"I Don't Want to Be That Guy": Chuck DeGroat on Shame, Burnout, the Limits of Spiritual Disciplines and the Nervous System

- The art of leadership network. - I think there's not just fear, there's shame. What have I done and who am I? Like that I was capable of doing this over the course of the last 20 years, you know? And then like I'll hear things like Chuck, I was the pastor that staff liked, that I was the one that they came to, I was the one that they trusted. And now I'm the one that, you know that, like I fear that they're, I'll just say it out loud, then, you know, they're gonna report me to the Royce report. You know, this is what I do all the time. Like I don't want to be that guy. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Keri New Hoff Leadership Podcast. Today, Chuck DeGroat is back on the podcast. You ever think to yourself, I don't want to be that guy, I don't want to be that church leader, I don't want to be that woman, shame, burnout. In the limits of spiritual disciplines, what is the impact of leadership on the nervous system? And so much more. We go there. How do you know as a young leader that you might be headed for crisis? What happens if the empire you built is crumbling, what role do character and charisma play in leadership? We explore all those things today on the podcast. If you're new here, you're interested in topics like this, make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you're watching, wherever you're listening and I really warm welcome to all of you. Chuck DeGroat is a licensed therapist, specializing in pastoral and leadership health, spiritual abuse and religious trauma. He serves as a professor of counseling and Christian spirituality and founding director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Western Theological Seminary. I think you're really gonna enjoy this episode. So without further ado, my conversation with Chuck DeGroat. Chuck, it's good to have you back and we're on a recurrent theme both in your ministry and on this podcast. We're gonna drill down on challenges with character that a lot of leaders are having. You had I think a huge impact with your book on when narcissism comes to church. I know we did a really great conversation. I'd love to know what made you focus in on character at something I'm thinking about, you know, through 31 years into church leadership now, you know, in different capacities, 20 as a lead pastor, 11 doing this. Yeah. Character just seems to be front and center. Like if I don't watch that, I'm dead man. Like, I don't know what's made you really think about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad it's front and center. My sense was that for a long time, you know I'm a therapist, you know that, but therapy, spiritual practices and things like that have become front and center. And well, I remember a time back in the late 90s when I became, you know, an ordained minister in a licensed therapist that I hoped that therapy and spiritual practices would be, would grow in terms of their prevalence and their impact and influence. But I guess I wondered, particularly after the narcissism book, are people really changing? Are people really being transformed? And that's some of what animated this book a lot of people have asked me over the years, can people really change? From the most difficult folks, you know, people who are diagnosably narcissistic to, you know, the rest of us who might not be diagnosed with some personality disorder, but we're just stuck, you know, we're not sure how to get out of a particular pattern. And so I wanted to take a positive turn. I mean, I think in some ways the narcissism book was a diagnostic, but I also. We all thought we were a narcissist there for about 10 minutes. - Yeah, well. - Thank you. - And maybe we are. It took some self-reflection to write that book about my own patterns, right? So it's like, I wanted to take a positive turn and think about, how do we grow and change? - That's very Dallas Willardy, right? Your greatest gift is who you're becoming. - Yeah. - That is the journey. So let's talk about character. I've always, well, I'm not always thought, I'm learned. One of the greatest dangers for me anyway is if my platform got bigger than my character, that terrifies me. And that almost happened prior to my burnout 20 years ago. And then there was a total rewiring of my inside. And a lot of that was focused on character growth. - Let me ask you this way. I'm kind of rambly today. Is character growth spiritual growth? Is spiritual growth character growth? Like, how do they interact? 'Cause I look at my last 20 years and there's been, I think a lot of both. And I'm like, I would not have been able to handle the influence that I have been given today with the character development I had in my 30s. I think I would have been a headline and roadkill and a casualty. And so I'm not saying I have exemplary character, I am saying it has been active development for me now. And I'm trying to make sure that my character development outpaces any platform development. - Yeah. Well, you did the interior work. You've told me a little bit about this before. And I don't know your whole story, but it feels significant. Like you had the kind of story that a lot of us mine happened about 15 years ago when I landed in the hospital. And so these moments that wake us up and invite us to do the interior work, which by the way, isn't the invention of modern-day psychology. I mean, go back to St. Augustin, the first-ever autobiographer, nine chapters of his own stuff, his own addictions. It's worked that I think we're all invited to do, but in this sort of fast-paced, efficient, speed-driven kind of Christian culture that we live in, it's often what's left behind because it's slow. It's necessarily slow work. And so I think what ends up happening through the burnout, through the hospitalization, is it necessarily slows us down. And reorient us in a particular kind of way. And it isn't it interesting that it often, for a lot of us, I'm 56 now, it happens close to midlife, you know, where, as Thomas Merton said, we climb the ladder only to realize that we've propped it up against the wrong wall. And so there is this kind of awakening this realization that often comes through significant challenges, burnout, hospitalizations, diagnosis, and more. - Yeah, you kind of wish there didn't have to be a crisis. For, we do have a lot of next-gen leaders listening to this show watching it. For those who are in their 30s, what should they be looking for? What should be the signs? - Yeah, maybe we should just say manufacturer crisis of some kind before it happens to you, right? But, you know, what should you be looking for? I mean, I think what you're inviting even in the question is just pay attention, pay attention to your life. You're probably operating at a speed that doesn't allow that. And that's what I find. You know, I do these five day intensives with pastors and leaders of all different stripes. And what they'll so often say is I just, I didn't pay attention. I read that one book. You know that one book by Pete Scazero? That one book by Steve Buster, whoever, right? But I didn't slow down long enough to pay attention to what was happening beneath the surface. And that's the interesting thing. And I get into some of these dynamics around the nervous system. But the reality is is that I'll have leaders come in and they'll say, I'm not anxious. Like I'm the least anxious guy. Look, I get on the stage and I can speak in front of thousands. And yet their nervous systems are in chronic dysregulation, which is to say they learned a long, long time ago to operate at a particular kind of speed in a particularly kind of braced way, vigilant way. And so I want them to slow down long enough to notice. But as you know, most of us don't take the time to do that. Or we feel like we can't afford that time. Or we feel like we're going to get in trouble if we step away for a sabbatical. I was just talking to a pastor a couple hours ago. And he's just getting back from sabbatical. And his biggest fear is, well, they think I was lazy for doing it. Yes, literally had an eight weeks sabbatical. And he's like, they're all going to critique me for being too lazy for taking time away. And so we worry about these kinds of things. I wish it wasn't all on us. I wish the church systems that we were in. I wish our denominational cultures prized a slower formation. But they don't often prize that kind of formation. When somebody shows up at one of your five day intensives, what usually brings them there? Are people doing it like for an annual checkup? Or it's like, here come the flames I'm going down. Like what do you see typically? Well, sometimes they're in flames. And sometimes they've decided to come because they're in crisis. Sometimes it's their denomination. It's their press material. It's their diocese, whatever context they're in. They get referred, right? They need to come. And those are some of the toughest ones. But there are many who are-- maybe they listen to your podcast. And if they read your work. And they have this sense that maybe it's time-- I'm 35, maybe it's time-- I sat with a guy who was 32 last week. And I loved it because he's still young enough to be sort of malleable. And yet he's just beginning to rub against the hard edges of ministry and experience a little bit of the cynicism that comes with some-- about some of the hardships and some of the, and so we had some things to talk about. He's not at a point of crisis, and so we were able to do enough work, and then we'll see what happens over the next few years, but it's sort of like I take people as they come, and I find that usually the folks who engage the work at the deepest level are the ones who have had the rug pulled out from under them. They are turned upside down, and they don't, they're at a place where they, it's like I don't have anything more to lose. You know, I maybe I've lost my ministry or my marriage, or and so there's more of a willingness there. - What are some of the signs for leaders at any age, but I'm thinking particularly of younger leaders. I ignored the signs for a long time. In my 30s, it was my wife who says, look, you need to go to counseling or this isn't gonna work out. It was a mentor of mine who tricked me into doing some of my, it was called Pastors of Excellence, the program. He goes, carry, you need to come. I really trust Chuck, I still do. And I'm like, well, excellence, yes, I need that. I need more of that. Look at how fast our church is growing. And then it turned out to be a whole journey of the soul. And if Chuck wasn't there and it wasn't a five-hour drive from Ohio back to where I lived, I probably would have just walked out that first night. Needless to say, it began to unearth, started to do the work that needed to be done, the interhealing, the reflection, the change, the transformation. And now I see it as a gift, but at the time, I just rolled my eyes 'cause I was smarter than that. I was better than that. I was stronger than that. So for leaders who are like dysregulated nervous system, nah, this is great. I'm doing great. Like, what are some of the subtle signs that you need to be looking for before the house is on fire or your wife says you need to go to council? - Yeah, it's really interesting 'cause I think you just named one of them that sense that you could do it alone, that you don't need unity, that you don't need others, that you don't need a mirror of relationship, people in your life, a community of folks who say, this is what we see in you. That's one thing that I see over and over again. - I see. - So the fact that you don't think you need it is a sign that you need it. - Right. That's what you're saying? - Yeah, I think so. - Yeah. - I mean, that's exactly when people sit on that couch over there and they're two days into a five day intensive. That's when I hear the truth. That's when they say, I really thought I could do this on my own. I really thought that all of that stuff that people have written or people's name about ministry or pastoral health or the formation was for other people. I thought I was immune to it. So that's one of the things. I think what they begin to notice is that the anxiety grows. I think this is the myth is that I'm a 25 year old and I'm just graduated from seminary. Pretty anxious, but when I'm 40 in ministry, I won't be as anxious, right? - I'm just wondering. - You know this, right? You're laughing because you know in the body that the anxiety grows. The responsibility grows. There are more eyes on you. You're the target of those Monday morning emails. And so there's a lot of tricks. You've done everything you can do on your own to solve it and it just gets worse. Yeah. - That's it. That connects back to I've tried to do it on my own, right? And so you begin to notice some of that so the anxiety grow. You begin to notice some of your own contradictions. You begin to see the, this is the person I want to be. But then at times this is the guy I show up as or the woman I show up as in the office, you know, and so some of the pervasive reactivity shows up that maybe lies dormant, maybe your spouse sees it, but now it's starting to come out and others are beginning to see it. And so I think there's some subtle things that come out. It doesn't take a moral failure. And that's what I always say to these younger pastors. You know, don't wait for the massive moral failure. You know, it takes these just noticing those contradictions, noticing that the anxiety is growing, noticing that you're pulling away, you know, Sunday mornings because that particular person is someone who's said hard things to you, noticing that you're drinking a little bit more in the evenings. Those kinds of things are the things that we should be watching out for. You talked about noticing growing anxiety. I am wonderfully in denial on that. To some extent, even to today, and my ororing really helps me figure out how I'm doing, I'm obviously much more aware of it now than I was 20, 30 years ago. But yeah, I just thought stress was normal, lack of sleep was normal, drive was normal, push, push, push. All of that defined my 30s. And like you said at the beginning, there's some people are like, what do you mean? I'm very relaxed, this is great. But you're saying their body has adapted to this unsustainable pace. So how would somebody listening know that there might be anxiety present or something that isn't sustainable when they think it's totally sustainable? - Yeah, yeah, well, first I wanna say, I think any probably agree with this, the systems tell us that that pace is normal, you know? I mean, just the way we've come to sort of expect pastures, so the pace we expect them to work at, you know, what's normal, that's a problem in and of itself. And I wonder how we steer the ship in a different direction. But say the question again about the anxiety, what? - Yeah, well, how would I even know if I think I'm not a very anxious person? - Yeah, I think I'm cool. 'Cause you've had those people sitting there and you're like, I see it. - Yeah, well, that takes a little bit more work. I wish there was something that I could point to that would be sort of an easy tell. But I'm, yeah, I was just having a conversation with a very large church pastor who I spent a little time with just today and he said, you know, anxiety from, what I learned about anxiety was that I studied Boenningham family systems and I learned that anxiety exists in systems and I learned about triangulation and I learned about differentiation and things like this. But I never, no one ever told me that from a very early age, my nervous system learned dysregulation or what we call sympathetic activation as normal. Grow up in a ministry family, grow up thinking, this is just the pace that we go at, grow up with certain expectations. And so what he was saying is I didn't have anyone in my life who oriented me to what I call home or what Paul in Ephesians 3 calls that rooted and grounded place in his great prayer. He prays for rooted and grounded lives. And so it's like I had no one to apprentice me in groundedness. And so that's the piece that I often see as significant as I'm sitting with these pastors and it's like, is there any other speed to go at? And so as we begin to reflect on what it might look like to live in a way that's a little bit different, tears come to their eyes because it's like, oh, but I don't know that. No one's ever told me about that beautiful land that's undiscovered country for me. And I'm just hanging out here on the hamster wheel, going, going, going, and then falling flat on my face. And so what ends up happening is I do a little bit of, I do a little bit of description of how the nervous system works. And as these guys begin to listen and pay attention, it's a little bit of a psychoeducational angle that I work with. As I give them some of the basics of the human nervous system, there's this sense that, oh, I don't know what that home place is that you're talking about, Chuck. What I do know is vigilance. What I do know is being braced in every meeting that I go into. What I do know are those digestive symptoms that people call IBS, that I can't seem to get rid of. What I do know is this chronic exhaustion on Sunday evenings or at the end of weeks, where it just feels like I'm numb and I can't get myself up. That's those are the kinds of things we begin to pay attention to. I call that the dashboard. We pay attention to the signals on the dashboard to tell us something about what's happening in our autonomic engine below. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Global Christian Relief. For a lot of us, the persecuted church can feel pretty distant. But the Global Church isn't an idea. It's not a concept. It's a family. And when one part of the body suffers, we don't get to stay spectators. We're called to action. So I want to tell you about a nonprofit. You should know about Global Christian Relief. This organization is led by Brian Orm. Brian's been a friend for over a decade. And I'm thankful for the way he leads GCR because he's helping our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ know that they're not alone. GCR supports our Global Church family in places where following Jesus carries a real cost. Places like Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, India, Iran, and many more. GCR brings Scripture to people where it's restricted. It provides emergency relief when crisis hits and supports the church long term so it can remain and grow stronger. When you support the Global Church, you're not just supporting a cause. You're standing with your brothers and sisters with your family. Global Christian Relief is doing some really impactful work. I would love for you to check them out. All you have to do is go to gcreleaf.org. That's gcreleaf.org. Let's talk a little bit more about the home sensation you're talking about. I've been thinking about that in the conversation. context of some of role, role hyzers, writings on dark nights of the soul and spiritual maturity. I don't know that I'm experiencing home. I think I feel home more than I have. I'll give you a very tangible example. So this weekend, we're doing this on a Monday. This weekend we had a family event on Saturday night that led me to go to bed at, I don't know, 10, 30, 11, which is later than I normally go. And then we had church on Sunday and then my wife was speaking at a church about an hour away and we went up with friends, had dinner with them, then heard her speak at the evening service and drove back, dropped off our friends, didn't get to bed till 11, 30. Old me would have had the alarm at 4, 45, 5 a.m. Go, go, go. I'm like, I don't live that way anymore. And I slept until 8 a.m., I was really surprised. And I feel great today. But old me would have just pushed, pushed, pushed and been very tired heading into this interview. No, me is, I've got this much time for work today, I've this much, I want to bring my best energy, I'm going to give it and then I'm going to do other life giving things tonight to quote our good friend Steve Cuss. And my capacity expands when I do that. I don't know that that's home or what, like what is home? Yeah, I think you just used to port more expansive capacity is what I would describe as home. And it's something that can be grown. I think the mistake that we've made is we've turned this into a set of practices or behaviors that you're supposed to do to be a little bit more centered, a little bit more calm or a little bit more stable. So walk the labyrinth or take a sabbatical or practice contemplative prayer. I want to say all those things are helpful, but you're just, if you're not aware of what's going on underneath in that autonomic engine that I just mentioned, you may be laying practices onto a dysregulated nervous system. And so what I first want to do is I want to, what we call, increase our window of tolerance, which is analogous to home. I want to expand your home. I want to increase your square footage. Let's just say if you're in a turtle home, right? So you're working with like a hundred square feet right now. Let's get you to a thousand. Let's get you to three thousand. What does that mean? That doesn't mean that you're living in perpetual like Zen calm. We all, you know, if you're in ministry, you will experience seasons that are fuller than others. When I was in pastoral ministry, my body, you know, would ramp up and advent into Christmas, you know, and then back again, it lented to Easter and there's seasons where you feel a little bit more revved up in seasons where you can sort of step back. But if you can increase this window of tolerance and this takes some practice, this takes some stretching. It's like stretching new muscles of the nervous system. What ends up happening is that your tanks, not perpetually unempty, you might go down to half a tank or something like that, but you can sort of find your way back more quickly. And then what people will say is, oh, that hard thing, like I got that email on Monday morning from that person always sends emails on Monday morning, but it didn't clobber me like so many of the emails tend to clobber me. That's what we call resilience. And so what we're doing is we're growing resilience. We're not making it about do this behavior over here. Take this sabbatical or just practice this thing on Saturdays or like let's grow your capacity, not so that you can do more, more, more, more, more, but so that you can be more resilient in the midst of the everyday stresses of life. Yeah. That's really interesting. I was finishing up a sermon. I'm preaching in California in a few weeks this morning and I had tackled that last week and it was technically internal deadline due last week and I love to hit my deadlines. But I thought I haven't got the frame of mind to really do it excellently. And so this morning, having had eight or nine hours sleep, I got up and it was so easy to put together. I mean, sermons are never easy, but you know what I mean? I had a clarity. I wouldn't have had had I cheated sleep or tried to cram it in at the end of a very full week before the weekend. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Because I found that capacity, like my need for rest, thought and downtime continues to go up as I get older, not down. Yeah. I mean, I think you're naming it as your own experience and that's exactly what I asked for when I sit with these pastors, you know, like what's your own experience of home? Like how have you noticed yourself in that place where you just feel more capacious and more resilient? And they'll tell me stories like they, we all have stories of, yeah, there was one pastor I was talking to who's a little bit embarrassed to say it out loud and I was like, come on, you can tell me. And he's like, well, for me, it's in a deer stand and I was like, well, it's a witch. A deer stand? And I was like, well, I grew up on Long Island, New York, you're going to have to educate this guy, you know, I've lived in cities a lot of my life. And he's like, well, I just like, for me, it's the quiet of, of a morning. I go up into my stand and I'm, I like to hunt and I do it maybe a couple times a year. And that's where I, I breathe because you know, he's connected to his, this is an interesting piece we haven't really talked about is he's connected to his breath. And when I asked about that, he said, oh, yeah, in ministry, I live kind of like this. Like, all the time, and he said up in the deer stand, I'm connected to my breathing because it helps him to calm down and be present. And I was like, what if you were able to take that and bring that into sermon planning and writing, into your staff meeting and, and again, tears down his face like I'd never even thought about that. I mean, and what was sad to him is like, I ought to be able to show up in ministry with that kind of presence. And yet it's up in a deer stand where I experience that, not, you know, not in the pulpit, not at staff meeting. And so this is, this is part of, you know, the work that is unique to every one of us. Because like, Kerry, you know, you have, you have your own story, right? And, hmm, kind of deer stand, he has his own story, the mega church pastor that I'm working with. Well, for, for him, it's, it's completely unique and he's learning for the first time in his late fifties to get connected to some of these deeper realities. And that's some of the fun of the work that problems, it's not a one-size-fits-all. So you can't write the best-selling book doing, but it's, nevertheless, I think there are some universal things that can be applied here. Let's dive a little bit more into the physiology, Chuck. Yep. So I think I'm, I'm very good at naturally ignoring what my body is saying and getting better at, is that I get older? Let's talk about the relationship between mental health and your actual physiology. Yeah. Well, first thing I like to say when I speak on these kinds of things is that this isn't unique to 21st century pastoring. Rowan Williams has his great book. You know, Rowan Williams is our former archbishop. I met him briefly. I haven't spent a lot of time with these books. You've actually met him. I haven't, but I love his work and he is an authority on the early church. And he says that, you know, the early church fathers were very interested in what I've been calling the autonomic engine, what happens beneath the water line. They were very interested in the anxieties, sort of the setting anxiety underneath our behaviors. They were, they were interested in our, our, what he calls our spirit of equisitiveness. You know, the spirit of acquisition, like we've got to constantly grab after the thing that we think will help will fill us, will satisfy us. And what he's talking about is a kind of anxiety that needed to be paid attention to. And I think the same reality goes for human physiology today. We just have better words for it today. The reality is that our nervous system has three gears. I'll just make it really simple home. Home is that rooted and grounded place that we can find our way back to. Home is a place where if we spend enough time there, we're increasing our window of tolerance. What I call storm, which is sympathetic activation, which is really good if you're about to be hit by a car, you know, going through the intersection in the other direction, right? Steer away by all means, activate at that point, right? It's not great if you learn very early in life to live in that kind of vigilant state. That's storm. Home storm and then fog, fog is a what we call a dorsal state. It's a state of overwhelm, a state of shutdown. Your listeners will know about those times where it's like they go, go, go, go, go, and they fall off a cliff and they've got zero energy and they're laying on the couch watching college football and their kids come running up to them and daddy, daddy, when you play with us and daddy's taking a sabbath right now, but you know, daddy's just half dead on the couch. You know, that's the dorsal fog and what I often say is that if your body learned storm and fog at a very early age as normal, chances are you're going to live there and that's going to shape your character over the course of time. And so you may on the outside look like a faithful pastor and you may preach in ways that are affirmed by well, well meaning and thoughtful people. Even on the inside, your your body may be in a state of dysregulation that will cost you at some point. I mean, it landed me in a Mexican hospital while I was on vacation at 42 years old. It will catch up in one way or another. It looks different in every one of us for some. It looks like burnout and others, some as hospitalization for some, the inflammation leads to disease or chronic fatigue yourself, but it will catch up to you. in one way or another. Home, storm, and fog. Are those your terms? Are they psychological terms? Did those run in plastic fog? Yeah, they're my terms for these three states of what we call ventral sympathetic and dorsal. I think it's really helpful when I work with people. I ask them to find their own names. How would you describe it? What would your weather pattern be? Perhaps storm for you is tornado or hurricane or something like that. Maybe fog is desert or wilderness. And so it's really important that we find our own names and descriptors for these internal states. But most important is for us to get a sense of what am I experiencing this? And what is it like for me when I'm in storm? When am I in storm? Most pastors I work with will tell me? Well, they'll say like when am I not in storm? Exactly. I spend most of my wake up when phone is right next to my bed. I pick it up and I'm already checking email or I'm already checking something else online, you know? And so then it becomes a question of like how do we best anchor in what I call home that rooted and grounded place? This episode is brought to you by Glue. So I want to ask you something, what would it change for your ministry if you could just focus on the mission? I mean, no wrestling with tech, no guessing whether your marketing is actually working. Well, I've got Brian Brown here who leads the team within Glue focused on helping ministries expand their reach. Brian, give people the short version. Like what is Glue? Everybody asked me that question. Yeah. Thanks, Carrie. Simply put, glue is the tech platform for the faith and flourishing ecosystem. Glue exists to serve people who serve others like your listeners. We do this two things really well. We handle tech and we help people connect with people. On the tech side of things, we bring engineering talent, scalable infrastructure, deep expertise and ministry and nonprofit tech so that you're not burning nights trying to hold all of your systems together by sheer force of will. And on the reach side, we help you actually connect with donors, with supporters, with the people you're actually trying to serve, which results in better engagement, smarter distribution and a real marketing strategy, not just throwing things at the wall anymore. And increasingly, we're using AI to make all of that faster, sharper, better, but our bottom line is this. You stay focused on the front lines and we'll handle the stuff behind them. So it kind of sounds like Glue is building out the infrastructure and also the staffing that most churches are like, yeah, we can't do all that because we don't have the staff. So, Brian, thanks for that explainer. I appreciate it. So if you're a church or non-profit and I'm personally a partnered with Glue as well, our company does, and you're tired of spending plates, go to glue.com/grow. I want to spell that out for you. That's g-l-o-o.com/grow. One of the things I've realized in my own life is we all build up skill sets and we have a lot of muscle memory. So in that season of burnout, when I was in a combination of storm and fog, I had enough muscle memory to know how to write a sermon, get up there and deliver it, tough it out for two or three services. And prior, sometimes during, and often after, I feel numb and dead. But in the moment, nobody watching that would be able to pick it up. And I just realized what a deadly pattern that is. Yes, yes. But I think almost everybody listening to this and leadership can relate to that pattern. So what happens if you have so much like, I know what I have to do at this board meeting. I know what I have to do at the staff meeting. I know what I have to do at this donor, I know what I have to do this Sunday. I know I'm just going to put on my podcast hat and do this interview. But it's not from a place of home. Yeah. This is why I talk about it in terms of character. Some of your listeners may know the name James K. A Smith. He's a philosopher. He's written a number of books, desiring the kingdom. You're your love. You love. He talks about habits that become automaticities. And I like that word, automaticities. In other words, this is second nature. This is just what I do. This is what I know. And you've got to catch yourself in the act of automaticity in the sense of like, this has become a pattern. I remember I was preaching down in Georgia and I had that moment that some of us know where I was sort of listening to myself talk, but I was standing behind myself watching myself talk. And it was so disruptive that I was flying back through Oh, hair that evening. My flight was canceled. Most who flown through Oh, hair know the story of the flight being canceled. Yes. And I get a hotel. And I remember that evening. I had three martinis. And I woke up the next morning, headache, groggy feeling awful about myself. And I was, I was sort of caught my own patterns, right? And this is, this is where you want to be caught, rather than some significant moral failure. Right, right. Three martinis is a little lower state than some of the other choices. But it's real. And that was the only time I did that. And that wasn't the only time that I had that sense that I'm not connected to what I'm saying right now. The problem is a lot of us in ministry don't have anyone to talk to about that. And who are we going to say like I'm not sure that I'm quite myself up there when everything is writing, especially if you're the senior pastor, everything's sort of writing on you, you know. And then if we do name it, we want to find the quickest solution. And that's not how character works. Character doesn't change through quick solutions, right? If these are automaticities, if they're habits that have been so constructed, this is the hidden architecture of our lives, crafted, constructed over time, then the remedy will likely be slower too. And so this is where the rub is really when it comes to the character conversation because there's not a quick efficient, take this sabbatical, engage this spiritual practice, re-Chuck or Kerry's book, and boom, you'll be there. Characters really slow change that begins at the level of those automaticities, right? Begins at the level of physiology. Chuck, I want to talk about the fears of getting healthy. I mean, one of the things when I started to realize, oh, I've got some work to do. And particularly on the other side of burnout, I was very afraid, like definitely my operating system wasn't working, except it was working. The church was growing at compound growth of over 30% a year, year after year after year, people were genuinely getting saved, getting baptized. I mean, the whole deal, it was working. I was terrified if I changed the operating system, so to speak, out of fog and storm, that somehow all of that success would go away. I was addicted to the dysfunction. What do you do? I've talked to other leaders about this off-mic, and they're also scared. If I go and you make me better, they're a Mr. Psychotherapist, you're going to ruin me. What if I end up leading nothing? Thanks for breaking me. That's a really good question, and I often, in those times, put those pastors in touch with some other pastors who've made the courageous decision to shift or change in one way or another. And oftentimes, if it's a big church pastor, I'm going to put you in touch with a big church pastor who made the courageous decision to maybe have a conversation with the elder board about what was going on. But there's not a single prescription I wish there was. And the reality is that our nervous system automatisticities look different for some of us. We're not quite as, it hasn't had the implications that it has for others. I'll just put it that way. For some, you see the damage that has been done relationally, the debris field of damage relationally, and the damage that has been done to their bodies is really substantial. For others of us, like we were talking about earlier, we're caught at like 35, 37, and it's not quite as bad, but we're beginning to see the cost. We're seeing it with our kids, we're seeing our relationship with our spouse. And so for me, it's like, let me give you a picture of what this could look like. Let's count the cost, and let me not be one of those therapists. I was a pastor for a long time, so I think I have a sense of the reality of it, right? So let me not be one of those therapists that simply tell you, well, you just need to make this change, and that's what integrity looks like, and go ahead and do that. Let's be honest about the reality that if you do go back and say, I'm a different person than I was when I left eight weeks ago before my sabbatical, they might say, get out of here, buddy, you don't have a job here anymore. We want that compound and growth, you know? And so what's a good, paced way of you re-entering, and who are the kinds of, who are your conversation partners? Which elder do you feel safest with to have this initial conversation with? Let's just start to tease it out. What might it look like for me to operate just a little bit differently here? For our staff to engage culture just a little bit differently, for us to maybe hire that consultant that we've needed to hire for a while to help us rethink our life together here. But I don't push people to make these kinds of wild decisions. that would turn their lives upside down. That's not good for nervous systems either, right? And so I want to think really carefully and craft plans that are specific to the past. - So if you catch it young, I'm just trying to tie some threads together before we move on. If you catch it young or relatively young, like I would say, and I'm not trying to make this whole thing about my story, but there are some direct connections. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I had done some relational damage, but there wasn't big headline damage or anything like that. And what I feared that it would reduce my capacity, he actually greatly expanded my capacity. - Yeah. - And what I could handle in terms of resilience. - Yes, yes. I think you just named something that's so important. The fact that when you do this work and you expand your window of tolerance, you actually have more energy. Like at 42, I felt like I was 62. My surgeon who saw that my body was not well. He said, Chuck, your body looks like you're in your 60s. And I was not well at that time. At 56, I have way more energy and way more capacity. So I'm actually in my ministry, probably offering a lot more, giving a lot more than I might have in my early 40s. That's the paradox of all of this is that I think when, when we think about the traditional ways that we've talked about these things for so many years around spiritual practices and stuff like that, I think a lot of pastors think, well, you're just trying to get me to slow down. And all those practices are about make me feel like, spiritual practice is akin to laziness. And I'm like, I wanna give you, I wanna give you the tools and I wanna invite you to stretch the muscles of your nervous system in a way that actually increase your capacity, not so that you're more busy. Like I mentioned, I'm in a conversation with a large church pastor where it's like, now that he's done some of that work, it's not that he wants to get more busy, it's that he's finally able to discern in a way that he was not able to discern when he was in that place of reactivity, that place of, let me just solve the problem. So, you're definitely having to solve the campion. - That's right. So now it's like, okay, for me to be effective in this season of my ministry, these are the things I wanna give myself to, but I can do that from a whole-hearted place. My yes can be a whole-hearted yes. I couldn't do that just a couple of years ago before we started meeting because I was living in a posture of reactivity. So, if you're younger, there's a promise there. And, you know, we haven't even touched on it. You're gonna be a better father, you're gonna be a better husband, wife, you're gonna be a better, you name it, friend, like that I've discovered. You talked about there being debris, like some people come to you at my stage in their early 60s. And by this time, the shine is off the apple. The empire is broken. Maybe there were 20 years of growth and now there's been five years of division and faction and it's all crumbling around them. There must be a lot of fear there too. What is sort of the promise or the reprobility of a situation where there has been a crash or so much collateral damage that it seems irreversible? - Yeah, because there, I think there's not just fear, they're shame. What have I done? And who am I? Like, that I was capable of doing this over the course of the last 20 years, you know? And then, I'll hear things like Chuck, I was the pastor that, staff white. I was the one that they came to. I was the one that they trusted. And now I'm the one that, you know, that like I fear that they're, I'll just say it out loud, that, you know, they're gonna report me to the Roy's report. You know, this is what I shoot all the time. Like, I don't wanna be that guy. And so there's a lot of shame underneath. And so those are really sacred conversations to be honest, as you might imagine, you know, because there's often, once you're able to name that tears. And then some sense of like, so what do I do? And what I'd say is, I don't wanna move too quickly to let's fix this. Like, let's clean up your mess. I wanna work with you. And how do we begin to change in a way that you do become that pastor, that person who's more resilient, more capacious. And then let's have those kinds of conversation. Then let's go and say to some of the folks on your staff that we need to have conversations with. So what has been your experience with me? What has it been like working for me over these last five years or 10 years? And I find that once a pastor's done some of his or her work, they're more ready for those kinds of conversations. I mean, think about it. If your body's still locked in what I call storm, sympathetic activation, those conversations aren't gonna go well. You're probably gonna be defensive. No, no, no, no, you're not thinking about it right. But I think even if the person giving feedback isn't spot on in their analysis, isn't 100% correct, you're gonna be able to receive it with a sense of thank you for telling me about your experience. - Let's talk a little bit more about shame. - Yeah, I think it's a very powerful thing. It's also the thing that keeps us from telling anybody, right? I'm so ashamed. I've got this addiction. I've got this thing. What is your advice to leaders who are really struggling with a sense of I can't talk to anyone about this. There's just too much shame. - Well, that's kind of the root of shame, right? I can't talk to anyone about this. Shame at its core is that, you know, that sense that we're stuck in disconnection. And I'm not enough, I'm not worth it. I don't belong. What I'm doing doesn't matter. That's a really tough place to be in. And that's a really tough reality to name. And so the antidote to shame is always connection. That's also the greatest risk. And I think you just sort of line me up for that one. It's set me up for that one because I do think, I do think that a lot of the guys that I talk to, and I work with a lot of male pastors. I work with women too, but they will say, I literally don't have anyone to talk to. And we'll sort of scour the mental rolodex to ask, what about elders, and former elders, and a parishioner that you might trust, and that guy you went to seminary with, or whatever it might be. And I mean, if shame hijacks your system, there may be a sense of, they won't be able to hold that. I could never say that out loud to that person, or my wife's not capable of hearing that. So this is where shame has the capacity to take us out completely. And shame is what drives so many of the addictions that I see that end up leading to the massive moral failures. Shame is what drives the relational strategies that prompt pastors to either isolate or fight on the opposite end of that. And so I want to catch, as we were talking about earlier, I want to catch shame earlier rather than later, because if I'm dealing with it later, I'm usually dealing with that wider debris field. If I catch it earlier, we can begin to talk about how they experience it, who they can let in, and like that 32-year-old pastor. There was a sense that there was a malleability there that I don't as often see in pastors my age and older. And so yeah, we want to catch it a little bit earlier. But we also want to know that we want to understand that this is a powerful force within the human heart. - I want to talk about a couple more things and then get into solutions. So for years, you had a picture of Jean-Vanier hanging in your office. And I think a lot of us, we live in an age where we look up to people and there have just been so many leaders who have fallen. And Vanier was discovered, I don't know, I can't remember what there was before after he died, that he had had a number, like a serial list of sexual manipulation of women, abusive relationships with women. And I mean, there's another hero fallen. And he was somebody who was hugely influential in Henry Nowins life, right? Jean-Vanier. So what, what, how was that on you and what did you learn from that yesterday? - So yeah, it was Vanier and it's several others in my first church office in the mid 1990s. And I taught a class, in fact, at the seminary where I am on Jean-Vanier in a theology of pastoral presence. And so it knocked me over, barreled me over. And it feels like nowadays that there are few heroes, right? Like Jean-Vanier, for me, felt like, well, maybe Henry Nowins might have felt if he were still living, you know? There's someone that I know is trustworthy. Like there's a solidity there. There's substance, there's depth, there's consistency over time. And all the things that I talk about when I talk about character that you can see. And yet, if you look at his story, very important person in his life, given his own background as family of origin, his own dad issues, you know, a very important person in his life became sort of oversized and overly influential. Let a small mystical cult within the Catholic Church where essentially abuse of women in the name of Jesus is kind of mystical abuse. They wouldn't have called it abuse. They called it mystical union. They they they sanctified it like we all do with our sin, right? He was drawn into this mystical cult within the Catholic Church and it sort of remain compartmentalized like most sin does for many many years. It's not something that he talked about publicly, although people knew of his connections to this this guy. I'm forgetting the name of the guy who's such a word on him. But you know, I think about the reality that Jean-Vanier was was probably insecure and like I am that Jean-Vanier needed a dad like I need a dad that Jean-Vanier looked to this person who had some influence and charisma who said, oh no, this is okay. We all have needs and we can we can participate in mystical union in the presence of the Holy Spirit in this sacred act with, right? Yeah, so I I have the same response that you did and I made me sick to my stomach when I heard it and yet he's drawn into this and it remains this very secret part of his life until stories begin to be told after he dies and there's a there's an entire inquiry into it. What's tricky about it is that you know, for a lot of us, I mean I get these calls pretty regularly where someone will say not that guy. Not that my my pastor like that's not someone I thought was capable of of doing that, right? And and there there's that reality that we can live with parts of our lives fairly compartmentalized for a long long period of time. And this is what happens when we're not known when we don't have people in our lives who we disclose things to. I'm not talking about accountability groups. I'm just talking about connection. I'm talking about do you have someone that you can talk to say all the things to your public self, your private self, your secret self, you know, here are some of the things that are going on or here are the things that I'm thinking or the things that I've wondered about with vulnerability. It's very, very easy early on to begin to learn patterns of subterfuge and secrecy that lead to addiction. You argue that we've traded character for charisma in the church today. Talk more about that. What do you mean? Yeah, I mean, there's no problem with charisma, right? I mean, I suspect that people are drawn to your podcast because you've got some charisma, you know, they like listening to you, you've got a personality. But charisma is at that level of personality, right? And there are a lot of, I think we've taken some some key personality features or spiritual gifts and we've made those central. We've prioritized those, you know, and so and it's really stunning to me because what we're talking about, you know, this character conversation does not need to be too complex. We're talking about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, goodness, gentleness, self control, right? Like we're we're talking about things that grow in you in the right conditions with sunlight and watering, you know, in the right conditions with good mentoring and good formation, whether that's in a seminary context or early ministry context or with a mentor or good apprenticeship. But what I hear from pastors is I never got that. What I got was another see a certainty, get all the content right. This is what I got back in the day, by the way. You don't know this carry about me, but I came into seminary in 1995 knowing all the answers to the stats already. God's gift to the reformed church because I was the guy who went to all the conferences and knew all the things and had memorized the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Knowledge is a weapon, right? And it became weaponized and thank the Lord in 1996. I had a professor come to me and say Chuck, you haven't done your work and you need to do your work and the reality is is you're probably already dangerous to the church. You know, you got in my face and named reality in a way that invited me to begin to enter into a new kind of conversation. But you know, I just recognize how rare that is. So if you don't have that, if you're listening right now and you don't have that, who in your life might be able to offer that to you or who might you be able to call spiritual director, a counselor, a coach to begin to engage a conversation about something like that? So what do you do? There's more than a few people listening, watching who have been told they're charismatic. I mean, I don't remember exactly how old I was, but it was certainly by college, it might have been in high school. People said, man, you've got charisma. And yeah, I don't know what that means. And I wasn't trying to conjure it up. Like it was just either there or not, I guess the Greek origin of the word is gift. So maybe it's a gift, I don't know. But when I was leading the church and we were going through, you know, for us, relatively rapid growth, the number one of the top criticisms. And I think it was fair is like, this is the cult of carry. This is charismatic. And as soon as he goes, it's all going to fall apart. And so I worked really hard. I wasn't doing, I'm sure I misused the charisma. If it's a gift at times, et cetera. I really worked hard to build a team and build a structure. And now I'm happy to say I have 11 years later. It's twice as big and growing like crazy. And nobody even knows who I am anymore. That's great. But now I'm doing this. You know, so if whether I'm charismatic or not, I mean, that was something that some of us got labeled with early on. And if you have that personality, what do you do? Well, it's a gift, right? You just name it. You know, it is a gift. And that does not preclude you from doing the work. You know, the guy I talked to not too long ago, who was a realtor like a year ago. And his senior pastor, the large multi-side church said, you're our next campus pastor. And he was just plucked out of, I mean, and it felt really good to him to be noticed by this lead pastor. And so he was plucked out of real estate. And he was put on stage. And he knew some of the Bible, you know, he grown up in the church. And he did a good job for about six months until he slept with his secretary, you know, and like, well, zero formation as a charismatic person can nurture that people. So I think what you're talking about is like, Christmas is important. And it's an asset in ministry. But if it's built on the foundation of character, which is more slow grown, just think about the kind of ministry that you can have then. You know, if it's, if there's a sense that it's, it's born out of substance, you know, and that confidence, your communication skills, the way you engage people, you know, it's, if it's, if it's anchored, I think, in character and that fruits of the spirit and love, enjoying peace, patience, kindness, and so on, there's, there's something about it that's really redemptive. Absent that, I think it can be really destructive. Yeah. Yeah. So help us work on our character. Can you give us some tangible things that we can do to make sure whether we're naturally charismatic or not, whether things are growing quickly, growing slowly or declining, because decline is its own form of sadness in a lot of us too that can lead us into destructive patterns. Yeah. What do we have to do to make sure our character stays intact? Yeah. Or grows, forget intact, grows deepens, broadens. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it begins with the kind of curiosity that allows you to ask that kind of question in the first place, right? If it's, if you're the pastor that said to me by the Presbyteria or something like that, chances are you're not coming with a whole lot of curiosity. If you're like, I really, I really want to grow. I want to be a person of substance. I want to be able to listen better. I want to be able to engage more curiously. Yeah. Well, then, then we're by halfway there, maybe even more than that. And then it, you know, I think the next piece might just be noticing some of the automaticities that I named earlier. We begin by noticing how you show up in the present, and we get curious about where those patterns started, right? And so we all have bad days. And so we're not going to think of one off, you know, like, you know, Kerry sort of, you know, was kind of really down last night. And he was a pooper at the party, you know, and like, I was, Kerry's always like that. No, Kerry's just having a bad night. What we get curious about are the patterns, like how you show up regularly. Who knows you well enough for, you know, how, how can you report on, you know, the guys who sit with me, they're kind of telling on themselves, this is, this is kind of what you get. If you work for me, if you're married to me, this is what it looks like. We begin to notice, and then we begin to get curious at a deeper level. Like, where did that start? You know, where did you learn that, you know, that that was the way to operate in the world. And then we, we sort of go backwards, right? I mean, we, we want to, if these are habits that have become automaticities and second nature, well, you can't behave your way out of them, you know, it does. There's not a sense that I can say just to here's a little trick and your character will change overnight. What we begin to do is we begin to reshape those patterns and that takes a lot of intentionality off and say attention and intention. It takes noticing, noticing at that physiological level what's happening. So we need to notice, you know, if many of our patterns are patterns of sympathetic storm as I was talking about earlier. I'd want to work on inviting you into that place I call home to that rooted and grounded place. From there, let me just back up from that more activated place, from that more sympathetically activated place that place I call storm, it's really hard to change. And so if you're eager to change, we've got to shift you to that place that I call home. Probably because when you're in that more sympathetically activated place, I keep doing this with my fists. It means that you're braced and means that you're living life in a mode of reactivity, in a mode of fight or flight. And so if we can slowly turn down the volume level of your physiology so that you begin to settle into your body so that you're more rooted and grounded, so that you're more capacious and open, well, then your body, your nervous system, your brain is more available to change. We know from better neuroscientists than me that our brains are more malleable when our bodies are anchored in this place of ventral home. When we're grounded, when we are breathing, when we're not as prone to reactivity and so that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that curiosity, I'm looking for you to notice your patterns. I'm looking for a wider curiosity about your story. I'm looking for you to pay attention to your physiology. And this feels like a lot perhaps, but this is why I call it slow work. If it were fast food, I'd give you the drive-through recipe, you know? But if this is slow work, then we've got to work at the level of your story, at the level of your physiology, so that from that new place, from that root and grounded place, you begin to shift in ways that create new habits, new automatistities. This is what I do now. This is what I love to do now. This is how I show up now. This is how I make decisions now. You're operating from, in a sense, a new consciousness, a new physiology at that point. Check, what are you doing right now to deepen and grow your character, to widen that sense of home? What's a practice, a discipline, a posture that is really helping you deepen your character? So as you might imagine, I've tried to do this kind of work, particularly over the last 15 years since I landed in the hospital and my life was turned upside down. And it began by noticing some of these patterns and very intentionally beginning to shift some of these patterns. That took me doing that anchoring work that I described. I'd love to be able to say, "I have named all of my patterns, and I am living in perpetual like, 'Ah, you know, perpetual,' but that's not what life is, that's not what home is. And the reality is that there are some patterns that I've not yet dealt with yet. There are patterns that I've not yet seen. There are automaticities that keep on keeping on in my life. That my wife might name, a student of mine might name. There are times when my body remembers what it was like to live in sympathetic storm. It's as if I left Egypt and I go back to Egypt because it's what is familiar. And so there are times that I go back. And I go back there because, frankly, that's where I got some applause. That's where I had some success, right? And so after a couple of weeks, maybe a month, Brian or John or Kyle or one of my good friends says, "Hey, you know, I haven't heard from you lately and it just feels like you're going hard. What's going on with you?" You know, and we have a conversation and I notice, "Oh, I'm back in storm." And it was that quick because my body, you know, my neural pathways have changed. The mold ones have sort of died, but there's still the memory of those neural patterns. And my body's like, "Oh, let's go back there again." That was such a lovely time in our life, you know? And so right back there, just like that. And so I catch myself in the act and I return. It's sort of like that passage in Isaiah 30 and repentance and rest and quietness and trust. There's that turning that needs to happen. I turn again, I repent again, I find my way home again, I anchor there again. I live there for a while in that beautiful new geography, but eventually as things get busy in a semester starts and I have a book coming out, check in with me in about a month, Gary, you know what book called "Season is" and there may be a sense that, "Yeah, yeah, I need to return again." I sort of got out, got out, or got back to some of those old practices that I learned back in Egypt. It sounds to me, it's self-awareness for sure, recommitting yourself to the practice of becoming better, getting rid of the, you know, shortening your seasons and storm and fog and getting back to home. The other thing I've found too is I used to beat myself up. I used to always think of there being a finish line, that, "Oh, that was me who needed therapy back then, but now, look at me, I'm redeemed, I'm resilient and I no longer believe that. I feel like it is book launch season for me. When this comes out, I'll be in the midst of a storm, but I'm not going to live in a storm and I've got a date on a calendar and I'm thinking about next year differently, I sort of fell into the old pattern earlier this year of "Yes, yes, yes, too many yeses." We've reflected on that as a team, we've looked at it as a team, my wife and I have discussed it, I prayed about it, and I'm like, "Yeah, I don't want to live in a constant state of hyper-vigilance or jet lag or time zones," and so next year will be a little bit different. I think this mission behind the book might be worth it, but I find, my old self would be, "Oh, how did you let that happen?" you failed, and now I'm like, "Well, okay, I learned a few things again," and it's sort of like a loop that you just, it keeps moving along, but I beat myself up less, and I just realized, "Yeah, okay, I've learned some new things, let's move ahead with some new behaviors." Yeah, that's it, right? I mean, I think that each of us finds ourselves in a place where we realize we have and come to the finish line, and there's this phrase from, "Across the Christian tradition, particularly in some of the contemplatives, begin again." We get to begin again, and with every season like the one I'm in now where things will wrap up and books need to be launched and all the things, I'll recognize probably in about three or four weeks from now, I'll hear that whisper of, "Begin again, find your way back home, breathe." We just had a real busy week, we've got two married daughters, and we should be empty nesters except that they keep coming back to our house and staying overnight and visiting on the weekends, and it was a packed weekend, and I didn't have that spaciousness that I longed for coming into this new week, this new semester. And so even today, coming into the office, I sat down on my chair over there this morning with about 15 minutes before my first client this morning and just breathed and realized, "Yeah, this is going to be a season of substorm, and as long as I can remain in my window as much as possible, I'll be okay. If I start to notice, carry in, you know, two, three, four weeks from now that I'm not getting as much sleep, I'm going to alcohol a bit more, having a few too many cups of coffee in the morning, getting short with my wife. Those will be things that hopefully I have got enough self-awareness to notice those things about myself. And if I don't notice, hopefully a good friend of mine or my wife will say, "Hey, here we go again." It's old pattern, it's the old story, re-storing once again Chuck, it's time to return home again, it's time to begin again. I think the joy that I've had, and you've had for 14 years, I've had for 20 since my burnout, is we know what home is like. And if you've only lived in storm or fog, you don't even know what awaits you. And so I think that's the promise in the invitation to people listening. Last question for you, I'm increasingly thinking about the pace of the world, what AI is going to do to the algorithms to our debate, 25 years of social media, nobody thinks that's a net positive at this point, I don't think, and Jonathan Hygiene-Twangi and others have pointed out just how divided and polarized and ugly we become as a culture and how alone we become as a culture. And I don't think AI is going to make that any better. And so when I think about where the culture is at, we seem to be in perpetual storm and perpetual fog. And I wonder if, and I just love your take on this sort of my thesis that I'm developing in real time is to use your metaphors. Somebody who spends a lot of time in home, unhurried, thoughtful, prayerful, doing the deep work, that, you know, first of all, much better way to live, much more grounded way to live. But secondly, I wonder if it becomes some kind of competitive advantage in the future that we're going to be able to see things differently than people living in perpetual storm or fog. If that's clear, any reaction to that, any thoughts? Yeah, that's spot on from my advantage, from a physiological and a neurological perspective, I think. Yeah, you have more brain power to put it simply, you know, your body, your brain is more expansive. There's, there's more capacity as we've been talking about. And so I think from that place, too, these things that come along don't become the thing itself. They're merely a tool that we can use and we can put down when we're done with it, you know, I think that's my worry with AI is when it becomes more than a tool, it becomes your brain. That's when there's a significant loss and we're losing our mind. I'm very worried about that. Yeah, and I mean, I, I paid attention to some of what you've said and written about these kinds of things. I think it's important to pay attention to some folks who are sort of leading conversations about what do we do in the midst of this, this age. I think we'd probably begin, we'd become a bit dualistic in times like this. I'm all in, I've got friends because I pastored in San Francisco. I've got friends in Silicon Valley who are like, this is the future. Embrace it now, Chuck. And I've got friends who are leadites, you know, haven't quite used, found a way to use the internet yet or email yet. No, it's terrible. I want to remain rooted and grounded in love. And then as these things come, I'm able to pick it up and use it as a tool for a few minutes for a particular time and put it back down and not lose myself in it. And that's, you know, that's what the ancient's called detachment. That's what Augustine talked about. That's what the desert father's mother's talked about, this posture of open handedness, you know, dispossessive desire. I can, I can engage, but I don't, I don't need to be lost in it. You know, it's so funny. I think that's a very great way to say it because it would be easy if you read the headlines to think I'm a lot, I, or I don't use AI. I'm a next meeting after this. We have an AI specialist coming in and he's going to help our company become much more AI forward so that we can boost our productivity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I can spend more time in home. So I can spend more time rooted, deeply doing the work that only I can do using my heart, mind, soul and strength to glorify God and letting AI do more of the heavy lifting. That is incognitive. So yeah, well, the new book is called Who You're Becoming. I'm really excited that you put some more good out in the world. Tell us where people can find the book. Obviously, everywhere books are sold, but is there any particular website or where they can track with you in your work? Yeah, folks can track with me at my website, check to grow.net. I started something called the Soulcare Collaborative. So if you're intrigued by these five day intensives, I've got a team of folks that I've vetted to do that kind of work and do ordinary Soulcare work. I've got spiritual directors and coaches and executive coaches. And so I'm on all the socials except I'm not doing TikTok. I can't do it, but I'm on Instagram at Chuck to grow. No criticism there. Sub stack. It's with Chuck and not hard to find me just do a little Google searcher ask AI I suppose. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Chuck, thanks so much. I look forward to our next conversation. Appreciate all you're doing for leaders and making sure that not only we stay in the game, but that we stay rooted and grounded in the things that matter most. Thank you. Thanks, man. Man, that's a conversation we keep having again and again here on the podcast in different ways. And I think it's just so needed. You know what? Nobody gets into leadership, particularly church leadership, hoping to screw up their lives, hoping to blow it, hoping to become difficult. Maybe maybe some people do, but like I don't know anybody who wants to do that yet we end up in a very different place. So I hope you found this conversation helpful. If you want show notes that will give you access to everything Chuck and I talked about including everything he mentioned at the end, you can join the over 23,000 leaders that are in my art of leadership academy. You can join for free anytime. Just go to the art of leadership academy.com. You'll find everything there. And if you haven't yet, hit follow or subscribe. You may want to do that. We've got Ron Johnson, story of the founding of the Apple store. What was Steve Jobs really like Andy Stanley? I love this conversation. More like a different angle of what we had talked about with Chuck today, like how do you know how to lead yourself well? Lisa Terkers, Ron Friedman, Mark Batterson and a whole lot more. Also Malcolm Gladwell this fall. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can leave a review or comment. The algorithm picks up on that stuff. And since the show to other people, when you do that, guess what? We get the best guests in the world. So thank you so much for helping us with that. And I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing. This episode is brought to you by AI and the Future Church, a Barna leadership intensive. People on your staff are using AI. This week, they might be writing something or doing research or maybe even working on a sermon, which means decisions about using AI are being made without a conversation about it and without people being on the same page. So here's how I want to help. On December 1st, I'm teaming up with Barna to offer you a three hour live event built for leaders that want to have these conversations now. It's called AI and the Future Church, a Barna leadership intensive. Barna is bringing research to nobody seen yet, like how pastors, staff and your congregation are actually using this stuff. And I'm bringing the cultural shifts and disruptions coming down the line. And together, we're going to define what a prepared church looks like. We'll turn it into practical next steps and equip you with a one-page plan to equip your team to use AI on a day-to-day basis. You can register at Barna AI and the Future Church dot com. That's Barna AI AMD the Future Church dot com. Be sure to register before it's too late. Registration closes soon. Again, that's Barna AI and the Future Church dot com. We'll see you there.