When John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart came out 20 years ago, it struck a chord that continues to reverberate decades later about the message men and women most need to hear.
John talks about his own unsustainable pace, what the internet is doing to our souls, and how to live your life at a pace your soul can sustain.
Welcome to Episode 355 of the podcast. Listen and access the show notes below or search for the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and listen for free.
Plus, in this episode’s What I’m Thinking About segment, Carey talks about some things he’s sensing leaders are thinking about this summer.
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Episode Links
The Unstuck Group
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the rapid changes and decisions that need to be made right now as a ministry leader? My team at Connexus just wrapped up another strategic planning session with Tony Morgan at The Unstuck Group to clarify where we’re going in this season and how we’ll get there. I can’t recommend their coaching enough. We’ve used them again and again because their practical, proven approach actually works.
If you want to get a taste, The Unstuck Group is hosting an exclusive 1-Day Masterclass on July 30th on key shifts churches need to make because of the Coronavirus. It’s $99, and you’ll walk away with action steps and clarity around what needs to change to thrive in the post-pandemic world. My listeners get free access to Lesson One from the Masterclass Guidebook.
Download your copy and learn more at theunstuckgroup.com/carey
ServeHQ
ServeHQ offers two online subscription software tools for churches—TrainedUp and HuddleUp. These tools are used to equip and engage your church no matter where they are. With the ability to send highly engaging mass video text messages and video emails, your church will always be in the loop and know what’s going on. Their safe chat feature lets you stay in direct contact with your people without worrying about inappropriate private communications. It’s like a smart private social platform for your church members and volunteers.
And, they just launched a brand new feature called Followups that is included with all accounts in both TrainedUp and HuddleUp. This feature can automate messages, training, and followup task assignment for every followup workflow in your church. Followups is a simple-to-use automated followup system that allows you to create a time-delayed sequence of actions or tasks. It allows you to send drip emails or text messages from HuddleUp, automatically enroll users in courses on a schedule in TrainedUp, or automatically assign followup tasks to staff and volunteers to complete manually.
Check out ServeHQ at servehq.church and get a free, no-obligation 14-day trial account
CONVERSATION LINKS
Wild at Heart by John Eldredge
Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge
Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge
How Many Friends Does One Person Need? by Robin Dunbar
Text CAREY 33777 to join more than 70,000 subscribers to our leadership content
What Church Leaders are (Really) Thinking in 2020 by Carey Nieuwhof
3 INSIGHTS FROM JOHN
1. There’s a masculinity crisis in the world today, and a lack of fathers
John’s classic New York Times bestselling book Wild At Heart struck a massive chord when it was released and has continued to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to this day. Why are so many people interested in the book? John says that it’s a response to the fatherlessness in our world.
To point out how big the need is, John said that, statistically, half of Carey’s listening audience grew up in broken homes where there wasn’t a supportive father. This has left a huge void in the soul of each and every kid that grows up in one of those homes. If you want to make a difference in the world, combating fatherlessness would be a great start.
2. The expectations you set on yourself ultimately get passed on to your team
Like most of you reading this, John is a high capacity leader. And for many years, he ran at a pace that he expected from himself, but would never ask of his team. He thought those high expectations of himself only affected him. He’s since learned that isn’t true.
He’s learned that the expectations you set on yourself as a leader ultimately get passed on to your team. When you’re sending emails at 8:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., and all hours of the weekend, you are communicating an expectation for your team to do the same. When John realized he was doing this, he began to work through a complete culture-shift as a company so that he wasn’t leading his team into burnout.
3. The human soul is village-sized
There is a lot of evidence showing that the human soul is village-sized. We were only designed to live with, care about, and share the pain of a small group of people. And that’s how humans have functioned for thousands of years. But now that we have global 24-hour news and social media, there seems to always be a new major catastrophe to care about. While it’s great to care about those tragedies, our souls can only take so much.
As a result of this “compassion fatigue” we get from the news, we are much more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression. Our souls are being overloaded with trauma and never getting time to heal. John encourages us to pause and put up boundaries between ourselves and the tragedies of the outside world. If we don’t, we’ll begin to neglect ourselves and our village around us.
Quotes from Episode 355
The way I treat my heart and my soul is the way I will end up treating everyone else's. @johneldredge Click To Tweet You want to be a more loving person? Care for your soul. You want to be more creative? Care for your soul. You want to make a difference in the world? Care for your soul. @johneldredge Click To Tweet You were never meant to be subject to an insane pace of life with no downtime, to being over connected in technology, and to being subject to the heartache of the entire world. @johneldredge Click To Tweet Everything depends on the health of your soul. @johneldredge Click To Tweet No one and nothing in the world is going to tell you to take care of your soul. @johneldredge Click To Tweet Let beauty back into your life and into your soul because it will heal you in ways that you didn't even know you needed healing. @johneldredge Click To Tweet Disconnected loneliness and the hopelessness is really getting people into this spiral of anxiety and depression because they're connected in the wrong ways. @johneldredge Click To Tweet Women can survive career setbacks that absolutely destroy men, because they're not looking to their career for validation. @johneldredge Click To Tweet Never quit on a bad day @cnieuwhof Click To Tweet Take a break, because leaders who never take a break end up breaking. @cnieuwhof Click To Tweet Fatigue is a terrible decision maker. @cnieuwhof Click To TweetRead or Download the Transcript for Episode 355
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Next Episode: Dharius Daniels
Dharius Daniels is one of the best communicators in America today. In this interview, we talk about the key to excellent communication, learning leadership the hard way, and how to lead and live with greater relational intelligence.
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