Tag: loneliness

  • 5 Ways to Fight Loneliness in Leadership

    It’s lonely at the top.

    For those who work in the church, we all know it. Those who make it for the long haul either succumb to a lifetime of loneliness and don’t have any real friends or we learn to adapt and find deep connection outside the walls of the church.

    But loneliness doesn’t have to be a part of the job. You really can have deep friendships and be in full-time ministry.

    Acquaintance vs. Friendship

    The first few years I worked at churches I confused church members hospitality with true friendship. Sure, I really enjoyed being close with people in the church… but at the end of the day (and certainly in retrospect when you step away from a church) a lot of those people I thought were my friends turned out to be just positional acquaintances. As soon as I stopped being their Pastor Adam they stopped wanting to hang out. Once I stopped investing in their kids there were no more invitations to dinner, golf, and BBQs.

    Of course, we have been able to transition a few of those church acquaintances into true lifelong friendship. (For which we’re totally thankful!) But I think getting there took some time and wisdom.

    A spouse helps but doesn’t really count

    Kristen is my best friend. That goes without saying. But Kristen could never fill the void I needed in ministry as a friend and confidant. When I meet with people young in ministry, I often see them putting their spouse in the friend category. Of course, your spouse will help you curb loneliness! But don’t forget your spouse needs to find true friendship outside of you, as well.

    So, what works?

    Here are five things that helped me get past loneliness and find some healthy friendship while in church leadership.

    1. Find a ministry network locally. Believe it or not, there are people just like you in your own community! Joining a network is a great way to meet people. Go a couple of times, see who you connect with, then take the first step and take that one person out to lunch.
    2. Join a sports club or league. I don’t mean a church league either. Join a league and get outside of your church social circle. Get to know contractors and realtors and other normal people.
    3. Connect with long-time friends intentionally. Some of my best friends in ministry, I only see once or twice per year. The few days we spend together per year are awesome and fill up our tanks. Going to the same conference really helps. But even meeting up for a weekend somewhere goes a long way.
    4. Ignore other leaders who live unhealthy lives. For whatever reason, church ministry attracts workaholics. Looking through job postings at YS I can’t believe how many of them will admit that they want someone to work more than 40 hours per week. Don’t work at those ministries. Go home on time. Make wise use of your ministry time and you’ll have tons of time for real friendship. Never forget that its Jesus’ job to grow the church.
    5. Take the first step! I think I spent over a year completely lonely and out of my mind crazy because I was waiting for fellow ministry people in my community to come find me. It’s not going to happen. The assumption is always going to be that you are busy and your life is full of relationships until you step out first.

  • Alone in the Wild

    wide shot ed walking

    Last night I watched a fascinating documentary on the National Geographic Channel called, “Alone in the Wild.”

    It was difficult to watch. Here was this outdoorsmen named Ed Wardle. He wanted to test himself to see… can I live completely independent of others and survive in the Yukon wilderness? He intended to make it 90 days. He made it 50. And the last few weeks weren’t pretty. As time wore on, as hunger set in, as the reality that he could contact people but was choosing not to set in, the pain set in. It was agonizing TV. He cried a lot. He dealt with a lot of emotional pain. And of course he documented his unraveling. With the pressure of shooting a film on his mind all the time and the reality that he was lonely– he was paralyzed. He was in the wild, all by himself trying to prove that he could do it on his own, and he realized he needed people. He could technically do it but he chose to give up.

    Deep exhale on that. He needed people. He had the skills to do it on his own. But we just aren’t wired that way. We’re hardwired to need one another.

    And so he quit. He couldn’t do it. Check out what he said:

    The isolation was the most difficult element of this adventure. With no contact I immediately began to lose direction and reason. Without food I lost concentration and the ability to think straight. I worked hard from week one to keep myself motivated and keep going and by the end I was spending hours every day just convincing myself to carry on one day at a time. When I was travelling or doing something physically hard I had a military voice superimposed on my thoughts keeping me going and getting me organised, other times I had a female voice that would tell me to be sensible, breathe and take it easy on myself. They helped and I could feel them getting stronger and more necessary as time went on. link

    I doubt Kristen would remember saying this to me but when we were dating in college she wrote in a letter, “I love you because you don’t need anyone but you chose to let me into your world.“ True– I was raised to be independent. One of my parents goals in raising my brother and I was that we’d be able to take care of ourselves. (I don’t think they ever meant this emotionally, but physically we knew how to take care of ourselves with food, laundry, cleaning up, and stuff like that pretty young!)  When things got rough in high school and college I took that desire to be independent to an extreme. In my dysfunction I translated “you can do it on your own” to “I will do life with no ones help, I will muscle through anything, I don’t need to depend on anyone.”

    Kristen was right. Back then, I didn’t need or want anyone in my life. It was amazingly fulfilling to find my own way, take care of myself, and go from absolutely nothing to paying my way through college. But it was also dysfunctional. And it took someone I loved calling that spade a spade to motivate me to change.

    This is where Kristen has completed me in a powerful way, though. She reminds me, in words and deeds,  that we need others in our lives. We need good friends. We need the wisdom of our peers. We need to be open in these relationships. She has taught me that while we don’t “need” others to survive… life is infinitely better with people than without.

    Doggone it if she wasn’t right, too. Life is way better surviving in the wild with friends.

  • More than a web guy, a lesson for church staff

    There are times when I realize that I’m not showing a ton of depth. Or maybe, it is that I get so pigeon-holed into being the person someone needs that I don’t get to exhibit depth.

    I feel that way right now.

    I’ve gotten ingrained here in San Diego as a social media geek. Within my world that may be true. But I recognize that within that skill is a tie to lifelong passion. But the passion itself is much more important than the method I’m trying to master. At work this is perfectly natural. I have no doubt that people there value me beyond my skills because I know that, in turn, I value their friendship beyond their skills or positions.

    Let me restate what I’m saying. I care a lot about building community online. I care deeply about networking people and ideas. I have learned best practices, nuance, and supporting skills to make it easier to convey my passion in more effective ways. Ultimately, that’s a skill set that could be applied to a lot of genres and businesses. But my passion is for working with middle and high schoolers and encouraging/networking/sharing life with those who do the same thing.

    Take the passion out of what I do and I don’t want to do it. I may be able to give some sage advice or share a few things about what works… but if you’re out there trying to network with me so I can help you build a social networking strategy, I’m probably not going to be that useful to you. I know you are just using me.

    At the end of the day, I’m good at social media only because I care so much about the message I’m trying to convey.

    The frustrating thing is that I think I am only interesting to some of the new people I’ve been getting to know in San Diego because of those auxiliary skills and not because of what I’m passionate about. It’s as if my only value is tied into some skills I’ve learned and that feels really, really shallow. It’s a slight that I see right through. Asking me about my kids or my hobbies to try to get me to share some tricks of the trade is lame. I don’t ever want to tie my value as a human being into the fact that I can build a website, or develop a brand, or tie that into a social media strategy. Lame. Lame. Lame!

    I don’t think this is unlike people who become fake friends when you work at a church. You kind of know they are fake but you’re so desperate for friendship that a fake friend is better than no friend at all. When we worked at churches there were plenty of people who valued our friendship because of a socialogical positional thing. 24 months ago if I had written down a list of people who would be our friends if we stopped being their pastor and I would have have been 100% correct. Not to sound emo, but the shocking thing is how sincere people pretended to be all those years. You’d be surprised by how few people we hear from after nearly 10 years of full time ministry friendships. 10? 15? 20 tops.

    For church staff, this is one shallow nature of relationship that makes the job so hard.

    But, now that we aren’t there anymore we have no value to them and we’ll never hear from them again.

    The flip side for church staff is simple. Open your lives up to those who are legitimately sincere in their friendship. Trust your gut. Just like Kristen and I have found real friendship over the years… a couple of bad apples shouldn’t catapult you into a life of keeping people at a distance.

  • People long for someone to talk to

    I am sitting here at a local eatery quietly writing. Unintentionally, I’m observing the people around me. Here’s a fascinating observation about the world we live in.

    Directly in front of me is a mother of a 1 year old interviewing a babysitter so she can go back to work.  It’s pretty clear that this married mother of a one year old needs someone to talk to. For the last hour she hasn’t stopped talking. She has shared with this stranger all sorts of personal information dating back to getting pregnant with Elliot. I keep thinking, “Does this babysitter need to know all of this? Does any of this have anything to do with her role as a babysitter?” Of course it does. This mom wants to know that her babysitter understand her. She wants to know that she is hiring a co-parent. In a way, she is hiring a friend. She needs to know that this person is trustworthy. And for this lady, being trustworty includes listening to her yack for ours at a time.

    More importantly, my observation is that there are a lot of lonely new mom’s out there. This mom needs a playgroup, she needs a Bible study, she needs a church family, and most importantly… she needs to get a life outside of Elliot.

    The reality is that if people don’t have someone to talk to on a regular basis, they’ll go crazy. God created each of us to connect with others, we crave human interaction that is empathetic and just says “uh huh” 200 times per hour. It’s kind of like sleep… when we don’t get that on a regular basis we just data dump on the nearest person who will listen. In this case it’s a babysitter. But it could just as easily be her cable guy, the checkout person at the store, or a random person at Starbucks.

    What can we all do to help this happen for new moms?