“Kia ora, my name is Dan, and I am a pastor in recovery.”
“Recovery from what?”, you might be asking.
Recovery from years of trying to do all of this by myself.
Writers and practitioners on leadership have often spoken about how leadership is a lonely existence. No one else quite gets what it is like to walk in your shoes, and often the result is one of misunderstanding. It can be hard to be in a relationship when you have a leadership power dynamic with another – is it possible to navigate those tricky dual relationships of being both friend and pastor with the same people? After a thousand small cuts, the dream of team collaboration or body-ministry can sometimes die and instead be replaced with a temptation to just push on and do things ourselves, within our own parameters of control so we don’t have to be hurt or let down again.
I don’t know why you might be tempted to lead in isolation, but one thing I am convinced of is that it’s not actually the way it’s meant to be done. It’s not healthy.
And it’s within this unhealthy temptation — this world of “no one else gets it” — that I have good news to share with you.
Some others do get it. You don’t have to do this alone.
Coaching is the work of a person getting alongside another in their walk towards what God is doing in them and their vocational work. It’s to engage in the important conversation that God is having with you about your calling, bringing you to the cutting edge of where your leadership matters most — asking the good questions about what God has said, why we do what we do, and how are we doing at it. It’s to check in and consider if we are actually doing what we are made for – or, if frustration, pain, or distraction has won out, and we are just doing something else in an unhealthy way.
I have experienced many of the accountability relationships that leaders often place themselves in. I have been with spiritual directors and supervisors as a commitment to growth, healing and integrity. But in the last 18 months, I began seeing a coach, and it was this space that has brought my sense of leading well back to the cutting edge for me. I am leading now not out of my reactions to pain or frustration, or a knee-jerk reaction – but out of vision; a vision that was discovered because my coach helped me to slow down, look and see what God had always been saying to me and calling me to do.
As a leader, I had forgotten the horizon, and my coach helped me to look up and see it — and the walk is so much better as a result.
So, don’t lone-wolf it. Find a coach, and start the journey of walking with someone who will care that you are walking well to what matters most.
