What happens when the person managing everyone else's anxiety is the most anxious one in the room?
Steve Cuss joins John for a conversation that starts in a childhood home in Western Australia and ends up inside the emotional wiring of every leader, marriage, and church staff meeting. Steve talks candidly about growing up in a household run by unpredictable anger, the confidence he built on a foundation of fear, and the hospital chaplaincy that stripped all of it away.
What emerges is a working theology of anxiety: how false needs hijack good intentions, how reactivity spreads through a room sometimes before it's even known, and why the most important thing any leader can offer their people is a well self.
What this conversation explores
• How Steve's childhood shaped a lifelong pattern of enmeshment, and how confidence can be built entirely on top of fear • What hospital chaplaincy taught Steve about false needs, and why the ones that feel most real in the moment are the most dangerous • The difference between reactivity and response, and how to take your own pulse before walking into a hard room • Edwin Friedman's idea of a differentiated self, and what it looks like to be close to someone without absorbing their anxiety • Why every false need has its own gospel, and why none of them can ever deliver freedom, peace, or love • How churches and leaders can offer differentiation instead of certainty in a polarized culture • Why Steve calls a well self the greatest gift any Christian leader can offer
Resources mentioned
• Managing Leadership Anxiety by Steve Cuss • The Expectation Gap by Steve Cuss • A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman • Thomas Wingfold, Curate by George MacDonald • Formation Podcast episode with Gary Haugen, referenced by Steve as a formative conversation
About Steve Cuss
Steve Cuss is a pastor and the founder of Capable Life, where he trains leaders to manage stress and improve relationships. He is also the author of Managing Leadership Anxiety and The Expectation Gap.
https://stevecusswords.com
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About Formation
Formation explores the science and soul of spiritual formation, bringing together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week.
https://formationpodcast.com
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