Let me give you a situation.

A leader gets asked for a decision. The information is on the table. The team is ready and leaning in. And then the leader reaches for the five holiest-sounding words in all of organizational life.

“Let me pray on it.”

Sometimes that sentence is exactly what it claims to be. A person truly seeking wisdom before they act. We honor that. We practice it ourselves.

Other times that same sentence becomes a permission slip, taped neatly over a decision the leader has already made and quietly does not want to carry out.

I know that one stings a little. It stings me too, because I have said it when we shouldn’t have. I had a made decisions in my mind that I knew had to happen, but wasn’t ready to face it. So I “prayed”.

But I’ve also delayed decisions where prayer was truly needed. I am currently coming off of a staff planning intensive that was delayed 6 months because I needed to gain clarity from the Lord in some very key areas and it made all the difference.

This week, I want to walk you through the difference between the two, because your people can feel that difference long before they can put words to it.

And the gap between praying and hiding is shaping the trust of everyone who reports to you right now.

The Fourth Clause James Never Wrote

There is a verse most leaders can quote in their sleep. It shows up on office walls and in staff devotionals, and it gives us a clean instruction for how to carry ourselves in the room.

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,

James 1:19 NIV

Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to become angry. That is a good order for the mouth and for the temper.

But, somewhere along the way, a fourth clause got bolted onto this direction that James never actually wrote.

Slow to decide.

We took a command about restraining our words and our anger and stretched it to cover our hesitation. Now the word “slow” carries a spiritual endorsement it was never given.

Read the verse again and watch what it protects. Slow to speak protects other people. It keeps you from wounding someone with a half-formed reaction you would regret by lunch.

Slow to decide, past a certain point, does the opposite. It leaves people hanging. It keeps a team member arranging her family’s life around a maybe. It keeps a whole department building backup plans for a word that never comes.

One restraint serves the room. The other quietly holds the room hostage.

James was teaching you to guard your tongue. He was not handing you a hiding place for your decisions.

Discernment and Avoidance Wear the Same Clothes

This is what makes the whole thing so hard to catch. Real discernment and quiet avoidance look almost identical from the outside.

Both of them involve waiting. Both of them get described as “praying about it.” Both of them sound mature in a staff meeting.

The difference lives entirely on the inside, and it comes down to one question every leader has to answer honestly.

In my coaching work with executives and pastors, I have learned to test that question with markers you can actually see.

Discernment has motion in it.

• It asks specific questions of specific people.

• It listens for particular answers.

• It narrows the options week over week.

• It knows what it is waiting for and roughly when it will arrive.

Avoidance has none of those markers.

• It stretches on with no end in sight.

• The criteria stay foggy.

• The list of options never gets shorter.

• Nobody, including the leader, can name what would need to be true to finally move.

Ask a discerning leader what they are waiting on and they will tell you plainly: two conversations, one budget number, a week of counsel. Ask an avoider the same question and the answer goes soft, because the waiting was never really the point.

Not deciding was the point.

Come back to James one more time. Slow to become angry has a purpose you can name. It buys you time to respond instead of react. If your slowness has no purpose you can name out loud, it may not be as holy as it feels.

God is patient. God is never passive.

Pilate Had a Decision Too

There is a moment in Scripture we keep coming back to, because it may be the most respectable leadership failure ever recorded.

Jesus stands before Pilate. We tend to fix our attention on the cruelty of the crowd and skim right past the man holding the gavel. Pilate had a decision to make, and the text is almost embarrassing about how clearly he already knew the right one.

He said it out loud, more than once.

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

John 18:38 NIV

He knew the truth. He had the authority. And then he did the very thing frightened leaders do when they do not want to own an outcome.

He stalled.

He shipped Jesus off to Herod. He offered the crowd a choice between two prisoners. And when none of it worked, he reached for a bowl of water in front of everyone and called the whole thing somebody else’s fault.

Notice what Pilate never did. He never did anything dramatically evil. He avoided doing the hard right thing and dressed the avoidance up as deference. Let the people decide. Let it play out. This one is above my pay grade.

That is this very temptation in its most respectable disguise, and it shows up in the performance review that never happens, the staffing change that drags for eighteen months, and the strategic pivot everyone privately agrees on and nobody will sign.

This is the part that should sit heavy with all of us.

Pilate’s refusal to act on what he already knew did not keep his hands clean. It shifted the weight onto other people while he got to feel like a bystander in his own courtroom. The water was for show. The verdict was already his.

The Leaders Scripture Actually Holds Up

Set Pilate next to the leaders God commends, and a pattern jumps off the page.

Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem’s wall is broken and its gates are burned. He does not announce a plan on day one. He rides out at night, alone, and surveys the rubble for himself. He gathers what he needs quietly and thoroughly. Then he stands up in public and moves, with his own name attached to the work.

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”

Nehemiah 2:17 NIV

Nathan carries a harder assignment.

He has to confront a king who has abused his power, and getting it wrong could cost him his life. So he waits for the right moment and prepares his words with care. Then he walks into the throne room and says the hard thing to David’s face.

Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”

2 Samuel 12:7 NIV

Both men waited. Both men prayed. And in both cases the patience had an ending. It ended in action with a name on it.

That is the pattern we try teach the people we lead, because it holds up everywhere a hard call has to be made. Waiting that ends in ownership builds trust. Waiting that stretches on forever eats away at it. Your team feels the difference long before they can explain it to you.

What Chronic Indecision Is Costing Your Organization

I have walked alongside enough organizations to say this with confidence. Indecision compounds like debt.

When a leader habitually defers, three things happen, and they happen in order.

• First, the organization stalls. Projects sit in limbo. Good people build their careers around backup plans. Real opportunities expire while the leader “gathers a little more input.”

• Second, trust erodes. Teams stop bringing decisions to a leader who will not make them. They quietly route around the office. The leader keeps the title and slowly loses the authority.

• Third, the culture learns the lesson. Younger leaders watch the stalling and conclude that this is what maturity looks like. Avoidance gets baptized and renamed as thoughtfulness, and it spreads.

This is why we must treat decision ownership as a culture issue and not a personality quirk.

A leader’s relationship with hard calls becomes the whole organization’s relationship with hard calls. Go back to James one last time. He was training a community, not just an individual. The way you handle the weight of a decision is teaching everyone under you how they are allowed to handle theirs.

Three Questions to Run Before You Say “Let Me Pray on It”

So let me hand you the same short audit you can run before you delay your next decision. Run these three questions before the words “let me pray on it” leave your mouth.

1. What exactly am I waiting for?

Name it out loud. A conversation, a number, a piece of counsel from someone you trust. If you can put your finger on it, you are probably discerning. If you cannot name a single concrete thing, you are most likely avoiding.

2. When will I have it?

Put a date on the calendar and tell the people who are waiting on you. Discernment can survive a deadline without any trouble. Avoidance cannot, because a deadline forces the vague fog to become a real answer.

3. What would have to be true for me to decide?

Write down the actual criteria. If the honest answer is “I already know what is right and I am scared of the fallout,” then the prayer you need is not a prayer for clarity.

It is a prayer for courage.

Sign Your Name to It

Plenty of weak leadership wears patience as a costume. The question underneath all of this will never be whether you are a patient person. The question is whether your waiting ends in a decision you are willing to sign your name to, or whether you are quietly hoping that someone or something else will decide so you never have to.

So I want to leave you with two prompts to sit with this week. Do it honestly, and do it on paper.

• What is the decision you have been “praying about” that you have actually already made?

• Where have you been washing your hands and calling it discernment?

Prayer was never built to be a hiding place from responsibility. It was built to be the fuel for it. Nehemiah prayed, and then he picked up a trowel. Nathan prayed, and then he opened his mouth. James told you to be quick to listen and slow to speak, and he trusted you to know the difference between guarding your tongue and burying your decision.

Your people are waiting on a word from you, too. Give them one, and put your name on it.

Leading Lazarus is available for preorder at www.leadinglazarus.com with some incredible bonus material for all preorders. All preorders receive access to our 8 week leadership transformation system that will create you into the healthiest, most effective leader possible.

Jared returns to the Examined podcast after a pause due to One City Church’s major transition and move into a new location in Chesapeake, Virginia, and announces the podcast will resume with one new episode per month. He shares that his book, “Leading Lazarus,” releases September 6, 2026, with pre-orders at leadinglazarus.com, and emphasizes that leadership systems only work when the heart behind them is healthy.

The core idea is that people don’t experience a leader’s intentions, they experience their leadership impact; he connects this to Luke 6:45 and Jesus’ tangible expressions of love. Jared recounts how his habit of taking over tasks communicated distrust to his team despite good intentions, and urges heart-level examination. He offers three steps: ask someone “What’s it like to be on the other side of me?” without defending, make your invisible heart visible in one relationship, and take the source issues to God before fixing surface behaviors, closing with a prayer for inner healing and Christlike leadership.

00:00 Welcome Back Update
00:36 Church Move Story
01:26 New Book Announcement
02:16 Intentions Versus Impact
03:31 Why It Lands Wrong
06:09 Jesus On The Heart
07:14 Jesus Made Love Tangible
08:35 My Overfunctioning Lesson
10:18 Fear Beneath The Gap
11:56 Three Reflection Questions
14:04 Three Steps This Week
17:14 Prayer And Sendoff

The Heart of the Matter: People Experience Leadership, Not Intentions

As I’ve been reflecting on the journey toward releasing this book, a profound realization has emerged: a system is only as effective as the heart that runs it. We can have the best leadership tools and frameworks, but if something within us is unsettled, these tools may falter. Today, I want to delve into an idea, exploring how our intentions and leadership intersect.

Exploring Intentions vs. Leadership

Have you ever left a conversation certain of your good intentions, yet the outcome deviated from what you anticipated? This disconnect arises because people don’t experience our intentions—they experience our leadership. Our words, tone, actions, and follow-through shape their perceptions.

The gap between intentions and impact often seeds broken relationships and cultures. Many judge themselves by intentions and others by actions, creating disparities. Reflecting on Jesus’ teachings in Luke 6:45, where the overflow of our actions reveals our heart’s contents, is crucial. Harshness often signifies deeper sources within us, and the remedy isn’t mere word management; it’s allowing transformative work within our hearts.

Leading Like Jesus: A Model of Visible Intentions

Jesus exemplified this harmonious alignment between intentions and leadership. He touched lepers, wept with mourners, and washed disciples’ feet, ensuring His good intentions were tangibly experienced. If Jesus prioritized visible actions despite flawless intentions, how much more must we, amid human imperfection, ensure our intentions are genuinely felt?

Personal Reflection: A Learning Journey

In my leadership journey, I often over-functioned, overshadowing team empowerment despite my well-meaning intentions. The key takeaway is acknowledging that defending intentions hinders leadership growth. Bridging intention-impact gaps demands introspection and addressing underlying fears or wounds influencing actions.

The Path to Tangible Leadership Transformation

True transformation begins internally. Here are three practical steps for redefining leadership impact:

1. Ask for Honest Feedback: Inquire, “What’s it like to be on the other side of me?” and listen openly, appreciating honest responses.

2. Visible Heart in Action: Choose one relationship to manifest your intentions visibly, ensuring your heart’s good intentions are felt.

3. Source Over Surface: Seek God’s guidance on underlying issues causing unintended impacts. Allow deeper healing, acknowledging that external actions stem from internal restoration.

Change requires uncomfortable reflections but leads to profound shifts. Embrace these steps, invite divine examination, and let overflowing goodness permeate your leadership.

Conclusion: Embrace Transformative Leadership

Thank you for journeying with us. Remember, people experience leadership, not intentions. The insights shared today form the fertile soil where effective leadership systems flourish. Dive deeper into this transformative journey by exploring “Leading Lazarus.” Let’s commit to presenting our hearts visibly, empowering others through authentic, compassionate leadership.

Stay diligent in your leadership evolution, make the invisible visible, and join us for continued growth in future episodes.

This morning, I woke up around 3:30AM with a sharp pain in my jaw. It turns out, the two top wisdom teeth that I was told would never cause me issues, caused me an issue. Praise God that I was able to get into a dentist at 7:30AM this morning and get that taken care of. But here’s what I’ll say, that pain led me to deal with something that I’m not sure I would have ever dealt with if it wasn’t there.

For most of my life I thought the mark of a strong leader was thick skin. Take the hard word, absorb it, keep walking. Then I started paying attention to what actually happened inside me after feedback. Some of it left me sharper. Some of it just left me smaller. Standing there in the moment, I usually could not tell which one I was in.

Both reactions have a cost.

When I swallowed everything, my conviction wore down one comment at a time. When I walled everything off, I lost my read on what was actually true. What finally helped me was neither a thicker skin nor a higher wall. It was learning to tell a critic from a sharpener, which is harder than it sounds, because the two of them will often say the exact same sentence to your face.

So let me draw the line I have learned to draw.

A Critic Wants To Be Right. A Sharpener Wants You To Be Better.

Motive is where it starts.

A critic is usually solving for himself. He talks to feel superior, or to be heard, or because watching you wobble makes his own footing feel a little more secure. What he says might be completely accurate. That is the part people miss.

The quickest read has nothing to do with the words. Notice how you feel walking out of the room.

Criticism leaves you smaller than it found you. Sharpening hands you something to work with.

I have felt both versions of this in my own gut. Walk out of a conversation with a clearer sense of what to do next, and a sharpener was in the room. Walk out doubting your worth and staring at nothing, and a critic just had the floor.

That feeling is worth trusting. Treat it as information, not insecurity.

A Critic Aims At You. A Sharpener Aims At The Work.

The second difference is aim.

Listen closely and you can hear where a comment is pointed.

Some feedback goes at the person. It tells you what is wrong with you. Other feedback goes at the thing you made, and carries a quiet assumption underneath it, that you are the right one to fix it. Same volume, sometimes even the same vocabulary, and yet one is talking about your character while the other is talking about your work.

The wording can land almost identically. The aim behind it is not close.

When a hard word comes at me now, I run it through three questions:

• Where is this pointed, at me or at the problem?

• What is it actually handing me, a verdict or a next step?

• What does it assume about me, that I am the flaw here, or that I am the one who can fix it?

Feedback aimed at the work treats you as competent. Feedback aimed at you treats you as the defect. Start hearing that difference and you will hear it everywhere, in the notes people give you and in the notes you give them.

A Critic Disappears After The Blow. A Sharpener Stays For The Repair.

If you only have time for one test, use this one. It sorts people faster than the other two combined.

Watch what happens after the hard thing gets said. The person who names the problem and then reaches down to help you carry it was never aiming to hurt you. The one who lands the blow and is already reaching for the door was never really there for you in the first place.

Whether they stay is the whole tell.

The book of Proverbs puts it about as plainly as language allows:

Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.

Proverbs 27:6

Stay on the phrase “can be trusted.” A wound you can trust is not the kind a stranger inflicts on his way past you. It comes from a friend who is still standing there when the sting sets in. The cut and the commitment show up together, and it is the commitment that makes the cut worth anything.

Then read the back half of the verse, because it turns the whole thing over. An enemy multiplies kisses. Flattery is the sweeter sound in the moment and usually the more dangerous voice in the room, since it leaves you nothing true to stand on. The friend willing to wound you is the one Proverbs says you can actually trust.

None of this stays inside a sanctuary.

The healthiest teams I have ever been part of carry the same mark. The people willing to challenge each other are the same ones who show up for each other after the challenge. The heat and the loyalty come as a set, and Proverbs 27:6 is telling you why.

What Paul And Peter Teach Every Leadership Team

There is a scene in Galatians that paints this really well.

Peter, the same man who once climbed out of a boat and walked on water toward Jesus, had started backing away from the Gentile believers the moment a certain crowd showed up. He was reading the room and adjusting. Paul does not soften what he did about it:

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.

Galatians 2:11-12

Feel the weight of the room for a second.

Paul was the newcomer. Peter had the seniority, the years of walking beside Jesus in the flesh, the kind of standing Paul was still building.

Every unwritten rule in that moment said to let it go, catch Peter in private later, protect the peace between two men the whole early church was watching.

Paul said it out loud instead, because the thing on the line was bigger than the comfort between them.

Now watch how the story ages, because this is the part I keep coming back to. The confrontation did not cost Paul the relationship. Years down the road, Peter writes about Paul’s letters, sets them right alongside Scripture, and reaches for a particular word:

Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.

2 Peter 3:15

The man Paul corrected in front of everyone calls him a dear brother and blesses him by name. When both people are after the same outcome, that is where a hard confrontation lands. It did not break the bond. It proved there was one.

Set that down in your own conference room.

The junior leader who names the drift in the strategy, the teammate who tells the founder the culture is quietly slipping, they are doing the Paul work of Galatians 2. Punish those people and you teach everyone watching to keep their mouths shut. Honor them and you build trust that can take a hard conversation and come out heavier than it went in.

The Softening Trap

Most of us were trained to believe the loving move is always the gentle one.

Some days it is. And some days the loving move is to plant yourself in front of someone you respect and tell them they have wandered. That is only half of it, though, and the other half is the part that actually exposes you. When the correction comes back around to your door, are you the kind of person who can take it?

Be honest about that. Would your closest working relationships hold up under a Galatians moment? Have you built the kind of trust where a hard word thickens the bond rather than snapping it?

Most teams have never once tested it. Better to find out now than at the moment everything is riding on the answer.

The Person I Am Most Tempted To Manage

This is where it stops being theory for me. My own home has tested this harder than any office ever has.

In my life, my wife Danielle is the sharpener I trust more than anyone. And even with her, I still catch the urge to quietly manage what I bring home.

I’m not lying to her. I just find myself curating to her.

Telling her about a decision after I had already made it, rather than while it was still on the table. Arranging the details so the conclusion I had privately reached looked like the only reasonable one.

The story I would tell myself sounded generous, something about not burdening her with things she didn’t have to carry, etc.

The truth was smaller and less flattering than that. I was steering around the one person who would spot it if my reasoning was really just off.

She always catches it, the way she catches most things. No temper. One sentence. “You already decided, and we are supposed to be making these decisions together.”

It always lands hard because there is nothing to argue with.

The people closest to you are the exact ones you are tempted to manage, precisely because their honesty reaches the parts that matter.

Staying open to the person who has to live inside the outcome of your choices asks for humility on a Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and again every time after that.

What is true across a kitchen table is just as true with a co-founder, an executive team, or a church board. The closer someone stands to you, the louder the temptation to narrate the decision rather than actually open it up.

Three Practices For Leaders Who Want To Stay Sharp

Discernment is a skill, which means you can train it like any other. These three practices are how I work at mine.

1. Audit the aftermath, not just the words

Once a hard conversation ends, check two things. Did you leave with a next step or only a ruling? And did the person stay within arm’s reach once the words were out, or did they vanish? Those two answers tell you how much weight the feedback has earned. Let Proverbs 27:6 make the call, and let the staying decide.

2. Give feedback that passes your own test

Point it at the work. Assume the person can handle the fix. Stay in the room for the repair. If you are not willing to help carry the problem you just set down on someone, you have not yet earned the right to set it down at all.

3. Watch for the curating tell

The second you notice yourself narrating a decision to a trusted person instead of genuinely handing it over, stop talking. Give them the real thing, while it is still warm and still able to change. That single habit has protected me from my own blind spots better than any system anyone has ever drawn up for me.

The Standard I Hold Myself To

I still catch myself curating. What is different now is that I can feel it happening, and feeling it happening is what lets me stop.

A hard word is not automatically good, and it is not automatically an attack. It has to be examined. Check where it was pointed. Check whether the person was still standing there afterward. Then give it exactly the weight it has earned, and not an ounce more.

The critic tends to be the louder voice. The sharpener tends to be the rarer one.

Building a life and a culture where that rare voice can actually do its work may be one of the most valuable things you ever protect.

So go find your sharpeners. Quit managing them. And the next time it falls to you to say a hard thing to someone you respect, say it to their face, and then do the part almost nobody does. Stay.

— Jared

I’m getting ready to hop on a plane to fly back to Virginia, with my family, after spending a few days with some incredible church leaders from across the country.

Reflecting on my time, I’m thinking back over the hundreds of leaders I’ve worked with inside more than 400 businesses and 50 churches.

I’ve noticed something unique. The ones running on empty are rarely the ones with the heaviest schedules. Something else is wearing them down, and most cannot even name it.

For a long stretch of my life I carried weight that I assumed had my name on it, and I never once stopped to check whether it actually did.

If something went sideways on the team, I treated it as mine to fix. If someone walked in carrying a bad mood, I felt responsible for turning it around before they left. I told myself this was simply what it looked like to care about people. Then one afternoon, worn down and honest about how tired I had become, a mentor of mine asked a question I have never shaken loose.

“Who said that’s yours to carry?”

Six words. If I’m honest, I didn’t have an answer for him. When I sat with it long enough, the truth came out in two uneven parts. A little of what I had been carrying really did belong to me. But the bulk of it never did.

In the years since, I have sat with a lot of leaders, and I keep meeting the same worn-out person in a different chair. They are not buckling under the size of their calling. They are buckling because responsibility and burden got tangled together in their hands, and no one taught them to pull the two apart. Learning to do that will either guard your calling for the long haul or quietly bleed it dry.

Jesus spoke directly to people living in that exact condition. Sitting with a whole crowd of them, He said:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28 (NIV)

Look closely at who He calls. Not the idle or the half-committed. He goes straight for the weary, and instead of piling one more thing onto the load, He offers them somewhere to set it down.

But, before we can take Him up on that, we have to look honestly at what we have been hauling around.

The Weight You Were Built to Carry

Some weight is yours by design. God places it in your hands and asks you to steward it well, and it usually looks like the things closest to your life. Your family. The calling on you. The handful of people who are truly in front of you, day in and day out.

Assignments like those fit. They sit inside your real capacity and line up with the authority and influence you genuinely have. You still feel the weight, but the purpose underneath it holds you upright while you move.

Think about the way soldiers get trained to ruck. The pack is loaded to match the frame of the person strapping it on, and when the load is sized right, mile after mile under it is the very thing that builds the strength to carry more. Overload that same pack past what the body was prepared for, and it stops building anything and starts breaking the person down. The weight was never the villain in that story. The fit was.

I have watched this play out with leaders who finally narrow their focus to the sphere they were actually handed. They start to see the exact spot where their leadership stops and somebody else’s rightly begins. That clarity fills the tank instead of draining it.

That crowd back in Matthew 11 was not exhausted from loving God.

They were worn out because the religious machine of their day kept lashing on extra rules God never asked them to shoulder. His rest was the difference between a load built for them and one that was crushing them.

The Weight That Breaks You

Then there is the other kind of weight entirely. Burden.

You begin carrying outcomes that were never in your control, the choices other people insist on making, a future you have no ability to see coming. Bit by bit, you take ownership of things that were never yours to own.

This can take on different shapes to different people but it’s always the same foundation. A CEO who feels personally responsible for the private struggles of every name on the payroll. A pastor convinced that every believer’s spiritual growth rises or falls on his own effort.

The load keeps getting heavier for one plain reason. No human shoulder was ever engineered to hold that.

An old illustration makes this easy to understand.

Hold a full glass of water straight out in front of you, and the first minute costs you nothing. Give it ten minutes and your arm starts to burn. Hold it out there for an hour and you feel like the whole thing is about to hit the floor. Nothing about the glass changed. What wore you down was how long you gripped it without setting it back on the table, and that is the honest story of most exhausted leaders I meet. They are not holding more than the people around them. They have just held it far longer than they were ever meant to.

Go back to the words Jesus used. He names the burden on purpose, because we tend to wear it like a medal, treating the exhaustion as proof of our devotion and commitment to leadership. Most of the time it is proof of nothing except that we picked up something He never handed us.

And that brings every tired leader to the same question I received: “Who said that’s yours to carry?”

How to Know the Difference

Before you carry a single thing one more day, run it through three honest questions.

1. Do I Have Real Authority Here?

If the final call is not yours to make, the full weight of it was never yours to carry either. You can still shape the outcome and throw your support behind the people in the middle of it. The decision itself, and everything that flows out of it, belongs to somebody else. Good leaders come apart at exactly this spot, losing sleep over calls they were never given the authority to make.

2. Can I Control This Through My Own Actions?

Your preparation is yours. Your response is yours. The effort you bring is yours. What you do not get is control over market swings, other people’s reactions and decisions, or timing outside your reach. Keep throwing yourself against things that will not move, and all that energy drains into an authority you only imagine you have.

3. Did God Actually Assign This to Me?

Needed and yours are not the same word. Just because something is needed doesn’t mean it’s yours to provide. Real discernment is the ability to know what to lift and what to leave sitting right where it is until the person called for that assignment shows up. Even Jesus, with more real needs pressing in around Him than you or I will ever face, still pulled back from the crowds when necessary. He stayed inside His assignment, and that is the whole model.

I have watched people pull in a full breath like it was the first real one in years, right at the moment they named what they had been carrying that was never theirs.

What Happens When You Drop the Wrong Weight

Set down the weight that was never yours, and something opens up. All at once there is room again for the work that was the whole point of what God called you to. Quit trying to force outcomes, and you can finally throw your whole self into the part you were built for, which is faithful work.

The energy you were burning on other people’s decisions gets pointed back toward your own growth, where it belonged. And the day you stop rehearsing a future you cannot see is the day you get handed back the one you are living in right now.

Peter understood this from the inside out. He put it about as plainly as it can be put:

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7 (NIV)

Sit with that word “cast” for a second.

It is not a soft one. It means to throw, to fling something off you with force. Peter is describing a person who has flat-out decided they are finished hauling around what was never theirs to hold.

Casting your cares on God is an act of obedience, plain and simple, and the steadiest leaders I know do it on purpose, and often.

Those same leaders are hardly ever the ones with the most piled up in their arms. They are the people who have learned what to set down, and when. They protect their capacity for the work that carries their own name and hand everything else back to God. That is the very trust Jesus was inviting that weary crowd into when He promised, “I will give you rest.”

The Practice of Putting It Down

Here is the piece almost everybody misses. Laying the weight down is a practice. You do it once and it creeps right back on, so you have to keep doing it, week after week.

So every week take an honest look of what you’re carrying. Run back through those three questions and look for whatever has quietly climbed onto your shoulders. Some weeks it may be an outcome you have started trying to force again. Other times it may be a worst-case scenario you keep replaying at midnight. Whatever you turn up, say it out loud, get honest about why you reached for it, and hand it back to God on purpose.

That rhythm has changed the way I lead. When the only thing on my shoulders is the thing that is actually mine, I have something left in the tank for the people who need me most. That is the rest Jesus was talking about in Matthew 11:28. He never promised a lighter schedule. What He promised was the right work, carried the right way.

So make it real this week.

Take ten quiet minutes and write down everything you are carrying: the worries, the outcomes, every person’s situation living rent-free in your head. Then drag the whole list through the three questions, one line at a time. Cross off anything you have no authority over, anything outside your control, and anything God never assigned to you.

You will be surprised how short the real list gets once the borrowed weight comes off.

Your Arms Are Full for a Reason

If you are running on empty, do not start by staring at your calendar. Look at your arms and take honest inventory of what is in them. Some of it truly is yours to hold. A good deal of it, if you are honest, probably never was.

And here is the part I would beg you not to skip past. The burden you keep holding onto might be the exact thing standing between you and the responsibility God actually meant for you to pick up.

The invitation He gave that crowd is still open to you, and it arrives with a condition folded quietly inside. His rest is not something you can receive while your hands are already full.

Release what’s not yours, leader.

— Jared

You may have already thought of a name.

Before you finished reading the subtitle, a face may have popped up in your mind. Someone on your team who should have moved on a while ago. You have had the talks. You have extended the grace. You have told yourself the next honest conversation would be the one that finally turned things around.

It didn’t. And a part of you knew it wouldn’t.

So you kept waiting.

You called it patience. You called it “giving people a fair shot”. You told yourself you were being the kind of leader who believes in second chances.

Here is what that decision was actually doing while you waited.

Every day you protected that one person, you were teaching everyone else on your team a lesson you never meant to teach. You were showing your best people that underperformance gets shielded and excellence gets overlooked. You were quietly announcing that your loyalty to one struggling person outweighed your loyalty to the whole team carrying the weight.

That is the hidden cost of holding on too long. And it is more expensive than almost any leader wants to admit.

Loyalty That Costs You the Room

There is a moment in the life of Israel where a good leader almost buried himself under this exact weight.

Moses had just led a nation out of Egypt. Now he was leading them through the wilderness, and every single day the people lined up with their disputes. From morning until evening, Moses sat and judged every case himself. He was the bottleneck for an entire nation, and he could not see it, because he thought carrying all of it was what faithfulness looked like.

Then his father-in-law showed up and named the thing Moses could not name for himself.

“What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.”

Exodus 18:17-18

Read that middle line again. “You will only wear yourselves out.”

Jethro was not just worried about Moses. He said you and these people. The way Moses was leading was draining the leader and failing the very people he was trying to serve. His refusal to change the structure was costing everyone.

That is the trap. When you hold onto a situation past its season, you convince yourself you are the only one paying for it. You are not. The whole room pays.

The Difference Between Grace and Enabling

From a distance, grace and enabling look like twins.

Both keep the person close. Both hand over another chance. Both come wrapped in patience and belief. Stand back far enough and you cannot tell them apart.

The difference shows up over time, in what each one does to the person on the receiving end.

Grace calls someone up. It names a clear expectation, offers real support, and builds the kind of accountability that helps a person grow into who they could be. Grace says, “I believe you can rise to this, and I am going to help you get there.”

Enabling lets someone remain stuck and calls it love. It quietly removes the consequences, lowers the bar, and shields a person from the exact discomfort that would have woken them up.

He loved people too much to let them keep living small.

So sit with this honestly. If your patience is helping someone dodge the very thing God is trying to grow in them, it stopped being grace a while ago. It became the thing that keeps them comfortable and keeps them stuck.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, because it changes the question you are asking about them.

The Question Underneath It All

Grace and enabling ask two completely different questions.

Grace asks what this person needs to become who they are capable of being. Enabling asks how to make things easier for them right now. One question is willing to create some tension for the sake of growth. The other removes every ounce of tension and calls the comfort kindness.

The uncomfortable truth is that the most loving move you can make is sometimes to let a person feel the full weight of their own choices. You are not doing it to punish them. You are doing it to wake them up.

Moses had to learn this on a national scale. He had to release his grip on being the answer to every problem so the people could actually be led well. Watch what happened the moment he stopped holding it all himself.

“He chose capable men from all Israel and made them leaders of the people, officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.”

Exodus 18:25

The nation did not fall apart when Moses let go. It got stronger. The bottleneck cleared. Capable people finally got the room to lead. And Moses got back the capacity he had been pouring into a structure that was never going to work.

Letting go did not shrink the mission. It multiplied it.

What the Waiting Actually Costs

When you hold onto someone past their season, you tell yourself you are delaying a decision. You are not delaying anything. You are making one.

You are deciding that avoiding an awkward conversation today matters more than protecting the people and the mission tomorrow. That decision comes with a bill, and it lands in four places.

1. It costs you credibility. Your team is watching how you handle the person who is not delivering. When you tolerate it in one, you signal to everyone that the standard is optional. Your highest performers start quietly wondering whether their effort even registers.

2. It costs you culture. Your culture gets defined by the behavior you are willing to allow, whatever the values on the wall happen to say. Every day you keep someone who is pulling against the mission, you teach your team that the mission is negotiable.

3. It costs you capacity. The energy you spend managing a person who should not be in the seat is energy you are stealing from the people who should. You are robbing your best people of the attention and development they have earned.

4. It costs the person too. Keeping someone in a role they are failing at traps them in the one place they will never thrive. You think you are protecting them. You are holding them back from the seat where they could actually succeed.

The cost of making the change is real. The cost of avoiding it is heavier, and it compounds every week you wait.

How to Know It Is Time

You do not have to guess whether it is time. Three signals tell you plainly, and if you are seeing more than one, you already have your answer.

1. The same conversation keeps repeating

If you have had the same talk three times and nothing has moved, the problem stopped being communication a while ago. It became commitment. They have heard you clearly. They are choosing not to change. A fourth conversation will not fix what the first three could not.

2. You are managing them more than leading them

Leading a person grows them and multiplies what they can do. Managing a person just keeps them from falling. When you spend more of your week cleaning up someone’s mistakes than developing their strengths, you have quietly slid from being their leader to being their safety net.

3. Other people are paying the price

Watch what happens to everyone around them. The moment one person’s underperformance starts draining the morale, momentum, or results of the whole team, your loyalty to that one person has become disloyalty to everyone else in the room.

Once you see the signals, the only thing left is the courage to move, and to move like someone who still cares about the person in front of them.

Making the Move Without Crushing the Person

Making the hard call does not mean you stopped caring. You are making it precisely because you care enough to tell the truth. Here are four steps to do it in a way that protects their dignity and your integrity, each one building on the last.

1. Be clear instead of frustrated

You do not owe them a list of every failure or a mountain of evidence. Name the reality plainly and move with respect. Something as simple as, “This role is not the right fit, and staying in it is not serving either of us well,” honors the person and the truth at the same time.

2. Own your part

If you waited too long, say it out loud. “I should have had this conversation months ago, and that is on me.” Taking responsibility for the delay will not change the decision, and it will protect the relationship on the way out.

3. Help them land well

Wherever you can, support the transition. A strong reference. A fair timeline. An introduction to the right opportunity. That kind of care shows you are ending the fit, not the friendship.

4. Speak to your team

You do not need to air the details. Your people do need to know you saw the situation and you handled it. Silence breeds speculation. A word of clarity from you builds the trust that quiet avoidance was draining.

The Freedom Waiting on the Other Side

Almost every leader who finally makes the move they have been dreading repeats a similar thought afterward. “I should have done that six months ago.”

The relief is bigger than getting a problem off the desk. It is the return of the focus, the energy, and the integrity that got buried under all that waiting. Your team feels it too. Standards climb. Morale lifts. The people who were quietly carrying extra weight finally get the support they deserve.

And the part that surprises everyone is what happens to the person you released. More often than not, they land somewhere better. They find a seat that actually fits. They stop straining to be something they were never built to be. They get a real shot at winning somewhere else.

You did not destory them. You released them, the same way Moses released the weight that was quietly wearing him down.

Your team does not need you to be their friend. They need you to protect the mission, guard the culture, and make the call everyone else is too afraid to make.

So stop waiting for the perfect moment, because it is not coming. Name the situation you already know you have carried too long. Make the call. Trust that the freedom on the other side is worth the discomfort of getting there.

Grace never meant keeping people trapped in a role that was slowly breaking them. Real grace cares enough to help a person move forward, even when moving forward means moving on.

Lead well, leader.

— Jared

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I put everything I know into a book to help people become the healthiest leaders possible. Whether you lead at work, at home, at church or anywhere else, we want to equip you to lead like Jesus. This book is for it.

It’s called Leading Lazarus, and it comes out September 6.

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Preorders are open right now, and preordering isn’t just buying early. It’s how you unlock the bonuses:

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I’ve been carrying this for a long time. It would mean the world to have you in early.

Talk soon,

Jared

P.S. The fastest way to help? Preorder a few copies for the leaders around you. You build a shared language for your whole team, and you unlock the biggest bonuses while you’re at it.

PREORDER LEADING LAZARUS

There a mistake that many successful leaders make in seasons of growth and transition. They will walk into that new season carrying the same toolbox that made them successful in the old one. Because of that past success, they carry the same instincts, same strategies and same grip on control that once felt like a gift.

And within a few months, we notice something strange. The things they were once known for are now the things that are holding them back.

There’s something very important about the story of Peter in the bible. So often, christian circles point to the reality of Jesus calling a brash fisherman to build his church on.

But a truth we never really talk about is the reality that Peter, the brash fisherman, could not have led the church at Pentecost if he never changed.

The same hands that hauled nets on the Sea of Galilee, the same gut instinct that made him the loudest voice in every room, the same confidence that let him jump out of a boat first, none of it was built to stand in front of three thousand strangers in Jerusalem and preach a sermon that would launch the global church.

Jesus knew that.

So the three years between the fishing boat and the sermon were not only preparation. They were demolition and reconstruction.

Jesus took Peter apart piece by piece.

• He let him walk on water and then sink in it.

• He let him swear undying loyalty and then deny he ever knew the man.

• He let Peter fail loudly at the very thing he was most sure of, and then He rebuilt him into someone the old Peter would not have recognized.

By the time the upper room came, the fisherman was gone. We don’t love that because it challenges the very identities that we’ve come to depend so deeply on.

But, look at the evidence. The new Peter waited ten days in a locked room because Jesus told him to stay put until the Spirit arrived. The old Peter would have likely been out the door by day two, organizing something, fixing something, talking. Patience like that doesn’t come from a personality tweak. It comes from a man who has been rebuilt.

The Tools That Built Yesterday Will Not Build Tomorrow

I have walked into new seasons holding old tools more times than I want to admit.

Every time I tried, a similar thing happened. The skills that made me effective in the last chapter started working against me in the new one.

The knowledge that anchored me in one season hardened into stubbornness in the next. The hands-on involvement that built something from nothing turned into micromanagement the moment the thing outgrew my reach. The patience that carried me through a long wait became passivity right when God was asking me to make the difficult decisions.

Nothing was wrong with any of those qualities when they were first formed. In fact, they served their intended season well.

They just came with an expiration date I did not want to admit because it felt like stalling.

For years I believed good leadership meant managing people well. So, I did. I built the schedules. I tracked the tasks. I kept everything on time. That worked beautifully when the team was small and the targets were simple.

Then God started expanding what we were building, and those same skills became a ceiling. The team no longer needed someone to manage tasks. It needed someone to multiply leaders. And I kept showing up with last season’s playbook, wondering why the room felt smaller every week.

Why Letting Go Feels Like Losing Yourself

Transitions throw you off balance because you are doing two hard things at once.

You are learning new things while unlearning old things that used to work.

That strength is part of how you see yourself. Surrendering it can feel like surrendering you.

I have lived through seasons where progress crawled. I wanted the results to match the effort I was pouring in. So, I pushed harder because in my mind forward motion mattered more than waiting on God.

It cost me. It came back to me in the form of strained relationships, lost momentum and a team that felt divided instead of led.

Those seasons exposed something I did not want to see but really need to understand. That I trusted outcomes more than I trusted God’s vision. The very drive that helped me build in one chapter was the thing keeping me from building in the next.

Here is what God taught me in those seasons. Slow, difficult progress is not wasted time. He was working under the surface on parts of my leadership that would not have survived the next level. I could not see it happening. That did not mean it was not happening.

Formation Rarely Feels Good While It Is Happening

And the process of becoming that person almost always involves losing pieces of yourself you assumed were permanent.

When Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the tree, He did not just adjust his perspective. He sat down in his house and rebuilt his whole life from the inside. The same thing happened with Peter. Jesus did not merely train him for ministry. He tore down the fisherman and built an apostle in his place.

So the uncomfortable season you are in, the one where old habits are being pulled up by the root and new ones have not fully grown in yet, might not be punishment at all. It might be the exact place God wants you.

Paul knew that ground well. Writing to a church under pressure, he said:

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Romans 5:3-4 NIV

Read the chain Paul builds there, again.

Suffering does not break the leader who stays in it. It produces something greater.

The pressure is not the enemy of your formation. The pressure is sometimes the method.

What Worked Then Will Not Work Now

Leaders get stuck because they refuse to release the thing that made them successful in the beginning.

The founder who cannot stop putting his hands on every decision when the organization is begging for vision. The pastor still preaching to 100 people the same way he preached to 15, wondering why it no longer lands. The executive who built the whole company on raw hustle and is now burning out the team trying to scale that same energy onto people who cannot carry it.

When the progress feels slow, I keep reminding myself that faithfulness always produces something, even when nothing is visible yet. God does His quietest work below the surface, long before the results break ground. The right perspective can turn a demanding season into a defining one.

The Question You Need to Sit With

Is God forming something in you instead of delivering something through you in this season?

If you are standing in a transition right now and it feels like everything you knew how to do suddenly stopped working, hear me on this. You may not be failing.

You may be standing in the middle of your own demolition and reconstruction.

I know that is tough to hear when you are in it, but the discomfort is not a sign you are sliding backward. It is a sign God is preparing you for something you could never have carried as the person you used to be.

The old tools got you here are not always meant to build what comes next.

And that is exactly how it is supposed to work.

Be patient, Leader.

— Jared

There’s a feeling that every leader needs to be aware of. It comes on the platter of other people’s success.

A team meeting where someone shares a number that lands stronger than yours. A conference where every speaker seems three steps ahead of where you are. A text from a friend that opens with “guess what just happened” followed by a success story. You’re glad for them. You mean it. And at the exact same time, something tightens that you can’t quite name and don’t really want to.

It rarely shows up as outright jealousy. It shows up as a question that sounds almost reasonable.

Why is their road smoother than mine?

Here is the part we don’t like to sit with. Other people’s success has a way of exposing our own unhappiness. And our unhappiness has a way of exposing what we haven’t surrendered yet.

The win across the room is never the problem. It’s the spotlight. It shines on the thing we’ve been holding onto and refusing to lay down.

That tension feels harmless but it’s not. It is the front door to a kind of bondage that drains more leaders than burnout ever will. And the way out of it was handed to us two thousand years ago on a beach, in one short sentence from Jesus that still cuts straight through every comparison we’ve ever made.

Peter Asked the Question We’re All Afraid to Say Out Loud

By the time we reach the final chapter of John’s gospel, Peter has been through the worst stretch of his life.

He denied Jesus three times. He watched the man he’d left everything to follow get arrested, beaten, and killed. Then he watched Him walk out of a tomb alive. And now Jesus has pulled him aside on the shoreline to do something Peter probably didn’t expect.

He restored him. He gave him an assignment.

“Feed my lambs... Take care of my sheep... Feed my sheep.”

John 21:15-17

This is enormous. Jesus is handing Peter the future of His church. He is telling a man who failed publicly that the failure isn’t the final word over his life. Peter should have been undone by the weight and the honor of it.

Instead, he looked over his shoulder.

“When Peter saw him, he asked, ‘Lord, what about him?’”

John 21:21

The “him” is John. And the question underneath the question is one every leader has asked in some version: what does his assignment look like compared to mine?

Jesus doesn’t soften His answer.

“Jesus answered, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.’”

John 21:22

What is that to you.

Five words. And every leader stuck in the comparison trap needs to hear them today.

Comparison Doesn’t Steal Your Joy First. It Steals Your Focus.

We’ve been taught that comparison robs us of joy. That’s true, but it’s not the real danger.

The real danger is what comparison does to your attention.

The moment Peter turned to look at John, he stopped looking at Jesus. He had a direct command in front of him, the most important words anyone could receive, and his eyes drifted sideways to someone else’s story.

That’s the trap. Not the misery of it. The distraction of it.

You begin running an audit you were never assigned to run. They started after me. They have fewer credentials. I deserve what they have. I want to be in the place they are in. Why is their path moving and mine is standing still?

None of those thoughts move you one inch closer to your own calling. They just add weight to a climb that was already steep.

And here is what makes it so dangerous for people who lead well. The better you are at strategy, the better you become at justifying the comparison. You don’t call it envy. You call it discernment. You call it “obedience”. You tell yourself you’re just trying to do God’s will for your life.

But Jesus didn’t ask Peter to evaluate the field. He asked him to follow.

Abraham Climbed His Mountain Without Looking at Anyone Else’s

Long before Peter stood on that beach, another man learned the same lesson on the side of a mountain.

Abraham waited twenty-five years for Isaac. He built his whole identity as a father around a son God had promised and finally delivered. And then God said the one thing that made no sense on paper.

“Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’”

Genesis 22:2

Give back the thing I gave you. The thing you waited decades for. The thing you built your life around.

Watch what Abraham does next, because the whole point lives in this verse.

“Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey.”

Genesis 22:3

Early the next morning. He didn’t stall. He didn’t lie awake building a case against the assignment. He didn’t poll his neighbors to see if anyone else was being asked to give up this much. He got up and he obeyed before his emotions could talk him out of it.

And notice what is completely absent from the story. Abraham never once looks sideways. There is no moment where he wonders why his test is harder than someone else’s. No comparison. No audit. Just a man and his son and a mountain and a word from God.

God stopped him before the knife came down. He provided a ram caught in the thicket. He honored the surrender without requiring the loss.

But Abraham didn’t know that ending when he started walking. He climbed fully prepared to release the thing he loved most, with no guarantee he’d get it back.

That’s the surrender nobody puts on a job description. The kind that costs you something you’re not sure you can live without. And you cannot offer it while you’re still measuring your sacrifice against everyone else’s.

You can’t lay something on the altar while you’re still checking to see if the person next to you had to lay down as much.

The Freedom Hiding Inside a Hard Question

When Jesus told Peter “what is that to you,” it sounds like a rebuke. Read it again and you’ll find it’s an invitation.

He was offering Peter freedom.

Not the freedom to do whatever he wanted. The freedom to put down weight that was never his to carry in the first place. To put down the weight of someone else’s timeline. The weight of wondering why their path looks so different from yours.

And the heaviest one of all, the one we’d never say out loud: the weight of quietly auditing God’s decisions for other people’s lives.

That last one is heavier than we admit. Most of us aren’t just comparing. We’re quietly questioning whether God is being fair in how He distributes assignments, seasons, and speed. We will blame the people God uses to hold us still and flock to the people who open doors for us, even if that’s not God’s will for us.

We would never say it that plainly. So we say it sideways. Why them and not me. Why now for them and later for me.

Jesus answers all of it with the same sentence. What is that to you. You follow me.

The question isn’t cruel. It’s the most freeing thing He could have said. He’s telling Peter, and He’s telling you, that John’s story is not your burden to carry. You were never put in charge of anyone else’s race. You have one job, and someone else’s pace has nothing to do with it.

How to Actually Put the Weight Down

Principles don’t change anything until they touch your calendar. So here is what releasing comparison looks like when you take it out of the sanctuary and into your week.

1. Start by naming your assignment in writing. Not what you wish God had called you to. Not the assignment you admire in someone else. The specific thing He’s put in front of you NOW. Write it down in plain language and keep it somewhere you’ll see it daily. You cannot follow a calling you’ve never put into words.

2. Guard what you feed your attention. Peter’s trouble started the second he turned his head. Yours will too. Pay attention to the titles, the situations, the feeds, and even the gatherings that leave you doing the mental math on someone else’s success. If you walk away from something feeling behind instead of sharpened, that input is working against your assignment. Cut it.

3. Catch the audit while it’s still small. Comparison rarely arrives as full jealousy. It shows up as curiosity that slowly hardens into frustration. Learn to recognize the first thought before it builds a case. The moment you notice yourself tallying someone else’s wins, redirect to your own next step. The earlier you interrupt it, the less it costs you.

4. Learn to celebrate without measuring. When someone else succeeds, train yourself to be glad without immediately holding it up against your own progress. Their win takes nothing from your calling. A leader who can genuinely rejoice over a peer’s breakthrough has already broken comparison’s grip.

5. Surround yourself with people who aren’t competing with you. Find the rare few who celebrate your wins without quietly keeping score. These relationships are harder to find than they should be. When you find them, protect them like the gift they are.

Each of these gets easier the moment you accept the truth underneath all of them.

Your Assignment Is Enough

Here’s what I need you to hear before you close this.

Your assignment is enough.

It doesn’t have to look like someone else’s to be valid. It doesn’t have to produce the same results at the same speed. And it doesn’t require the people around you to understand it or applaud it.

Peter asked about John because he wanted reassurance that his own path made sense. Jesus refused to give him that reassurance, because the reassurance was never going to come from comparison. It only comes from obedience.

The mountain in front of you is the right mountain. The timeline you’re walking is the right timeline.

And the moment you stop looking sideways, the weight you’ve been dragging up the hill quietly drops. Your focus sharpens. Your steps get lighter. The thing God called you to becomes the only thing that has your attention.

That’s the surrender Abraham showed on Moriah. That’s the freedom Jesus offered Peter on the shore.

Both men were asked the same thing in different words. Stop watching everyone else. Follow Me.

Stay in your present, Leader…

— Jared

I remember reading a study once that tracked executives who got fired from major companies. The researchers expected market collapses, failed products, bad timing. What they found surprised them. Most lost their positions because of patterns inside themselves they refused to confront. Pride. Defensiveness. An inability to take feedback. The threat that ended their leadership had been living in their own offices the whole time.

That finding lines up with everything I have watched happen to leaders in ministry, in business, and at all kinds of different tables.

We pour most of our energy into the wrong battle.

We brace for the difficult person. The hostile critic. The competitor circling our market. The shift in culture that threatens everything we built. We construct our defenses against the outside world and call it wisdom. While we watch the door, the real damage starts somewhere we forgot to look.

The leaders who fall almost always fall from the inside.

This is not a modern problem. Open Scripture and the pattern is everywhere, written into the lives of the people God used most.

The Pattern We Keep Missing

Saul was not taken down by the Philistines. He was taken down by jealousy.

He heard the women singing, and something in him broke.

“Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.”

1 Samuel 18:7

From that moment, his leadership ran on comparison instead of calling. Every choice he made afterward passed through one filter: is David getting ahead of me? The man who once stood a head taller than everyone in Israel spent his final years hunting a shepherd boy through the wilderness, undone by a song.

Solomon was not taken down by enemy nations. He was taken down by compromise. The wisest man who ever lived made small concessions, year after year, until he could no longer recognize how far he had drifted from the throne where God once met him.

Demas was not taken down by persecution. Paul names it plainly.

“Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me.”

2 Timothy 4:10

He grew tired of the sacrifice and walked away.

No army brought any of them down. Each one was undone by something that grew in his own heart while everyone around him assumed he was fine.

Why the Inside Threat Is the Deadly One

You can prepare for opposition you can see. You can study it, build around it, and gather people to help you meet it.

The threat inside you operates in silence.

By the time you feel it, it has already been steering your decisions for months. It has shaped how you treat your team, how you spend your resources, how you receive correction when it comes. You did not schedule a meeting with it. It moved in without an invitation and started running things.

In my work with leaders across ministry and the marketplace, I keep watching the same story repeat.

Here is the part that keeps me awake at night.

The threat inside you usually shows up dressed as a virtue.

The Disguise That Fools Us All

If I am honest about my own leadership, comparison would not top the list. Neither would entitlement. Mine wears a holier costume than that.

Mine is overextension that I dress up as faithfulness.

I say yes because I care about people. I take on more because the needs in front of me are real and my sense of my own capacity runs ahead of the truth. I step into the gap because I see it and my first instinct is to fill it myself.

None of that feels like an enemy. From the outside it actually reads as generosity. But, underneath it sits a cost I do not always stop to count.

The people closest to me get whatever version of me is left after the day has already spent me. The work that carries the most weight gets the scraps from things that felt urgent but were never mine to carry.

My enemy does not look like selfishness. It looks like service.

The Enemies That Hide in Plain Sight

Your inside threat may look nothing like mine. It is still there. After sitting with leader after leader, these are the ones I see most.

• Comparison: You measure your progress against someone else’s highlight reel. Every win feels hollow because someone won bigger. Every setback feels like the end because you are sure you are falling behind. You stop leading from your calling and start leading from a wound.

• Entitlement: You start believing you have earned the right to coast. The early years took everything, so now you tell yourself you deserve ease. You stop serving and start expecting to be served. You mistake longevity for license.

• Complacency: You settle for protecting what you built and stop pursuing what you are called to build next. You guard the past so closely that you have no hands free to reach for the future. Growth asks for discomfort, so you quietly decline.

• Isolation: You convince yourself nobody understands the weight you carry. You stop being honest with the people who could actually help. You start making alone the decisions that were always meant to be made in community, and you call that strength.

• People-pleasing: You shape your choices around who might be upset rather than what is right. You dodge the conflict that leadership requires because you need to be liked. You trade clarity for comfort and tell yourself it is kindness.

• Control: You micromanage because you trust no one to do it the way you would. Everything routes through you, so everything slows to your speed. Your organization can only grow as large as your own two hands, and you cannot bring yourself to open them.

How These Enemies Grow

Here is what makes the inside threat so dangerous. It never arrives full-grown.

It starts small. One comparison. One boundary you let slide. One flash of entitlement that nobody challenges.

He does not say, “here is a destroyed marriage.” He says, “here is one website, and nobody will ever know.” He does not say, “here is an addiction that will own you.” He says, “it is only one drink, and you could hide it easily if you wanted to.”

He lures us with the version of the thing we are sure we can manage. We never meant to carry the whole weight. We kept adding one link to the chain at a time (this is also one of my favorite sermon illustrations to do).

The trouble was never that we failed to say no to the big thing. The trouble is that we never learned to say no to the small thing that opens the door to it.

What Delay Actually Costs

What we delay dealing with now, we hand permission to grow later.

The longer an inside threat sits unattended, the more it bends our decisions, colors our relationships, and shrinks what God could have done through us.

I have watched a leader lose his family because he never named his workaholism. I have seen a pastor lose his church because he never confronted his need for control. I have sat across from an executive who dismantled his own team because he could not face his insecurity.

In almost every case, the warning came long before the collapse. The leader just waved it off. Justified it. Gave it a spiritual name.

“I am just being faithful.” “I am just trying to serve well.” “I am just doing what has to be done.”

And so the enemy kept growing the whole time, fed by every excuse.

What Radical Honesty Requires

Dealing with the threat inside you asks for the one thing most of us spend our lives avoiding. Radical honesty.

You have to name the thing you would rather leave unnamed. You have to admit the pattern you have been protecting. You have to stop pretending that what looks like a virtue from the outside is doing no harm on the inside.

You cannot defeat what you are still willing to entertain. Entertaining it does not mean you are chasing it. It means you have left the door cracked. You have kept it on the table as an option and refused to cut it off all the way.

Radical honesty means naming the exact situations, relationships, and habits that feed your inside enemy.

• The social platform that triggers your comparison.

• The friendship that nudges you toward compromise.

• The calendar that rewards your overextension.

• The fear underneath your people-pleasing.

Whatever it is, you have to be willing to remove it. Removal feels extreme because we have talked ourselves into believing we can keep the thing and manage it at the same time. The pattern in Scripture says otherwise, and so does every leadership collapse I have ever witnessed.

The Clock You Keep Ignoring

One of the great lies we believe sounds reasonable. “I have time.” Time to deal with it later. Time to face it once things settle down. Time to work on it after this season passes.

Inside threats do not wait for a convenient season. They need to be faced now. Every day we delay, we give the thing more room to take root, more room to spread, more room to shape our choices and wound the people we love.

We miss something important when we read God’s patience as His approval.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

2 Peter 3:9

God’s patience is meant to walk you toward repentance. It is the space He gives you to turn around before the cost grows beyond recovery.

The longer we wait, the harder the turn becomes. Sin hardens the heart. It dulls us to correction, deafens us to feedback, and blinds us to the damage we are leaving in our wake.

A Way to Fight Back

If you are ready to face your inside threat, here is the path I have walked myself and walked with the leaders I coach.

1. Name it. Identify the specific enemy. Be honest with yourself and with God. Do not soften it or give it a gentler label. Call it what it is, confess it, and own the way it has touched your heart, your relationships, and your calling. You will never deal with what you refuse to admit is a problem.

2. Replace it. These threats thrive in empty space. Once you remove the behavior, fill the gap with something that honors God and feeds your calling. If comparison lives on a screen, give that time to a practice that grounds you in who God says you are. If overextension is your enemy, replace the reflexive yes with boundaries that guard your core relationships.

3. Fight it. The enemy will look for a way back in, and fighting it is the work of a lifetime, not a weekend. Gather people who will pray for you, challenge you, and speak truth when they see you drifting. Stay anchored in Scripture and let it strengthen you for the long battle ahead.

The key to real change is not perfection. It is persistence.

You take one step. You name the enemy. You replace the habit. You stay in the fight. And you trust God to hand you the victory He has already promised.

The Question You Have to Answer

So here is the question waiting for you. What is your inside enemy? The one that never looks threatening because it wears a spiritual disguise. Comparison. Entitlement. Complacency. Isolation. People-pleasing. Control. Or something that belongs to you alone.

Whatever it is, it is worth naming today. Before it shapes another year of your decisions. Before it costs you another relationship you cannot get back. Before it limits your impact in ways you will not be able to undo.

The leaders who finish strong are not the ones who never faced an inside threat. They are the ones who saw it early and fought it with honesty.

The enemies worth watching were never the ones in front of you. They were always the ones inside you.

And the time to face them is today.

Deal with it well, Leader…

— Jared

There’s a kind of rejection that competence can’t fix.

You can earn the degree. Land the title or the job. Build the track record. And then you walk into a room full of people who knew you before any of it, and watch all of it evaporate in real time.

They don’t see what you’ve become. They see the kid who used to sit three rows back. They see the version of you that existed before the calling, before the growth, before God did the work that changed everything in your life and in your character. And the harder you try to show them who you are now, the more they dig into who you used to be.

If that’s ever happened to you, I want you to know something today.

It happened to Jesus first.

The Hometown That Tried to Throw Him Off a Cliff

Luke 4 puts us in Nazareth. Jesus has launched His ministry. He’s been teaching in synagogues across the region, and word is spreading fast. So He comes home. He walks into the synagogue on the Sabbath, the same room He’d sat in as a boy, and they hand Him the scroll of Isaiah.

He reads the passage about the Spirit of the Lord being on Him to proclaim good news to the poor and freedom for the captives. Then He rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says one of the boldest sentences in the Gospels.

“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Luke 4:21

The room should have erupted. Instead it went cold.

“Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

Luke 4:22

That question carries the whole problem. They weren’t asking about His theology any longer. They were reminding everyone in earshot where He came from. They watched Him grow up. They knew His family, His trade, the limits they’d assigned Him years ago. And their memory of the old Jesus blinded them to the anointing on the new one.

It escalated fast. By the end of the scene they weren’t just skeptical. Luke says they were furious enough to run Him out of town and haul Him to the edge of a cliff to throw Him off.

His own people. The community that raised Him. The table He grew up at now wanted Him gone.

Read what He does next, because it’s the whole point.

But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Luke 4:30

He didn’t give a speech defending Himself. He didn’t stay to prove them wrong or win anyone back. He just left.

The Instinct That Keeps You Stuck

Here’s where this passage gets uncomfortable for me, because my instinct is the exact opposite of what Jesus modeled.

When I used to walk into a room that rejected me, everything in me wanted to prove I belonged there. So my initial response is to work harder. Show more. Make the case louder until the people who dismissed me finally had to admit they were wrong.

I wanted to sit them down and walk them through the receipts. Every change. Every result. Every reason their picture of me was outdated.

But watch what that instinct actually costs you.

Jesus didn’t walk away because He couldn’t handle rejection. He walked away because His identity was already settled before He ever entered that room. Heaven had spoken over Him at His baptism and we saw in Matthew 3:

“This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Matthew 3:17

Read this next line carefully. You can’t argue people into receiving an anointing they’ve already decided to ignore.

So Jesus took what He carried somewhere it could land.

Why the People Closest to Your Past Struggle Most With Your Present

I have watched this exact pattern play out in church after church, business after business, family after family. It shows up everywhere because it isn’t really about the people. It’s about how memory works.

We file people into categories based on how we first knew them. The intern. The struggling kid. The one who used to be a mess. And when that person outgrows the file we put them in, it creates friction. Not always because anyone is cruel. Sometimes the people who knew you “back then” simply can’t reconcile the old version with the new one.

So they keep handing you the old scroll. They keep asking “isn’t this Joseph’s son” while God is trying to do something through you that has nothing to do with Joseph’s son.

And if you’re not careful, you’ll spend the most productive years of your life trying to update their file instead of walking in your assignment.

I’ve seen gifted leaders burn years of momentum this way. Staying in organizations that tolerate them but never value them. Showing up to tables where they’re permitted but never wanted, convinced that one more win will finally shift the room. It rarely does.

Because the energy you spend fighting for validation in the wrong room is energy you’re not investing in the right one.

That’s not permission to quit at the first sign of resistance. Some resistance is exactly what God uses to sharpen you. But there’s a difference between pushing through resistance and clawing for a seat that was never meant for you.

The Same Words Landed Completely Differently One Town Over

Notice where Jesus went after Nazareth. Luke 4 doesn’t leave Him wandering. It takes Him straight to Capernaum.

They were amazed at his teaching, because his words had authority.

Luke 4:32

Read those two scenes back to back and let the contrast do its work. The teaching was identical and so was the teacher. One town tried to kill Him. The other was amazed by Him.

The people of Capernaum weren’t more deserving than the people of Nazareth. They were simply ready to receive what He carried. And Capernaum became the base of His ministry. He healed there. He taught there. He built a movement there.

Your calling was never going to require universal acceptance. It requires the right placement.

You don’t need every table to make room for you. You need the table where what you carry actually matters.

I know that’s hard to sit with when the table you want is the one that raised you.

Three Questions Before You Walk

So how do you tell the difference between resistance that’s refining you and a door God is asking you to walk through? When leaders bring me this tension, I give them three questions to sit with honestly:

1. Is this resistance sharpening me or restricting me?

Healthy resistance pushes you to clarify your vision and refine your thinking. It makes you better. But when the resistance is a constant attack on your competence, your character, or your purpose, that’s not iron sharpening iron. That’s erosion. Name which one you’re actually living in.

2. Am I fighting for the assignment or fighting for the approval?

Sometimes we stay in a hard room for a holy reason. Sometimes we stay because we need the people there to admit they were wrong about us. Only one of those is worth your time. If the goal is to be vindicated, you’re not protecting your calling. You’re feeding your ego.

3. Is my presence actually bearing fruit here?

This is the one that settles it. If your contribution is landing, if people are growing, if the work is moving forward, stay and keep building. But if you’re pouring everything you have into a room with nothing to show for it but exhaustion, that’s not faithfulness. That might be God pointing you toward Capernaum.

When the Right Table Doesn’t Exist Yet

Here’s the part I don’t want you to miss, because it’s where Jesus takes this further than most of us are willing to go.

He didn’t just relocate from a bad room to a better one. He built something from it. He gathered twelve people. He created a community that could receive what He carried and then multiply it. The movement that changed history didn’t start because Nazareth came around. It started because Jesus stopped waiting for Nazareth and built the table somewhere else. Sheesh…that one hit me just writing it.

If you’ve looked for a room that values what God put in you and you can’t find one, that absence might be the start of the assignment. Start building. Build the healthy culture you’ve been waiting for someone else to build.

That’s not ego. That’s stewardship. If God handed you something real and no one is making space for it, creating that space becomes your responsibility, not your backup plan.

Now, don’t miss this. If you’re not walking in obedience, you’re not in a position to do it, yet. If God is holding you where you are as he builds your character, you must allow that formation to happen before the calling is answered.

What Nazareth Couldn’t Decide

Rejection from the people who knew you first does not get to write the story of where you end up.

Jesus was nearly thrown off a cliff in Nazareth. He changed the world from Capernaum. The people who couldn’t see Him clearly in chapter four didn’t get a vote on what He did in the chapters after.

So if you’re sitting at a table right now where you’re tolerated but not wanted, ask yourself the honest question. Are you staying because this is genuinely where God has you, or because some part of you still needs to prove something to people who already made up their minds?

If it’s the second one, you have permission to walk to the next place.

Because the most powerful move a leader can make when the room won’t make space isn’t to fight harder for the seat.

It’s to carry what you’ve been given to the place that’s ready to receive it.

And then build something that outlasts the room that turned you away.

You’re welcomed at this table, leader.

— Jared

You ever push on a door so long that you forget to check if it was ever unlocked to begin with?

Early in my business career, I worked hard on project we cared about looked perfect on paper. The plan made sense. The timing felt right. Every piece lined up the way you would want it to.

And nothing moved.

Every step forward met resistance that made no sense. So I did what most leaders do when they believe in something. I pushed harder. I refined. I doubled our effort and told the team the breakthrough was one more move away.

It wasn’t.

Eventually we got quiet enough to ask a question we had been avoiding. What if the resistance was not the obstacle? What if the resistance was the answer?

It was.

I know that’s hard to sit with, because most of us were trained to treat a closed door as a personal failure. We measure our faith by how hard we are willing to fight for something. There is a quieter kind of faith we tend to overlook, the kind that listens fast when God says go a different way.

Two Closed Doors and a Dream

Acts 16 holds one of the strangest sequences in the New Testament.

Paul and his team set out to preach the gospel in the province of Asia. They are not chasing personal ambition. They are trying to do the very thing God called them to do. And the Spirit tells them no.

So they pivot toward Bithynia. Reasonable plan. Open territory. The kind of move any strategic leader would make. And the Spirit blocks them a second time.

When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas.

Acts 16:7-8 (NIV)

Two redirections, back to back, with no explanation attached to either one. No reasoning. No “here is why Asia is wrong for this season.” No long strategic overview showing how the next move fits the bigger mission.

Then night falls and Paul has a dream.

During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

Acts 16:9 (NIV)

What gets me about this passage is what Paul does next. He doesn’t sulk over the first two rejections. He doesn’t write a letter questioning the logic of a God who would close two perfectly good doors. He adjusts. He keeps moving. He stays open to a direction he had not even considered an hour earlier.

After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Acts 16:10 (NIV)

At once. No committee. No three-month feasibility study.

And here is the part you cannot miss. Macedonia became one of the most fruitful chapters of Paul’s entire ministry. The church at Philippi was born out of that detour. The letter Paul later wrote back to that church, from a prison cell, is one of the most joy-soaked books in the whole Bible.

Two closed doors and a dream. That was the strategy.

The Block You Are Fighting Might Be Navigation

Here is a pattern I have watched play out in leader after leader.

A good leader has a plan. The plan is genuinely good. The execution is strong. The team is talented and the work ethic is real. And the results still refuse to match the effort.

The natural instinct is to grind. Tighten the strategy. Push through the wall. Sometimes that is exactly the right call, because some walls are meant to be broken through and the only thing standing between you and the breakthrough is endurance.

The resistance you keep slamming into might not be something God wants you to overcome. It might be something He wants you to notice. We are quick to assume that anything blocking our plan must be the enemy. We rarely stop to consider that the same God who opens doors also closes them on purpose.

Look back at the language in Acts 16. The text does not say the devil stopped them. It says the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to go. That was not interference. That was instruction.

So before you interpret your block as warfare or a personal attack against you, sit with a harder possibility. What if the door you keep throwing your shoulder into won’t budge because there is a better door you have not noticed yet?

Persistence Knows How to Adjust

There is a real difference between persistence and stubbornness, and most of us are worse at telling them apart than we think.

Paul was relentless about preaching the gospel. He went to prison for it. He was beaten for it. He never once wavered on the assignment. But watch how loosely he held the route. Asia closed, so he moved. Bithynia closed, so he moved again. The mission never changed. The map changed constantly.

That is the posture we lose when we have invested too much.

I have watched organizations pour through their resources, their best people, and their momentum staying loyal to a plan that stopped working two seasons ago. Not because the plan was foolish when they built it. Because it was the right plan for a season that had already ended, and nobody wanted to be the one to say so out loud.

The cost of staying too long on the wrong path is almost always higher than the cost of changing direction. And the longer you stay, the harder it gets to even see the alternatives, because now you have so much invested that walking away starts to feel like admitting the whole thing was a waste.

None of that effort was wasted. It belonged to a season, and seasons end so that new ones can begin.

Paul could have forced his way into Asia. He had the gifting, the calling, and the conviction to justify it. But, he chose to trust the redirect instead, even while it made no sense in real time. And that trust is the only reason Philippi exists.

The Question to Sit With Before You Push Again

So let me bring this all the way home and make it personal.

Is there something in your life or your organization right now that feels blocked? A plan that should be working and isn’t. A door you keep pushing that won’t move. A goal you have been grinding toward while the progress refuses to match the effort.

Before you push harder this week, I want to give you something better than another motivational shove. I want to give you a process. Three steps, and each one builds on the last.

1: Stop and name the block.

This week, get honest about the one thing you keep forcing. Write it down. Be specific. Not the vague sense that things are hard, but the actual door. The hire that won’t come together. The launch that keeps stalling. The relationship you keep trying to revive. You cannot discern a block you refuse to look at directly.

2: Ask what the resistance might be protecting you from.

Once you have named it, sit with the harder question. Paul’s closed doors were not punishment and they were not a test of his stubbornness. They were protection from a path that was not meant for that moment.

Take your block to God in prayer and ask Him plainly: are You stopping this, or am I just facing normal difficulty I am supposed to push through? Then give Him room to answer instead of filling the silence with your own agenda.

3: Watch for the door you have not noticed.

Macedonia was never on Paul’s radar until the night it suddenly was.

The redirect God has for you may be sitting in your blind spot right now, waiting for you to stop staring at the door that won’t open long enough to see the one that already is. Pay attention to the unexpected opportunity, the strange invitation, the option you dismissed too quickly. That overlooked door might be the whole point.

Here is what I learned the hard way too many times. The things God redirect us toward is usually not even on our list when we start. But, they’re better than anything we had planned. And we would have walked right past them if we had kept forcing the original.

So maybe the most faithful thing you can do this week is not push harder.

Maybe it’s to stop fighting the redirect and start watching where the Spirit is actually pointing.

Because the door that’s closing might be the only way God can make room for the one He’s been trying to open all along.

Lead well this week, Leader.

— Jared

A few months ago, I sat across from a pastor who told me he hadn’t taken a full day off in four months.

He said it the way you’d report a statistic. Matter of fact. Almost proud of it.

When I asked him how he was actually doing, he gave me the answer every Christian leader gives. He said he was tired, but God was good, and the work was worth it.

Then he said something that stopped me cold.

He said, “God won’t give me more than I can handle.”

And I realized in that moment that the sentence I’d heard a thousand times, the sentence I’d said a thousand times, was doing more damage to leaders than almost any other phrase in the Christian vocabulary.

I’ve sat with leaders in conference rooms across the country. I’ve sat with pastors in coffee shops while their phones buzzed and they couldn’t take their eyes off of it. The exhaustion tends to look the same in every room.

And underneath it, almost always, is a sentence they’ve built a mantra around that they’ve believed for years. The problem is that the sentence was never actually true.

The Lie You’ve Probably Said Out Loud

“God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

You’ve heard it at funerals. You’ve heard it after a hard diagnosis. You’ve probably said it to someone in a season of grief, hoping it would land like comfort.

Here’s the issue.

It’s not in the Bible.

What Paul actually wrote, in 1 Corinthians 10:13, was this:

“No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”

1 Corinthians 10:13 (NIV)

Look closely at the subject. Paul is talking about temptation. He’s making a specific promise about a specific category of pressure: the pull toward sin.

Somewhere along the way, we lifted that promise out of its lane and applied it to everything. We turned a verse about resisting temptation into a blanket statement about responsibility, leadership, suffering, and the weight of a calling.

And once that misquote took root, it started shaping how we lead.

What the Bible Actually Says About the Weight

God absolutely gives you more than you can handle.

That’s not a contradiction of Scripture. That’s the design of Scripture.

If you could carry it alone, you wouldn’t need Him. And if you didn’t need Him, you wouldn’t grow. And if you didn’t grow, your calling would shrink to the size of your own capacity.

Look at the people God called.

• Moses stood in front of Pharaoh with a speech impediment and a resume as a fugitive. He told God he wasn’t the right guy. He was right.

• David showed up to a battlefield as a teenager carrying snacks for his brothers. The giant in front of him was not something he could handle. That was the whole point.

• The disciples were given a mission to take the gospel to every nation. They were a small group of fishermen, tax collectors, and political extremists who couldn’t agree on who was the greatest among them ten minutes before the cross.

Every major assignment in Scripture came with weight the person could not carry alone.

Which means if you feel like what you’re carrying right now is more than you can handle...you might actually be in the exact place God intended.

The problem is the lie we believe about who’s supposed to carry it.

A Second Lie Costs More Than the First

Here’s another one I believed for years.

“If I’m doing God’s work, He’ll protect the people around me from the cost of it.”

I’ve heard leaders say their family would be sustained because the mission was God-given. That their friendships would forgive their absence because the reason for it was noble. That the people closest to them would feel honored by the sacrifice instead of damaged by it.

None of that turned ever turns out to be true.

The people standing next to you while you carry your calling feel the cost of how you carry it. Every late night. Every cancelled dinner. Every distracted conversation where you’re physically present and emotionally somewhere else.

And the phrase “I’m doing this for God” doesn’t land the way you think it does when the person across from you just wants you at the table.

I know that’s tough to hear. I have to hear it too.

You don’t protect the people around you by making the mission your excuse. You protect the people around you by how you steward the mission.

How the Damage Actually Happens

The shift from healthy leadership to unsustainable burden-bearing rarely happens overnight.

You don’t wake up one morning underwater. You wake up one morning and realize you’ve been underwater for months and you can’t remember the last time you came up for air.

It starts with small concessions. A skipped day off because something needs to get done. A missed family dinner because the meeting matters. An ignored exhaustion because people are counting on you.

Each decision feels justified in the moment.

Each decision builds on the last.

And before you realize it, you’re not leading anymore. You’re just surviving.

I want to say this clearly to anyone in that place right now: survival mode is not a leadership strategy.

It feels like one because it produces output. Things still get done. Sermons still get preached. Quarters still get closed. Families still function on the surface.

The Honest Inventory You’re Avoiding

If you’ve gotten this far and recognized something of yourself in the story, the next move is honest assessment.

Not what you wish were true. Not what other leaders seem to manage. What’s actually happening in your life right now.

Take five areas and look at each one with fresh eyes:

• Your self. Are you physically rested? Emotionally steady? Spiritually connected to the God you preach about? Or are you running on caffeine and adrenaline while telling everyone you’re fine?

• Your family. Are the people closest to you flourishing? Or are they quietly building a life that doesn’t include you because they got tired of waiting?

• Your team. Is your team growing because you’ve built capacity around them? Or are they constantly compensating for your absence and your exhaustion?

• Your faith. Is the faith you’re intentionally being developed or is it accidentally wandered into when it’s convenient?

• Your community. Are you actually making a difference in the lives you’re called to reach? Or are you so depleted that even your best efforts are running on fumes?

The areas you don’t want to look at honestly are the areas that need the most attention.

You already know which ones those are. You felt the resistance when you read them.

What Changes When You Stop Believing It

The moment you stop believing you have to carry everything alone is the moment you actually become useful again.

I’ve watched this happen in counseling rooms. I’ve watched it happen in my own life. The leaders who find real freedom aren’t the ones who try harder. They’re the ones who finally admit they can’t do it alone and start operating like they believe it and empowering the people around them.

When you stop white-knuckling your calling, four things start to shift.

1. God shows up in ways He couldn’t when you were trying to be God on His behalf.

2. Your team steps up in ways they couldn’t when you were the bottleneck.

3. Your relationships heal in ways they couldn’t when you were always too busy to be hurt by them.

4. Your impact multiplies in ways it couldn’t when you were the ceiling on what God wanted to do.

This is what Jesus was modeling the whole time. He had crowds following Him, demands pulling at Him, and a calling heavier than any of us will ever carry. And what did He do?

He went to the Father often, early and alone.

He didn’t pretend He had what he needed. He admitted He needed the Father.

If the Son of God led from dependence, what made you think you could lead from self-sufficiency?

What This Looks Like When You Apply It

Getting this right requires decisions that feel uncomfortable in the moment but compound into something life-giving over time.

1. Start with one honest conversation. Maybe with your spouse. Maybe with a friend who’s earned the right to speak truth. Tell them what you’ve been carrying alone. Let them in on the parts you’ve been hiding behind the leader version of yourself.

2. Then move to delegation. Look at what you’ve been holding onto because no one else could do it the way you would. Hand a piece of it to someone else this week. Resist the urge to take it back when they do it differently than you would.

3. Then protect time. Put it on the calendar before the calendar fills up around it. Sabbath. Family dinner. A night with friends who aren’t asking anything from you. These are not luxuries. They’re how you stay sustainable.

4. Finally, ask for help before you’re desperate. The pride that says you’ll reach out when you really need to is the same pride that keeps you from reaching out until it’s too late.

The Question We Need to Answer

There’s one question I keep coming back to when I sit with leaders who are running out of road.

What would it look like to lead from health instead of from depletion?

Not what would it look like to do less. What would it look like to actually be the person you want your team to follow? To be the spouse your husband or wife needs you to be? To be the parent your kids will write about with gratitude one day?

The answer to that question requires honesty about what needs to change.

For some of you, it’s a schedule. For others, it’s a belief. For most, it’s both.

The leaders who last in the work of God aren’t the ones with the most talent or the most opportunity. They’re the ones who figured out how to carry what’s actually theirs to carry and release the rest to the One who said the burden was supposed to be light.

You were never meant to do this alone. You were never asked to.

The weight you’re carrying was designed to drive you to dependence on God and to interdependence with the people He’s placed around you. That’s not a weakness in the design. That’s the whole point of it.

Stop carrying what was never yours.

Start trusting the One who said His yoke was easy and His burden was light.

The people around you don’t need a hero. They need you healthy enough to still be standing when this season is over.

Stay healthy, leader.

— Jared

I’ve had the privilege of consulting over 400 business leaders and 50 lead pastors across the country.

Different industries. Different cities. Different problems on paper.

But there’s a pattern that keeps showing up in many of these conference rooms and churches I walk into:

The person with the biggest title walks in, and the room goes quiet for the wrong reason. The person with no formal power walks in, and the room leans forward.

That’s the gap nobody on the org chart wants to talk about. And it’s eating leaders alive.

Most of the leaders I work with assume their title is doing the heavy lifting. They show up to the meeting, take the head seat, hand down the directive, and wonder why nothing actually changes after they leave.

The team complies. The team doesn’t commit.

There’s a name for what’s missing in that room. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it in your own leadership.

What the Org Chart Can’t Give You

Authority is what the company hands you. The title. The office. The signing authority. The ability to make changes.

Influence is something different. Influence is what people hand you back.

You can have a wall full of authority and still be a leader nobody is following. I’ve watched executives who can fire anyone in the building struggle to get a single direct report to genuinely care about the vision. I’ve sat with pastors who boldly control the pulpit but can’t get the congregation to engage beyond the parking lot. I’ve coached managers with full approval power whose teams give them exactly what’s required and nothing more.

You can demand the output. You can’t demand the buy-in.

That’s not a small problem. That’s the whole problem.

Because at some point in your leadership journey, the title stops being enough. Your team stops responding to the title and starts responding to the person behind it. And if there’s nothing behind the title worth following, the room empties even when the meeting is still happening.

The Religious Leaders Had Authority. Jesus Had Something Else.

The Pharisees in the first century had a kind of authority most leaders today will never touch.

They controlled access to the temple. They interpreted the law. They could pull a man out of his community with a single ruling and ruin his standing forever. The org chart of ancient Israel ran straight through their hands.

And then…here comes Jesus.

No credentials. No institutional backing. No degree from a recognized rabbinical school. A carpenter’s son from a town so small that one of His own future disciples laughed at the idea of anything good coming out of it.

But watch what happens in Matthew 7.

“When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”

Matthew 7:28-29 NIV

Read that again slowly.

The teachers of the law had the authority. The credentials, the title, the institutional power. But the people watching Jesus felt something the religious leaders couldn’t produce with all their position.

The crowds said it themselves. He’s not teaching like the people in charge.

Here’s what’s so powerful about that passage. The Pharisees never lost their title in the moment. They still controlled the temple. They still had the institutional power. But they had already lost the room.

The Audit That Most Leaders Refuse to Run

If your team is technically performing but the energy is dead, you don’t have a strategy problem. You have an influence problem.

I want to give you five questions to sit with this week. Don’t skim them. Sit with them.

1. Do people seek out your input when they’re not required to? If your people only bring you the things they have to bring you, your title is talking but you aren’t.

2. When your team executes your ideas, does it look like ownership or like obligation? Ownership has fingerprints all over it. Obligation looks like a checklist.

3. Do people speak openly around you, or do conversations get careful when you walk in? Authority without influence creates a careful room. Influence creates an honest one.

4. Are people staying, or are people leaving? Quiet turnover is almost always a vote on leadership, not compensation.

5. Do people defend you when you’re not in the room? This is the one that exposes everything. Your reputation in your absence is the truest measure of your leadership in your presence.

I know those questions are hard. They’re supposed to be.

Most leaders won’t answer them honestly because the answers would force them to rebuild something they’ve been coasting on for years.

Jesus Didn’t Lead From the Temple. He Led From the Street.

Look at how Jesus built influence.

He didn’t lecture from a balcony or issue directives from behind closed doors. He went to the boats and watched fishermen work. He sat down at a well and asked a woman for water. He went into the homes of people the religious authorities wouldn’t touch.

He got close to the work and the people doing it.

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Mark 10:45 NIV

The Son of God lays out His own leadership philosophy in one sentence, and the word He chooses is serve.

Not lead. Not direct. Not oversee.

Serve.

Most of the leaders I sit with have inverted that. They believe the team exists to serve their vision, their goals, their growth metrics. And then they wonder why the team feels used instead of led.

The leaders who actually move people are the ones who flipped it. They see their position as the thing that lets them serve the people under their care, not the thing that lets the people serve them.

That’s a quiet shift. And it changes everything about how a room responds to you.

Five Moves to Close that Gap

If you’re sitting in a position right now and you can feel the gap between your authority and your influence, here’s where the work starts.

1. Stop leading from your title.

The moment you say “because I’m the boss” or “because I’m the pastor,” you’ve broadcast that you have nothing else to offer the room. Lead from character. Lead from competence. Lead from your care for the people in front of you.

2. Get proximate to the work.

You cannot lead from a long distance and expect people to trust you. You don’t need to overshadow their presence, but know what your team is actually carrying this week. Allow them to invite you into the hard moments, not just the easy ones.

3. Admit what you don’t know.

Authority hates uncertainty. Influence is comfortable saying “I don’t have that answer, let’s work it out together.” Every time you pretend to know what you don’t, your people see it. Every time.

4. Care about the person, not just their output.

If every conversation with your team is about output, your team will give you output and nothing else. Know their kids’ names. Notice when they’re carrying something heavy. Celebrate their wins outside the building.

5. Keep your promises.

This is the simplest one and the most ignored. Every broken commitment is a withdrawal from the trust account. Every kept one is a deposit. Leaders with influence have a track record. Leaders without it have a trail of forgotten words.

What People Will Actually Follow

Authority can be granted overnight. Influence is built subtly, over years, by leaders who refuse to take the shortcut.

You don’t fake this. You live it.

The crowds in Matthew 7 weren’t amazed at Jesus because of His credentials. He didn’t have any. They were amazed because they could feel the difference between a leader who was leveraging a title and a leader whose life was the credential.

That same test is being applied to your leadership right now, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Your team isn’t reading your title. Your congregation isn’t impressed by your platform. Your kids aren’t following your job description.

They’re watching how you actually live.

And they’re deciding, in a hundred quiet moments you’ll never see, whether what you’re offering is worth following.

Lead well, leader.

— Jared

Jesus spent three years pouring into twelve men.

He shared meals with them, slept where they slept, and pulled them aside for the private teachings the crowds never got. Hours before His own death, He washed their feet.

And one of them got up from the table that final night and walked out the door for good.

Here’s what hits me every time I read this in scripture. Jesus knew. He knew exactly where Judas was going and what he was about to set in motion. And He didn’t stop him.

“What you are about to do, do quickly.”

John 13:27 (NIV)

WHAT?!

No final appeal. No pulled-aside conversation in the corner. No, “Let’s talk this through before you make a decision you can’t take back.” Jesus just releases him into the very thing that would lead to the cross.

The other eleven sat at that table watching it happen and didn’t even understand what they were watching. They thought Judas was running to do something. Only Jesus knew the exit was permanent.

And He let it happen.

The reason most leaders won’t let people go

I’ve been doing this long enough to know what most of us do when someone walks out of our life.

We chase. We text. We gossip. We replay every conversation looking for the moment we missed it. We rehearse what we’d say if we got one more chance to fix it. Or, we justify why it wasn’t our fault and we stew over the relationship relentlessly trying to make sense of what happened.

Underneath all of it sits the assumption that if we had been better, smarter, more attentive, more spiritual, they’d still be here.

I know that’s tough to hear. But it’s worth sitting with.

I’ve consulted with hundreds of organizations that have shown me something I didn’t want to learn myself at first.

Some of the most painful seasons of my own leadership came from trying to hold onto people who God had already started moving along. I gave them access. I rearranged my time around them. I quietly compromised parts of the vision so they wouldn’t feel pushed or would still fit.

And every single time, the cost was the same. The people who were supposed to be at the table started losing my best, because my best was being spent on someone who was halfway out the door.

The branches God prunes are the ones already producing fruit

“He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”

John 15:2 (NIV)

Read that slowly.

Pruning is what the gardener does to a branch that’s already producing, because he knows it can produce more.

The branches that get cut back in this verse are not the dead ones. They are the ones that have already been bearing fruit. The reason they get cut is so they can produce at a level the gardener has been building toward all along.

This is one of the hardest spiritual realities I’ve ever had to accept. God doesn’t only remove what’s broken. Sometimes He removes what’s around what’s working because what’s working is keeping you from what’s coming.

A productive partnership can still be the wrong partnership for what’s next. A meaningful friendship can still be the friendship that has to end before God can introduce the one He’s been preparing for the next season. A staff member who has served faithfully for years can still be the person God is moving on so the next chapter of the mission can take its shape.

We assume good things should be permanent things.

God’s economy doesn’t operate on that assumption.

What you’re really feeling when someone walks out

There’s a difference between grief and guilt.

Grief is the honest weight of losing a relationship that mattered. It’s a holy thing. Even Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb, and He knew the resurrection was minutes away.

Guilt is something else. Guilt is the voice that tells you their departure is evidence of your failure. That if you had loved better, prayed harder, communicated more clearly, they would have stayed.

Most leaders I sit with who have lost someone on their team aren’t grieving. They’re spinning in guilt.

Here’s the question I’ve learned to ask: did you fight for their best interest and give them what they needed to success? If the answer is yes, what you’re carrying isn’t guilt. It’s the weight of trusting God with an outcome you didn’t choose.

That’s faith under pressure, and God honors it.

Jesus didn’t fail Judas. He washed his feet. He fed him. He gave him three years of personal access to the Son of God Himself. When Judas left, it wasn’t because Jesus hadn’t done enough. It was because Judas had decided where he was going.

Release isn’t the same as abandonment

I want to sit here for a minute because I’ve watched too many leaders confuse these two.

Abandonment is what we do when we’re hurt. It slams the door, cuts the cord, blocks the number, and calls the whole thing closed because the pain became more than we wanted to feel. The motive is self-protection.

Release looks different. It comes from a posture of open hands that says, “I see this season is ending, and I’m trusting the God who built this relationship to know what He’s doing with how it ends.” The motive is faith.

Jesus released Judas. He didn’t abandon him.

He still loved him at that final meal. Still washed his feet. Still gave him bread from His own hand. And when the moment came, He opened His hands and let him go.

Letting go is the work we keep skipping. We’re trying to figure out how to cut people off without ever doing the inner work of releasing them. So we end up with closed fists and bitter hearts, calling it boundaries when really it’s wounded pride looking for a new vocabulary.

Open hands change everything.

The Eleven Needed Him Fully Present

Here’s something I think we often overlook about that upper room.

After Judas walked out, eleven men were left. And those eleven needed Jesus more in the next few hours than they had needed Him in the previous three years combined.

If Jesus had spent His remaining time focusing on figuring why Judas left or chose to do what he did, those eleven would have been robbed of the most important night of their training. They needed every word He spoke after Judas left. The new commandment. The promise of the Holy Spirit. The high priestly prayer of John 17.

All of that came after Judas walked out.

I want to ask the question I’ve had to ask myself more than once.

Who needs your full presence, your full attention, your best leadership, and is getting your distracted version because you’re still running back to a chair that’s already been emptied?

The eleven became the foundation of the church. They turned the world upside down. They wrote letters we still read 2,000 years later.

That happened because Jesus didn’t chase Judas.

The Math of the Kingdom is Rarely the Math of Leadership Culture

Most leadership content will tell you that growth is the goal. We focus on more people. Bigger teams. Wider reach. Inside that frame, anyone leaving feels like a step backward.

The kingdom operates on different math.

Jesus had crowds of thousands and narrowed them down to twelve. Then twelve became eleven. Then eleven became ten when Thomas doubted. Then back to eleven when Thomas believed. Then 120 in the upper room. Then 3,000 at Pentecost.

The table got smaller before it got bigger.

If you’re in a season right now where your table is shrinking, please hear me. That doesn’t automatically mean something has gone wrong. It might mean God is making room.

Some of the most fruitful chapters of your life are going to require a different team composition than the one that got you to this point. The mission is going to ask more of you. The calling is going to demand a tighter focus. Carrying everyone from the last chapter into the next one would slow you down in ways you can’t yet see.

This is uncomfortable. I know.

Where loyalty turns into a liability

We’ve made loyalty a virtue in leadership culture, and in many ways it should be.

Loyalty matters. Faithfulness matters. Long-term relationships matter. The people who have been with you for the long haul are gifts you should never take for granted.

Loyalty to a person should never override obedience to God.

Jesus loved Judas. He chose him. He included him. He washed his feet hours before the betrayal. And when the moment came, He did not compromise the mission to keep him at the table.

This is where a lot of us get stuck. We’ve confused loyalty with enabling. We think faithful leadership means nobody ever leaves. We’ve made a quiet little theology that says if we’re doing it right, the team stays intact forever.

That isn’t biblical leadership. That’s codependency wearing a spiritual disguise.

Faithful leadership is staying committed to what God has called you to do, even when the people you love choose a different road. Faithful leadership is trusting God’s plan when it costs you a relationship you’d never have walked away from on your own.

Four moves to make when someone walks out

Reading about release is one thing. Walking through it when you’re actually losing someone is another. Here are the moves I’ve had to learn the hard way, in the order they need to happen.

1. Name the loss without spiritualizing it.

Before you reach for a Bible verse, tell the truth about what you’re losing. Write it down if you have to. The relationship, the trust, the access, the season, whatever it actually was. Most leaders skip this step because it feels weak. So they bury the grief under theology and wonder six months later why they’re still carrying it.

You can’t release what you haven’t named.

2. Audit your motive before you make any move.

Before you send the text, write the email, or have the conversation, ask yourself one question. Am I about to do this from a posture of open hands or closed fists? If you can’t answer that honestly, wait. A delayed response done with the right heart is always better than a fast response driven by hurt.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is nothing for forty-eight hours.

3. Bless what was, even if you didn’t choose how it ended.

This one is hard, and I won’t pretend it isn’t. But somewhere between the departure and your next chapter, you have to thank God for the season you shared. Out loud. In prayer. Maybe even in writing.

Blessing what was doesn’t mean endorsing how it ended. It means refusing to let bitterness become the soundtrack of the next season God is opening up. Bitterness will recruit your imagination, hijack your prayers, and poison the way you show up for the people who are still there.

Bless it, and let it go.

4. Re-engage the people still at the table.

This is the move most leaders never make. We grieve the one who left and forget to look at who stayed.

Pick up the phone. Schedule the dinner. Send the text that says, “I see you, I value you, and I want to be more present.” The people who are still here didn’t sign up to compete for your attention with someone who left. Bring your full self back to the table.

If you do this for thirty days, you will be shocked at how much capacity you suddenly have for the assignment God is putting in front of you.

The Chair Was Never the Point

The empty chair isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign of transition. Every transition feels like loss before it starts to feel like gain.

Give it a year.

What looks like subtraction right now will reveal itself as multiplication. What feels like the end will turn out to be the setup for a beginning you couldn’t have written for yourself.

God is clearing space at your table. Not to leave you sitting alone. To make room for who’s supposed to be there for what’s next.

Trust the door He’s closing. Trust the redirection.

The One who built the table knows exactly who belongs at it.

So take a seat, Leader…

— Jared

There’s a verse in Titus 3:10 that completely rewired how I think about leadership.

“Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them.”
— Titus 3:10 NIV

Two warnings. Then done.

Paul wrote that. The same Paul who wrote the love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. The same guy who said love is patient, love is kind. That same Paul looked at Titus and told him some people get two conversations and then you move on.

This morning, I spent some time reading a powerful research report that showed the impacts of toxic work cultures. I want to dive into a bit of it today.

I’ve spent over a decade consulting with more than 400 businesses and 50 churches across the country. I’ve watched leader after leader extend grace to divisive team members for months, sometimes years. I’ve done it myself. And the pattern always plays out the same way.

Two warnings becomes four. Four becomes six. Six becomes a year of hoping someone changes while everyone around you watches the same cycle repeat.

We justify it with Scripture.

• “Love covers a multitude of sins.”

• “Forgive seventy times seven.”

• “Bear with one another.”

All true. All real. And not one of them means what we’re using them to mean.

The Hidden Cost of Unlimited Warnings

Here’s what the research is screaming at us about the way we avoid hard boundaries.

Turnover tied to toxic workplace culture has cost organizations as much as $223 billion over the last five years. And 58 percent of the people who walked away from a job because of culture pointed directly at their manager as the reason they left.

Read that again. The manager. The person who was supposed to protect them.

A study from Hogan estimates that roughly 6 percent of the global workforce behaves in toxic ways. That’s one out of every seventeen people.

You know who pays the price when we refuse to address that one person? The other sixteen.

Forgiveness and Access Are Not the Same Thing

Here’s where most of us get tangled up.

We start to believe that forgiving someone means we have to keep handing them the same access to our leadership, our team, and our organization.

You can release someone with grace and still release them from their role.

Look at Jesus. He forgave the very people who crucified Him. He also let Judas walk away from the table. He didn’t chase him down. He didn’t pull him aside for a fifth conversation about loyalty. He didn’t give him another chance to betray the other disciples.

He released him.

When that distinction finally clicked for me, it changed everything about how I lead.

I’ve had to sit across from team members who were creating real division. People I genuinely cared about. People I had prayed for. People I wanted to see win. People who I sacrificed for because I saw something in them. And after the final warning, when the behavior didn’t shift, I had to make a decision.

Protect the one or protect the many.

Every time I chose the many, the team got healthier. Every time I delayed, the damage grew.

What Divisive Behavior Actually Does to a Team

Let’s get specific about what we’re actually protecting against.

As we’ve seen above, research shows that divisive coworkers have a measurable impact on a team’s ability to hit deadlines and reach goals. Their behaviors, gossip, passive aggression, refusal to cooperate, slowly eat away at trust, communication, and collaboration.

The result ends up in delays, lower productivity, and missed targets.

But what research can’t capture the part that matters most.

The emotional toll on your high performers.

Your best people are watching you. They’re watching how you handle the team member who keeps undermining unity. They’re watching how long you let it drag on. And quietly, they’re making decisions about whether they want to stay.

Working in a toxic atmosphere is linked to higher levels of stress, burnout, and mental health issues.

You’re not just managing culture. You’re stewarding people’s health. Think deeply on that.

Compassionate Accountability Is Not a Contradiction

This is where we have to reframe what compassion actually is.

The research shared that compassionate leadership points to six core elements: integrity, empathy, accountability, authenticity, presence, and dignity.

Look at that list again. Accountability is on it.

Compassionate leaders don’t avoid hard conversations.

When leaders fail to set boundaries with their staff, the whole team feels it. People become unsure of their roles, their responsibilities, and what’s actually expected of them. The result is confusion, inefficiency, and slowed productivity.

Boundaries aren’t unkind. Boundaries create clarity and safety for everyone.

I’ve learned this through painful experience. Early in my leadership, I thought being a good Christian leader meant giving people endless chances. I thought it meant absorbing their dysfunction so they didn’t have to face the consequences of it.

What I was actually doing was teaching that person their behavior was acceptable.

And teaching everyone else I wouldn’t protect them.

The Two-Warning Framework in Practice

So what does this actually look like when you put it into motion?

First warning: A direct, private conversation. You name the specific behavior. You explain the impact on the team. You set clear expectations and a timeline for change.

You document the conversation. You follow it up in writing. There can be no ambiguity about what needs to shift.

Second warning: If the behavior continues, you sit down again. You reference the first conversation. You acknowledge that change hasn’t happened. You make it crystal clear that this is the final opportunity to address the issue.

And you tell them what happens if it doesn’t change.

After that: You follow through. You release the person from their role. You do it with dignity. You do it with grace. But you do it.

This isn’t about being harsh. This is about being honest.

Proactive conflict resolution is one of the most overlooked responsibilities of leadership. When divisive behavior shows up, leaders need to step in early to mediate before the issue spirals.

The key word is early.

We wait too long. We hope it will resolve on its own. We talk ourselves into believing one more conversation will be the one that finally lands.

Meanwhile, your best people are quietly updating their resumes preparing for a place that is more fruitful to work in.

What About Restoration?

People always ask me about this. “What if they change? What if God does a work in their life later down the road?”

Beautiful. I celebrate that. I pray for that. I hope for that.

But restoration doesn’t mean reinstating someone to the same position they held before. It means welcoming them back into community, into relationship, and into the body of Christ.

It does not mean handing them access to the same people they hurt before.

There’s a difference between being forgiven and being trusted with leadership again.

Forgiveness is immediate. Trust is rebuilt over time through consistent, changed behavior.

I’ve watched God do remarkable work in people after they were released from a leadership role. Sometimes losing the role is exactly what they needed to face their behavior and get help.

Your job isn’t to be their savior. Your job is to steward the people under your care.

The Question You Need to Sit With

Here’s where it lands.

When you extend grace beyond the two-warning boundary, you’re making a choice.

You’re choosing to protect the divisive person from consequences at the cost of everyone else on your team.

You’re choosing their comfort over the team’s health.

And you’re doing all of it in the name of grace.

That’s not grace. That’s avoidance.

Grace doesn’t mean shielding people from the natural consequences of their choices. Grace means offering people dignity and respect even as you put boundaries in place.

Grace is having the hard conversation with kindness. Documenting clearly. Following through consistently. Treating someone as a person made in God’s image even as you release them from their role.

Boundaries and grace aren’t enemies. Boundaries are what keep grace from quietly becoming a weapon against the very people you’re called to protect.

A Quick Note to Close

If you’re reading this and you already know there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding, you also already know what you need to do.

You need to have the first warning conversation.

This week.

Name the behavior. Set the expectations. Give the timeline. Document the conversation.

If you’ve already had the first warning and you’ve slipped into the pattern of endless chances, you need to have the second warning conversation.

This week.

The people who are waiting for you to lead are counting on you. Your strongest team members are watching. The health of your organization is at stake.

Paul knew exactly what he was talking about. Jesus modeled it. And you carry both the authority and the responsibility to put it into practice.

Lead well, Leader.

— Jared

Several years ago, a CEO I was working with with told me he had just spent $180,000 on a leadership development program for his executive team.

Six months later, his number two quit. His operations director got hired out by a competitor. And the three people he had identified as future leaders all admitted they still didn’t feel ready to make a real decision without him in the room.

I’ll never forget that call we had. He called me frustrated and said, “I don’t get it. I gave them everything.”

I asked him one question back.

“Did you ever let them try?”

He went quiet.

That conversation has stayed with me because it’s the exact moment most leadership development dies. Not in the budget meeting. Not in the org chart. In the gap between what we say we want and what we’re actually willing to release.

Jesus didn’t have that gap.

He spent three years training the most influential leaders the world has ever seen, and He did it without a curriculum, a certification track, or a single offsite retreat. He used a method so simple that medical schools would later borrow it and modern leadership books would dress it up with new vocabulary.

Watch one. Do one. Teach one.

He let the disciples watch Him heal. Then He sent them out to heal. Then He told them to go and make disciples who would do the same thing.

Modern leadership calls this apprenticeship.

Jesus just called it Tuesday.

The Method Hidden in Plain Sight

Most of us read the gospels and miss the genius of how Jesus actually trained His people. We focus on what He taught. We rarely study how He transferred it.

But look at the pattern.

In Matthew 10, Jesus calls the twelve together and gives them authority to do exactly what they had been watching Him do for months.

“These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.’”

Matthew 10:5-8 (NIV)

Read that slowly.

Jesus is sending people out to heal who have never healed. He’s sending people out to cast out demons who have never cast out a demon. He’s putting the message of the kingdom in the mouths of men who, just months earlier, were fishing for a living.

Most leaders today wouldn’t trust their direct reports to send a company-wide email without three rounds of edits and running it through ChatGPT.

Jesus released His disciples into real ministry while they were still learning what ministry was. He didn’t wait for them to be ready. He created the conditions where readiness could be built.

And here’s what we miss: He stayed close enough to debrief afterwards.

When the disciples came back from their mission in Luke 10, they were fired up about what had happened. Some things worked. Some things confused them. Jesus didn’t shame them for what they didn’t get right. He used the experience as a teaching moment for what was next.

That’s the pattern. Watch. Do. Teach.

The watching gives them vision. The doing gives them experience. The teaching gives them ownership.

Skip any one of those steps and you’re not developing leaders. You’re just running programs.

The Step Most Leaders Skip

I want to talk about the second step because that’s where almost every leader I work with gets stuck.

I’ve consulted a lot of organizations across the country. Churches, businesses, ministries, family-run companies. Different industries, different sizes, different cultures.

The breakdown is always the same.

Leaders love step 1. Watching feels safe. You stay the expert. You control the room. You get to be the smartest person in the meeting.

Leaders love step 3. Sending people out feels like multiplication. You can point to it on a slide and call it scaling.

Step two requires something most leaders quietly resist.

It requires you to watch someone do your job worse than you would do it. And not take it back.

It requires you to sit in a meeting where they fumble through the conversation you could have wrapped up powerfully in five minutes. And not interrupt.

It requires you to stand in the back of the room while they teach the lesson you’ve taught a hundred times. And let them say it their way.

I know that’s tough to hear.

This is the part where leadership actually gets transferred. The messy middle where they’re learning by doing and you’re learning to let them.

This is also the part where Jesus separated Himself from every other teacher in the ancient world. The rabbis of His day kept their disciples at arm’s length until they were “ready.” Jesus brought His disciples in and put them to work before they had any business doing the work.

That’s not poor judgment. That’s intentional discipleship.

Jesus understood something most leaders miss.

What Step Two Actually Looks Like

If you want to build leaders who can actually lead, you have to give them assignments that are slightly beyond their current capacity. Then you have to resist the urge to rescue them.

In John 6, Jesus is staring at five thousand hungry people and a kid’s lunch.

Watch what He does.

“When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, ‘Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’ He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.”

John 6:5-6 (NIV)

Jesus already knew what He was going to do.

He wasn’t asking Philip because He needed input. He was asking because He was developing a leader. He created a moment where Philip had to wrestle with a problem that was bigger than him. Where Philip had to look at the resources, run the math, and feel the weight of leadership he wasn’t ready for.

That tension is the curriculum.

Most leaders rob their people of that tension because the tension is uncomfortable for the leader, not just the learner. We don’t like watching someone flounder. We don’t like the silence in the room when they don’t know the answer. We don’t like the inefficiency.

So we jump in. We rescue. We give the answer. And we tell ourselves we’re being helpful.

What we’re actually doing is keeping them dependent on us.

Jesus didn’t do that. He let Philip sit in the impossibility of feeding five thousand people with no resources. He let the disciples count the fish and bread and report back. He let them pass out the food and watch the math break in their hands.

By the time they finished collecting twelve baskets of leftovers, they had learned something no sermon could have taught them.

They had learned what it feels like to lead through a problem that requires faith.

That’s what step two does. It puts your people in situations where they have to grow into the assignment. And it keeps you close enough to debrief without being close enough to take over.

The Heart Check Behind Multiplication

Here’s a question I’ve started asking leaders who say they want to develop their people.

Are you developing them, or are you cloning yourself?

Because there’s a meaningful difference between the two.

Cloning is when you want them to do it your way, with your words, in your style, at your pace. Cloning feels like development because there’s training involved. But the goal isn’t their growth. The goal is your replication.

Development is when you give them the principles, the heart, and the mission, then you release them to apply it in their own way.

Jesus made disciples. He didn’t make copies.

Peter led differently than John. Paul led differently than both of them. Their personalities were intact. Their gifts were distinct. Their methods varied.

The mission was the same. The message was the same. The heart behind it all was the same.

Jesus gave them the values. He let them keep their voice.

And when the day comes that you have to step away, the whole thing collapses because nobody else knew how to do it without you.

That’s not legacy. That’s a bottleneck dressed up in a leadership title.

Three Weeks. One Skill. One Person.

You don’t need a budget for this. You don’t need approval. You don’t need to launch a formal program or hire a consultant.

You need three weeks, one skill you want to transfer, and one person ready to be developed.

1. Week one is observation.

Bring them into the room where you exercise the skill you want them to learn. The hard conversation. The strategic decision. The difficult meeting. Don’t just let them watch. Tell them what you’re thinking as you go. Walk them through the questions you’re asking, the moves you’re making, and why you’re making them in that order.

You’re giving them access to how you think, not just what you do.

2. Week two is execution.

Hand it over. Let them lead the conversation while you sit in the back. Let them make the call while you’re available for questions. Let them deliver the message while you’re nearby to step in only if it falls completely apart.

When they’re done, debrief. Ask what they noticed. Point out what worked. Offer one or two adjustments for next time.

Then have them try it again.

This is where most leaders fail. They take it back the second something feels off. Don’t. Sit in the discomfort. Let the lesson land in their hands, not yours.

3. Week three is transfer.

Have them teach it to someone else. Walk a new team member through the same skill. Lead a workshop. Train the person stepping into where they used to be.

When they teach it, they own it. Now you’ve gone from one leader to two. You’ve stopped scaling yourself and started scaling capacity.

Do that with one skill, with one person, every quarter, and within a year you’ll have a different team. People who can make decisions when you’re not in the room. People who can think on their feet. People who can develop the next generation behind them.

That’s how Jesus built something that outlasted His physical presence on earth. He didn’t just train twelve men. He trained twelve men to train others, who trained others, who trained others.

Two thousand years later, we’re still here.

The Question Underneath Every Real Leader

Here’s the question I want to leave you with.

If the answer is no, you’ll stay needed. You’ll feel important. You’ll keep getting the calls and making the decisions and being the bottleneck everyone runs through.

You’ll never multiply.

If the answer is yes, you’ll have to let go of being the smartest person in the room. You’ll have to release control before you feel ready. You’ll have to watch your work get done in ways you wouldn’t have chosen, and trust that the values are still intact even when the methods change.

That’s the cost of building something that lasts.

Jesus paid that cost on purpose. He spent three years pouring into twelve men so He could trust them to carry the mission without Him. He didn’t try to stay indispensable. He tried to make Himself unnecessary in the right way, so the kingdom could keep moving forward.

The method works. It worked for Him. It will work for you.

Watch one. Do one. Teach one.

The only question is whether you’re willing to release the part of leadership that feels safest to keep.

Because the leader you’re building is waiting to grow.

Step into that, leader.

— Jared

I’m writing this post from an airport lounge today. I am currently flying back to Virginia from New York City after taking my daughter, Zoe, to her new home in the fall, St. John’s University. As I sit here, I am glancing around at the multitudes of people and personalities sitting around this room.

To select the most successful leader in the room would immediately lead someone to look at the optics of those sitting there and determine who looks the most “successful”. This was the situation the prophet Samuel found himself in.

Samuel walked into Jesse’s house with one job. Anoint the next king of Israel.

He saw the oldest son first. Tall. Strong. Looked every bit the part.

God said no.

Seven sons walked in front of Samuel that day. Seven times, God said no. And Samuel was confused, because he had just run out of candidates standing in the room.

So he asked a question that changed history:

“Are these all the sons you have?”

Jesse almost didn’t mention David. He was the youngest. The one out in the field with the sheep. So overlooked by his own family that nobody thought to invite him inside when a prophet showed up at the door.

But God’s response when David finally walked in was clear:

“Rise and anoint him. This is the one.”

1 Samuel 16:12 NIV

The kid nobody invited to the meeting became the greatest king Israel ever had.

And here’s the hard part. That moment in Jesse’s house wasn’t a one-time event. It’s a pattern. A pattern that keeps repeating itself in offices, boardrooms, ministry teams, family businesses, and leadership pipelines right now.

We keep overlooking our best people because they don’t look how we want them to look.

The Selection Bias We Don’t Talk About

We say we value character over talent. We claim we want heart over resume. We talk about potential over optics.

Then we walk into a room and gravitate toward the person with the biggest platform.

I’ve done this myself. I’ve made assumptions based on appearance. Based on credentials. Based on how polished someone seemed in a room full of polished people. And I missed what was happening in the quiet person standing in the corner.

The principle God gave Samuel in 1 Samuel 16:7 cuts right through that blind spot:

“People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7 NIV

Read that again and let it land. Because this isn’t a verse about spiritual sentimentals. It’s a verse about talent identification.

We scan for experience. God scans for faithfulness.

Notice what God doesn’t ask Samuel to evaluate. He doesn’t ask about public speaking ability. He doesn’t ask about charisma in a crowd. He doesn’t ask whose name carries weight at the town gate.

He asks Samuel to see what nobody else was seeing. A man who had something none of the others had.

And if we’re honest about how most of our organizations actually make promotion decisions, we’re not operating by 1 Samuel 16:7. We’re operating by whatever the opposite of it is.

The Preparation Ground Nobody Values

Look at where David was when Samuel arrived. He wasn’t in a leadership meeting. He wasn’t interning under the priests. He wasn’t shadowing a general.

He was in a field. With sheep. Doing work that his own family apparently didn’t think was worth interrupting for a prophetic visit.

But watch what was happening in that field.

David was learning to protect what had been entrusted to him. He was developing courage facing lions and bears when nobody was watching. He was cultivating faithfulness in a role that offered no recognition and no advancement.

Those weren’t wasted years. Those were the exact qualifications required to lead a nation.

There’s a person on your team right now who shows up early to set up chairs without being asked. There’s a team member who handles the unglamorous project with the same excellence as the high-visibility one. There’s someone serving faithfully in a small role while the louder, more polished voices position themselves for bigger platforms.

Those are your David candidates.

The problem is the talent identification system in most organizations wasn’t built to find them. Your system is built to reward the people who perform well in interviews. The people who present confidently in meetings. The people who already look like leaders.

And while your system does its job, the person doing excellent work in the field keeps getting missed.

When Lack of Credentials Becomes the Actual Advantage

Let me pull up another figure nobody would have drafted. Amos might be the most underqualified leader in the entire Bible. And he owned it. I’d love to do an entire book just on him alone.

When the establishment confronted him about his credentials, watch how he answered:

“I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.”

Amos 7:14 NIV

No seminary. No lineage. No training. No mentor who passed a torch down to him.

Just a guy tending animals and trees who God pulled out of obscurity and said, “Go speak to my people.”

And the assignment God gave him wasn’t small.

Confront the wealthy. Challenge the religious establishment. Call out injustice at the highest levels of society.

A fig farmer walking into the power structure of an entire nation. That was the assignment.

That is a casting decision that only makes sense when you understand one thing: Amos’s authority didn’t come from his resume. It came from the One who sent him.

I think about that passage whenever a leader tells me they need one more certification before they step into what they’re called to do. One more degree. One more year of experience. One more round of validation from people who might never give it.

Amos had dirt under his fingernails and a word from God in his mouth.

That was enough.

The Proximity Problem

Here’s something that should make every leader uncomfortable. David’s own family failed to consider him as a candidate for kingship.

The people who knew him best were the least likely to recognize his potential.

Read that again slowly. The people who ate with him. The people who grew up alongside him. The people who had the most insight on his daily life. They looked right past him.

• I’ve watched this exact dynamic play out in businesses where the most capable next-generation leader gets overlooked because “we’ve always known them.”

• I’ve seen it in churches where the person with genuine pastoral gifting gets passed over for the more “polished” speaker or leader.

• I’ve seen it in executive teams where the person doing the heaviest lifting gets written off because they don’t fit the mental picture of what a leader is supposed to look like.

So here’s a question worth sitting with.

Who in your organization are you too familiar with to see clearly?

What Obscurity Is Actually Developing

Let’s keep going back to 1 Samuel 16, because the passage has more to say than we usually give it credit for.

David wasn’t killing time in the field. Something was being formed in him that could not be taught in a leadership course.

He was learning to protect what was entrusted to him. Developing courage in situations nobody was going to post about. Cultivating faithfulness in a role that gave him zero recognition and zero public advancement.

Those weren’t irrelevant experiences waiting for the real work to start. They were the real work. They were the training ground.

The person who handles the small, invisible tasks with excellence is already telling you how they’ll handle bigger responsibility.

You just have to be paying attention.

The Recognition Gap In Your System

Most organizations I’ve worked with have sophisticated talent development programs. Structured succession planning. Leadership pipelines with stages and mile markers and named tiers. We have those too and love them.

But so many organizations are still missing the right people.

Because formal processes tend to surface people who fit existing patterns. They identify candidates who look like previous successful leaders. They promote people who are visible, vocal, and already operating inside recognized leadership contexts. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it’s limiting.

And here’s what gets overlooked far too oftern

• The person doing faithful work without seeking recognition.

• The individual with real capacity who doesn’t self-promote.

• The leader who serves effectively without needing a title.

Your organization needs something your formal process was never built to do. You need a way to surface overlooked talent.

And that mechanism is you.

The Power of Prophetic Recognition

God sent Samuel to find the kid in the field. Sometimes God sends you to do the same thing for someone in your own circle.

This isn’t about generic affirmation. It’s about specific, observed recognition of what you’ve actually seen.

Not, “Great job on that project.”

But, “The way you handled that conflict last week showed real wisdom. You stayed calm, you listened well, and you found a solution that honored everyone involved. That’s leadership.”

Not, “Thanks for your service.”

But, “I’ve noticed you show up early every single week to set up, and you stay late to clean up. You do excellent work when no one is watching. That tells me something important about your character.”

It means you have to actually see people. Not just their role. Not just their title. Not just their position on the org chart. You have to see what they’re doing when they think nobody is paying attention.

And most leaders are not slowing down long enough to do that.

Your Practical Challenge This Week

Think about the people in your life right now. Your team. Your church. Your family. Your community.

Who’s the person nobody is paying attention to while they absolutely outperform the masses.

The quiet one doing faithful work while louder voices get the recognition. The one who shows up every single time but never gets asked for their opinion. The one who serves behind the scenes while others lead from the stage.

Here are three progressive steps to take before the end of the week:

Step 1. Identify them by name. Not a category. Not a role. An actual person. Write the name down. If you can’t name anyone, that’s your first signal that you’ve stopped looking.

Step 2. Observe something specific. Pay attention to what they do when nobody’s watching. How they treat people with nothing to offer them. How they handle an assignment that won’t get them credit. How they show up when they’re tired.

Step 3. Tell them what you see. And be specific. Name the behavior. Name the pattern. Name the character you’ve watched them display. Don’t hand them a compliment. Hand them a mirror that shows them what you’ve already been noticing.

Something like:

“I noticed that you always follow through on what you commit to. That’s rare and it’s valuable.”

“The way you treated that difficult person with respect showed real maturity.”

“You’ve been faithful in this role for years without recognition. I see that, and it matters.”

You might be the Samuel moment in someone’s life. The voice that calls forth potential others have overlooked. The person who sees what their own family has missed.

If You’re The One In The Field

Before we close, a word for the reader who’s been passed over.

If you’ve ever felt looked through, left off the invite list, or kept out of the room where decisions are made, you might be exactly where David was when Samuel came looking.

In the field. Doing faithful work nobody sees. Waiting for a moment that nobody around you is expecting.

Keep doing excellent work when nobody’s watching. Keep serving faithfully without the recognition. Keep developing character in the quiet places. Keep tending the sheep and the fig trees. It matters to what God will do next.

God’s pattern hasn’t changed. He’s still looking at hearts while everyone else is still scanning resumes.

The question isn’t whether you have the right credentials. The question is whether you’re being faithful with what’s in front of you right now.

That shepherd kid became king. That fig farmer confronted a nation. Your current role might be preparing you for something nobody around you expects.

Stay faithful, leader. Your moment is coming. As long as you have the right posture. Not gifts. Not talent. But the character God’s looking for.

— Jared

There’s a psychological phenomenon researchers call “role engulfment.” It’s when a person becomes so absorbed in a role that the role stops being something they do and becomes something they are. Sociologists first studied it in caregivers who had poured so much of themselves into caring for others that when the caregiving ended, they had no idea who they were anymore.

The caregiving was gone. And so, apparently, were they.

You don’t have to be a caregiver to recognize that feeling. It shows up in boardrooms and pulpits and living rooms all across the country. It shows up in the leader who hasn’t taken a real day off in three years. The pastor who checks attendance numbers before finishing their first cup of coffee Sunday morning. The entrepreneur whose mood tracks directly with last month’s revenue.

The role ate the person. And most of them never saw it coming.

What God Did Before the Work Started

Before Jesus healed a single person, preached a single sermon, or called a single disciple, something happened at the Jordan River that most of us read past too quickly.

Jesus came to John to be baptized. The Spirit descended. And then the Father spoke.

“This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

— Matthew 3:17 NIV

Read the timing on that.

Jesus had done nothing yet. Thirty years of quiet life in Nazareth. No crowds. No miracles. No ministry to speak of. And God the Father declared Him beloved. Said He was pleased with Him.

That all came before the assignment.

That order is not incidental. God was establishing something. He was planting the identity of Jesus deep into the ground before any weight would be placed on it. Before the storms came, before the critics showed up, before the cross was in view, God was saying: this is who you are, and that does not depend on what you do next.

That sequence changes everything. And most of us get it completely backwards.

The Trap High Performers Fall Into

Here’s what the backwards version looks like.

You start chasing the assignment hoping it will tell you who you are. You believe that once you’re doing the thing you were called to do, you’ll finally feel settled. Secure. Certain. So you work harder, build faster, produce more. Somewhere inside, you’ve made an agreement that your worth lives in your output.

If the work is good, you’re good. If the work fails, you fail. No separation between the two.

That’s a fragile way to live. And a fragile way to lead.

What’s striking is that the enemy understood this long before most of us do. Right after the baptism, right after God spoke identity over Jesus, the Spirit led Him into the wilderness. And every temptation Satan leveled at Him started with the same two words.

“If you are the Son of God...”

Satan didn’t attack the assignment. He attacked the identity. He knew that if he could make Jesus uncertain about who He was, the whole mission would unravel on its own.

The strategy hasn’t changed. When your worth is wrapped up in what you produce, you become easy to destabilize. One difficult quarter and you question your calling. One season of stalled momentum and you wonder if God has stepped back. One critical review and you’re in a spiral that has nothing to do with the critique and everything to do with how deep your identity actually goes.

What Fragile Identity Actually Costs You

The practical costs of building your sense of self on your output are steeper than most people realize.

Think about the executive who can’t disconnect because staying busy is the only way they know how to feel valuable. The leader who drives their team relentlessly because they’ve quietly decided that results justify their presence in the room. The parent who measures their worth by their child’s performance, and falls apart when that child makes different choices.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re the natural result of building on the wrong foundation.

Fear of failure. Fear of being exposed. Fear of losing what you’ve built. And fear-based leadership is recognizable from a distance. Teams feel it. Cultures absorb it. The people you lead begin to perform for the same anxious reasons you do, and before long the whole organization is running on pressure rather than purpose.

There’s a reason Nehemiah spent time in prayer and fasting before he ever picked up a brick. There’s a reason David wrote psalms in the wilderness before he ever sat on a throne. The internal work came first. They understood something that high-capacity leaders often miss: you cannot build anything that outlasts you if you haven’t first settled who you are.

The Freedom That Comes From Settled Identity

Go back to Matthew 3:17.

God didn’t say, “This is my Son, who is about to accomplish great things.”

The declaration was present tense. Already true. Already settled. With him I am well pleased. Before any ministry had happened, before any crowd had gathered, before any miracle had been performed.

That same truth applies to you.

Your worth is not something you earn by executing your calling well. It was established before you ever started building. You are not your ministry. You are not your title, your platform, your results, or your revenue.

You are His.

That is the only foundation that holds when everything else shifts.

Here’s what changes when that truth gets down into your bones:

• You stop producing to prove yourself and start building from a place of fullness. The work doesn’t change. The motive does. And that shift is felt by everyone around you.

• You can take risks without needing them to succeed to feel okay. When your identity isn’t riding on the outcome, you lead with a kind of courage that people around you find contagious.

• You can receive correction without it crushing you. Feedback about your work stops feeling like a verdict on your worth. That’s when real growth becomes possible.

• You stop driving the people around you from anxiety. Leaders who are secure in who they are create cultures where others can grow, fall short, learn, and become who God made them to be.

Building the Right Way

So what does this look like when it gets practical? Here are four moves that create a foundation before the work demands it.

1. Sit with God before you step into the day’s agenda. Not as a warm-up routine. As a deliberate choice to hear your Father’s voice before anyone else gets a word in. Let Him remind you who you are before the performance pressure starts.

2. Watch what you measure at the end of the day. If the first question you ask yourself when your head hits the pillow is “did I produce enough today,” that’s a signal worth paying attention to. Ask yourself instead: was I faithful today? Did I lead from what I believe, or from what I feared?

3. Build a real boundary between who you are and what you do. You can lose the role, the title, the business, and the platform, and still be whole. Practice saying that. More than that, practice living like it’s true.

4. Give the people you lead permission to be human. When you stop needing their performance to validate your leadership, you start actually developing them. The two are connected more directly than most leaders want to admit.

The Foundation Everything Rests On

The baptism of Jesus was not just a religious ritual. It was God establishing the order of things. Identity comes first. Assignment follows.

If you’re leading anything that matters right now, whether a team, a family, a congregation, a company, this principle is the one worth coming back to. Because the weight of real leadership will eventually expose whatever your identity is actually resting on. The question is whether you want to find that out during a storm, or before one arrives.

You are not what you produce.

You are His.

Build from there, leader.

— Jared

There were twelve of them. Twelve men who left everything to follow Jesus. Twelve men who heard every sermon, watched every miracle, and sat at the same table.

But Jesus didn’t treat them all the same.

When He walked up the mountain and His appearance changed like the sun, only three men were there to witness it. When He pressed deeper into the garden at Gethsemane and the weight of what was coming nearly broke Him, only three men were close enough to see it. When He stepped into the room where a young girl lay lifeless and called her back to life, He didn’t bring all twelve. He brought three.

Peter. James. John.

Jesus loved all twelve. But He trusted three with the moments that mattered most.

That used to bother me. It felt selective. It felt like favoritism wrapped in spiritual language. Then I started leading people and realized something that changed the way I think about every relationship I have: you cannot take everyone to every level with you.

Some people belong in the crowd. Some belong in the twelve. A small few belong in the three. The people who see the version of you that isn’t polished for public. Who carry the weight you can’t talk about openly. Who you trust with the moments that could wreck you if the wrong person heard about them.

The problem most leaders face is not a vision problem or a strategy problem. It’s a proximity problem.

The wrong people are too close.

“Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.”

— Proverbs 13:20

That second part doesn’t get quoted nearly enough. The flip side of that promise is a warning.

Their priorities will quietly become your priorities. Their ceilings will start to feel like your ceilings.

Here’s what that verse is really pointing at: proximity creates influence, and influence reshapes the person on the receiving end of it.

The people with the most access to your life right now are forming you. They’re forming how you see yourself, how you interpret setbacks, what you believe is possible, and how close you’re staying to the purpose God gave you. The question worth sitting with is whether that formation is pulling you toward who you’re called to be or away from it.

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the most important leadership question you can ask right now.

The Exercise That Challenged Me

Before any action comes honesty.

When I did this, I was immediately challenged to evaluate who I was being shaped by. I want you to do the same.

Write down the names of the three to five people who have the most access to your life at this moment.

The ones who get your real time, not your scheduled time. The ones who know how you’re actually doing, not just how you say you’re doing. The people whose opinions about you carry the most weight when you’re alone and thinking.

Now ask two questions about that list.

• First: Are these people making me more like Christ or less like Him?

• Second: Did I put them there on purpose, or did they just drift into that position?

That second question is the sharper one.

The person you went to school with who’s still the first one you call. The colleague who became a confidant because you spend a lot of time together. The family member who has always had unlimited access because questioning that access felt disloyal.

Proximity is not the same as purpose. Familiarity is not the same as wisdom.

And when you let people into your inner circle by default rather than by design, you hand the steering wheel of your formation to whoever happened to show up most.

The Slow Drift Nobody Notices

You don’t abandon your convictions in one afternoon. You don’t wake up one day and realize your values have shifted. What actually happens is quieter and harder to trace.

One conversation nudges your thinking slightly. One shared frustration starts to feel like discernment. One person’s cynicism starts to sound like wisdom. Over time, without any single moment you could point to, the temperature of who you’re becoming has changed.

Romans 12:2 puts the stakes of this in plain terms:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

— Romans 12:2

Paul isn’t talking about abstract cultural pressure here. He’s talking about the daily, relational, conversational pressure that slowly shapes what feels normal to you.

The people in your inner circle set that temperature. If they’re driven by ego, ego starts to feel reasonable. If they’ve grown cynical about the church, cynicism starts to feel empowering. If they’ve quietly let their purpose drift, you’ll start to feel less urgent about yours.

That’s a hard truth to sit with. Because you can’t blame the people around you for this. You gave them access. And access, over time, becomes authority.

How Jesus Built His Three

Jesus chose His inner circle with intention. He didn’t go with whoever had followed Him the longest. He didn’t default to whoever made Him feel most comfortable or agreed with Him most readily.

He chose people who could handle the weight of what He was carrying. People who would eventually become the foundation for what He was building after He was gone.

Think about what that means for you practically.

Your inner circle isn’t just about friendship and emotional support, as valuable as those things are.

They’ll shape how you think about your marriage, your calling, your money, your faith. They’ll be the voices in your head when you’re alone trying to figure out the right call.

That’s too much influence to assign by accident.

The people closest to you should be people you chose on purpose. People who share the values that drive your most important decisions, are equipped to carry what you need to share with them, and who will point you back to God rather than away from Him when the pressure gets real.

If the honest answer is that your current inner circle doesn’t meet that standard, you don’t have a relationship problem. You have a design problem. And design problems have design solutions.

What Adjusting Access Actually Looks Like

Raising the standard for your inner circle doesn’t require dramatic confrontations or painful exits. What it requires is clarity and honesty about what level of access each person in your life actually holds.

• Not everyone needs to know everything.

• Not everyone needs to be part of every conversation.

• Not everyone needs a voice in decisions that will shape the direction of your family or your work.

Here’s a practical path forward:

1. Define the levels clearly. Who is in the crowd, meaning people you love but who don’t have access to the real version of your life? Who is in the twelve, meaning trusted relationships that get more of you? And who is in the three, the people with full access? Write it down. Most people have never thought about this with any precision.

2. Audit where your energy actually goes. For one week, pay attention to who is getting your most honest conversations, your most vulnerable moments, your most unguarded thinking. What you find may surprise you. People you assumed were in the crowd are operating with inner-circle access.

3. Set expectations out loud. One of the primary sources of relational tension is unspoken assumptions about access. Telling someone clearly what you need from them and what they can expect from you isn’t cold. It’s respect.

4. Guard the inner circle like it matters. Because it does. The three to five people with the most access to your life right now have more influence over your future than almost any strategy, resource, or opportunity you’re pursuing.

Some of the hardest conversations to have are with people you genuinely care about who expect more access than you can give them.

Those conversations are costly. But watch what happens to your clarity, your conviction, and your sense of purpose when the people closest to you are actually built for the role.

The Standard Worth Holding Onto

The people in your inner circle should make you sharper, not softer in the ways that matter. They should tell you what you need to hear, not just what lands well. They should be willing to pray for you when you’ve lost the words to pray for yourself. They should celebrate your wins loud without competing with them, and carry your burdens without broadcasting them.

When Peter, James, and John witnessed the Transfiguration, they saw something the other nine never saw. That wasn’t by accident. That was the return on the access Jesus gave them.

The right people in the right positions don’t just make your life easier. They make you more of who you’re called to be.

That’s the standard. And anything less than that is worth reconsidering.

Your inner circle will do more to determine the direction of your leadership, your family, and your faith than almost anything else you can name.

Choose it on purpose. Protect it without apology.

Build that circle wisely, leader!

— Jared

There’s a story most leaders know but few sit with long enough to feel uncomfortable.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. He counts them at the end of the day and comes up one short. So he leaves the ninety-nine and goes out into the dark to find the one.

Terrible risk management. Extraordinary pastoral instinct.

Jesus tells this story in Luke 15, and it’s worth slowing down on before you move past it. Because in that moment, He’s not just telling you what God is like. He’s showing you what leadership is supposed to look like.

The ninety-nine are fine. They’re accounted for. The numbers look good. But the Shepherd isn’t asking what the numbers look like. He’s asking where the one went.

That question is the whole point of this article.

The Title Jesus Chose for Himself

Before we get into what shepherd leadership looks like in practice, it’s worth pausing on why the title matters at all.

Jesus could have called Himself anything. King. Commander. Architect. Founder.

He chose Shepherd.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

— John 10:11 NIV

That choice wasn’t accidental. It was intentional.

In the ancient world, shepherding wasn’t a prestigious occupation. It was low-status, physically demanding work. Shepherds smelled like their animals. They carried scars from predators. They spent long nights outside in the cold while everyone else was indoors.

And Jesus looked at every metaphor available to Him and said: that one. That’s who I am to my people.

I’ve spent years working inside organizations, sitting with leaders who are brilliant strategists, gifted communicators, and genuinely talented executives. What I’ve noticed is that the gap in most leadership isn’t skill. It’s care. Leaders know how to build. Fewer of them know how to tend.

The Shepherd in John 10 doesn’t just manage a flock. He knows his sheep by name. He goes looking for the one who wanders. He positions himself between his flock and whatever is coming for them.

That’s a fundamentally different posture than running an organization. Most organizations look at who shows up and writes off who’s not there.

The Reality That Exposes Everything

Here’s the tension most high-achieving leaders won’t name out loud: you want the results of excellent organizational leadership and the heart of genuine pastoral care at the same time. And those two things pull in opposite directions.

• Growth metrics reward efficiency. Pastoral care is almost always inefficient.

• Org charts reward clarity of roles. Knowing your people deeply requires moving past the role entirely.

• Systems reward repeatability. Human beings are gloriously unrepeatable.

I’ve been in rooms where the strategy was precise and the growth numbers were impressive and the people running the place were quietly exhausted, disconnected, and wondering if anyone above them actually knew their name.

That’s what happens when the system becomes more important than the people it was built to serve.

Jesus draws a sharp line between two types of leadership figures in John 10. There’s the good shepherd, and there’s the hired hand.

The hired hand isn’t a villain. He’s just someone who runs when the wolf shows up. He doesn’t own the outcome. He doesn’t carry the cost. And when things get difficult, he’s gone.

The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he wolf comes, he abandons the sheep and runs away.

— John 10:12 NIV

That verse should be uncomfortable for anyone in a leadership role. It’s because it’s accusatory but because it forces the question: when things get hard for the people under your care, do you move toward them or away from them?

What Shepherds Actually Do

So what does this look like when you’re leading a real team, running a real organization, or pastoring a real church?

1. Shepherds know who’s missing.

The first thing a shepherd does at the end of the day is count. Not to report numbers upward. To find out if anyone is gone.

When’s the last time you paused the strategy long enough to notice who had gone quiet? Not a mass email, not a team announcement. A specific person, a real conversation, five minutes of actual presence.

The Shepherd in John 10 calls his own sheep by name. That’s not a small detail. That’s the whole model. You cannot lead people you don’t know. And I don’t mean knowing their title or their output. I mean knowing what they’re carrying, what season they’re actually in, what they’re afraid of going into next quarter.

This takes time you feel like you don’t have. Do it anyway.

2. Shepherds move toward the threat.

The ancient shepherd carried a rod and a staff. The rod was a weapon. The staff guided the flock. Both were tools of protection, not just management.

Saying no to good things because they cost your people too much is one of the hardest disciplines in leadership. And one of the most necessary.

3. Shepherds go after the one who wanders.

Back to Luke 15. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to find the one.

Think about what that actually costs. Time. Energy. The risk of leaving the rest unattended. The vulnerability of going out looking when the result isn’t guaranteed.

In practice, the people who wander off are rarely the rebels. They’re usually the ones who quietly stopped feeling like they mattered. They disengaged slowly. They got passed over or overlooked and didn’t say anything about it. And then one day you looked up and they were gone.

Shepherd leadership means you notice before it gets to that point. You pay attention to changes in energy and engagement. When someone who is typically present starts going silent, that’s worth a conversation. Not a performance check-in. A real one.

The Cost Nobody Warns You About

Let’s be honest about something: this model is expensive.

Leading like a shepherd costs you time you could spend on strategy. It costs you the clean simplicity of treating people as roles instead of as human beings. It costs you the efficiency of running a tight machine where everything is optimized.

Jesus describes the cost plainly. The good shepherd “lays down his life for the sheep.” That’s not hyperbole dressed up as leadership language. In the ancient world, shepherds died protecting their flocks. They protected them against lions, against bears, against thieves.

You likely won’t face a literal predator. But you will face moments where you have to choose between what’s fast and what’s right. Between what builds your reputation and what serves your people.

I’ve turned down opportunities because my team needed me present. I’ve slowed timelines because the people we had weren’t ready for what came next. I’ve had hard conversations with high-capacity leaders who were producing results while destroying trust underneath them.

Every one of those decisions felt costly in the moment.

Every one of them was the right call.

What Shifts When You Lead This Way

Here’s what I’ve seen happen when leaders make the shift from managing performance to actually tending people: the culture changes underneath you without you having to manufacture it.

People stop protecting themselves and start contributing. They stop performing safety and start taking real ownership. Trust moves through the organization in ways that no onboarding process or values statement can produce.

Your people have to come first. Projects wait. Productivity metrics are hollow if the people generating them are quietly falling apart.

John 10:14 says, “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” That mutual knowing is the foundation of every high-trust organization I’ve ever been inside. It’s not a program. It’s a practical advice. It’s built one conversation at a time, over time, by leaders who decide that knowing their people is a non-negotiable part of the job.

Where You Start

You don’t have to restructure your leadership approach this week.

Start with one move.

1. Block individual time. Put it on your calendar like you would any critical commitment. Fifteen minutes with someone on your team. No agenda except asking how they’re really doing and meaning it.

2. Learn to read what’s shifting. Shepherds develop instincts. You can too. Pay attention to who has gone quiet. Who has lost the energy they used to bring. Who is still showing up in body but checked out in practice.

3. Create room for honesty. Most organizational cultures quietly punish vulnerability. People learn fast to perform strength and hide struggle. Shepherd leaders build environments where it’s okay to not have it together. Where someone can say “I’m overwhelmed” without worrying about what that admission costs them.

4. Celebrate health alongside results. What gets celebrated gets repeated. If the only thing you recognize is outcomes, you’ll build a team that produces outcomes at the expense of everything else. If you celebrate sustainable health, you’ll build a team that can produce for the long run.

The CEO asks how to scale. The Shepherd asks where the one went.

Both questions matter. But if you only ever ask one of them, you already know which model you’re operating from.

Jesus didn’t build an institution. He built a movement, through twelve people He actually knew. He knew their weaknesses. He knew their histories. He called them by name and went looking for them when they wandered.

That’s the model we’re called to follow. And let me say this: It’s not the most efficient path. But it’s the one that actually changes people.

And the leaders who change people outlast every leader who simply managed them.

Know your people, leader.

— Jared