Don't skip leg day

adaptive leading in the mundane of every day

Seven(?) years ago, I took an adaptive leadership course. It asked for us to formulate a team. So I grabbed powerful women leaders from across the community. Public Health, Higher Ed, Non-profit, and K-12 education. We would gather at a Starbucks and work on a project that utilized the principles we learned. The entire premise summed up in a short post is this: you can’t skip leg day.

We are all leaders. Are you taking breath? Made the decision to get up and out of bed? Good on you, leader! Every choice we make is cumulative life leadership. We cannot outsource leadership to others or to AI. It is baked into your essence, into your purpose, into you.

What does it mean to be in the balcony of your life? It means the planning part. How do you plan for your day, week, month, year, 3-5 year plan? How do you set yourself up for success? What tools are you laying out the night before next to your favorite outfit? Balcony is about observing, assessing, and setting up the next steps.

Then, you run down the stairs to the dance floor and do the work. This is where you take actions that you planned to take. In both spaces, we can get caught. We can get caught thinking planning is the same as acting and wonder why we aren’t yielding the results we planned for…and it is simply because we convinced ourselves that thinking about the thing is the same as doing the thing. The reverse is true as well. We can get so busy in doing the actions that we lose sight of alignment and outcomes. Sure, I’m doing the thing, but to what end? Why?

As we continue to live this magical life, it is about the space between. When we are on the staircase, can we slow down and pause at the midpoint to monitor both? Can we see that if we prefer planning (oh, I love me a good plan!), we may over plan and not do the thing enough to actually make progress. If we prefer doing, we may not be in alignment with where we plotted out we wanted to go.

In addition, life throws in some mad screwballs that we never anticipated hitting us as we dab and floss. And they are constant. That is why adaptive leadership in our lives is vital to the quality of our lives. What is our motivation? Why are we doing this? Are we losing the plot of our own lives because we are fixated on the outcome, the action, or the screwball?

Oh, and we have to consider motivation as well. What motivates us to plan, do, act, assess, course correct, repeat? Have we planned for the days that just go to shit and there isn’t much we can do? Have we built in rest days? Are we hydrated? Have we planned for whimsy and joy in addition to rain and hail?

I don’t remember our project. I went to look for it and it is probably buried in one of my past google accounts. I do remember how we discussed who loves the balcony, who is a natural dancers, and what the purpose of the stairs really is. The principles matter, how we apply them matter, and at the end of the day? Leg day matters.