From Pastor to Leader: Mastering Emotions & Growth Through Challenges

So I mean, I know that took a hard left turn when you say, hey, tell me about your new— your PhD. But it was really quite the experience of a life change, you know, if you will.

Hey, go any direction you want to go, Doc, man, you got the floor. So I mentioned this earlier that, you know, you ordained minister and things of that nature. So over your career, you've worn many hats. So tell us about your role as a pastor and how that experience has shaped your approach to leadership and counseling.

So from when I was, uh, I was a youth pastor, then associate, then senior. So in 2000, uh, after I was a youth pastor for 5 years and then shifted to an associate pastor, and that was during the time I was underneath the leader that was really struggling. So a combination of things of one is a lot of negative emotions being under a difficult leader, because you've heard that, you know, people don't leave companies, they leave supervisors. And that over and over and over again. So it's really leadership and those negative emotions produced out of relationships, whatever it may be with a leader, of course, spouse, children, whatever, that the key is that it kind of was revealing to me. So there was victories and then there was defeats. Victory was that I held my emotional maturity and realizing that, look, he's the pastor, he's the leader. I'm not going to in a sense, rebel, but at the same time working through the truth of my opinions, right? Then that, uh, I became a senior pastor. Then as a senior pastor, um, we grew like crazy, but I, it started to kind of reveal in my own heart insecurities, my own insecurities that when people would disagree with stuff or leave the church, I really started to take things personally. And then that led to, you know, eventually after 15 years, and it was overall a wonderful experience. I was at the church for 15 years that I became a Christian as a kid, but After that, it was when I left that church and had a great experience. I gave them a year's notice, but after that is when things started to really show themselves. And in the book, I talk about that I had, um, after that, after I left the church, I was a, you know, pastor at another church just helping out, as well as a counselor.