Clergy Wellbeing Down Under

"Don't Take Us Out of The Truck!" With Jo Muirhead

• Valerie Ling • Season 1 • Episode 8

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**EPISODE TRIGGER WARNING**
This episode contains some discussion about suicide, violence, and other potentially traumatic material. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you or someone you know is struggling, please seek professional help or, in Australia contact Lifeline 13 11 14.

Jo Muirhead is a Rehabilitation Counsellor and is the founder of Purple Co.   Purple Co facilitates workplace recovery by emphasizing the holistic integration of health, recovery, purpose and choice.

In this episode, Jo relates how there are vocational hazards in the helping and serving professions that are not always evident. She relays her experience in assessing and re-designing work roles in high stress, high pressure roles, to manage burnout and psychosocial risk.  Jo shares her work riding in ambulances observing and detailing what pressures are unseen, and how revealing one statement by an ambo "Don't take us out of the truck!" relates to wellbeing in ministry.

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Podcast Disclaimer:

Please be aware that the opinions and viewpoints shared on this podcast are personal to me and my guests, and do not represent the stance of any institution. This podcast aims to present findings for open discussion and dialogue, inviting listeners to engage critically and draw their own conclusions. While the content serves informational purposes, it is not a substitute for professional advice. Thank you for joining me on this journey of exploration and conversation!

Valerie Ling:

Hey, it's Valerie Ling. I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm your host for the clergy well-being Down Under podcast. I'm looking forward to interviewing an expert today to take you through my findings from my research where I asked 200 pastors down under how they were doing. Don't forget to subscribe, like and share. Buckle up, and here we go.

Valerie Ling:

Welcome back to another episode of the clergy well-being Down Under podcast. I have a very dear friend with me, jo Nealhead, and I could introduce her in so many different ways, but the first thing I'm going to say is that Jo is a dear friend and we have some common interest in the burnout space. Jo also has experience in the church space and has interesting things that we talk about, but we also genuinely like to tinker around with some of the mutual puzzles that we see we can help people to work in a way that's sustainable.

Jo Muirhead:

Yeah, absolutely, that's a great introduction, I'm glad.

Valerie Ling:

So, jo, like I said, there are so many different reasons why I want to talk to you, but I'm going to talk to you as your professional, with your professional hat on, and your ministry and church informed itself. So would you care to just introduce yourself and your business and what you do?

Jo Muirhead:

Sure. So thank you, valerie. The first thing I'm going to say is I'm a career loving mum and it's taken me the full 23 years that my son has been alive to own that. So I know that a lot of women in the church and ministry space really struggle with the juggle and I really own. I'm a career loving mum and he's happy with that. I'm happy with that and I feel like it's a good given thing. So there we go.

Jo Muirhead:

I'm a rehabilitation counsellor by qualification, so I went to university. I have a undergraduate degree in health sciences, so I went to the same schools as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, some psychologists and my area of special interest because we don't say expert anymore, do we, valerie? My area of special interest is helping people navigate their who they are, how they work and the intersection of making work a part of their whole life. So I have a consulting practice of rehabilitation counsellors and OTs and mental health social workers where we help people reclaim their life through their work. So I used to say we help people return to work after injury, illness and trauma. But what we're noticing now, since the pandemic and since the epidemic of burnout, is that people don't just need to return to work. We actually need to have a conversation about making our work good for us and healthy for us.

Jo Muirhead:

So I've got nearly 30 years experience in doing this and I have been in church for a really long time. I've been in and out of church for a really long time. I've had some periods where I was in, some periods where I'm out. I've had some experience across lots of different faith denominations. We've had quite a different exposure to different people in leadership and different faiths come through our business. So we've been able to help them navigate this experience of my work's no longer healthy for me, my work's no longer working for me, and the crisis that that can bring up, especially for people in leadership positions in faith. Now, it was a really good luck typing that out people.

Valerie Ling:

Amazing. I love that. And of course, you also have a coaching business, so you're no stranger to working with leaders and owners of businesses just also trying to make their best work for themselves.

Jo Muirhead:

Absolutely and I feel that's a part of my gifting to the world is how do we create ways of working, how do we create, create businesses that support our lifestyles, not consumers. And I think and I think that's such an important topic or important framework to have, especially for people who are in ministry, because I have watched so many people myself was included become totally consumed by their church life, by their faith life, by their ministry life. And you might think, well, that's not a bad thing, that's what Jesus did, that's what the apostles did, that's what we're called to do. Yeah, but Jesus also had a lot of rest. He also took himself away. He also made them go eat and leave me alone. So there are some lessons that I spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I'm very, very conflicted about it for a long time, val.

Valerie Ling:

And Joe, I've been thinking about you a lot and the image that keeps coming back to me. And I'll tell you why I've been thinking about you because I'm a psychologist and my observation is that in the church spaces we've relied a lot on psychology as a profession to help people who are in ministry, who are burning out through the individual resilience piece. But I'm really starting to think that there's a lot that we need to look in terms of the ministry design and the role design and the organizational design piece. And the image that keeps coming back to me is you riding with the Ambo's?

Jo Muirhead:

Yes, oh yeah, the two weeks that I did riding with the Ambo's.

Valerie Ling:

Yes, yeah, you were called in, I suspect, to go and investigate and see what their role, what the work design was and how that was impacting them. I would love to know why were the Ambo's Keene? If you're able to tell us, why don't they want to get you riding with their people?

Jo Muirhead:

Yeah, so that was an amazing project and it is really helped informed a lot of my work, particularly for frontline professionals, which pastors, leaders, ministry people need to understand they are in the frontline. Okay, so at that time the ambulance service of New South Wales so this was quite some years ago was doing a big piece of work, trying to understand the physical and psychological risks inherent to their work and what they were noticing was that ambulance officers were not reporting stress symptoms or pathological symptoms.

Jo Muirhead:

I'm trying not to use psychology speak, so they weren't reporting distress or PTSD around things like multi vehicle accidents or being threatened with a knife or having to turn up to a domestic violence dispute where a kid had been hurt. Yeah, those images are horrible, but it was turning up in a way that they were saying I hate it when I'm stuck at Westmead Hospital in Sydney and my entire 10 hour shift is waiting for a bed to be available in emergency because they weren't out on the road doing the job they were trying to do. In their mind they were going. People are dying because I'm stuck here in this emergency back because you may not know if you're in an ambulance and you're taken to a hospital, there's no bed for you. The ambulance officer can't leave you, okay. So that was one thing that.

Jo Muirhead:

The second thing that we learned along the way was that the ambulance officers at that point in time were like can you stop taking me off the road? Basically, anything that was taking them off the road meetings, unnecessary meetings, change management, emails that make no sense, submitting for a certification that they'd already got, the certification of the certification of anything that was taking them off their duties and off their job. That is actually what we discovered was the primary problem. But what they were then looking for as a part of the work I was doing was how to help us understand what the psychological and the psychosocial which like the relational demands of this job are, so that we can be better informed to help people come back to work in a way that's safe. So there were two things that were going on in that project. Now it was like a baptism of fire for me, because I spent two weeks doing it, so I was nightshifting King's Cross in an ambulance total new learning for me. I spent a 10 hour shift at the emergency room of Westmead.

Valerie Ling:

Hospital.

Jo Muirhead:

I turned up and I got to watch an emergency paramedic on a motorcycle resuscitate somebody back to life. So in that two week period I got to experience their adrenaline, their serotonin, their dopamine and I had to watch them turn up to work day after day. It was exhilarating, it was draining, but wow, was it informative. And then from that lens I've been able to take some of that knowledge and apply it to police officers, rural fire service officers who we often don't think of because of volunteers and, of course, the ministry space, because after what I've seen happen in some of church leadership, it almost feels like the work health and safety laws that we have in this country to protect our employees don't apply. And I say that quite openly and people might hate on you for that, but it really does feel like you can't get away in corporate Australia or small business Australia with some of the things that go on, unhealthy things, that go on in church life.

Valerie Ling:

So let's reflect together a little bit in terms of your experience with the first responders. You know like it's so big. What did you, what did you recognize as being okay? Here is some some work, health, safety or work design issues that just weren't apparent, but then it's so common sense. You just need to think about this. People, I mean, were there, were there things like that? Or when the police officer.

Jo Muirhead:

I remember this guy can still see his face. He turned around to because I said to him what do you think the most psychologically demanding part of this job is? He was driving an ambulance through Sydney traffic. He turned around to look at me. So I'm freaking out right now and he goes taking me out of the truck, like taking me out of the truck and I went oh, of course.

Jo Muirhead:

So these are people who you turn up to be a police officer and ambulance officer or a fire, the fire what do we call those guys? The fiery, or in the rural fire service, or in the minors. Not everyone chooses to do that. The people who choose to do that are doing that on a set of values and a part of who they are. They want to serve, they want to wear a uniform, they want to feel good about what they're doing. That you know. They want to be energized by by their work.

Jo Muirhead:

So if you give people a skill set because you have to do, like to get into the ambulance, the police, the fire, is not easy to get through. The training is not easy to get through. Your first lot of supervised sessions is not easy, and then you're going to start telling people. Well, I'm going to be a force shifts on this week. I'm actually going to take you out of the truck and stop you from saving lives because I need you to go over here and complete this work.

Jo Muirhead:

Health and safety program or and so for me, the design of that. I get it from a compliance point of view, but the design of it totally ignored the values that make these people awesome at the work that they were employed to do. So we see that with police officers, when they're taken away from you know you take them out of their communities. The police officer design. I've done a lot of work with police officers. A lot of police officers will work in the communities in which they live. So they're constantly apprehending people, bar fights, domestic violence but when they're in uniform, they feel protected by the uniform and by the weapons they have at their disposal. Now I'm not suggesting they're all firearms because they're not right.

Jo Muirhead:

So we have this magic way of helping them return to work by taking all that off them. But they still live in these communities. So I remember a gentleman, a police officer, turning up. He was distressed and he'd come out of some horrible back back before that. We'd sorted out how to deal more effectively with gangs. We had a lot of gang violence coming on.

Jo Muirhead:

So he turned up to meet with me because we were going to talk about his vocational future and his career future. And he was. He couldn't sit still. And I worked out. I said hey, how do we need to set this room up so that you can concentrate? Yes, I need to see the door. Well, okay, cool.

Jo Muirhead:

So we just changed how we were sitting. And then I just looked at him and went you're still really nervous, what's going on here? And he goes I'm uncomfortable because you don't know that I'm carrying a weapon. Now I felt very uncomfortable knowing there's a weapon in the room. So I went well, why don't we put it on the table so we can both see it? And he brought out this big knife and he put it on the table and I went cool.

Jo Muirhead:

And then I had to have a discussion with him about when do you think you would need to use it? Why did you feel it necessary to bring it here? And that's when he told me all of the protective measures that I have been given got taken off me as soon as I made a claim saying that I'm not well enough to work. Yet I'm still expected to walk around my street, go to the shopping center, go to my physiotherapist, go to my psychologist. I just don't feel safe. I went oh, that's huge. So again, from a design perspective, we get so caught up in compliance, compliance, risk management, compliance, risk management, compliance that we often forget that the human has to exist in a social space. And they don't exist as a set of checklists.

Valerie Ling:

And it is a checklist. I think that creates the tasks. We just keep piling them on. We can't do the ministry space.

Valerie Ling:

But I think what you've said has a lot of parallel. I just chunk it down now and I'm really interested in your rehab consultant hat going. You know, practically this is probably what it means and this is probably what the direction that we need to take to fix it right. So, number one, just like you said, for the last decade we have known that people in ministry feel disconnected to the real core task. But why are they trained? Why they wanted to do full time ministry? So you know the preaching and teaching of the gospel, discipling others. You know caring for a broken wall by sharing. You know Jesus with them. That meaning work is disconnected to what they do. 70, 80% of the time, yep, right. So from I've observed that the solution, therefore, has been to try to give people more time off, make sure they're taking vacations, looking at you know they work hours and you know trying to maybe reduce some of the maybe meeting. But is that all? It is no.

Jo Muirhead:

No, it's not, and this is where we run into some complications. So for most of the overworked ministry leaders that I have worked with and experienced in my life, the common thing that there are two things that come up for me, and one is they're completely under resourced, and two is they are dealing with traumatic experiences that they have got no hope on earth have been under process by themselves. So let me speak into that one first. So I live with an ex senior pastor. He's my husband and he he I was horrified when he started to tell me some of the things he did early on when he was building a church. He was. He turns up to suit the families would call him instead of the police when a family member suicide it. So he would turn up to a garage where somebody a member of his congregation had hung themselves and then he had to get that person down and then he chose to call the police. Then he tells stories about people doing this on train lines and then he tells stories about domestic violence. Now, that's his stories. I know I've heard other stories where you value your psychologist. If you had a psychologist on your team who was witness to those things, you would put a whole heap of protocols in place to help that person be safe. None of that goes on. None of it. There's just supposed to get on with that and pass to their flock. I can health professionals know that if we turned up to an event like that, there are mechanisms that we would need to put into place to help us be safe around that, so that we have we have somebody that we need to go and talk to. We might engage in EMDR or another type of modality that helps us process that trauma, because they don't just go away because you don't think about them all the time. They turn up in other ways. So that's a resourcing issue. And I know you've got a whole thing about supervision and I'm grateful that we now have supervision. It's a little bit horrified at how small it is, but anyway.

Jo Muirhead:

Then we've got the whole under resourcing problem. So you've got people who are the visionaries of their church and they're in this apostolic position where they are expected to grow a church, grow the finances of the church, feed the flock, teach, preach, teach, teach, make people aware, report to a board or a synod or whatever terminology you have there. So essentially, you've got your. If you parallel this to the corporate world. You've got your business development, you know. You've got your CEO, your business development manager or your, you know. Then you've got your tech person, because all churches need to be up to date with all tech and audio visual. Then you've got your whole. You've got to be the leader of your ministry around worship and kids, and so what we find is people they don't have. They have great heart to lead, to teach and to share the gospel. What they're not skilled at is building team. What they're not skilled at is delegation. What they're not skilled at is building a high performing team.

Jo Muirhead:

And then there's this incredible tension between how do I have enough money left over at the end of the week to keep my family fed? What do I need to do to make sure that people keep giving us money while I'm trying to do all of these other things? And I think it's just a complete lack of resourcing. Most businesses would have somebody in charge of looking after the money, looking after the sales and marketing, making sure there's enough money coming in, looking after the team and all the resources. But it's not until you're getting to hundreds of people in a church that you can start to resource the church properly.

Jo Muirhead:

So what do we do? We rely on volunteers, and volunteers aren't going to have as much skin in the game. So then what do we resort to? Manipulative, super spiritual tactics that help shame and blame our volunteers because they're not committed, because they're out there trying to earn enough money to keep the church afloat, because you, as the leader in the church, don't have enough resources. That the whole design is thought, which is why we need Christ, which is why we need the Holy Spirit, and so. But I'm just saying, yeah, that the design of it, if you, if you took that model out into the world, it would fall flat. Yeah, we wonder why we have so many people in ministry burning out, which often turns up with a moral fall or a moral failing, because we only tend to take notice of the burnout when it gets that extreme end game when it's end game, yeah, and then we can shame and blame all of these ministry leaders and saying you weren't faithful enough, you weren't disciplined enough, you didn't read your word enough.

Jo Muirhead:

You know it's easy to say, you know you didn't keep it in your pants or you know you were lying when you were saying all these people were being healed and you know you were just orchestrating it. You were trying to do the work of the Holy Spirit without going. What on earth was so broken that this that led this person to this place?

Valerie Ling:

You know, Joe, I've also been really digging into looking at psychological safety and one of the models that I've come across talks about how you know when there's social and reputational threat, like social threats, the stakes are so much higher because it's right into the individual. And one of the things I've been reflecting on is how much current church ministry certainly can only speak with. What I see in Sydney, yeah, is moving on that influence apart. You know the pastor who's got, you know a huge church and there's a reputation and there's an influence, but it's really costly. From a work design or a role design. That is a costly space to be in, is it not? Absolutely.

Jo Muirhead:

And the church influences the church and the church influences space. That's intriguing me as well, because I can actually see it. So my social media research is showing me that people are dissatisfied with the really big mega churches. And you know what? I think we've reached a period of time in history where they've done their job for a while OK, they'll come back and people are looking for a more intimate real life connection. Yet we've got these people in church leadership who are really paddling very, very hard onto the surface just to keep people in seats. They haven't processed the impact of COVID on their congregation. They haven't processed the impact of COVID on themselves. How do I know this? Most health professionals haven't.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah.

Jo Muirhead:

Right. So we just ran, we just went oh, can't do it in person, now we're going to do it online. Now we're doing hybrid. How do we do hybrid? We better get small groups connected. Oh my God. Offerings up, offerings down. Should we put a new conference on? Should we not put a new conference on? And nobody's got time to take a breath. So in terms of psychological safety, it's a huge problem. So an influencer puts themselves out for all sorts of hate. If you are going to put yourself out there and say things about the gospel in a very, very open space like social media, you can expect to be persecuted. It is going to happen. And if you don't have the resilience, the personal resilience, if you are not activating your resilience, if you are not working closely with a mentor and supervisor, consistently and frequently, that is going to eat you up, because it eats everybody up.

Valerie Ling:

This is the midpoint break for the podcast. If you want to put a pause and walk away and come back with it, make sure you do check out the description for all the various downloads that we have for you, including my full report, research and reflections. You might also want to remember to like, share and subscribe. So stop now or keep going.

Valerie Ling:

Do you know what's the interesting thing I've noticed in myself, Joe? So you and I, we know that a costly space for us to be in business is that marketing. These days, a lot of it is in social media. We have so many things that help us with that. But here's an interesting thing I've noticed. We talked about how one of the differences in churches is that we have volunteers.

Valerie Ling:

So, myself as a parishioner in my church system I'm super stressed whether I'm on music at the service that I go to, because it's the recorded streamed. Now, one part of my identity is I almost became a musician, so you can imagine all of the thinking that goes in my head when I'm knowing that I'm being recorded. And the one time, joe, I re-listened to the recording, I was so horrified I didn't want to play ever again. It took so much work on myself to say I'll just get back. But do you know what? I refuse to service leave If that service just will not do it. Now for me as a volunteer, in terms of me retracting my sense of meaning in serving the Lord in my own way, it's more thing too, because I'm calculating my own vulnerability in this new environment. It's like a whole system has shifted since the pandemic has hit us.

Jo Muirhead:

Yeah, I have a similar story. So yours is about music. So I put my hand up to host our online community. So I because I am very present online because of that's how I help my business grow I've now got my church community and my work community. I don't segregate the two. So I feel like if I'm not promoting my church work as much as I'm promoting my business work, then the people in church are going to judge me and tell me I'm not doing it really well.

Jo Muirhead:

But then my people in my business will be going. We don't necessarily need to hear about that all of the time, so they're going to judge me harshly as well. And then I found myself over this last weekend reflecting that I know I have got a really, really big eight weeks ahead of me and I had. I did the really uncomfortable thing where I have to cut off everything. That is a nice to have. So I've actually blocked out on planning centre which is the planning centre, whatever that thing is and told my church I'm actually not available until the middle of October.

Jo Muirhead:

Now they've just seen me celebrate my birthday all over social media, going out and being celebrated and eating great food and eating a lot of clava cheesecake, which is awesome. So for me then to go whoops, I need to let you know I'm not available now, that it's like I don't even want to turn up to church this week because I'm scared. People are going to ask why, when I know that to look after myself and make sure I'm doing, the thing that I know is that. I know that. I know that. I know that this is the thing I need to do get the attention Like I have to strip off everything else. But yeah, it's a perception of others and our need to people please and our need to get affirmation in our church, because we are very good at weaponising spirituality to guilt and shame people into doing work.

Valerie Ling:

And I'm wondering, because I just went through an exercise in our own business and I call it the pandemic stand down that a lot of the things that we brought in to prop us up just created extra work. But the three main reasons I'd love to come back to this because I think your resourcing thing is really interesting the three reasons ministers are saying that they would leave and, mind you, these are the ones that have hung on right.

Valerie Ling:

So we've been talking.

Valerie Ling:

you know we're months and years now past what it was all before Loneliness.

Jo Muirhead:

Yeah, and we know it's none of the one of the most debilitating factors. There's a ministry for loneliness in Great Britain. Their government has a minister for loneliness. It's that big of a deal.

Valerie Ling:

Anyway, keep going, I know amazing right Impact on family and you know we didn't drill down what sort, but it could be work stress, but I suspect there's also a lot of psychological safety for family, because that's the uniqueness of the ministry role. I want to say that you know, whenever we take a minister down, you know there's a whole family and kids and a whole generation.

Valerie Ling:

Yes, that's 20 years there. Actually, absolutely Stuff, yes, okay, and then work stress workload. So I want to start with the work stress workload first. Yeah, A lot of what we're hearing from our clients is in the pandemic. They peddled hard, but they were also at home, so there were a lot of their work that was simplified, but now a lot of the structures have remained and we keep putting more things on because we're afraid that the finances are down. People aren't coming to church and so we've got to put more activity. You know, when you look at that as a rehab consultant, you see.

Jo Muirhead:

I see the perpetuation of all the fuss and flurry that we went through with COVID. It's almost like it's a hyper vigilant response. So, instead of people, so I actually think the smart thing to do and this is if you came into my room and you sat with me right now and you were talking to me like this my job, I would see my job as going. We need to help this person get to a point where they feel safe enough to ask the question, because you can't just do it straight away. So I ask the question what does my congregation, what do my people now need, not need of me now need? So does my church, does my congregation need, in person and online? Just because we can do it, should we be doing it? Do we need an activity happening, doing these three conferences a year, and do those conferences need to be hybrid? In person and online? Like, what are the? We've got to get right back to stripping away. Like you said, we just put more and more and more and stuff.

Jo Muirhead:

What is your core business? What is your core role? And you know, when I worked with ministry people, they never tell me preach the gospel, that's their value. They say my main function is making sure the finances there's enough money coming in. So they've attached their performance how well I perform on a Sunday or Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday or Wednesday. How I perform is how they've attached that to how much money is coming through the church and they feel that very, very keenly, very keenly.

Valerie Ling:

Don't you think, joe, that that's a real world problem? Absolutely.

Jo Muirhead:

It's not. It's not. It doesn't have. It's not ministry and isolation, but it's not something like he talked about. It's not something the people that come and speak to me are very uncomfortable about talking about money. So I've got to provide. Got to provide. Hang on a minute. God gave your brain. He also calls us to be good stewards. He also gave us examples of people who used to be able to make money, and make a lot of it. You can't just sit around and just think that it's going to fall from the sky. If you are doing the things that God called you to do, which is love him, have relationship with him, you're just. You're just empowering through all of this in a strength that sounds sustainable, because you've taken on a mission that you actually can't fulfill on your own.

Valerie Ling:

Let's work with that a little bit.

Valerie Ling:

So what you're saying is that okay, we need to ask you know what, what? What does what does that congregation mean? Not for me, but you know what do they need? Make the main thing, the main thing in terms of what is the? The core business, if you like, of church and ministry. But then you've got these practical things. They are running out of money, people aren't coming back to church, and there's almost like this you know what's the equation then? Because it feels like you just need to do more, and so it becomes a productivity in how much more you can do so that the finances come back, so that people come back.

Jo Muirhead:

Yeah. So, val, we've learned in the business that that doesn't work. So give yourself permission to scale back. So I, I've got a big train coming past me right now. So I, I've had a business where I had a team of 20 where we were making a lot more money during the month, but that infrastructure costs and the cost to me is somebody who hadn't quite nailed her own leadership style meant that I couldn't sustain that. So, and then you know, so I've gone from what I consider to be a big team in my space to quite small teams. I've also just been solo joke, just Joe on the road. The infrastructure costs there are nil, but the psychological stress to me is considerable. So I think we need to go back.

Jo Muirhead:

If you if we're going to use tangible numbers if you had pre-damp pandemic, had a congregation of 500 of active members or congregation of 200 of active people turning out, putting money in the plate that you could rely on, and now you've got a congregation of 100. Stop, stop pretending. That's 200. What does that? Your responsibility as the leader of that congregation is to look after those 100 people beautifully, like you did way back when it was your first 100, and help that 100 of core people become 200. That is your job as the leader of that church, so it might mean that we are so much. My church went back. We changed from three services on a Sunday down to two. Oh, super impressed when they did that. We don't need three in person services anymore because we just don't have the people. People weren't coming. Nobody likes preaching to an empty room.

Valerie Ling:

So I'd really like to go to that resourcing, you know you were talking about how you know people.

Valerie Ling:

when we're in ministry, we are essentially under resourced and we are exposed to a great deal of traumatic material and conflict material. So I'm going to come kind of tie this in now into the psychosocial aspect. When you look at the types of conflict that my survey discovered and you know really is, if the research assignment had allowed me I would have made the survey much bigger. It is still PhD. Yeah, it's a deal of that sort of data.

Valerie Ling:

And that's just ministry, isn't it? That's type of conflict, isn't that just ministry, that suck it up people.

Jo Muirhead:

I love this conflict. I mean, we've got the letters that Paul wrote in the Bible and I don't know my Bible as super well, but you know he talks about a lot of conflict. He talks about conflict. I mean, we've got the, even got the letter to, I think, titus, where it's like you know, dude, you need to discipline this guy, you know.

Jo Muirhead:

I think that the conflict piece is we leaders. Leaders aren't equipped themselves. Personally, it's not about reducing conflict. That's never going to happen. If you work with humans, live with humans, deal with humans, have anything to do with humans, they will be conflict. No one's going to agree with you. It's just not going to happen.

Jo Muirhead:

But you, until you as a leader, can own how you're going to turn up in conflict and how your personality style, your behavioral style, how you turn up under pressure, who have you got speaking into your world that can help you navigate that? So I know, for me conflict turns up. The more stressed I get, the more conflict comes. I am also one of those very traditional burnout people. Whereas I don't cry, and you know, in a corner and falling in a heap, I overwork, I get angrier, I become harsher and I can see it's a very male dominated trait, even though I'm not a man. But it's not uncommon in the church where you see pastors turning up to everything, going to every conference, they micromanage and then they're taking that level of conflict because the conflict is in themselves. The conflict is not out there with the people, the conflict is in themselves. I'm not doing the job that God assigned me to do and I don't know how to get out of this mess. So they take that conflict home. Their wife feels it all. Their spouse feels that, their kids feel it. They're not as engaged and we know that that family, that the biggest piece of resilience, that biggest piece that's going to keep you healthy, is a healthy family.

Jo Muirhead:

One of the most rewarding pieces of advice I ever got from a gentleman in leadership, when I was coming up through a church. He said, joe, if my family started to disintegrate, I would walk away from the pulpit in a minute and I trusted that he would do it. And it helped me so much because I was a single mum at the time and what he was letting me know was you've got to get your house in order, honey. You've got to get your house in order and you've got to keep that strong, because that is the foundation of allowing you to do everything else. So conflict, you can't avoid it.

Jo Muirhead:

People pleasing is not the solution to conflict. Having a strong sense of integrity around it's not personal. This is the way we do things around here. So then that breeds into the culture of your church, the culture of your leadership, what you will tolerate, what you won't tolerate. Because people don't just hear and do what you say. They watch how you treat them and others. So if you tolerate being spoken down to, if you tolerate spending four hours counseling somebody after a service on the Sunday when you've promised your family to go and do something fun together, then that's communicating a message to people. One is his family doesn't matter. I can step all over him or step all over her. He will do anything I want him to do, whenever I want him to do it. What your family is learning is oh, this parent is unreliable and the church is more important than us. And I'm pretty sure that when you're counseling kids of families in ministry that the church always came first thing is probably coming up a lot.

Valerie Ling:

Look, I'd have to say that this is my drive, right? Joe? I think when I was on your podcast, you were surprised that my primary motivator is not the resourcing of leaders.

Valerie Ling:

It's the rescuing of our kids, kids in ministry. We're doing a lot of wrong by them, kids in ministry, kids in mission coming through. We've got a lot of rebuilding to do in that space so I would really like to ask you so yes, we're talking now about the buildup of chronic stress. Yes, that pushes unhelpful responses and behaviors. What are your thoughts, if you can think of a parallel, because I think the police are a fascinating, similar other to think about. I haven't thought about that a bit because of the power dynamic, but there's kind of destructive leadership patterns that happen even as seniors and associates, and it's happening both ways. We see it in both ways. There are associates who are having a lot of difficulty with their seniors and their seniors who are having a lot of difficulty. This destructive leadership that happens from a design or from your professional view of ministry. What's that?

Jo Muirhead:

That's humans, because I get called in to work with CEOs with conflict with their board, or CEOs in conflict with the rest of the C-suite, ceos with the next level down. So it's again that didn't help me just going. What is that? That's humans, that's ego getting in the way. That, again, is a lack of self understanding, self respect, self leadership. So my big thing at the moment is helping.

Jo Muirhead:

If you don't know yourself, if you don't know how you turn up when you're stressed, if you don't know how you turn up when bad news happens, if you don't have a suite of things that you need to do on a daily basis to keep you healthy, you're actually not doing the work that keeps you healthy enough to keep turning up in front of people all the time. So, if you, if the thing that concerns me, that the isolation piece, is because ministers, particularly men because I haven't had as much experience with women except for my own experience I'm not allowed to talk about the stuff that's causing a stress because we're supposed to have enough faith to just get over it.

Valerie Ling:

Or in our circle it's enough ministry grit. Oh Lordy, you've got that gospel grit.

Jo Muirhead:

Gospel grit.

Valerie Ling:

Gospel grit.

Jo Muirhead:

Okay, don't like it, I don't like it. So can you see, for people listening, that is weaponizing. That is actually saying to me, joe, if you were gritty enough you'd just get over it. If you, if you just had enough grit inside of you, if you just prayed more like I haven't enough time. I'm in meetings from eight until six every day. I've got my spouse wanting my attention, my three kids wanting my attention. We're behind in our mortgage.

Jo Muirhead:

I've now got to do this annual report. I've had somebody say that they've been harassed by them. I've actually got a massive domestic violence problem happening in my church and now I've just learned that a kid tried to. A kid in our youth ministry is tried to, you know, harass somebody sexually inappropriately on the church grounds. Don't tell me I need to pray more Like so. When you talk about the chronic stress that that what I just blurted out then that's not an exaggeration of what these frontline ministry workers are dealing with. So the, the New South Wales Police Service have had to over gazillion years. We had one stage where we had more than 50% of our serving police officers out of work due to stress related injuries or illnesses.

Valerie Ling:

Oh, I remember I was a clinician during that time Exactly.

Jo Muirhead:

So can you. So we've got 50, our workforce was decreased by 50%. Yeah, did we take the load off? Did everybody decide, oh, that's it, no more crime for the next three months. So the police, you go talk to them. It just see, it didn't happen. But so you've got these pastors and these senior leaders and these associates running around to haven't had enough that they don't get adequate to briefing, they don't get adequate supervision, they don't get adequate assistance to learn how to manage conflict.

Jo Muirhead:

You know, you think I, for me, church ministry people need to do a degree akin to social work. You, because you need to understand family systems. You need to understand how to case manage a process and a place. You need to know how to ask a question in such a way that allows you to go ooh, I need to find another person to help me do this Right. So social workers are great at bringing in other resources. That's, that's what they do. Some of them move into psychotherapy, which they're very cool at, but I'm talking about the ones that know I need to put you over here, then I need to put you over there, then I need to resource you this way. I need to read so I see the role of the senior ministry team. They want to preach great, but their job is to kind of make sure the engine keeps working. But they can't do that if they are the engine, the brakes, the brake fluid, the accelerator pedal, the brake pedal, the indicators, like just trying to build a picture here. It's an impossible task.

Valerie Ling:

Can I ask you, from what you're seeing, then, in terms of your professional work, what are organizations doing in this? I'll give you an example. I know that my team, we need to go back to stripping back, but we're a very small team. We're a large team but you know we're not like big corporate. So we really been coming back to making the main thing, the main thing. You know where are our clients at, where are we at, what do we need and what can we drop off, so that you know we, you know we'll just have a good enough version of what needs to happen. What is some? Because I think the church has become quite professional now.

Jo Muirhead:

You know we've got all these professional structures, and so I think they have the facade of professional. I think they would like to think they're professional.

Valerie Ling:

Well, I haven't got the substance of professional. Okay, I think we're using professional frameworks.

Jo Muirhead:

Yes, good, we can measure appropriately.

Valerie Ling:

So, given that we're not going to change the structures overnight, we still will have it. We still will have to, you know, figure out all the governance and compliance issues. What can you see? Practically, the steps. What are the steps, joe? What are?

Jo Muirhead:

the steps. Okay. So in my grand scheme of wishful thinking, the way, because it's people usually come to us when a person is a problem. Right, a person is a problem and they're causing a problem from themselves and others. So, whether that's harassment, or they're not performing, or they've had a breakdown or a moral failure, or they can't preach without crying, or you know, they've got some other thing going on.

Jo Muirhead:

So what we end up having, what we find, is that the work with the person, the individual person, is about 35% of the work. So where that person needs to be reinserted to that's the majority of the work. Okay, so that 35% of that work is awesome, because I've got people like you in my world that can go, I can go. Could you please help this person rebuild themselves? I need to know what this person can and wants to be able to do, so that I can then take them and that desire and get them to a point where we can meet with their leadership team whatever that looks like and go right. These are some of the things that we now need to change. So, if I am reinserting and I'm using that language today to try and help paint the picture a leader back into a leadership team, you can't just do that without having done some work with the rest of that team. So that's things like social and emotional intelligence. That's things like very practical strategies on what is the culture of this place, what behaviours do we accept, what behaviours do we reject.

Jo Muirhead:

That whole culture piece can take. It can actually take the heavy weight off this, because it shouldn't be the senior pastor facilitating it. The senior pastor or the senior leader needs to be a part of the process, not superimposing the process. If you get an experienced and credentialed facilitator to come in and help you navigate this process, they will help pull it out of your team, because what the senior leader thinks is going on and what is really going on can quite often be almost opposite. We are a culture of inclusion, but everybody has to climb 20 stairs to get into the building. We don't have any. We don't tolerate people coming on and off rosters, yet that's happening all the time. So the way a senior leader might perceive things are going on and the way that the reality is going on is very, very different, and that's not a fault. You need somebody to help you see that. So I think, when we come back to the resourcing. I think senior people in the community, senior people in positions of senior leadership, they need a one-on-one supervisor mentor that they're seeing weekly.

Jo Muirhead:

And there needs to be a structure to those sessions and there needs to be agreement about how it gets reported back if it ever gets reported back at all, okay, and it might tailor off where it stops being weekly. But I'm saying weekly because it's not happening at all at the moment. You've got a mandatory for sessions a year. I nearly fell over when I heard it was for Right. If you know you've got so much stuff you've got to get out, then you've got to get that out so you can actually start coming to work from a place of health, because you're actually coming to your work from a place of incredible depletion at the moment. And I know it is because I'm watching health professionals do the same thing and I'm watching a lot of first responders do the same thing. And if we I love that.

Valerie Ling:

So 35. And you know, this is probably the reason why I took this the sabbatical, because I was finding that I was getting so many requests to speak on the self care piece and leaders coming to me that it's like I'm a psychologist ideal of the individual stuff, right? So you're saying that 35% of it, 65% of it, you're saying, is looking at the reality of how things are structured. What are your thoughts then in that 65% space for the destructive conflict that we have in our church?

Valerie Ling:

To me, you know, if I had a smaller luck in my business I have a small team I can use a lot of informal things to manage that sort of the thing. Right, I can spend a lot of time. But you know, when you've got a large church and you're getting I call it Monday PTSD, right after Sunday you're going to get all the emails about your grandma and about whether you actually did the reading to prepare. And then you've got, you know, things like people accusing you or being mean to their kid. You know there's not a structure thing, I mean, I know it's a human thing. But how.

Jo Muirhead:

my first response is why are you even receiving that information? There needs to be a gatekeeper between you and that information. Okay, so my first, my first thought there is you need a PA or an EA or an associate who takes on the protection of you. So, and it's not to avoid so, and when I say protect you, don't you on a Monday? You don't need to see that. So on Friday you have a specific meeting with the person that says what was the feedback from last week? So there's some space, and that person, who's in charge of collating that feedback, goes oh, guess what?

Jo Muirhead:

Nobody likes your use of this word in this context. Oh, apparently you said John 416 when you meant John 516. So you can when you've got some space between that. As a speaker, I've done professional speaking the worst thing I can do after I've been on the speaking, like I've just come off the stage with the amount of emotion, the amount of hype, the amount of intensity in my body that is coming. If I got a heap of criticism immediately after that, I would be that. That would make me a mess. So if you've spent months working on a like we don't, what do we call them?

Jo Muirhead:

sermon series and you know that it's a God anointed and you felt the Holy Spirit and you knew that this was coming from a place other than yourself. And you start delivering that and you're doing it from a place. If I can't wait to share this with my congregation, I can't wait for people to grab a hold of this and start applying it. If you did that the first week and then the very next day you're getting ridiculed for your use of the wrong tense in a sentence or your playground conflict that your child you're seeing your use pastor should have been looking after. But put some protections in place, put some space there. You don't need that level of immediacy. And I think the other thing that I've seen is senior leaders and associates don't build a trusted network. It doesn't have to be big, three people. Are we enough a trusted network of people that you can just call up and go? Today sucked Because you, we got to get over the fact that there could be shame around that.

Jo Muirhead:

So I think building some I call it building behavioral boundaries, because we all hear boundaries and we go build boundaries, you don't. But so for me, at the end of my work day, because I will just keep working, I will work and work and work and work and work and work and work. I actually have to make an appointment with someone. Off of my dog we have to go for a walk, because that makes me shut down my computer, turn off my lights, lock my office door and leave. I need that level of behavioral prompt to act because I don't want to come back down into my office and turn on all my lights and turn on my computer again when I finish for the day so I can put space like I've learned to put space there. I can. Bookends to your day, bookends to your sermon. There's I don't think it's written in anybody's position description that says after I preach a sermon on Sunday, I must hang around and serve the congregation for the next three hours. Maybe you should leave.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, I think what I'm hearing is the reverse engineer. Every situation like this is where we're at. You know, how did we get here? From a behavioral point of view, from a timing point of view, from a trigger, we call it chain of events, right?

Valerie Ling:

So I just, we go like, particularly in parenting. You know you sort of and this is where it's different again like you love your children, so you know something is changed, you can't leave them. You know the parent who explodes and calls their child all kinds of excuses and many comes in for help. We reverse, engineer with a chain of events and very often that that explosion, you know, really was not the key event Death by a thousand paper cuts, right, it goes all the way. Okay, joe, I'm going to bring this now to four quest wealth. I don't have a question, but I'm going to do it a little bit differently with you. I'm going to ask you the magic wand question. Okay, oh, awesome, if you had a magic wand. Money was an issue, resourcing was an issue. What is, what is the one thing that you would sprinkle on organized church in relation to all the things we've talked about burnout, destructive patterns? You know what's the one thing, or a few things. What would you magic wand In how we do church?

Jo Muirhead:

I would create a external consulting role where an external consultant, or several consultants, advised this organized church on leadership development and increasing leadership capability, on the current legislation that exists in this entire nation on managing psychosocial risk at work because churches you're not exempt from that. This consulting company would also be coming into. Help people manage conflict, learn how to deal with conflict, build the capabilities of your team. They would not be employed by the church needs to be about the church becoming increasingly independent in these things, but as that church grows and develops, that consulting company will then need to help them grow and develop. So I employ a coach, I employ a PA, I employ a VA, I employ a psychologist, I these are all that. I have a physical therapist, I have a coach, I have a psychologist, I have an executive assistant, I have a business manager and I have a VA. Those five roles work to keep me one person healthy in my work. If I was doing clinical work at this point in time, I would add clinical supervision.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, nice, you know, if I could, if money wasn't an issue and I could build a resource, I'd build for my church a whole house of these auxiliary services so my pastors could just do what they would feel called to do. You know, that's what I love it.

Jo Muirhead:

I think that's the way like when we talk about that. I think funding the church need fundamentally needs to change, but that's a whole week I haven't got.

Valerie Ling:

I can't do that. Well, I might let you go, because I think that's a brilliant landing point. Thank you so much, jennifer, for spending time with me.

Valerie Ling:

Thanks, Val.

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