Although leaders are expected to always show up in their best selves, they will still find themselves struggling with the biggest obstacles in life. Dr. Dan Allender, author and founder of The Allender Center, joins Greg Leith for a discussion on managing personal trauma as a leader. Dan is the author of Leading with a Limp, which focuses on understanding the value of one’s brokenness. He explains how to keep the faith even if you are facing your inner battles and why it is okay to be a little off track sometimes. To learn more about Dr. Allender and his work, visit https://theallendercenter.org.
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Leading With A Limp With Dr. Dan Allender
Welcome to the show. We’re here with Dr. Dan Allender. Some of you may not be familiar with Dan. He is a pioneer of a unique and innovative approach to trauma. For 30 years, the Allender Theory has brought healing and transformation to hundreds of thousands of lives. That’s powerful. He has an MDiv and a PhD in Counseling Psychology. He is a faculty member at Grace Theological Seminary. He founded The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology to train therapists.
He founded The Allender Center to cultivate healing and train leaders. He is a professor of Counseling at The Seattle School and the author of my favorite books, Leading with a Limp, The Wounded Heart, and The Healing Path. He co-hosts a weekly podcast seen by two million. Most importantly, he lives with his wife Becky on Bainbridge Island, where they enjoy their three children and grandchildren. Dan, welcome to the show.
I am delighted to be with you. Anytime I hear my own bio, the response is mostly exhaustion. How do we actually live and do things? I won’t take us any further than thank you. Thank you for the privilege of being with you.
Recognizing That You Actually Have Trauma
You’re welcome. Convene has been working with thousands of executives for 25 years. You and I have talked before this time to know that somewhere, groups of men and women who lead companies are meeting for a day, half a day, or a few hours. They meet on a regular basis. I know you’re a fan of that kind of thinking, but all across the country, these leaders are going as fast as you’re going with all the things I described in your bio. They’re going 100 miles an hour in the 55 zone. They’re saying things like, “I’m fine. I don’t have time to think. I don’t have time to feel.” Here’s the genesis of my wanting to spend time with you.
I was so excited about this. I was listening to my friend Kay Warren and you doing a podcast in the very room that you’re in. She said to you something that was not profound, but it became profound. She said, “I’m just so tired.” You said, “I am, too.” You began to talk about people who won’t let themselves be tired, are drinking that extra glass of wine, and do not want to sleep for five minutes in the middle of the day. You said, “It’s trauma.” I said, “I don’t have any trauma.” You said, “Let me define trauma.” Speak to those people, if you would.
The fact that they’re reading, in and of itself, is a gift and a privilege because so often, people who are in leadership positions have both the privilege and the burden of keeping things going. The idea of stopping feels like everything is going to catch up to you, and you’re not going to be able to move forward. Just alone to be able to address these matters, as I said, it’s a great honor and privilege. Let’s start with trauma. Trauma can be capital T, severe violation of human dignity, or a violation that comes due to a severe threat or danger, an auto accident, which you barely survived.
Yes, that’s a capital T trauma. You just got followed by somebody with road rage. They threatened you at some level by driving too close. I wouldn’t call that a capital T trauma. Your body generally doesn’t distinguish between capital T and small T, because our bodies are, in many ways, by the gift of God, prepared for fight or flight, or to freeze. Our body is prepared for danger. The nature of trauma involves a threat, any level of threat, such as a threat to life, a threat to reputation, a threat to income, or a threat to one’s organization.
Anytime there’s a threat, your body is going to ramp up with certain biochemicals, including cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and the catecholamines. All the stress biochemicals are going to shoot up when you get a phone call that puts you in the middle of a crisis. If we start with that, crises are another form of trauma. Your body ramps up. Fight, flight, or freeze. Most of us who are in leadership positions fight.
We are prepared for the unpreparable. We ramp up, but it’s when you live at that level of threat. It’s when you add a sense of powerlessness. Leaders, generally speaking, cannot and will not own where they have been caught in some form of trap. We are addicted to being able to get out of the miry pit. Nonetheless, there are many situations, often in marriage, often in friendship, and often with our children, where we have worked hard for a long period of time, and we cannot get out. That combination of threat and powerlessness not only intensifies, but takes even small t trauma and exit as something of a capital T trauma.
It’s when you’ve got those two elements, plus a sense of shame, some degree of “I’ve failed. I am not doing what I need to do.” When you’ve got those three combined, threat, some degree of helplessness, powerlessness, “I cannot make the needle move,” and judgment of shame, you have the elements of trauma that your body is going to have to engage at some point. Maybe it’ll be a year or two from now before your body begins to break down. It’s one of the things we can absolutely verify with strong scientific data. You can outrun trauma for a season. Do you want to shorten your life? Do you want to incur significant health issues? Keep it up, buddy. It will bite you. That’s the promise.
How Executives Should Deal With Trauma
With your history of founding, creating, inventing, dealing with crises, and dealing with people who need a therapist, some of the people who are reading are high D running $50-million-plus companies. Some of our leaders are running billion-dollar companies.
They’re saying, “You look like a nice guy, but I’m not buying it. My time is scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. We had a 25% dip during COVID. We pulled it back. I went to the shareholders’ meeting. We have the shareholders’ meeting coming up. I couldn’t do the date with my wife. We got on the plane after I was done. We flew to Hawaii. We had a great vacation. We came back, and I’m back at it. I don’t buy it. Trauma, what are you talking about? This is my life. I don’t have time to think and feel.” What would you say to that executive?
This will sound like a threat. I don’t mean for it to be heard. We were made for homeostasis, a balance between tension, threat, danger, rest, and comfort. In many ways, we can say that the nature of faith is the ability to rest and the ability to trust. Hope, on the other hand, is the ability to enter into risk, to dream, and to risk. God has intended for there to be this interplay between something that stabilizes us and gives us an anchor, and yet also something that draws us into risk and danger. Faith and hope are working constantly.
We were made for homeostasis, a balance between tension, threat, danger, rest, and comfort. Share on XThe bottom line is, as Paul says rather clearly in 1 Corinthians 13:13, “The greatest of these is love.” Faith and hope are the handmaidens, the servants of love. That person whom you just described, I don’t doubt that they are capable for a long period to function with what comes to be called allostasis. That is, you’ve moved out of homeostasis. Your stress biochemicals are so ramped up that it’s a new normal, then a new, new normal, and then a new, new. I won’t continue the redundancy, but you get the point that you are pressing yourself into a new normal.
You have the capacity. Nobody else does. Here’s the point, nor does your own body. We can come back to heart disease, cancer, all immunological issues, or inflammation of the body in terms of how stress biochemicals, as they metabolize, create a kind of arthritis and lots of other immunological issues. You can’t escape the reality of living in a fallen world to the degree that you have that presumption and arrogance. You are actually partaking of what you have no right to partake of. That’s the power of God. If you think of yourself and some of the language you’ve used, Greg, and believe that’s true, then you’re already defying creation. You’re defying your Creator. You’re defying, essentially, what’s necessary to be able to love.
That particular executive, what I’d say is, let me talk to your wife or your husband. Let me talk to your children. They may have all the benefits of your multimillion-dollar life, but I can promise you nobody can love well when you’re violating faith and hope. I need to eventually talk with you about the reality of you having sold your soul for a success that has cost you not merely your health. That as well, but primarily, what you have lost is your ability to hear, to suffer, to join, and to have communion with others in the way that God intended you.
If you want to live that life, let me remind you of a number of psalms that give very clear clarity about what happens with the rich who have ultimately no intention to deal with justice, to deal with honor, to deal with dignity, or to deal with real service. Ultimately, when we get down to this, we can talk about health to the nth degree, but my major concern is not just your body. It’s your soul. It’s your spirit. It’s the quality of your relationships.
Be Faithful With The Small To Get The Large
Someone tuning in said, “I’m in. I get it. I believe. I’m thinking about this for the first time. What should I do?”
First and foremost, I want to say thank you to that person. Don’t get too busy too quickly. A lot of times, we don’t work out because we don’t have time. A lot of times w,e don’t have a conversation because we don’t have time. To be able to do five push-ups would be better than nothing. Don’t minimize the small. Be faithful with the small. He will give you the large. It is to take five minutes and to say, “Do I live in a fallen world?” Yes.
In a fallen world, will there be ongoing crises? Yes. Are they a form of trauma? Yes. Do they have an effect on my body, my heart, my relationships, my spirit, my soul, and my relationship with God? I haven’t thought about it, but yes. We took 45 seconds to say that. You’ve got four minutes and fifteen seconds to say, “Jesus, what do you have to say to me with regard to this?” It may be a commendation, thank you that you’re beginning.
It may be that Jesus is going to invite you to be able to say, “Maybe I need to take another five minutes from now and ask the question, ‘How is my health?’ Does it take me a week or two weeks vacation, a third of the time, just to come down to something called normal? The last third, then, is ruined because I’m preparing to go back. The middle third is ruined because I spent a lot of time doing work and not being with my family, my world.”
It is just honesty. So much of confession begins with, “Can I tell the truth? What truth can I tell?” We’re all deceived and deceiving. That may sound harsh, but the reality is, I don’t want to hear the truth about my own life. I don’t want to hear the truth, ultimately, about my impact on others. If I will slow down enough to say, “My life has a wake. That wake has an effect on others, both good and ill. Can I name both? Not just ill, but both.”
That would be where I would begin the process of some degree of honesty and eventually self-disclosure. Will you talk with your spouse, a good friend, or your mentor? Will you begin to name certain realities and say, “This is not good. I don’t know quite yet what to do, but it’s not good for what I know I’ve not only experienced and feel, but who I want to be.” That is a beginning that will take you very far.
I have three boys and two girls. The three boys all have MDivs. Two of them are pastors. Two of them say to me often these words, which are finally sinking in. I’ll say, “Carson, what are you doing today?” He says, “I’m taking the day to reflect on the week.” My first reaction is, “What a waste of time.” I have trained myself over the years, as I listen to them say that, to know that is an investment in self and in relationship with God and relationship with others. Taking time to reflect is healthy.
Amen. Here’s the difference. I would already know that was good. Here’s the problem. I don’t do what I invite you to deal with. That’s part of the struggle for any good leader, irrespective of the world they’re in. I would provide counsel for anyone. If you turn it back and say, “Dan, let’s look at your calendar,” where have you taken an hour to do this? That was a conversation I had with my wife. She said, “I want you to take a half day off.” I’m like, “What do you want to do?” She said, “I don’t want to be with you. I want you to take a half-day off and reflect on what it’s cost you over the last two years of a lot of crises, COVID, trials with personnel, donors, and life. Step back and take a moment.”
Part of me actually said out loud, “I can’t afford that. There’s too much chasing me.” It wasn’t so much what’s ahead. That is all that I need to do. There’s too much grief. There’s too much heartache and fragmentation with the debris of the last several years. It’s in my calendar. I can say at some level, I’m not looking forward to the time yet because I’ve done this, at least at certain points in my life. I’m also aware that this is a redemptive moment, where I’m creating space for God to speak, and for my own heart to hear, but also speak about the things that we as an organization, and I within that organization.
I have not had the leisure or time in the midst of a lot of raging forest fires to take that. Let’s say for each of us, if anyone reads this and says, “Yes, I should diet. Yes, I should sleep more. Yes, yes, yes,” this is a spiritual discipline. This is not going to be easy. It will cost you. I don’t know how to say it louder. The gain is life.
How To Lead With A Limp
Let’s switch gears a little bit. You pick up most leadership books. You find strategies for leveraging your power to minimize your weakness and to build on your strengths, but the Bible has a different model. God seems to favor leaders who may not make the most of power as a thing by itself, but the power that comes from brokenness. Most effective leaders don’t rise to power in spite of their weaknesses. They lead with power because of their weaknesses. You say that in your book. It’s their authenticity in limping leadership that compels others to follow them. How would you say you define leading with a limp? It sounds like, “I don’t want to do that. I surely don’t want anybody to know I have one.”
Let’s start again with something that will sound brutal. Everyone reads your mail. If you think you can hide your weaknesses, either you are not very bright, or you have indulged in a level of arrogance that does not befit you. If anyone has been around you for likely a half hour to an hour, they have a sense of how, in one sense, remarkable and beautiful you are, but also how broken and, in some sense, weak you are. The more the crisis comes, the worst and the best of us come to the surface.
We need to be able to start with, if you think you can hide your weaknesses, then you’re with people who are not very bright. You’re not bright. The people around you are bright. They read your mail. The task at this point is, shall we start with a phrase that Paul uses in 1 Timothy 1? “Here’s a worthy statement worthy of your full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst.” Paul takes a status as the person who most needs forgiveness.
If you think you can hide your weakness, then you are with people who are not very bright. Share on XIt’s not debatable if you believe Scripture. Who is number two? My conviction is, I know my own heart better than any other heart. I get the privilege of working with many people. I know a lot of people well, but I know my heart better. I know the reality is, I struggle with lust, which is the desire to consume. I struggle with anger, which is a vengeance that I want to make people pay. That’s what Jesus refers to as sin, lust, and anger. It’s not just sex. It’s not anger management. It’s the interplay of an emptiness I want to have filled and demanded.
When it doesn’t work, I’m going to make somebody, maybe even myself, pay for that. We can step back and be able to say, “The nature of sin is what creates weakness.” If we’re escaping weakness, we’re really trying to escape the reality of lust and anger in each of our lives. We need to come to be able to say no one, no matter how mature, has escaped the reality of sin. “If you say you do not sin, you’re a liar,” John says.
It’s a bind. We eat sin and fail every day. That’s why forgiveness is such a gift, yet no matter how well I dress and how well I articulate, the reality of my own lust and anger is going to show itself in every meeting. It’s going to show itself in every endeavor in some form. That doesn’t mean every encounter, I need to be confessing my sin. I just need to be aware it’s there. When, in one sense, the ripples become far more substantial waves, I got to have the ability to name it and/or the ability to let others name it.
I was in a meeting not long ago. One of my staff members said to me, “Would it be all right if we took about a ten-minute break?” I said, “Yes, absolutely,” but it didn’t make sense at that moment. I said, “Can I ask why?” The person’s response was, “We’re stepping into hard matters. Your irritation is showing. It creates fear for most of us. I thought if you took ten minutes to walk, to pray, and to collect yourself, then maybe your own fragmentation wouldn’t cause us to fragment.” I’m like, “Is it that obvious?” The answer was, “Yes, it is.”
A ten-minute break was not a potty break. It wasn’t to get a drink. It was, “Can we let Dan tend to his own heart and come back to who he really wants to be, so that we can return?” There was no judgment, like, “You’re a bad leader,” or “Get it together, buddy.” It was, “I can’t read my own face, but the people who are with me can.” That gifting, there is the ability that, first and foremost, the data of our failure is not foreign. It should never be foreign. It also shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that we all struggle with lust and anger.
In which case, then, there is a freedom to engage our own heart and other hearts to create a far more profitable process to move forward in any endeavor. Be it marriage. Be it friendship. Be it parenting. Be it a meeting with your major executives. How this actually gets played out, how you articulate it, might be very different than the way I put words to it. We need to be able to engage one another’s failures, as well as one another’s brilliance, goodness, and beauty, in a way that is neither foreign nor forced, yet, indeed, highly truth-oriented and profitable.
We need to be able to engage one another’s failures and brilliance in a way that is neither foreign nor forced, but highly truth-oriented and profitable. Share on XI love the way you put something in the middle of those few paragraphs. If executives could say to themselves or if they could give their staff permission to say to them, “Can we take a break so that you, the leader, could return to who you really want to be?” I love that. Thanks for that.
It’s a gift. I’m thinking of the particular person, Melissa, who spoke those words to me. She’s a courageous young woman. I don’t think she would have chosen to speak it if I had not spoken about it myself in other meetings. At least, I’ve been able to name, “I’m not doing well right now, given where we are. I need about a ten-minute break.” Those ten minutes might be a run to the bathroom, or to get a Synergy raw kombucha cosmic cranberry, which I have right here.
It’s also, “Can I get back, ultimately, to my relationship with Jesus? Can I get back to engage Him? In which case, I will be a better man. I will be a better leader if I can do that.” Again, there are times when it would not be helpful. I know I’m not doing well. It would not be helpful to make that break. Nonetheless, is there freedom to do that? The absence of that is quite telling.
How Leaders Should Deal With Glory
Another thing you talked about in Leading with a Limp, an incredible book, was that executives and leaders have to deal with glory. I said, “Glory, what is that? Is that glory hallelujah?” It wasn’t. I remember a business trip I was on one time, back in the old days, when we actually got on planes. Everybody has our profile. They’re so happy that we spend all our money at their hotel. I remember getting in the limo. The driver said, “Hello, Mr. Leith. How are you?”
We got to the hotel. They said, “Welcome, Mr. Leith. We have your room ready.” When I was on the plane, they said, “Mr. Leith, we’re so thankful you’re flying with American Airlines.” Everybody was thanking me. I got to the meeting. Everybody was like, “Hello, Mr. Leith.” Sometimes, when we go to book a hotel, they line people up at the front door to greet us. That’s glory. We have to fight it. Talk about that.
Dealing with each of our own brokenness is hard work. Frankly, if you’re prone to a pretty high level of narcissism, facing your own need for a savior is not easy. The reality is, even those who are bound to a certain degree of grandiosity, or big dreams, etc., in good private moments, there’s at least some ownership. Given that, it is easier to deal with sin than to deal with glory. You are made in the image of God. That alone ought to stagger you. You are made in the image of God. No creature, rhinoceroses, or the Archangel Michael, is made in the image of God, but you and me.
We are recreated in the image of Christ. It is stunning. You house the very spirit of God. You are a temple. This is not new stuff. To step back from that and to say owning your giftedness, I find more reluctance and more refusal to name the tenderness, the strength, the beauty, and the goodness of your life. You may know you do well at certain things, and there’s ownership, but the heart and its glory are named in you. People are embarrassed and reluctant. It’s a complex issue that might take a whole other show to address, but let’s name it in this way. Most people, when they truly get named for the beauty, don’t know how to receive it. There is a glory that you have been given.
You didn’t create yourself, whatever self-made existence you think you did. It’s all a gift. Many executives have gifts in the range back to that Matthew 24-25 passage. You were given 8, 9, or 10 talents. Can we own those? Can we truly own them? Can they be owned particularly in this framework of “they are a gift,” and for you to be humble enough to name they exist, but also to name they are gifts? A gift is always meant to create gratitude. Does your own glory create gratitude and a sense of awe? Does it create, “I can’t believe I get this privilege. Thank you.”
So many executives feel powerful but burdened. The kind of “I’ll do it,” but not with a deep sense of privilege, because there’s an absence of gift and an absence of gratitude. In that, an amazement that a man like me, at the level of failures, past, present, and future, gets to be on a show with you talking about these matters, it ought to stun me, versus, “It’s part of my day. It’s part of my schedule. Yes, it’s part of the work that I do. What’s the next thing?” That mentality of, “I’ve got fifteen-minute appointments. Move on,” I can promise you there is no sense of gratitude or awe by virtue of owning the giftedness that allowed you to be in the position you’re in, doing what you get to do.
There are moments when you need to go on your own, but only because you have gone with a community together. Share on XWhy Limping Leaders Need Each Other
We’re closing in on the end of our time. I want to finish with one idea. I don’t want this to be a commercial, so we’ll try to make it not a commercial. Convene is about men and women who lead companies getting together on a regular basis for years on end and working with each other to put the leadership that they do on a biblical framework. They are together in the community every month for a day. You’ve said in your book, “Limping leaders need each other.” Speak to the person who says, “Need other people? Meet for a day a week? Are you kidding me? I’m fine. I don’t have time for that.”
Again, can we address your arrogance? It isn’t the issue of time. It’s the issue of isolation. What I try to put words to in Leading with a Limp is that crises are inevitable. It’s another form of trauma. Every time you’re in any crisis, you will never have enough information to make the best decision. You will always have to deal with confusion. Wherever there’s confusion and uncertainty, there’s fear. Wherever there’s fear, there’s going to be fragmentation.
With that, there’s always some degree of power struggle. There’s always some degree of betrayal, and with that, increased exhaustion. Nobody is going to solve this but you, which then creates this keyword, isolation. The byproduct, and if I can bring a whole other concept, who wants you isolated? It is the prince of darkness, the father of lies, the one who is most committed to your destruction. Go back to warfare. Divide and conquer. To the degree you’re alone, you’re divided, not only internally but externally.
To the degree there is one or more, two of you, His presence is there. We’re right back to a very key biblical concept. That is communion, fellowship. There is not just fellowship of wisdom or suffering. There is a fellowship of the spirit. Again, the fellowship of the ring. Yes, there are moments where you need to go on your own, but only because you have gone with a community together. It is that interplay of the one heroic act, but always in a context of communion and community. In The Lord of the Rings, yes, there was a task that needed to be done, but that task always had to involve others for it to be done. To step back and to uncork all that, all I can say is God shows God’s self with us in community. Yes, alone, but in community.
Get In Touch With Dan
Dan, thank you so much for taking the time from Bainbridge Island in Washington, helping people around the world who are leading companies to grapple with the fact that it’s okay to be a little off track sometimes, and all the things that we’ve talked about. Thank you so much for your work. Thanks for the book, Leading with a Limp, and thanks for the work you did on the movie The Heart of Man. That’s been a strong learning content material at Convene. We’re very grateful you took the time. For more to find out about Dr. Allender and everything that he does, log on to the Allender Center. If you want to buy the book Leading with a Limp, you can log on to Amazon. If you want to find more about Convene, it is www.ConveneNow.com. Thanks very much for being with us.
It is my delight. Thank you.
