Following My Way to Fitness

Apparently, I’m not done blogging about physical fitness.  (Why confine myself to areas of genuine expertise?)  I think you’ll find the connection to ethical leadership obvious, however…

For most of my life I have treated my body as a life support system for ideas and words.    The relationship has been at best cool, and at times hostile.  I am committed to making a change: I want physical action to become an end unto itself, and I want to enjoy moving.  In short, I seek – I intend, I plan – to become an athlete.   

I am certain that I can’t make this journey alone (I’ve tried before).  I need support, and more specifically, I need to be led.  Therefore, I am pleased to be following my friend Michael Gayle of MGayle Studios.  I am learning a lot, and my actions are different as a result.  One unexpected lesson: I am finding it much harder to be a follower than I had expected.  Perhaps as a consequence, while I strive to follow well, I am learning much about leadership.

My cognitive dissonance is deafening.  The health and fitness stuff is one thing – a huge thing – but it turns out that I’m just as conflicted about being led.   I may teach the idea that great leaders must also be willing and able to follow, but when it is my turn…I resist doing so.   I want to trust “my intuitions,” even though they are ultimately unreliable in this arena (read MalcolmGladwell’s Blink for a good account of why).  I want to be self-sufficient, which somehow becomes self-directing.  However, I’m also committed to doing things right, which means, in this case, doing them differently.  So, I take a deep breath, and accept the guidance and support that is being offered to me.

Gayle makes it easier to be a follower, because he is a talented leader.  In fact, I am heartened to observe that he exhibits the very qualities that we at the Hill Center talk about, to anyone who will listen.  He has clear vision, and an equally clear commitment to reality and to making sound, fact-based decisions.   He knows his stuff, for sure, as an accomplished and educated trainer, athlete, coach, and physical educator.    He’s creative (in, among other ways, overcoming my objections).  He also tells the truth, even when it is hard.    

Many people are talented technicians.  I think the deciding factor in my decision to follow Michael is not knowledge, but commitment and caring.   This guy really cares about his work, and more particularly, about my success.  The work becomes, in a very real sense, our task, and our accomplishments.  

Above all, this experience is reinforcing for me the degree to which leadership is an agreement.  As a follower, I am responsible and accountable for effort, and for providing Michael with the candid input he needs to exercise leadership judgment.  I cede that judgment to him, in turn, because I trust his abilities as well as his motives.  That’s the core of it – the sustained actions flow from there.

So it turns out that leadership, like fitness, begins with a strong core.

Back at it,

CAW