3. You Begin to Suffer From the Fear of Missing Out
Ending the affair is even more difficult if your church or ministry is growing, as ours was.
Even if you realize that working more hours doesn’t make you more faithful, it’s still easy to worry that you’re going to miss out on fully realizing your mission if you change your ways.
After all, if more hours got you to where you are today, it’s just natural to believe that more hours will take you even further in the future.
There’s a logical absurdity in that (you only get 24 hours in a day), but a profound fear of missing out on future opportunities can drive you to keep going.
Looking back on it, I think I had a profound fear of missing out in ministry.
What ended that? For me, it was burnout, and then an intense desire to carve out a new pattern in my recovery that would lead to a much healthier way to live and lead, which I outline in detail in The High Impact Leader.
The irony, of course, is that healthy, sustainable patterns don’t make you miss out on anything. In fact, you realize far more opportunities than you ever miss.
Healthy people realize far more opportunities than they miss. Unhealthy people miss far more opportunities than they seize.
But when you’re stuck in the fog of the affair, you just can’t see that.
4. Your Affair Gets Rewarded and Promoted
Making this ever-more-complicated is that our culture rewards and promotes people who work hard.
Some of that, of course, is good and natural. There is nothing wrong with hard work. I believe God created us to work hard at whatever we do. I still work very hard at what I do. But I’ve realized you can work hard AND work healthy.
Workaholism is the most rewarded addiction in our culture.
Often, leaders who work too many hours don’t get punished, they get promoted.
Well, what about a board’s role in all this you ask? Shouldn’t they be regulating how many hours you work?
Sure…I had a board who was always checking in to see if I was OK. They cared very deeply.
I always told them I was doing great, because, at the time, I felt like I was.
And like most addictions, a lot of the extra work was done in the off hours when no one was looking.
So is it the board’s fault if you keep getting promoted for your obsession? Well, no, especially if you’re not telling them the whole story.
Ultimately, no board or group is responsible for your health. You are.
