Leading in Weakness

Welcome! 

This space is for anyone who’s felt the pressure to be strong but knows what it’s like to struggle behind the scenes. Settle in; you’re among friends who get it.

Let’s be real: carrying the weight of leadership can leave you feeling worn out and alone. But maybe, just maybe, the places you feel weakest are where something good can finally break through.

Don’s been through it—health scares, addiction, and starting over when life fell apart. He’s not here to give easy answers, but to share what he’s learned about finding real strength in the middle of weakness.

This first episode is about facing your own weakness, letting go of the pressure to be perfect, finding hope in unexpected places, and simple ways to build real connection and clarity. You’ll hear about failure, faith, recovery, and what it looks like to start again.

01:08 A Ticking Time Bomb Finally Explodes  

05:25 A Lesson from 2 Corinthians

12:07 A Lesson from the Book of Psalms 

13:32 A Lesson from the Book of Proverbs

15:02 Practical Applications

05:40 “My weakness didn’t disqualify me. I was in a position for God’s strength.” —Don Wood   

09:37 “I just realized how far I had fallen. I had hit rock bottom. We never think that bad things will happen to us. When we go down the highway, it’s inconceivable that it’ll ever happen to us.” —Don Wood

10:10 “I was not a criminal, really, but I was a danger to myself and to other people.” —Don Wood

11:59 “In the years since, I’ve seen God do something incredible. He turned my brokenness into strength and my shame into a testimony.” —Don Wood

12:21 “Time went from a pit of addiction to a place of purpose in my life, not because of my willpower— it was God’s grace.” —Don Wood

13:41 “Leadership starts with trust. It’s not about your intelligence or strategy— it’s God’s wisdom.” —Don Wood  

14:18 “If you’re not humble, you’re going to stumble.” —Don Wood  

14:45 “God created you for a purpose, and he’s given you a couple of gifts to make sure that that purpose is lived out while you’re here. So the stakes are high for Him.” —Don Wood

16:42 “We weren’t made to be isolated. We need fellowship.” —Don Wood

17:50 “Your weakness does not disqualify you. It’s the doorway to God’s greatest strength in your life.” —Don Wood

Don Wood is the founder of Men’s Leadership, God’s Way, where he coaches executives and leaders to achieve clarity, confidence, and peace without sacrificing their health, faith, or family. Drawing from his own journey through adversity—including overcoming addiction, serious health challenges, and personal loss—Don inspires others to lead with conviction and purpose. His faith-based approach emphasizes transformation, resilience, and the power of vulnerability, helping men discover their unique gifts and live out their calling. Don is dedicated to equipping leaders to experience true success by trusting in God’s wisdom and strength.

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Welcome to Men’s Leadership, God’s Way. I’m your host, Don Wood. This is the place where men learn to lead with faith, clarity and conviction. Together, we’ll explore real stories and biblical principles to help you be a model of integrity in your work, family and everyday life. Let’s get started. 

Don Wood: Hi, guys. Welcome to Men’s Leadership God’s Way. I’m Don Wood. Now, if you’re listening today, you probably know what it feels like to carry the weight of leadership, maybe at work or at home. You might even have a ministry. You feel the pressure to provide, protect, to always have the answers. And yet we all know this, leadership can be lonely. People look to you for strength. But inside, you might feel weak, worn out, or even ashamed. I’ve been there. 

In this episode, I want to share my story, not because I have it all together, but because I’ve lived through seasons of failure, burnout, addiction and even physical collapse. And perhaps, you can find a little bit of your story within my own. And what I’ve discovered is this. The very place where I thought I was disqualified as a leader was where God met me. 

So today, I want to walk you through my journey with some scripture that became lifelines to me, and then give you some space to reflect on where God is calling you to lead differently. Now, I want to take you back a few years. I was running hard. I was pushing myself at work, saying yes to every responsibility, trying to be the strong one, the dependable one. And at the same time, I was ignoring the quiet warning signs, exhaustion, stress, and definitely a lack of peace and serenity in my life. And eventually, my body said, enough is enough. 

Over an 18 month stretch, I went through 11 surgeries. I started out with kidney stones, then I went to open heart surgery, a couple surgeries for septic shock, some heart attacks. I’ll never forget lying in that hospital bed after the surgery, there were tubes in my arms, machines were beeping, and I thought, this is what it’s come to. The leader who thought he could handle it all is now flat on his back, unable to move. It was humbling, terrifying. But most importantly, I had some clarity. Because at that moment, I realized that I never had control in the first place. God was the one sustaining me. 

Let me take you back to that moment where I was sitting at my desk, I was doing some work. And all of a sudden, I felt this pain down my right side. And within one minute, I was down on the floor screaming in agony, and I was rushed to the hospital. The surgeons decided to admit me, and they sedated and put me under. And the surgeons came in the next morning and said, you had kidney stones in your right kidney. But the irony is that you had a rock wall of kidney stones in your left kidney, so much so that it was barely functioning, and it’s going to take a series of surgeries to correct this problem. Well, in the middle of all those procedures, they discovered that my blood pressure was sky high, and they couldn’t control it, so they took a closer look. And before I knew it, I was in Boston the next morning having triple bypass open heart surgery. I never saw it coming. I often tell audiences that I’m the one gentleman that will tell you that I’m grateful for kidney stones because I had a ticking time bomb, and I never saw it coming because had I not had those surgeries where it exposed sky high blood pressure, I wouldn’t be speaking to you today. 

Now, what’s interesting about recovery from open heart surgery is that it’s either very seamless or people struggle. And I was one of those ones. It was a slog for me. They have you blow into this container and see if you can make this little plastic ball rise up and down, and I couldn’t do it. And they kept saying to me, Don,, you have to get serious about your recovery. And here I am, this athlete, and I wasn’t able to do it. And another memory I have is I couldn’t walk outside. I had to walk at the mall because I could only walk a certain distance before I had to sit down. I’m shuffling along, and I feel like this 95 year old man. And in my mind, I thought it was over with. I’m never going to recover. And then shortly after the open heart surgery, the kidney stones returned, and fluids backed up into my kidney and I went into septic shock. And when you’re in septic shock, bacteria races through your bloodstream and it attacks your organs, and it’s very lethal. Matter of fact, 40% of people that have sepsis never walk out of the hospital again. They die.

And so I had it twice. And within those two bouts with septic shock, I lost my kidney. And before I lost my kidney, they had driven a hole in my back with a tube hanging down with a bag, and they tried to restore my kidney that was failing as a result of being attacked by the sepsis bacteria. But after a couple months, they realized they weren’t able to save my kidney, so they took my kidney out, and the tube in the bag went away. And now, I’m able to start my road to recovery once again. And then I had a couple of heart attacks, and I thought to myself, I just want to get off this crazy merry go round. And it took about two years, and I finally got to the other side of it. And you know what? It’s when the book of 2 Corinthians 12:9 became real for me. It says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”. And for the first time, I realized that my weakness didn’t disqualify me. I was in a position for God’s strength. So I want you to just pause and ask yourself, as I’ve just shared this story with you, where are you in your life? Where do you feel weak right now? Could it be that God wants to show his strength in that very place? 

Now, my health collapse wasn’t my only breaking point. Years before that, I faced another battle that I never thought that I had, and it was a quieter one on the outside. But it was more destructive on the inside, and it was my struggle with alcohol. Now, I grew up in an alcoholic household where there was just chaos, broken promises and violence, and I was someone where I was such a nervous kid. By the time I was in third grade, I had developed ulcers, and I had to go down to the cafeteria in the middle of the afternoon to drink a pint of milk to treat my condition of altars. That’s what they did at that time. I remember looking at my 3rd grade picture and seeing bruises over my eye from my father hitting me. My mom and my sister were abused physically. My animals were beaten. 

I remember one year, I was having my first communion, and my father was drunk for the celebration. And when my mother and sister took my grandmother home, I was alone with my father, and the neighbor across the street had invited me over because they had a first communion gift for me. And when I came back home, my father thought that I took too long, so he stripped off all my clothes and whipped me with a belt. My mother came home and found me hiding up in the closet with welt marks all over my body. By the time I became a senior in high school, I completely checked out. I would step in my room and would just stare at my aquarium watching the fish all alone, and feeling like I was never going to be able to get out of this prison. But I promised myself that once I got out, I was going to have a completely different life. 

I went to college, and did well in college. And by the time I was a senior, I found out that my mother was now dying of cancer. And before my last semester, she had passed away, and my life had really started to spiral downward. The only way I could deal with the pain was to drink more alcohol, and just forget about the horrible situation where my mom had died. My mom had more friends my age than I did, and it just was devastating to me. What happened at that point where I finally, one day, just looked in the mirror and thought, you know what? Mom wouldn’t want this for me. She wouldn’t want me to move on with my life. So I decided that I was going to go out and do the very best I could with my business career, and that’s exactly what I did. I rose to the top of the sales rankings. I had achieved all kinds of awards, won trips, made great money, had great clothes, nice car, nice bank account. 

But you know what? To handle all the stress, cover the pain and push through life, I drank alcohol. It was my way of coping. And it came to a point where it was affecting my relationships, my career. And certainly, my own self respect, and I became a shadow of the man that God was calling me to be. And then came the moment of reckoning. For years, friends around me had said, Don, you’re going in the wrong direction. On one side, you’re very successful with your business life. But in your personal life, you’re about to crash. And one night, I got into some trouble, and it landed me in jail. And sitting there in that cell, I just realized how far I had fallen. I had hit rock bottom, and I never believed it would happen to me. It’s interesting, we never think that bad things will happen to us. We all buy automobile insurance in case we get into an accident. But you know what? When we go down the highway, it’s inconceivable that it’ll ever happen to us. Because when it does, we’re shocked. 

And so I was shocked as I was sitting in the jail cell, and I spent some time in there because they didn’t know what to do with me because I was not a criminal, really, but I was a danger to myself and to other people. And so before they decided to release me, I had spent some time in jail. I’ll never forget one day, this gentleman walked up to me and said, come over here. I want to have a conversation with you in my cell. And I went in, and his cell looked like an office. And he said, tell me about your story. And I said, well, my father was this way, and my life has been a disaster. My employers have been unfair to me, and my relationships never worked out, and poor me. And you know what he said to me? Don, you put yourself here. This is going to be an opportunity for God to use you for his purpose in your life because you weren’t created just to work hard to pay your lousy bills. You’re here to serve God, and God is more interested in your life than you are. 

What he did is he slid the Bible over to me, and he started reciting verses to me, and I was just absolutely blown away with what this guy was sharing with me. And he said, you know what I want you to do every single day? I want you to read something from this book, and then I want you to come back and tell me how it touched your heart. And so I did that. And after a couple of weeks of doing that on a daily basis, one day, this guy walked up to me, I was reading the Bible and said, will you read the subscription to me as well? Here, you can borrow the Bible. And he said, I can’t read. And before I knew it, I had three guys sitting around that couldn’t read, and I was reading scripture to them. And here I was at the bottom of my life, and it was the beginning of a whole new trajectory. It was the grace of God. And that moment didn’t end my life, it became the start of a new one. That was over 30 years ago. 

And in the years since, I’ve seen God do something incredible. He turned my brokenness into strength, and my shame into a testimony. It reminds me of Psalm 40:2 where it says, “He lifted me out of the pit, out of the mud and mire. He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand”. Time went from a pit of addiction to a place of purpose in my life, not because of my willpower. It was God’s grace.

***Hey, guys. You ever feel like you’re leading on the outside but running empty on the inside? Hi, I’m Don Wood, Founder of Men’s Leadership, God’s Way. I work one on one with executives and leaders who are ready to trade burnout, confusion and isolation for clarity, confidence and peace. My coaching is designed to help you to lead with conviction without sacrificing your health, faith or family. So if you’re ready to experience the transformation you’ve been searching for, visit mensleadershipgodsway.com, and let’s start your journey today.

So let me ask you, is there something in your life where you’re running to instead of running to God? It may not be alcohol. It could be work, an affair, pornography, food, gambling, success, or even approval. But what would it look like to let God lift you out of that pit? Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding”. See? Leadership starts with trust. It’s not about your intelligence or strategy. It’s God’s wisdom. And God says, my thoughts are higher than your thoughts, my ways are higher than your ways. Joshua 1:9 says, “Be strong and courageous. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go in your life”. 

Now, which one of these Scriptures speaks to you the most right now? Do you need to have more trust in your heart? Do you need to have humility? I always tell guys, if you’re not humble, you’re going to stumble. You need courage because it seems like all the odds are against you. What I encourage you to do is write it down, record your thoughts, and then sit in silence this week and ask Jesus some questions. Say, Jesus, what do you love about me? What’s so significant about my life? What purpose do you have for me? What gifts do I have, Lord? Because God created you for a purpose, and he’s given you a couple of gifts to make sure that that purpose is lived out while you’re here. So the stakes are high for him. And when you ask him those questions, scripture says, my sheep, hear my voice. He’ll be more than happy to give you the answers, so let’s take a moment and get practical. 

Grab a journal. And if you’re driving, just think through these for the time being. But when you get home, grab a journal and write these questions down. Where in my life am I trying to lead in my own strength? Is it with my family or career? Or am I trying self discipline through my rational mind? Or am I really reaching into my heart, because that’s where true change takes place. Another question you could ask is, what would it look like to surrender that area to God this week? And who in my circle of friends could hold me accountable to walk this change process out? This is where transformation happens. It’s not by listening to me, but it’s by letting God speak to you. 

Have you ever considered taking the time to pick up the phone and have an honest conversation with somebody where you could pour out your heart and be vulnerable very often? When I start a men’s group, I’ll say to the guys, it’s going to take a while for this group to get going. And here’s what I mean. When you go out and hang out with your friends, you come home and your wives or your girlfriends ask you, well, what did you guys talk about? The group is normally silent. And I’ll say that that’s why it’s going to take a while for this group to get going. But once it gets going, the guys never miss because they begin to share their thoughts, their fears, their anxieties, and even in their victories. And it’s amazing how strong the group becomes because we weren’t made to be isolated. We need fellowship, and that’s what this podcast is all about, that we can learn leadership God’s way. But we can encourage one another and give each other hope. Even in the coaching practice that I have for men, I work one on one with guys, and we discover what their purpose is, and the gifts that they have so that they can move forward and be decisive in their path in life, rather than just being influenced by the roar of the world. 

So guys, take some time in silence. When you first get up in the morning, read God’s word, pray, and develop a relationship with him. Because when you do, you’re going to begin to trust him, because you’re starting to know him. And when you know him, you’re going to certainly love him, and he will make a light for your path in life, and you will end the confusion, the discouragement, doubt and despair. 

Guys, I want to thank you for spending this time with me today. And if nothing else, I want you to remember this, your weakness does not disqualify you. It’s the doorway to God’s greatest strength in your life. I’ve lived through it. The surgeries, addiction and recovery, failure and redemption. And when you stop carrying it all alone, and when you let HIM lead through you, you’re gonna find the peace, the clarity, and the strength that you never knew existed in your heart. And if this episode encouraged you, I want you to share it with another guy who needs it. And next time, we’re going to dig into how Leadership God’s Way is radically different from the world’s definition of success. But until then, let’s keep leading God’s way. 

Hey guys, thanks for spending time with me today on Men’s Leadership, God’s Way. I hope this episode gave you encouragement and practical wisdom you can use right away. And if you would please take a quick moment to rate and review the show on Apple or Spotify, your support helps more men discover how to lead with awareness, courage and confidence. And if you’re ready to take the next step in your leadership journey, you can learn more about my coaching services and resources at mensleadershipgodsway.com. Until next time, demonstrate optimism and possibility wherever you go.