Good Life Project - The Power of Following Before You Lead

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

I don’t like following, never have.Other peoples' rules and procedures and constraints and processes often don't sit quite right with me.I prefer to take my own path, follow my own rules.It’s why I was the “Lemonade Stand Kid” in my neighborhood—I wanted my own money, own responsibility. It's why I've been an entrepreneur the better part of my adult life. I enjoy figuring things out on my own, then leading rather than being led by others.But what I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older is there are very real, very important lessons to be learned from being led by others, before you step in to lead yourself.Maybe my biggest awakening to the power of following before you lead came when I was rock climbing with a few partners in Rocky Mountain National Park, and various other destinations in Colorado. As the relative newbie in our group, I spent the entire time following my guide's lead.During the entire weeklong climbing adventure, I never once led a pitch (a ropes length of the climb that was many rope's lengths high). Those days, however, taught me more about how to eventually lead than almost any other experience. And, my classroom came with a 20-mile view and life-and-death terms.That's what we're exploring in today's short and sweet Good Life Project Riff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, today I'm talking about the power of following before you lead. So there's this kind of thing that happens with a lot of people, probably me included. And that is I'm a bit of a rebel. I don't like to follow other people's rules. I don't like other people's systems. One of the reasons why I have had jobs, I have worked in traditional companies, I've worked in massive government bureaucracies and large law firms and technology companies. But for the most part, I have worked on my own. And that has been since I was a little kid, actually. I was the lemonade stand kid. I was the entrepreneurial landscaping kid. And I've had my own companies on and off for the vast majority of my life and built my own rules. And part of the reason for that is because I'm not an easy follower. That said, I have come to learn that for certain things in life, that there's a really important reason to follow before you choose to lead. And part of it is because when you're following,

you gain the experience of what it's like to be led. You understand the social dynamic that happens between you and the person or the organization that's seeking to lead you. You understand on a personal, a very visceral level, what's going right, what's not going right, what lands well with you and what makes you recoil or get angry, what triggers you and what lights you up in a good way. And this is really important psychology to know for that moment when you choose to lead. And that can be leading in business, leading in life, leading in your voice, leading in the work that you create,

whatever it is and however you define it. But there's another important reason that you may want to explore following before you lead. And that is because those who are leading very often have spent years developing the skills and abilities to do things that you cannot yet intelligently do. And rather than having to figure it all out by yourself, if you can actually follow them, at least for a little while, learn their path, learn their rules, learn their process, that

doesn't mean that you then continue through life breaking off and only doing what they've done. But if you understand, if you follow long enough to really understand in a deeply nuanced way, the rules of the game, the path that has been set before you, then you get to a place where you can start to really know how to improve on them. So kind of an interesting example here. For a solid chunk of my life, I was a rock climber, technical rock climbing. So out on big slabs, you know, I climbed in different parts of the country and learned in New York in a place called the Gunks.

If anyone's listening from the Gunks, big love to the Gunks. And have traveled around Utah and Colorado and different places. And a bunch of years back, I was out in Colorado. And I actually hired a guide. And I didn't know the mountains. I didn't know the range. And we went into Rocky Mountain National Park. And we were doing this astonishing climb where you go pretty high.

And when you climb, you climb in pairs. And when you climb in pairs, one person leads and the other person follows. And the thing is, the person who is leading has a profoundly different job than the person who's following. And somebody who's new to the following side of that can sometimes delude themselves into thinking that they're ready, that they're capable of leading long before it's possible. So the person who is leading has the job, not just of climbing, but as they go, they have a big rack of little pieces of equipment that are on them. And as they go, they have a big rack of little pieces of equipment that are on them. And as they go, they're not only looking for the best route, they're fumbling and feeling with their hands

to try and find, okay, where do I place my hands, my feet, my body in order so that I, you know, A, move up and B, don't fall. At the same time, there's a different process going on. They are responsible for placing what's called protection into the rock. So they have all these tiny little metal devices and cam systems and chocks and levers. And as they go, they're looking for cracks and crevices and little things, little places to place these pieces of protection. It's a complex problemving thing. If they place the wrong piece of the protection in the wrong spot, then when you fall, you fall, and that's it. If they place it right, then they click the rope through that. It serves as like a little pulley system, and you keep placing new pieces of protection higher and higher as you go, so that the longest you'll ever fall is twice the length of rope from the last piece of protection. Now, that can sometimes be big, but usually it's pretty short.

That saves your life as a leader, and it saves the life of the person who's following you. So this is really complicated to lead. Now, the person who's following kind of is holding the rope and taking up slack, and then when the person who's leading reaches a point, they fix themselves into the rock. And then the person who's following starts to climb up and the leader takes up the slack with the rope. Then the person who's following looks up. They see the chalk marks on the rock

where the leader has already gone. So if they choose, a lot of the route has been figured out for them. They look and they place their hands and their feet in the places where the chalk is already on the rock. They've also been watching the lead climber the whole time figure out, they can see where are they getting stymied?

Where are they flowing through? How are they moving their body to make it happen? So when they go, they're actually, they have a map, a route mapped out for them. And they have the benefit of having seen somebody else figure it out. They know where the rough spots are, and they know a lot of the markations to get through them, and they don't have that second massively complex job of placing protection along the way. pull out what's been placed and put it on their racks so you can keep reversing and sort of leapfrogging like this. Now, here's the thing. That second climber, right, the follower, sometimes feels like, huh, well, you know, like that wasn't so bad.

And what they don't realize is that the lead climber very often is capable of climbing something that is rated substantially harder than the person who's following because they have the job of figuring out the steps, the problems, the complexities, and keeping everybody else safe along the way. So if you have the opportunity to lead, you may at some point be like, well, I'm following all these things, you know, and I seem to be going up them just as fast, if not faster than the person who's leading. So I must be just as good as them, but you're not. And it's really important to actually take a moment and understand that you want to spend

a lot of time both following and looking at how the person who's leading you is doing what they're doing, deconstructing, and then talking to them. How are you choosing where to place your protection? How are you choosing what's right and what's not right? What happened to you in that one move when you slipped and fell? What happened when you just nailed it and you found out? What were you searching for with your hands and your feet? What were you thinking? Right? So we have this opportunity when we follow to actually not just follow rules, but ask questions. So we can follow the rules, but more importantly, learn the why behind the rules. Now, if all you do in your whole life is follow the rules, then yeah, following may not have a whole lot of benefit except for keeping you safe, right?

But pretty soon it's not going to be all that challenging. But if you take the opportunity to follow, not as this force thing where you're not the leader yet, but an opportunity to see the rules, to see the process, and then ask the why behind the decisions and the process and the rules and study and learn and grow, then it's an astonishingly powerful experience. So take your time and embrace the follow. Embrace the follow. Because when you embrace the follow and you learn not just the rules but the why behind the rules,

that is the thing that gives you the opportunity to then turn around and lead on a profoundly different level. And not just lead by following somebody else's rules, but on your own terms for life, but lead by creating your own new path and then bringing others along with you. Something to think about for those of you who consider yourselves rebels or those who are not containable by any other system and someone who will never, never, never, never follow. Reconsider. There's astonishing value in it if you go beyond just doing by rote and start asking why. I hope that was valuable to you. I will see you back here next week. maybe you want to share it around social media, or even be awesome if you head over to iTunes and

just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.