would want to sell the retreat center and use that money to build a new retreat center on the camp property, which was only about 20 miles away and had plenty of space. It had 275 acres. After working through our board and then the annual conference, we got approval to sell the retreat center, and in the spring of 2005 we were about to settle on the sale when I got called in to meet with the cabinet. Along with our two board co chairs.

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The cabinet included the bishop and our district superintendents, the people who supervise our clergy and manage our different districts in the annual conference, along with our director of connectional ministries, the chief program officer. In that meeting, each of the district superintendents shared how they did not want us to build a new retreat center. They did want us to sell the retreat center, but then take the money and use it as an endowment to fund retreats at hotels around our region. Interestingly, the bishop, who had only been our bishop for about six months, and the director of connectional ministries, who was my boss, remained silent. I have to tell you that this was one of the most anxious leadership situations I've ever experienced.

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These were the people in power in our annual conference who were saying they didn't want us to move forward with the vision we believe God had given us. And this occurred just two years after the annual conference had voted to approve to sell the retreat center to build a new one at the camp. I'll cover what happened next in part two. That's it for episode 260, a bit of a cliffhanger. Never done that before.

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Hopefully you don't mind and you'll come back for episode 261 to hear what happened. I'm also going to dig into more of the book of a failure of nerve to describe characteristics of a chronically anxious system and what is the opposite? What are the characteristics of a healthy system? Don't forget that you can find more information in the show notes about how to sign up for Friedman's failure of nerve, our nine week study that is free. You can also connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com and you can email me at jack@christian-leaders.com.

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Until next time, thanks and goodbye.