Who actually knows your real story right now? Not your reputation, your title or your gifts, but what this season has truly been like for you. For many leaders the honest answer is almost no one. These pages take that question slowly. By the end you should be able to name one person, and one true sentence you could say to them.
You can work through it alone in about an hour with a notebook. A small group of leaders can use it across one or two meetings. Every exercise is private unless you choose otherwise. Nothing here requires you to confess anything to anyone you are not ready to trust.
Draw three circles
Before reading any Scripture, take a blank page and draw three circles, one inside the other.
In the outer circle, write the names of people who need you: those who call when something breaks, who bring you their questions and their grief. In the middle circle, write people who know of you: who respect your work and would speak well of you. In the inner circle, write only the names of people who know what the last month has really been like for you. Include what you are afraid of, what you are tired of, and what you have not said out loud.
Leaders often find the outer circle crowded and the inner circle nearly empty. If that is your page, leave it that way for now. The point is to see your situation accurately. You can decide what to do about it later. One question for the inner circle: when did each of those people last hear something true from you, as opposed to something accurate but polished?
How closeness can run in only one direction
In a conversation with Dr. Nicole Martin, Lisa Fields described talking with a pastor whose friend, also a pastor, had fallen in a way that shocked everyone who knew him. Looking back, this pastor and the others in their circle realized something about years of conversations. In Lisa’s retelling, the pastor said “he never shared any of his struggles with us.” Then he added, “We were just sharing.”
That is worth sitting with, because it describes friendships that probably felt real to everyone in them. The friends talked honestly. The fallen pastor listened well. Lisa observed that because he was the one helping others through their troubles, people assumed he was strong. His usefulness was taken as proof that he was fine.
Look back at your map. Being needed by many people can feel like being surrounded, even like intimacy. But most people in that outer circle know you as the one who helps, and few have been given a chance to know anything else. Some of them may be able to move inward. You will usually see it in small things: they ask a second question after you say you are fine, they remember what you mentioned last time, and they have never repeated what someone else told them in confidence.
None of this makes those relationships false or unimportant. It means they cannot do a job they were never handed.
Reading the text: two places where people are not meant to stand alone
Wisdom about falling
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 reads: “Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.”
This is wisdom literature. It describes how life tends to go, not a promise that a companion will prevent every fall. Notice what the writer assumes: if they fall. Falling is expected, even for the person with a companion. The difference is what happens afterward. The danger the text names is being alone when weakness arrives, with no one near enough to notice.
Read the verse once more and ask a plain question of your map. If you fell this month, who is close enough to know it had happened?
Jesus tells three friends the truth
Now turn to Matthew 26:36-46. Read it slowly and pay attention to small details before drawing conclusions.
Jesus brings his disciples to Gethsemane. He takes Peter and the two sons of Zebedee further in with him, and Matthew says he began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then Jesus speaks to them directly: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me” (Matthew 26:38).
This is narrative, so it describes what Jesus did rather than issuing a rule. Still, the description is striking. On the night of his greatest burden, Jesus does not hide his state from his closest friends. He tells particular people, not the crowd. He tells them plainly how heavy it is. And he asks them for something modest: stay here and watch with me.
The passage is honest in another way too. The friends fall asleep. Jesus finds them sleeping more than once, and he goes on praying to his Father. Telling the truth to people did not guarantee that they would carry it well. Some leaders have learned this the hard way, and the text does not pretend otherwise. What it does show is that naming your sorrow to trusted companions is not beneath faithfulness. The Son of God did it.
Why hiding feels safer, and what it costs
If being known is good, why do so many leaders avoid it? Dr. Nicole Martin offers a careful answer. She does not think most leaders set out to be proud. She says “we refuse to acknowledge our insecurities,” and she describes the result: weaknesses get covered, and pride becomes the mask over them. In her words, “we try our best to cover it up, because we don’t want anybody to see.” The polished leader is often guarding something.
Martin is just as direct about the cost. “It is exhausting to be inauthentic,” she says. She also names a weight that leaders who walk people through loss know well. Speaking about what pastors carried during the funerals of 2020, she describes secondary grief and trauma, and says that “when they don’t have spaces of authenticity, then that grief feels like their grief.” The losses of others do not stay outside you when you have nowhere honest to put them down.
Do not wave this away. If you have spent a year walking families through hospitals and funerals and you feel hollow, that hollowness is the ordinary weight of carrying alone. It tells you something about your circumstances, and nothing about how much you love God.
There is a fair objection here, and it deserves room. Some leaders have been known, and it went badly. A confidence was shared, a board turned, a friendship broke. For those leaders, hiding is self-protection learned from real injury. This guide will not tell you that every person is safe or that openness is always rewarded. The point is narrower. Being burned by the wrong person is a reason to choose carefully. It is not a reason to choose no one.
Martin also admits that this kind of honesty has taken her time. Early in her leadership she worked hard at not seeming too emotional or too passionate. Now, she says, “I’m just now learning to just be me.” If someone carrying serious responsibility is still learning this, you are allowed to be a beginner too.
A practice for this week: one sentence, one person
This practice has three steps. Do them at your own pace. Stopping after the first step is still progress.
- Choose the person. Return to your map. You are looking for someone who is not under your authority, does not depend on you for their spiritual care, has kept a confidence before, and would not use what you tell them. That person may already be in your middle circle. Look also at people who have encouraged you from unexpected places. Martin describes a season when support did not come from those she expected, and she says, “I didn’t get it all the time from the places I wanted it.” The discipline she learned was to pray, “Lord, help me to receive it when it comes from people that maybe I hadn’t even expected it from.” If no one fits yet, write down one person you would like to know better in this way, and leave it there for now.
- Write the sentence. Draft one true sentence about how you are actually doing. Keep it short and current, not a story about a struggle that is safely in the past. Martin models how ordinary this can sound, describing a time she could say to a friend, “I’m in a season of life right now where I can’t make heads and tails of things.” Your sentence does not have to be dramatic. It has to be true.
- Make the first move. If saying it in person feels like too much, start smaller. Ask the person whether you could tell them something real sometime this week. Then follow through when they say yes.
Questions for reflection or conversation
Answer these on paper, or talk through whichever ones you choose. In a group, anyone may pass on any question without explanation.
- Looking at your three circles, what surprised you? What did not surprise you, even though you wish it had?
- Think of the people who come to you for help. What do you suspect they assume about how you are doing, and what have you done that might have taught them that?
- In Matthew 26, Jesus tells three friends how heavy his soul is, and they fall asleep. What do you notice in that scene, and what do you make of it?
- Has being honest cost you something in the past? How is that experience shaping who you let into the inner circle now?
- Whose losses have you carried this year? Where, if anywhere, have you set that grief down with another person?
- What would have to be true of someone for you to trust them with your real story? Does anyone you know already meet that description?
If you are gathering a group of leaders
Agree at the start that what is said in the room stays in the room, and say plainly that passing is always allowed. Leaders are used to being the ones who keep confidences. Many have not had the experience of someone keeping theirs.
Expect the conversation to drift toward leadership in general, since talking about the topic is easier than talking about yourself. Answering one question honestly yourself will usually do more than any instruction. When someone finally says something true, resist the urge to fix it or attach a verse to it. Thank them and let the silence be comfortable. Do not ask anyone to share their map. It belongs to them.
When the heaviness is more than loneliness
Sometimes isolation and exhaustion grow into something heavier. Martin calls depression and anxiety authentic conditions and names counseling, medication and prayer as part of how God brings help. Jude 3 Project affirms that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, which means a counselor or doctor can belong on your map alongside a friend. Neither replaces the other. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, today.
Something to carry
Go back to your map one last time and look at the inner circle, however full or empty it is. You do not have to fill it this week. You only have to write one name in pencil, or one name you hope to write someday, and one true sentence beside it.
Jesus did not carry Gethsemane in silence. He told his friends how heavy it was, even knowing they might not stay awake. You may decide to do the same.