How to Manage Your Burnout Risk : Arianna Molloy

Full-Text Transcript

What exactly is the dark side to your ministry calling, and how does it relate to burnout?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Arianna Molloy. Arianna is a professor of Organizational Communication at Biola University. Her newest book is entitled Healthy Calling. Together, Arianna and I explore some of the toxic burnout risks associated with our calling into ministry. Arianna also shares some examples and insights of how we can recalibrate our calling so we can serve in healthy and meaningful ways. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of FrontStage BackStage. Really excited about today’s conversation. I’m your host, Jason Daye, and each and every week, I have the opportunity to not only sit down and have a conversation around a topic that we believe will help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy and sustainable rhythms so you can thrive in life and leadership. But beyond that, we also create an entire toolkit that complements this conversation. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network, and you can find the toolkit for this conversation and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. There, you’ll find a number of resources, including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now, this growth guide has some insights pulled out of the conversation. It also has some questions to help you and the team of ministry leaders at your local church dig more deeply into the topic we discuss and reflect on it, see how it meets you where you’re at, and how it is a part of the context of which you are ministering. So be sure to check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders. If you’d like to learn more about how you could get a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, you can check that out at PastorServe.org/freesession. If you join us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better. We’ll be praying for you, and we’ll be praying for your ministry as well. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe and follow. You do not want to miss out on any of these great conversations. As I said, we have a good one for you today. At this time, I’d like to welcome Arianna Molloy to the show. Arianna, welcome.

Arianna Molloy
Thank you so much for having me.

Jason Daye
Yes, excited for this conversation. Now, Arianna, we’re going to get into a topic that all of us in ministry are familiar with, and that is the idea of calling. We’re actually going to be looking at the dark side of calling, which is fascinating. But before we get there, I want to pull back a little bit. Arianna, in your new book, Healthy Calling, you talk about the idea of work, and you have three different categories when it comes to thinking about work. Can you walk us through these categories and then also how these categories might relate to one another?

Arianna Molloy
Absolutely, Jason. So, first of all, I love talking about work, so I could just be here all day with you. I’m a qualitative social scientist, and I study communication and within vocation, psychology, business, and communication. We typically think of work in three different ways. Now, these are not contained categories, so we could experience all three in the same day sometimes, but generally, we approach work in one of three ways. The first is just a job, and in that approach, people would go to work for the paycheck. You might not use your skill sets or your passions at work, and that’s not a terrible thing for you. If this is your approach, people typically work to get to the weekend, and also, there’s not really a promise of upward mobility. So, you have this job, but there’s not like a 15-year plan, necessarily. That’s the first one, just a job. The second is career. In the career-focused one, people do apply their skill sets and their interests. They typically have a sense of like, here’s where I want to be in 10 to 15 years. And there’s a sense of explicit reward. So you know you’re doing a good job when you get a raise, a change in office, or you can take your family on vacation. You like what you do. You might even really, truly enjoy it, but it’s an external motivation. The third one is a calling, and that sense of calling is when you feel an internal compelling to do something that is meaningful and impacts others. In fact, there are four key parts to a sense of calling in the workplace, and the first one is that you experience it as meaningful. So, it’s more than just turning the lights off and on. You feel like I have purpose behind this. I’m bringing light into the world by doing this. That’s meaningful. The second is, you can identify a sense of a caller, and we as Christians know that that’s God. In the Bible, we know he says, My sheep hear my voice, we hear His voice, and we respond to that calling. The third thing is that we combine our passion and our skill set, and the combination is key. It’s not enough to like something. You have to know how to do it well, and it’s not enough to know how to do it well, which can feel good for a little while. Long-term motivation requires that we really enjoy it. The fourth part, and this is what makes it different than a hobby, is that not only is it meaningful, we can identify a sense of a caller, there’s a combination of skill set and passion, but it’s something we call in social sciences pro-social behavior, or you’re making a positive impact on others. So, in a calling, you might not see the external reward right away, like you would in a career, but you know you’ve made a difference that day. Now, some people can experience a job or a career and then a calling kind of on the side, like a secondary job or a side hustle. That makes it more complicated, but it’s completely possible.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s fascinating, and I love the way that you walk us through that because as we look at our lives as ministry leaders, that calling is so very important because that meaningful piece is what helps get us through some of those challenging days. If we’re just looking at it as a job, that’s not a helpful thing. Now, when we look at this idea of calling, we know that research shows that they’re definitely positive, some really positive things that come along with that, right? There’s more motivation, there’s higher level of engagement, and those types of things. But there’s also what you write about in your book, this dark side of calling that is often overlooked or ignored. So, I would love to hear, Arianna, kind of a two-parter here on this question. One, how do the rewards or the positives that go along with calling sometimes lead us to overlooking the dark side? Then let’s dive into what is the dark side of calling all about, right?

Arianna Molloy
Yeah, great question. Yeah, and I love that you brought this up. In fact, more than any other category, more than a job, more than a career, if you feel called to your work, you’re the person they want in the room. You’re the one who has the motivation, the satisfaction, and you just bring a kind of emotional contagion in a good way that makes everyone else excited to be there. You’re the person they can call after hours, and you’ll be like, Sure, I can do this because you see the need and studies show all over the place that this is wonderful and beautiful, but it’s precisely this reason that does take us to the dark side. I think we have to go back a little bit, and this, again, is obvious for sure for our listeners today, but calling involves a relationship. Sometimes we get a little distracted and veer off to the right or the left with calling, focusing more on the calling than the caller, but ultimately, it’s relationship with the caller, with ourselves as we talk and get to know ourselves, and also our community. Now, the reason I bring up these sort of three C’s of calling, the caller, the called, and the community, is that that thing that makes us so excited to do it is why it’s really hard to say no. It’s hard to say no because when we say no, we’re not just saying no to ourselves; we’re saying no to what we feel is something God asked us to do and something where we can see the direct impact on others. We see the need. We want to fill the need. As I’ve worked with pastoral staff, teachers, educators, and health professionals, sometimes it’s like you feel like, hey, if I don’t help them, people die, whether it’s physically or spiritually. So that need is so compelling that we tend to overlook important and healthy boundaries.

Jason Daye
Yeah. It’s interesting because that sense of urgency that we have in our calling as ministers, as you said, has eternal consequences. So we can feel that weight on our shoulders, and we feel called into it because we care about people, right? We know that Jesus is the opportunity for them to experience wholeness in life. So that compels us. But, as you said, we can get so caught up in that calling and put more on our shoulders than God’s actually putting on our shoulders that can lead us to this dark side and that’s where we get into this burnout, right? We’re seeing burnout in lots of professions, but in ministry, burnout is huge. So help us unpack a little bit more about this kind of, what you call a toxic relationship between burnout and our calling.

Arianna Molloy
Yeah. So again, I’m a communication person and my general sense of things is, if we pay attention to the communication that we have, again, with ourselves and others, it’s kind of like taking your pulse. You can get a sense of the health of your system by looking at the communication. So really, one place that we want to start is looking at how we’re approaching stress. So there’s good stress and there’s unhealthy stress. The good stress is for a period of time. Let’s say there’s a new church plant. We’ve hired someone new on staff. We have a big campaign, some sort of fundraising component, or the holidays. That’s kind of like a stress that has a deadline. So you know you can push through. You know you should push through. You know you might need to do more than normal, but ultimately it will end at one point. That’s good stress. We need that. We need that surge of adrenaline. The bad stress, or what psychologists and vocational organizational communication folks say is chronic stress, or sustained stress, is when stress becomes a normal way of living. Because when we’re in that stress place, we go into survival mode, so we get these like horse blinders on, and we are missing all these important cues from everyone else. Our body physically goes into survival mode, so it kicks certain things into gear that are not meant to be there long term, and ultimately that chronic stress is the genesis of burnout. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jason Daye
No, you go ahead, please.

Arianna Molloy
I’m on a role. I’m excited about it. So here’s the thing, when we feel called to something, we tend to bypass that good stress, and we assume that this chronic stress is just the way we’re supposed to live, and that will take us to that burnout. Now, the reason that burnout from a calling is more than regular burnout, the reason that it moves to toxic burnout, is that it involves a sense of deep shame. That’s a literal term, deep shame, that’s emotional and spiritual. So, let’s back up a little bit. So regular burnout, it’s terrible. Nobody wants it. It’s that feeling of psychological paralysis. You just don’t want to do it anymore. You can’t think anymore. You might scroll your phone, then scroll your calendar, then scroll your to-do list, and then look at pictures and do anything you can to sort of engage in the world, and it can lead to sick days, depression, and anxiety. So that’s very real. But burnout from a calling is not simply I don’t like what I’m doing anymore. It’s I don’t know who I am anymore. When that happens, there is that deep core sense of identity crisis because all of a sudden, this great gift that God has given us, that we feel like we are worshiping Him when we do it, that we’re part of the kingdom we don’t want to do, or we’re not able to do anymore, and that feels deeply shameful. Now, there are a lot of things in life that can cause burnout that we don’t have control over. But there are two, and they are workaholism and job idolization, and those two things that are part of the dark side of calling can really take us to that toxic burnout.

Jason Daye
Yeah, no, that’s really good. I’m glad I didn’t interrupt you. I almost did, but I didn’t. So, Arianna, one of the things that you talk about in regard to this burnout is you say that burnout isn’t fixable, right? But you can manage it. So let’s lean into this a little bit because there’s been a lot of conversation around burnout right over the last while, since the pandemic, primarily, right? A lot of conversation. So help us understand what you mean by it’s not necessarily fixable, but it’s manageable.

Arianna Molloy
Great. So, one of my top five strengths is positivity. I’m not trying to be negative here in terms of it’s not fixable, but there’s a difference between fixable problems and manageable ones. A fixable problem is, hey, the light bulb is out. I’m going to stop what I’m doing, put all my focus to going to the hardware store, getting a new light bulb, changing it, and then everything’s fine. That’s a fixable problem. But a manageable problem is something that is going to continue in some way, it can get better, but it requires a long-term perspective. So here’s an example. When I was little, I grew up in a home that was a safe place for me, which I realize is a privilege. Both of my parents loved each other and loved me in a way that I knew who God was more because of their love and my parents loved each other. But my dad grew up in the south on a farm. To be on time is five minutes early for him. My mom grew up in Southern California singing musicals and taking a different way to the grocery store every time, just for a change in scenery. So when I was younger, I would remember on Sunday mornings, there would be some tension that would surface. One thing was, as we’re getting ready for church, my dad had hand on keys, shoes on his feet, waiting at the front door five minutes before we’re supposed to leave. my mother, who is the kindest, most generous person in the world, but was not born with a clock inside of her probably at this point, still had like, her robe on and some curlers, and she was heating up her coffee for like the third time, and he was frustrated, understandably so. This went on for a while, and finally, we sat down at the table, and whenever my parents had conflict with each other in front of me, they’d always have resolution in front of me as well, so that I could see the full scope of that conflict cycle. So I would sit with them and we sat at the table, I remember very clearly, my dad had a yellow pad of paper, and he looked at my mom and he said, no matter what I’m committed to you. Then he looked at me and he said, no matter what I’m committed to you. Then my mom said the same thing and I said the same thing. Then he’s like, let’s write down everything we’re mad about and we’ll just tackle it one step at a time. Ultimately, here’s what they figured out, my dad will always view being on time as a high, high value. My mom, try as she might, may or may not always be able to do that. So they realized something that they could do. If she wasn’t ready at a certain time, they would go to church in two separate cars. This was not ideal, but this is what a manageable problem is as it relates to burnout. Unfortunately, it is something that more than any other people group who approach their jobs as just a job or a career, people who feel called by a high-scale are more prone to burnout because of that felt need that it’s not just about yourself, it’s also about other people. So burnout is not a question really of “if” it’s more about “when”. The way to manage that is to stop thinking about it like a category. It’s not a category. It’s a spectrum. You can imagine, okay, healthy callings on this side, toxic burnouts on the other side. Where am I today and how can I pay attention to what needs to change if I’m getting too close?

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s incredibly helpful. So as we look at this idea of managing the spectrum where we find ourselves, a couple of things come to mind immediately, Arianna. One is, we have to have enough self-awareness to pause and say, Where am I on this spectrum, right? So what do you recommend for that in particular? Because that’s where it’s all gotta start. Otherwise, you’ll ignore it, and you’ll end up in this toxic zone, and bad things happen.

Arianna Molloy
Yeah, and let me just say, I don’t think anyone wants to be in that toxic zone, right? We get there, especially in pastoral ministry, there are so many crises happening all the time. We’re juggling it all the time, and there’s almost a runner’s high, not in an addictive way, but just kind of like, okay, I can do this. I’m making it. Hey, I can do this. This is pretty good. I’m okay. And maybe you’ll feel that tap in the back of your heart of like, you gotta slow down. You can’t do this forever. But then another crisis happens and so you keep meeting the needs of other people. So part of it is what you said, you cannot make a change without reflection. You cannot have self-awareness without reflection. And reflection, a necessary ingredient of that, is taking a pause. It’s having margin room. I would say, I’m a big proponent of Sabbath. Sabbath is not meant to be the kitchen sink where we just dump all of our needs for rest into that one day. Sabbath is a relational act also where we connect and reorient with our author of time, with our Savior and our shepherd. But we really ought to be living a Sabbath mindset seven days of the week and looking for margin moments, rather than getting on our phone or responding right away to the next thing. To just take a moment, breathe, and give yourself those spaces to reflect.

Jason Daye
Yeah. So, we start there, as you said. We begin to pause, breathe, and reflect. We make that part of a rhythm, a healthy rhythm in our lives, not just a moment where you just dump everything into it. But, as you said, and then as we come to those points, what are some practices? Let’s say we do that assessment. We say, Whoa. I really feel like in this season, that I have moved along the spectrum closer to toxic burnout. What are some practices that we can begin to incorporate in our lives as ministry leaders to help bring us back down to that healthy calling zone?

Arianna Molloy
Yeah, there are a lot of things we can do, but we can go back to that place of stress when we’re thinking of that chronic stress. Three things happen to our communication that we can begin to kind of evaluate. So that’s the first thing we can talk about, and the second thing we can talk about is really the linchpin of a healthy calling, which is pursuing humility. So you tell me where you want to go, Jason, so we can do it.

Jason Daye
Let’s go first.

Arianna Molloy
Okay, so in chronic stress, three things happen to our communication. The first is that we withdraw, which is actually a healthy thing to do. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s unhealthy when we don’t communicate it. So if we are withdrawing from our spouses, our kids, our coworkers, and withdrawal can look like simply just, again, being on our phone a lot, over-booking ourselves, not taking time to linger in our emotions, which, by the way, are tunnels we have to go through. We can’t avoid them. Can’t go around it. Can’t go under it. Gotta go through it, right? So withdrawal is something that we can pause and say, Hmm, have I been withdrawing from some people over this last week, just because I can’t handle it? Who is that? Who am I doing that with? Have I explained to them that I actually think I need a little break, so I just need to take a minute? It’s not about you. I’ll be back. So, checking out that withdrawal pattern. The second thing is reduced awareness. So when we’re in that chronic stress, our brain chemistry literally alters to give us that flush of adrenaline. What can happen is that we miss out on the social cues of others. So 70%, approximately, of our communication is nonverbal. So if you’re in a staff meeting and you’re stressed, you are potentially missing 70% of the nonverbal cues of others. If you’re trying to talk about a new sermon theme, a new initiative, or something happening in children’s ministry, and you’re making comments and you’re missing all these nonverbal cues, that can lead to greater stress and resentment among your staff. So you want to ask yourself, huh, have been missing some things? Have people been reacting to me in a way that maybe they’re feeling like I’m not hearing them? That would be a place to question. Then the third thing is just physical tension, and that’s where anxiety, a flushness of your face, that adrenaline pumping, sweaty palms, the inability to be still physically, and that can really impact us. So, again, thinking through if I have been embodying a sense of anger, frustration, and impatience with certain people in a way that that it’s being housed in my physical body? Taking time to evaluate that, and I would say, just looking at the last week as a diagnostic. Where has my communication been in the last week? Would I deem that healthy communication? Who am I hurting? Who’s frustrated with me? Do I have any ownership in that? Or maybe I don’t. So that would be the first step.

Jason Daye
Excellent. Okay, so let’s move to that linchpin of humility.

Arianna Molloy
So I love how the Holy Spirit works because when I was in middle school, I was elected to be the valedictorian of our middle school graduation. You had to choose a life verse and mine was Ephesians 4:2, which is, be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love, make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Well, humility has been following me around. Not because I’m humble, but because I need to look at it. So in the third year of my work as a professor at Biola, I myself had an experience of burnout, which is ironic because I’d already been studying it for about seven years. When I was looking at and when I was aware that I was feeling burnt out, I kind of did a little checklist. I’m like, oh, oh. Data says this, Yep, that’s me. Data says this, about it, that’s me. Oh, shoot, I fill all the boxes. At the time, there was a fellowship where you could apply to cut your teaching load in half and then work on some research with a bunch of other scholars from all over the country. I didn’t even pay attention to what the fellowship was about, honestly. As it turns out, it was about humility. I know humility is a very virtuous term, but it also is kind of unsexy. It feels very intangible, I think, for a lot of people. Over the course of that semester, I was reading all of this literature on humility, and then I was reviewing the data I had pulled from all the research I’d done of people who experienced a healthy calling, and I was seeing that the enactment of humility and how they lived out their calling literally was a blueprint. It literally overlaid and part of it is that humility. I mean, we know in Micah 6:8 that we are invited to walk with God. How? With humility. It actually is a requirement if we want to walk with God. So there are sort of three tenants to humility, and this goes back to your question of, what do we do about it? Humility is actually a diagnostic. So there are three parts to humility. The first one is the one that we often especially misunderstand, and frankly, a lot of times, women in particular tend to. They’re socialized to misunderstand this. It’s that humility is not modesty. It’s totally not the same. They can overlap, but they’re not the same. What I mean by that is humility means that you are a competent communicator. You know your strengths, you know your weaknesses, and you’re not distracted by either one. I think sometimes we’re socialized to be uncomfortable with compliments, or we don’t want to come across as egotistical, and so we just don’t accept the good things, or we’re not self-aware of what we’re good at. But in the workplace, you better know what you’re good at, or you’re not helpful to other people. God knew what his role was when he came down here on earth as Jesus, and even the limitations of living in body form, in human being form. So knowing your strengths and your weaknesses, that’s the first thing, and not being distracted by either one. The second is that you are a learner, a lifelong learner. Humility means knowing that you don’t know everything, and that’s not a bad thing. There’s a reason that Jesus was called rabbi and teacher. I think sometimes when we’re in the role, especially in leadership roles in the church, there’s an expectation that we’re supposed to know everything, but we don’t know everything. Part of living that out is being willing to delegate and not being defensive when people have a different perspective or an idea. So a lifestyle of learning releases the tension of having to know everything at all times. The third thing is, in humility, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and not being distracted by either one is the first. A lifestyle of learning is the second and the third thing is the ability to take a break. To take a true break. We know that Jesus withdrew. We know that he withdrew, by the way, sometimes by himself, but often with an inner circle of support. So this is where that Sabbath mindset as a relational act, there is a time for solitude, that’s absolutely important, but a lot of times, Sabbath is best experienced in community and in support. So another diagnostic is the combination of, am I truly resting right now and who’s part of my accountability circle who is supporting me in that pursuit? Because we’re not meant to do this alone.

Jason Daye
Yeah, it’s incredibly helpful, Arianna, and it’s interesting that the third point on humility that you just mentioned, this idea of resting, often times in ministry, it seems we’re challenged by that and we fool ourselves into thinking that this is our calling. This is something I’m passionate about. There is some urgency to it, therefore I need to be engaged in it. We almost take on the responsibilities that are literally the Holy Spirit’s responsibility, not my responsibility. We get to thinking we would never say this, we’d never admit this, probably, but like, I’ve gotta be involved. I’ve gotta be engaged. I gotta be there. I can’t take a break because the ministry needs me. Talk to us a little bit about how humility plays into that. I just want to dive a little bit deeper into that because this is something that I think many, many ministry leaders and pastors that we work with struggle with, and again, wouldn’t admit that, but yet, you’re feeling that. You’re sensing that within. So, what would you speak to about that?

Arianna Molloy
I love that you asked this question. I also just want to acknowledge that it’s not an easy answer, and it’s certainly not easy to live out. There are real consequences when we don’t take that phone call or when we choose to take a break. Sometimes it does mean that someone else gets their needs unmet, and it’s hard. It’s really hard. So this is not easy. I just want to acknowledge that. But this goes back to that first tenant of knowing your strengths and your weaknesses. We are not machines. We were not built to keep going, and if we truly are honoring our calling, resting should not be a hard decision. In fact, I remember interviewing a police Chaplain. Slightly different, but she specifically worked with police when they were going through crises. They would call her and she’d be there. When I asked her about this, she said, actually, if I’m really pursuing my calling, I would never get to that place of burnout because there’s a sacred honoring of the calling. We say to ourselves, I don’t want to wear this out. I don’t want to become so exhausted and so cynical that I am no longer useful in this calling. And this goes back to like, what is it really about? It’s actually not about the calling. It’s about the caller. So I think the reorientation is, in humility, saying I am not meant to keep going. God did not make us that way. He designed us to need to have rhythms of eating, sleeping, and purposeful connection. That’s literally part of how we thrive as human beings.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely, that’s good. That’s so good. So Arianna, as we’re looking at some of these practices, some practical things perhaps, that can help us avoid slipping into that toxic burnout, are there other specific practices that you would encourage those who are living out their calling to engage in to maybe help us either attach ourselves to humility in a healthier way, or just kind of those rhythms? What would you recommend?

Arianna Molloy
Yeah, great question. Again, I think sometimes it’s specific to the person. So again, if I’m sitting talking to someone, I find out their personality and their tendency. So, for example, I love the book Sacred Pathways, where you learn about your different ways of connecting with God. When my husband and I read that, it was like light bulbs went off because we were sitting in this place in Taiwan, visiting his family, having high tea, and both exhausted. It was like the third year into our marriage, prior to having a kid, and we were talking about how we were doing with our Sabbath days because I’m a big believer in Sabbath. I didn’t actually learn how to do that until I was in my PhD program and we realized something really significant. What is restful to me is not restful to my husband. So this comes back to your question. For me, I feel rested when I’m able to be contemplative, when I’m able to be in nature, when I am not ruled by the clock, when I can literally, physically slow down. For him, he feels rested when he can play, when he is active, but he’s playing, he’s an Enneagram three, so he’s like achiever all the time, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. So what I would say is figure out what genuinely restores you and put that into a rhythm of practice. A couple of things that I do is I actually don’t get on my phone until I’ve had time with God in the morning, which might seem obvious, but I use my phone for my alarm, so I turn my phone off, and then I put it away. So it’s just a commitment I’ve had for a while now, maybe five or six years, where I just don’t get on my phone until I’ve spent genuine time with God. Now we have a five-year-old, so doing that, we both work full time. It’s a lot. It’s hard to find. We also put our phones in a box, an unplugged box, for about three hours each day, from 5:30 to 8:30 when we’re all home together. If we need to check something in our email or our phone. That’s fine. We walk over to the box and do that. The other thing that I have found, and again, this is just me. So for my husband, he has to have another sort of play point in his calendar where he knows he’s going to be able to just let loose and have fun. Go to Disneyland, see a fun movie, or go to some cool event. For me, the day before I Sabbath, I actually go for a walk. We live close enough to the water where I go for a walk along the beach for 30 minutes. I don’t listen to anything. I don’t have my phone with me. I mean, I have it in my pocket in case. I just reflect with the Lord about my week, and I think about, what were some wins? What were some fails? What do I want to do about it? I offer it up to him prior to the day of rest, prior to that final day of pushing, so that my heart is reoriented. Oh, you know what I thought of? One more thing. Again, this might not totally translate, but I think having email boundaries is really important. What I mean by this is, there are going to be people that you need to respond to at other times of the day. But for me as a professor, for example, I don’t respond to my student emails outside of 8:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the evening, Monday through Friday. We talk about it as a class. I encourage them to have their own boundaries. Now, if my boss needed to email me, I would probably look at that and respond. But I think setting those boundaries is really, really important. And I know that in pastoral ministry, it’s easy to probably feel or to receive kind of boundary shaming. Well, you’re supposed to be available all the time. Ministry never stops. That’s true, but we as human beings need to stop. So this goes back to recognizing in Genesis, what the first thing God called holy was in all of Scripture, that is rest, and we are to emulate that. It’s actually, literally part of a good, healthy work life.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that is so good. I love that and I’m glad you brought up boundary shaming because as I was reading through the book, that is something that I highlighted. I took notes about it. Boundary shaming versus boundary resilience, because that is one of the things that jumped out as a minister, and for those in ministry leadership. That is one of those things that I think we really wrestle with. There is that boundary shaming. So you touched on it, but I would love, as we’re kind of wrapping up this conversation, for you to help us understand a little more about boundary shaming and how it might be happening. We may not be recognizing it, right? Then this idea of boundary resiliency.

Arianna Molloy
Yeah, good. So this is a phenomenon I began noticing as I was studying healthy work life boundaries. Boundary shaming is something that happens when we are doing our job, so that’s the prerequisite. So let’s be clear, we’re doing what we have committed to do. That is happening. But when we’re asked to do more, the response is such that we feel like a social penalty, that someone else is comparing their level of work capacity to our level of work capacity, and expecting them to be the same. Capacity, by the way, is a great compliment to give someone versus being a workaholic. Like, let’s not talk about workaholic as a compliment anymore, ever. It’s an addiction. But we were all wired with different levels of capacity. So someone else in the ministry might only need six hours of sleep. By the way, I need eight and a half or I’m not a person. Someone else might not need to eat every two hours. Other people do. Someone else might not need an hour to reflect and be by themselves and recharge. Other people do. Someone else might be energized by planning an event, whereas someone else is stressed by that. Boundary shaming is when someone expects you to rise to the level of their capacity, going above and beyond the work expectations. If you say no, there’s a relational dynamic that happens where you are no longer being called on, considered part of the team, or considered committed, and there’s a judgment, a job judgment, that happens, and it’s really dangerous to respond to that. If we start paying attention to the boundary shaming and try to prove that we’re all in, you will always, always fail. You’ll just always fail. Boundary resilience, though, is figuring out and going back to what, Cloud and Townsend are like the best about talking about boundaries, but really it goes back to who am I? What are my core values and are the actions that I’m committing to honoring those or not? If they’re not, then we need to figure out a proper response to someone. The old adage is kind of like if someone’s asking you to do more, you can say, hey, thank you so much for the honor of asking me to do that. Here are the things I’m committed to. I’d love your advice. Which one of these should I take off so I can take on this extra thing? Just in a very non-defensive way, say, you know, I would love to say yes to this. I’d love your advice. This is what I’m committed to, and that’s all that I can do right now. Is there something you see that I could maybe shift or juggle or hand off to someone else to take this on? Or the kind of thing of like, Thank you for thinking of me. I see this need. I’d love to help you find someone to fill it. Right now, that’s not me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. I think in ministry that shows up so often. Over and over and over again. Arianna, as we’re closing here, I’d love to give you the opportunity, kind of a last word to just share some words of encouragement to pastors and ministry leaders. When we’re thinking about this whole idea of calling and the beauty of calling, this idea of healthy calling, and the reality of the other side of that spectrum, as you said, that toxic burnout and what we’re seeing in the church and many ministry leaders wrestling with this. What words of encouragement do you have for them?

Arianna Molloy
I want to, first of all, thank them for being part of the spiritual front lines of society. I think the world has kind of lost its mind at this point, so I think it’s especially needed. But what I would say is this, don’t wait until burnout overtakes you. It does not go away on its own. It will not go away on its own. You have got to pursue practices that will help you get out of it. But if you’ve been in it, if you’ve been feeling burnt out, I’ve talked to some people who felt burnt out for seven years, there is a way out. You don’t have to feel like this forever. It is not meant to be how it is. The thing that’s so amazing is that if you go back to who the caller is, he’s the creator. He’s the God of third options. Where we see a wall, he brings worship in, and he crumbles that wall. Where we see scarcity, he blesses it and brings plenty. We have to remember about the God that we serve and who he is, and there is no shame in being tired. Being tired is not a bad thing. It’s just a cue that we need to honor the body, which is something God gave us to do.

Jason Daye
Oh, absolutely love that. Thank you so much, Arianna. Thank you for spending time with us. For those of you watching or listening along, Healthy Calling is Arianna’s newest book, and we’ll have links to that in the toolkit that we have for this episode. you’ll find links to Arianna, to her book, and you’ll also find in there a ton of other resources, including that Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, so you can dig more deeply into this topic that we just discussed. You can find that PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out. Arianna, it has been an absolute joy. Thank you for making time in your schedule to hang out with us on FrontStage BackStage. I appreciate it.

Arianna Molloy
My pleasure.

Jason Daye
God bless you.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.