Steve Cuss > Quotes

“Anxiety shrinks the power of the gospel because it presents a false gospel—one of self-reliance rather than reliance on God.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“This is why I think the gospel of Jesus is such incredibly good news, because what you may not have gotten as a child, Jesus freely offers without condition: identity, acceptance, love.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“The goal of managing anxiety is not simply for relief, it is to connect more fully with God and to raise awareness of what God is doing. Anxiety blocks our awareness of God because it takes our subconscious attention. This means that anxiety can be an early detection system that we’re depending on something other than God for our”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Differentiation is the courage to lead people to a difficult place while still being deeply connected. Connected to yourself and your conviction, connected to the people you are leading, and remaining nonanxious in the face of anxious responses. It is the ability to walk into an anxious situation and lead people into a new reality while maintaining caring connection to them even when they are sabotaging your efforts. Jesus, not surprisingly, is a model of differentiated leadership.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“We all know the importance of observing some kind of Sabbath rhythm. After all, you can’t fill a moving cup.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“God is in control, so I don’t have to be. God is perfect; I can do it well enough. God knows it all; I can be curious. God is there for everyone; I do not need to save the day. God frees me from needing human approval because of the grace of unconditional love.”
― Steve Cuss, The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space between Our Beliefs and Experience of God

“Jesus forever changed the perception of infection and sin transfer. When Jesus, the healthy and holy man, touched the sick and when he lived in close proximity to “sinners,” he infected them. Instead of Jesus becoming sick or sinful, the people became clean.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“simple prayer I frequently offer to God: Jesus died so I don’t have to anymore.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Once I was able to name and manage the internal and external pressure to “do something,” I could enter a room and pay attention to what that family actually needed.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Burnout has less to do with workload and more to do with internal and external leadership anxiety.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“One simple exercise for those brave enough to try it is to ask people you trust, “Why do people follow me?” If you gather several friends and ask one another, you will discover a variety of differences.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“you find yourself in the anxiety of interpreting mixed messages, simply choose the message you want to receive, ignore the other, and see what happens.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“God has forged a new path in Jesus that leads to life and freedom. Walking by faith, then, is the lifelong habit of trusting God’s story over the story we tell ourselves. Contemplate this modified phrase: Jesus died to free me from needing anymore.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Awareness is critical to be sure, but it is not the path of growth, it is simply the gate.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“By paying attention to what was bubbling underneath and managing it, I discovered new levels of freedom and a profound encounter with God’s grace. I experienced genuine spiritual breakthroughs of patterns that had previously kept me stuck.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Anxiety is a sign that the false self is demanding we nourish it instead of dying to it.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“An essential part of our leadership journey is being kind to ourselves as we navigate these challenges.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“you become not only self-aware but also group-aware and lead beyond awareness, you can create a healthy culture for people to thrive.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“We needed them as kids and they fit well, but as we grew into adulthood, they became constricting and began to strangle us. A vow suffocates your future and increases your anxiety, because you are living out of that vow rather than by faith in God.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“The greater truth was that God was present in those situations; God was in the room before I walked in, and God would guide me. I did not, in fact, need to know what to say. The more I depended on needing to say the right thing, the less effective I was as a chaplain. I was managing my own anxiety rather than paying attention to God.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Jeanie Duck said that in the absence of information, “people will connect the dots in the most pathological way possible.”1 Often the stories we tell ourselves are full of all manner of pathology and half-truths. The good news of Jesus is the story no longer gets the final word.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“symptoms. The primary symptom is when you keep seeking new answers to old questions rather than reframing the questions.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“The temptation of every person who wants to make an impact is to wish we were like somebody else. We look at the gifts and talents of another person and we think, If I had those gifts, I’d be a better leader, but God has made each of us unique and qualified to lead based on our gifting.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“All people should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why. —JAMES”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“The miracle of salvation isn’t that Jesus stops us from sinning or being tempted to sin, it is that Jesus changes what our hearts want.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Paul was saying that now that we are in Christ, the jig is up with sin; it no longer has power over us because Christ has pulled back the curtain and shown its false allure.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“When we are under pressure, feeling threatened or anxious, we depend on this false self rather than depending on God. If we can learn to notice when it is at play, name what we think we need that we do not actually need, and then die to it, we can be freed from its grip and opened to a deeper experience of grace. I am not talking about heaven and hell and the forgiveness of sins or a transaction with God in the past. I am talking about freedom and transformation moment by moment. I think this is one reason Jesus calls us to deny it daily. Sometimes we need to deny it hourly or moment by moment to encounter God’s freedom. In this approach, anxiety becomes a gift rather than a curse because it serves as an early detection device that your false self is at work.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“This was the fundamental goal of the chaplaincy experience, to be fully present to God and the people God had called me to serve in that moment and to recognize that God is already where I am heading. I think it is the goal of any leader as well.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“In contrast, a differentiated leader is fully present, but fully intact, with space between where he or she ends and the other begins.”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

“Here is what I did and I regret how I did it. Here is where I was coming from. I am not saying that to excuse it. I know it caused damage, and I am sorry for the hurt that it caused. I would like to hear how it affected you.” Repair work takes humility and courage, but also builds significant trust and relational equity. The simplest repair is when you acknowledge what you did, apologize for it, and acknowledge the impact it had on the other. An apology without an acknowledgment of impact isn’t enough. But most people will give each other grace for these situations if repair is handled well. Recognize”
― Steve Cuss, Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs