ken wilson online

Maybe you’ve notice that pastoring seems to be a near occaision to mainline anxiety.  I’ve been battling anxiety for the past year myself, thank you, but I seem to be on the mend.  Thanks in no small part to the best book on leadership I’ve read in years: A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman.  Stop, drop, and read this book if you are a young pastor battling anxiety.

Friedman was a family systems counselor and a rabbi who worked closely with pastors, rabbis, ministers and their families.  How I wish I’d read this book thirty years ago!

Friedman says we live in an age of anxiety, owing to the unprecedented rate of change in modern society.  Anxiety, according to Friedman, isn’t just a function of your inner deepies, it’s a function of systems (families, churches, societies) that are facing rapid change. In the face of change, people go on hyper-alert status.  They become more reactive than responsive, more fear driven than love driven, more hostile, more angry. Does any of this sound familiar?

In an age of anxiety, more people respond to leadership [that is a leader taking the lead] with various forms of sabatage, according to Friedman.  Sabatage is common and it often comes from members of the group who have poor self regulation skills.

The Limits of Empathy

Leaders in the modern era have been taught to respond to this  by exercising empathy.  Empathy is an attempt to feel what others feel; leaders try to feel what others feel in order to be more effective leaders.  Forget the fact that it is impossible to feel what others feel.  You and I can never know that what I see when I see “red” and what you see when you see “red” are the same thing.  You cannot experience my consciousness and I cannot experience yours.

We can feel with others (sympathy) but empathy (feeling what others feel) is, of course, impossible.  We can reveal what we feel to others, but others cannot get inside of us to feel what we feel.  When Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain,” in other words, he was mistaken.  The pain he felt was his own, by definition.

Friedman says that most of the stress experienced by pastors, rabbis and other congregational leaders, is not due to overwork but to the stress of seeking to empathize with those who are responding anxiously in the congregational system.

Self-Define, Stay Connected

The key to effective leadership, he says, is maintaining a non-anxious presence when surrounded by anxiety–staying connected, but not seeking to lead by trying to empathize with those who are upset.  Listen, yes.  Seek to understand, yes.  But do not attempt to crawl into another person’s insides in the hope that by feeling what they feel you may be of help to them. That attempt, according to Friedman, only serves to tap you into the anxiety that is running rampant in families, congregations, and societies.

Instead, according to Friedman, a leader should, after listening, and while staying connected, self-define.  State clearly what one thinks to the other.  Not autocratically, but directly.   Let the other be the other.  Remember that the other has a Savior, who is alone authorized to feel what the other feels and you, as an under-shepherd at best, are not that savior.

But don’t take my word for it.  I’m just repeating what I read in an effort to understand it better myself.  Now I’m on to Friedman’s earlier book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue.

Read this gem, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, for yourself.  Stop, drop and read it, but only if you are an anxious young pastor.

Tags: A Failure of Nerve, anxiety, Bill Clinton, Edwin Friedman, empathy, family systems, Generation to Generation, sympathy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.