By: Eric Betts
We live in a culture that often celebrates people who keep going. The successful leader handles one responsibility and moves immediately to the next. There are meetings to attend, people to help, deadlines to meet, families to care for, and communities that depend upon us. Yet Baltimore pastor and leadership scholar, Walter S. Thomas Sr., in his THREAD model, begins with a surprisingly simple practice: Take a Breath. Sometimes the wisest thing a leader can do is pause. Taking a breath does not mean abandoning responsibility; it creates enough space to remember why we accepted the responsibility in the first place. Constant motion can keep us productive while leaving us little time to ask whether the life we are living still reflects the values we claim to hold.
Thomas follows this with another important practice: Harmonize the Different Selves. Most of us carry more than one identity into each day. We may be professionals, parents, spouses, friends, neighbors, caregivers, church members, community leaders, and people with private hopes and struggles that seldom appear on a résumé. Problems arise when these different parts of life become competitors rather than companions. Vocational success should not require succeeding in one part of life while becoming a stranger to ourselves in another. Harmony does not mean that every responsibility receives equal time every day. It means learning to live as one whole person across the many places where life calls us to serve.
There is a spiritual dimension to this kind of wholeness. We can become so occupied with what has been entrusted to our hands that we neglect the person into whose hands it was entrusted. We cannot faithfully steward our responsibilities while continually neglecting the life through which that stewardship must occur. Taking a breath creates room for reflection: What is driving me? What have I neglected? Which part of myself has become disproportionately large, and which part has nearly disappeared? Thomas’s remaining THREAD practices—reinvesting in God, extending ourselves differently, accepting advice and help, and continuing to discover and develop ourselves—remind us that healthy leadership requires renewal, relationship, humility, and continued growth. The goal is not merely to recover enough energy to return to the same unhealthy patterns, but to become more whole in the way we live and lead.
Perhaps true success requires occasionally resisting the pressure to keep moving. A breath can become a moment of interpretation, allowing us to examine where we are before deciding where we should go next. Harmonizing our different selves can then become an act of formation, bringing vocation, relationships, spirituality, and personal well-being back into conversation with one another. A life of purpose should not require losing the person who is living it. Learning as a lifestyle means learning not only how to accomplish more, but also when to pause, listen, receive help, and become whole. Sometimes moving forward begins by taking a breath.
By: Eric Betts
Curtis Coleman Center for Religion Leadership and Culture
Athens State University
