The Resilient Rabbi: Self-Leadership in Challenging Times 

As rabbis our ability to remain resourceful, adaptable, and balanced in the face of emotional stressors is key to our career success and our personal wellbeing. But we face unique challenges, including social isolation, regular exposure to deep grief and anger, the ongoing anxiety, uncertainty, and burnout in our institutions, and decreasing kavod extended to us as clergy. While we cannot control how others behave, we can strengthen our capacity to respond to these stressors in more productive ways. Or as Victor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”   

Taught by Larry Dressler, rabbinic leadership coach and the author of Standing in the Fire, this course offers a set of principles and practices rooted in neuroscience, performance psychology, and wisdom traditions that help you spend less time in unproductive reactivity and more time leading in ways you and others experience as grounded, deliberate, and open. After taking the course you will: 

• Understand your own “threat response” and practice self-interventions that enable you to respond with dignity and integrity.
• Identify your personal “saboteurs” – patterns of thinking and acting that undermine your effectiveness and happiness. 
• Use somatic and mental practices to access the part of you that is calm, receptive, and able to adapt to whatever challenge is in front of you. 
• Learn how to recognize and exit the “drama triangle” which creates a self-perpetuating victim-persecutor-rescuer cycle.

All sessions meet on Thursdays.

Fee: $450
Generously supported by the Steven A. Fox Fund for Rabbinic Leadership and the Jim Joseph Foundation.

This course requires a minimum of 12 participants and will be limited to a maximum of 24.