There is a version of burnout that has nothing to do with hours worked, and I only recognised it once I had already lived through it. I was doing everything asked of me: the shifts, the sessions, the sermons, the sound desk on a Sunday, and by most external measures the leadership was going well. What had quietly gone was the sense of who I was when none of it was happening. I had become entirely the sum of what I did for other people, and I did not notice the substitution until I tried to rest and found there was no version of me left underneath the roles to rest.
The particular danger of leadership built on service
This is the particular danger of leadership built on service, which is most leadership worth doing. Service asks you to hold other people’s needs above your own comfort, and a leader who does that well gets rewarded for it, in gratitude and in the quiet satisfaction of having actually helped someone. The reward makes it easy to keep drawing from the same well without noticing the water level. Nobody tells you to stop, because from where they are standing, the well looks fine.
A self that exists independently of the service
The corrective is a self that exists independently of the service, sturdy enough that the service becomes something you do rather than something you are.
For me that has meant protecting the early morning hour before any of the day’s roles begin, not as a productivity habit but as the one part of the day where I am answering to God rather than performing for anyone who is watching. It has meant letting the people closest to me see the tired, uncertain version of me that never appears in front of a congregation or a mastermind cohort. A marriage that only ever meets the competent version of you is not really a marriage.
What Scripture assumes
Scripture is fairly blunt about this. The command to love your neighbour as yourself assumes a self worth loving in the same measure, not a self that has been quietly liquidated to fund the neighbour’s account.
It looks like selflessness when a leader has no identity outside the leading. It is actually an operation with no reserves, and operations with no reserves eventually fail the people depending on them, usually at the worst possible moment.
The test
The test I use now is simple. If every role were removed tomorrow, the doctor title, the platform, the ministry position, would there still be a person left who knows who he is?
If the honest answer is no, the leading has already cost more than it should.
Phase 3: The Leader’s Core
- Competence, Commitment and Character: What Earns Trust
- Perception Shapes Trust, and Trust Shapes Outcomes
- Courage, Commitment and Community
- Leading Without Losing Yourself (this post)