The Power of Belonging

Discovering the Confidence to Lead with Vulnerability

Will van der Hart, Rob Waller

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780830775934
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830777167
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Do you struggle with feeling like an impostor in your own leadership? Do you carry a secret anxiety about being revealed as a fraud? We all long to belong, especially those in positions of leadership. But deeply rooted shame can keep leaders from connecting authentically and vulnerably. Reverend Will van der Hart and Dr. Rob Waller—an experienced church leader and respected psychiatrist—integrate the story of Scripture with the science behind mental health, offering real steps for transformation. When leaders know that they belong to God—when they develop a deep sense of security in Him—they can overcome constricting shame and lead with confidence. Offering a psychological and biblical response to one of the most persistent problems in leadership, The Power of Belonging is a unique resource to help you build success from your sense of security, allowing your unique leadership gifts to flourish and grow. Each chapter includes study guide questions for group or individual use.

Chapter 1

Longing for Home

‘The ache for home lives in all of us; the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’ ¹

Maya Angelou

(Will): I woke up from a fitful night’s sleep in the Appalachian Mountains, not sure whether it was the altitude or the jet lag that saw me getting out of bed at 5:00 a.m. I had already planned the teaching I would deliver to the church, whose weekend retreat I was leading. Yet, rising in my mind was an odd question: How do you pick up a snake? I got dressed and groggily tramped out into the cold forest that surrounded my lodge, prayerfully wondering what, if any, significance this question had for my life.

It didn’t take me long to recall the story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush. Far away from his home, Moses was hiding in the desert, living as a Midian shepherd. Then God appeared to him on Mount Horeb and called him into a leadership role that he felt desperately unqualified for.

Standing on top of my own mountain, far from my home in the UK, I sensed God was speaking to me. I often struggled with feelings of inadequacy for the calling on my life—I knew that fear was stopping me from addressing the snake-like shame issues in my life. I could hide behind the veneer of slick communication skills, but did God want my ministry to be about hiding or leading? Could I ever experience true belonging?

For the last two years, alongside my dear friend Rob, I have been studying the life of Moses and finding answers to questions that I never knew I needed to ask. This book is our journey to a sense of belonging in leadership that can best be described as ‘feeling at home’. This can be your journey …

Starting from Home

The best place to begin a journey to belonging is from the concept of ‘home’. Defined as a place ‘where one lives’, home gives us the strongest impression of a place of authenticity, confidence, and freedom. It is a concept that we can all relate to even when our experiences of its reality are vastly different. To say, ‘I feel at home here’, is to express the greatest sense of security to lead. But what is ‘home’ to you—and how can you experience it within your leadership?

Psychotherapist and theologian Kent Hoffman describes a Circle of Security, ² where ‘home’ has two functions, depending upon our needs. Firstly, it is a ‘secure base’ from which we can adventure into life. Secondly, it is a ‘safe haven’ to which we can return from the challenges of life. Without an image of home that can provide this sending and receiving, our leadership must stem from what we are currently doing. We place ourselves on our own pedestal and carve out a place in the world through our competence (or lack thereof). And we long for home.

(Rob): I’m about as English as they come, with ancestors dating back to Saxon times. But twelve years ago, I moved to Edinburgh to marry my Scottish wife, and then two years ago, we moved as a family to New Zealand.

My wife and I both have fond childhood memories of overseas homes (Jamaica and Mauritius, respectively) and wanted our two boys to experience something of the same. There was also an element of the ‘travel bug’—perhaps making up for the adventures we never had, or because of the realisation that if we didn’t go soon, it wasn’t going to happen till the boys left home.

Whilst we weren’t consciously searching for home, the question of ‘Whether and where have we felt at home?’ is one that every traveller asks. We came to the strong realisation that home is a place in our hearts rather than a place on the globe, and in the end, we made the decision to return to Scotland. Over the last couple of years, I have become more aware that my sense of belonging travels with me. It is found most clearly within my relationships with God, family, church, colleagues, and friends. This book is, in some ways, my journey.

In the Absence of Home … Fake It

The ‘fake it to make it’ cultural motto has grown up over recent years. It suggests that if you can pretend that you feel validated in what you are doing for long enough, you will eventually be validated and feel secure. But far more than a statement of strategy, this is often an exercise in confession. Our world is full of people who are faking their sense of belonging in the vain hope that when (or if) they ‘make it’, they will find validation. We feel anything but ‘at home’ but believe that if we pretend we do for long enough, the feeling will somehow suddenly show up.

(Will): ‘I have got no idea. Somewhere over there.’ I pointed around the hillside as cold Welsh rain pelted down on our freezing bodies. I had a map and compass but had missed out on attending the orienteering training session and had no idea how to navigate to our destination.

My group had passed the stage when it all feels ‘a bit exciting’ to be lost on the moors. Now they were in the wet-and-cold incrimination stage. I had left their patience on a ridge ten miles back, and it was all grumbling and muttered threats at this point.

A call to Welsh Mountain Rescue was probably about an hour off when we finally fell through the door of the farmhouse that had been designated ‘home’. My only comfort was the fact that the team were so exhausted and hungry they could barely voice their disdain for me publicly. I tried to make the best of it with comments like, ‘Well we got there in the end!’ But to be honest, there was no upside to this whole experience.

I was operating on the ‘fake it to make it’ principle in my orienteering adventure. What was I thinking? That I could fake reading a map long enough to finally get the hang of it and claim my new identity as a ‘survivalist’? Even the most competent individuals can still feel insecure and fraudulent. No amount of skill, success, or wealth acquisition can generate a sense of authenticity, the security of home. This can only come from an understanding of your belonging.

Central to this book is the principle that authentic belonging makes for successful leadership. One example is found in outstanding sportspeople. Even in disciplines that appear to depend entirely on the skills of one individual, such as snooker or motor racing, winners will often point to their team as the reason for their success. In a post-race interview, Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton said, ‘I couldn’t have done it without my team … This team is just remarkable and what we have achieved together is so special … These guys also did a great job.’ ³ Whether a tennis player or a pastor, business leader or a parent, a leader who truly believes that they belong finds a way to reach their fullest potential.

Many of the leaders who struggle with insecurity today started out by faking it. Initially their faux confidence seemed to work, but finding success in the eyes of those around them didn’t make them feel more qualified; it just made them feel more fake! Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, said, ‘What was a normal goal for the young … becomes a neurotic hindrance to the old.’ ⁴ In other words, people do whatever they can to climb up the career ladder in their younger years; the real struggle comes when they reach the top and realise that it’s leaning against the wrong wall!

Figure 2: When you get to the top and realise you have been climbing the ‘wrong wall’.

Broken Homes

It is increasingly difficult to talk about ‘home’ in a manner that resonates positively with most people. It’s not just that traditional nuclear families are becoming less common as much as the fact that the digital age has convoluted our experience of core relationships. We both grew up in small families, long before the Internet, mobile phones, and social media were easily accessible. Home was relatively defined by a fixed membership and a set of distinct values. Our parents both still live in their family ‘homes’. Though such families are not guaranteed to have a sense of belonging, they do help to offer a vision of what home could be.

Your experience of ‘home’ may be wildly different. You may come from a broken home, have step-parents as well as parents, or have moved house often, maybe at critical times in your development. You may have even come from a ‘home’ in which love and security seemed entirely dependent upon your performance, behaviour, or achievements. If this is your experience, it can be harder to find a secure base and it is more tempting to hide your vulnerabilities.

The three books written by Veronica Roth in the Divergent series (made into films in 2014–16) tell of a dystopian future where people leave their families and enter ‘factions’ based on their personality and skills. The factions are meant to be home; ‘stronger than blood and where you belong’, but something in the system is not right. It takes one ‘divergent’ person who doesn’t fit into a faction to bring the whole idea tumbling down and to show it for the oppression it is.

For many people, especially those in leadership, success appears to offer a form of ‘home’. People around us, and on the Internet, react with approval to the achievements we present to them. Unfortunately, this model relies on our ability to replicate these success stories. It is called a news ‘feed’ because it gives rise to suppliers and consumers. We ‘feed in’ our news, and our reward is that our hunger for belonging is satiated for a while.

Yet when the news runs dry and there is no more genuine success to share, news gets replaced by fake news or people end up liking pictures of our evening meals. ⁵

The Internet isn’t the only place that encourages conditional belonging. Work and social environments can do this too; even supposedly accepting pla...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Longing for Home
• 2. Belongingness
• 3. Understanding Shame
• 4. How to Pick Up a Snake
• 5. Security and Success
• 6. Relationalism
• 7. Oversharing and Belonging Boundaries
• 8. Beyond Belonging
• Appendix
• Further Resources
• Notes