The Emotionally Healthy Leader by Peter Scazzero

Week 6: Chapter 5 — Planning and Decision Making

Read Chapter 5 of The Emotionally Healthy Leader. Key passages: Proverbs 3:5-6; James 1:5; Acts 15:28 ("It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us").

This chapter marks the pivot from "being" to "doing" — Scazzero now asks how a transformed interior life should change the most concrete, everyday tasks of leadership, beginning with how we plan and make decisions.

Discussion Questions

8 questions

1.Scazzero begins Part 2 by insisting that the interior work of Part 1 is not merely preparation for leadership — it is the foundation that determines the quality of everything in Part 2. In your own words, how does who you are shape how you plan and decide?

2.He challenges the common model of Christian planning that simply borrows secular strategic planning frameworks and adds prayer at the beginning and end. What is missing from that model, according to Scazzero, and what would a more deeply integrated approach look like?

3.Scazzero introduces the concept of discernment — communal, prayerful, unhurried — as distinct from mere decision-making. What are the key differences between a decision-making process and a discernment process?

4.He draws on the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 as a model of communal discernment under the Holy Spirit — a messy, relational, Spirit-guided process that arrived at a decision the whole community could own. What made that process work, and what can leaders learn from it?

5.Scazzero warns that leaders often make decisions from their shadow — from fear, from the need for approval, from unacknowledged ambition — while framing those decisions in spiritual language. Can you think of a decision you have made or witnessed that may have been driven by shadow material, even though it sounded like vision?

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Closing Prayer

Full guide

Holy Spirit, you are the one who leads us into all truth, and yet we confess that we often plan without you — bringing you our finished proposals rather than our open hands. Forgive us for the decisions made in haste, from fear, or from the need to appear decisive. Teach us the slower, harder, richer way of discernment. Give us communities where we can say with genuine faith, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." Let our planning be an act of worship, and our decisions an expression of trust. Guide every choice we make, large and small. Amen.

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