Welcome to Episode 367 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. If you are new to this podcast, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leader.com with your questions, comments, and suggestions for new episodes. You can find more resources at thenonanxiousleaders.com, where you can find out about my coaching practice, the books that I've written, my speaking engagements, and courses that I offer. You can also subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter at the website or at the link in the show notes. Finally, if you'd like to support my work for as little as $5 a month, you can find out more information at the link in the show notes. Thanks in advance for your consideration. Now, without further ado, here is episode 367, a rebroadcast of what exactly is a failure Sphere of nerve, 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. When you do that, that involves change. 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. This bowled me 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 Friedmann 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. 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 Friedmann 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 non-anxious 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. When sabotage occurs, knowingly people will work to undermine what is going on. For example, if a leader has decided to start a new ministry helping people a need in the community. Those in the system who are uncomfortable and who are 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. 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. 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. This actually undermines the energy involved with moving forward with positive change. Friedmann 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. Now that you understand what is sabotage, we can get into what exactly is a failure of nerve. 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. 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 nerve. The other aspect of reactivity is a reactive response. 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. 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 non-anxious presence, to stay focused on where they are headed without getting reactive to be more 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. 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 There's the freedom of choice to either follow or not.

He writes in A Failure of nerve, 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, non-anxious, 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. No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity. Friedmann reminds us that this type of leadership, leadership through self-differentiation, is not only counter intuitive, 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.

Having a coach or having a group of people who see things from a system's 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. 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. At that time, we had two sites. We had a camp and we had a retreat center. The retreat center was an old Georgian mansion that had been restored and had been donated to our annual conference back in 1965. It had been a cherished place for adult retreat ministry for many years. However, it became It was 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, it had lots of beds, and people's preferences were changing to want single and double occupancy rooms, along with a lack of meeting space.

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. 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. These were the people in power in our annual conference who were saying they didn't want to move forward with the vision we believe God had given us. 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 2.

That's it for episode 367. Remember, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com, and you can find more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com. If you If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who would benefit, and please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks in advance for your help. Until next time. Go be yourself.