The Emotionally Healthy Leader

How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World

Peter Scazzero

Summary 

This rich and wise book explores two key dimensions of every spiritual leader’s life: 1) the interior life and how to cultivate it; and 2) how to integrate a rich personal spiritual life with key outward tasks that are the responsibility of every leader.  Scazzero explains that cultivating the inner life involves facing one’s shadow, leading out of marriage or singleness, slowing down for loving union, and practicing Sabbath delight. After discussing these four areas thoroughly, he provides a self-measurement tool to help each reader identify how they are doing in each.  

He then, through a very open description of his own strengths and weaknesses, explains his journey in attempting to integrate a rich spiritual life with four key responsibilities of leadership: planning and decision making; culture and team building; using power and establishing wise boundaries; and successfully navigating endings and new beginnings.  

His vulnerability in sharing his own journey is remarkable and one of the great strengths of the book – it serves as a highly useful teaching tool, instructing the reader about the real-world consequences of spiritual/emotional maturity and immaturity. It becomes unmistakably clear that the author is writing out of decades of experience in spiritual and organizational leadership.