A Thriving Leader Implementation Series
A Letter About the People Who Are Undermining You
A Guide for Pastors Leading Under Sustained Provocation by Someone They Trusted
Dear Fellow Pastor,You came in this morning, and there was an email.The subject line was harmless. The body of the email made you stop reading after the second paragraph. It was the third board member this month who had been told something about you by someone you once trusted.You forwarded the email to your spouse, and you did not eat lunch. The whole afternoon was blocked for sermon prep. You did not write a sentence. You scrolled the elder team's group text instead, looking for the names of those who had not posted in a while, trying to figure out who was on the inside of whatever this was.By Friday, you were exhausted in a way that did not match the work you had actually done.If you have been in ministry for any length of time, you recognize this season. The board member who keeps texting other board members about you. The staff person who agrees in the meeting and undermines in the hallway. The elder you mentored, who is now gathering a quiet coalition. The volunteer who has not openly opposed you but is somehow always at the center of the rooms you are not in.You cannot fire them.You cannot avoid them.You cannot even confront them without setting fire to a relationship that matters to your family or your soul.So you carry it. The carrying turns into vigilance. The vigilance turns into exhaustion. The exhaustion convinces you that you are the problem.You are not the problem. This is not a character flaw. It is a signal. And it is pointing at something worth paying attention to.
WHAT THIS GUIDE ACTUALLY DOES
Most leadership resources treat sabotage as a conflict problem: have the hard conversation, document, bring in the third party, establish clear expectations. You have tried those things. They did not work. And the fact that they did not work made it worse, because now you have evidence that the tools you trust will not save you.This guide takes a different approach.Conflict and sabotage look similar from the outside. Inside, they are different shapes. Conflict happens in front of you, with a stated objection and a path to resolution through clarity. Sabotage happens around you, with a hundred unstated objections dispersed through other people, surfacing in places you cannot trace. The frameworks that solve one will actively worsen the other.Edwin Friedman, a rabbi who developed family systems theory for organizational leaders, named the dynamic precisely: the problem in any anxious system is rarely the trouble-maker. It is the leader's reactivity to the trouble-maker. A differentiated leader stays connected to the system without being controlled by its anxiety. An undifferentiated leader gets pulled into the system's emotional currents and ends up either fighting back or fleeing, both of which the saboteur can exploit.This guide helps you see both: the structural dynamic that makes sabotage different from conflict, and the interior work of self-differentiation that changes the game. Then it gives you three practices you can start this week.
WHAT IS INSIDE
The Real Diagnosis
Why the frameworks that worked on conflict will actively make sabotage worse. Grounded in Edwin Friedman's work on self-differentiation and family systems. Not a lecture. A mirror.
The PART Principle
How Adaptive Resilience functions as the pillar that holds when the outer life is under active attack, and what happens to every other capacity when this one cracks.
The Thirty-Day Campaign Audit
Count the people you have talked to about the situation this month. Sort them into two columns. Stop the campaigning. Keep the supervision. The honesty this exercise requires is the point.
The Three Things You Will Not Do
Name, in writing, three specific actions you are not going to take this month, no matter how the provocation escalates. The togetherness force of an anxious system is patient. Get ahead of the erosion.
The Bitter Spirit Practice
Take what you have been carrying to a place that can receive it without weaponizing it. One hour. One page. The most interior of the three practices, and the one that most pastors avoid the longest.
The Deeper Work
An honest assessment of what three practices can and cannot do, and guidance for when you are ready for the sustained, relational work this kind of change actually requires.
What Pastors Are Discovering
"I have been calling it conflict for two years. I read the first page and realized I had been using the wrong word. The relief of having the right name for it was worth the five dollars by itself."
"The campaign audit was brutal. I counted thirty-one people I had talked to about the situation in the last month. Twenty-six of them were campaigning. Stopping the campaigning is the hardest thing I have done in ministry this year, and it is the only thing that has actually changed the dynamic."
"I thought I needed a strategy. What I needed was permission to stop waiting for the apology that was never coming. This guide gave me that."
$5
Instant PDF download
I priced this at $5 because I want it in the hands of every pastor leading inside a wall they cannot leave.Every leader has been blindsided by someone they recruited.Every minister has stopped sleeping because they cannot remember their last meal without scanning the room.Five dollars will not change your life. But naming the structural dynamic beneath the wound, and learning the three practices that begin to change your nervous system's relationship to the provocation? That changes things.
The saboteur is not the problem.
The reactivity is.
Grace and Peace,
Matt Adair
30 years in ministry · Helping pastors burn bright instead of burning out
P.S. — This guide pairs with the Anxiety Reset Session ($97), a focused 60-minute conversation where we run the full diagnosis on your specific situation and map a path forward. But start here. You cannot address what you have not named. Learn more at https://leadershipreset.carrd.coP.P.S. — This is the second guide in A Thriving Leader Implementation Series. Guide 1 (I Can't Turn Off My Brain) is for the pastor whose brain will not shut off at 2 AM. Guide 3 (capacity) lands in June and Guide 4 (departure) in July.