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How can you use fitness and exercise to propel your leadership development and be the best, most confident, and be your most flourishing you?

Fitness is an incredible tool for personal leadership development and fueling other areas of your life.

During my high-school years, I learned how to coach myself. I pivoted from playing soccer to falling in love with track and field. There is just something about running that I absolutely love, but it really did not come naturally or easily to me. I didn’t have the mentorship and coaching I needed, and I also had chronic leg pain and serious ongoing injuries I was dealing with.

With a need, (the desire to pursue running and improve), a lack of mentorship, and a daily obstacle of chronic leg pain, I learned to coach myself. I learned how to map out a week of workouts, how to design different running workouts, how to design alternative workouts that could mimic jumping and sprinting in a pool of all places, and I learned how to keep things fun and different. I’m no professional by any means, but I coached myself well enough to medal at state and run a couple years of division 1 track.

I continue to workout with the same mentality, but my focus is dramatically different. Now, my goal is to design and use workouts to be healthy, and to give myself a healthy challenge that deposits a little bit of confidence, energy, and leadership development into myself each day!

How do these things all tie together and how can you leverage a small commitment to fitness to propel yourself forward in other areas of your life?

3 CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FITNESS AND LEADERSHIP:

1. LEAD YOURSELF

How can you use fitness and exercise to propel your leadership development and be the best, most confident, and most flourishing you? When you work out, you have the opportunity to exercise your self leadership muscle.

Let’s look at the example of an interval workout. First, you have to get yourself to do start the workout in the first place. And that, to me, is just like you having to get yourself to try something new or put yourself out there of your next goal. You’re leading yourself by practicing taking the initiative to do something you know is going to be challenging! 

Once you get yourself to the workout, it’s a whole different ballgame of learning to lead yourself. I bet 99% of us have heard the little voice in our heads during a workout complaining, amplifying the discomfort we are experiencing, and making us want to quit.

Tying this into leadership: If you want to influence others, you need to start with influencing yourself. There’s no better place to exercise that kind of willpower than in fitness, and my personal favorite is in interval training.

Any goal you have worth going for is going to be challenging, and learning to push ourselves in a healthy way during exercise is a great place to start learning how to accept the challenges our goals will require us to overcome.

In others words, we all know that if we want to do hard things, we have to do hard things. We all know sometimes we need to do the things we don’t want to do, but we need to practice leading ourselves to do those undesirable tasks and trust it will pay off in the long run. 

2. DISCIPLINE OF REST

The second partnership between fitness and leadership development has to do with the discipline of rest. Just like how we can exercise leadership of self by listening to the voice that says “push yourself” in your running intervals, we can exercise a similar discipline when we remember we also need rest. 

Our Creator didn’t make us robots or machines. We need to rest to recoup and function at our best. If we don’t give ourselves permission to rest, we can see harmful effects in our bodies ranging from hormonal imbalance and chronic fatigue to muscle tears and plateaus in improvement.

Oftentimes, when we’re working out and challenging ourselves, it requires we swallow a little bit of pride to admit that we feel like we should rest for the day or do a very easy workout. The discipline to rest and kind of call it quits for a time being is really valuable as a leader. 

If you can hone in on your ability to know when to notice something and change direction, just imagine the opportunities you can have to help others change direction, rest, or put the brakes on something for a bit. Generally, this is really challenging for most of us, so to lend a helping hand in this way can encourage those around you to have the courage to slow down when they need to.

3. GROUNDING AND ROOTING IN REALITY

Lastly, fitness can teach us that, just like with our leadership, we never arrive at a certain point. We are never perfect and we never actually reach our fastest possible run time. Technically, we can always possibly get better. Similarly, we might be trying to lift a heavier weight one day, and we become painfully aware of our physical limitations when we can’t quite lift it. A slice of humble pie always has something to offer to our leadership development. A humble awareness of our limitations and shortcomings is really valuable, and when it comes to fitness, either you can do it or you can’t. We can’t fake a run time or an amount of weight lifted, and that’s a good thing! This is how fitness keeps us grounded in reality and humble in our weaknesses.

MY FAVORITE RUNNING WORKOUTS

Find a track and do five or six 200 meter repeat sprints. Sprint or run fast around half the track, and then walk the other half of the track and then do that 5 or six times.

Another one on a track is similar but with 100’s and you can build up to this. Start with just a mile (which is four laps) and build up to two miles. You sprint the straight part of the track (which is 100 meters) and then you walk the curve (which is also 100 meters).

Another fun running interval workout is a 3,2,1 workout and you’ll need a watch for this one: Run at a pretty good clip (but definitely not a sprint) for 3 minutes, jog or walk for 3 minutes; run at a fast pace for 2 minutes, jog or walk for 2 minutes; run at a fast pace for 1 minute and then jog or walk for 1 minute. and repeat that two or three times.

When you work out, you have the great opportunity to exercise your self-leadership muscle.

Just remember: You also need to scale things to where your starting point is, so please don’t just go from never running or working out to running a marathon. Pace yourself.  Also, when you work out and push yourself, listen to your intuition, and let it serve as a reminder that you also have limitations, and that’s the moment to rest. Rather hit the pause button, but not the stop!

If you try any of the workouts,  let me know and drop a comment!

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