Getting Reps Leading

In his book, Awaking from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke proposes the following building on Christopher Mole's work, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology.

Think about the words "walk" and "practice." If I ask you to walk, the instruction is clear. You know what action to take. If I ask you to practice, you might ask, practice what? The idea of practice always relates to another activity.

To practice well improves two things.

First, it improves the activity being practiced.

Second, practicing well improves one's ability to practice generally. And this meta-skill of effective practice is transferable.

For example, the professional cellist, who succeeded thanks to her ability to practice intelligently and with focus, finds herself well served by her ability to skillfully practice when she decides to change careers and needs to learn coding to enter a new field, software. Her ability to practice well is portable and comes with her into other contexts.

The same is true of leading.

If I ask you to lead, you might ask, lead what? Just like we cannot practice absent an activity, neither can we practice leading without an opportunity.

And like with practice, learning to lead well develops the transferable meta-skill of leading more generally.

This is good news.

It means, opportunities to lead can improve your leadership ability.

But, not all opportunities are created equally.

The opportunity to lead your son's camping trip is an opportunity to practice leading, however, it might only present itself once a year and waiting for that annual occasion means you get one opportunity to practice a year. This would be like trying to learn a language by dedicating one weekend a year to practice.

So, what's an efficient way to get reps in?

Leading a dance.

To lead on the dance floor you need to have sensitivity of your partner, awareness of yourself, clarity of your intention, and clear direct communication. I cannot imagine any sort of leader (whether that's a military general, a manager, or a father shepherding children) that is not more effective thanks to this collection of qualities.

I've never set out to develop leadership qualities in myself. And despite that, since learning to lead Salsa, I've noticed now and again moments in my life unfold differently than they would have prior to learning to dance. Moments where my sensitivity of another or situation met a gentle assertiveness from me that changed an interaction or circumstance.

This is no different than feeling the direction of movement of the woman I am dancing with and participating in her movement to lead her into the unfolding of what follows. (As I write this I'm realizing that leadership requires a tremendous amount of sensitivity coupled with the willingness and ability to take action. Without action there is no leadership, and without some level of sensitivity the action taken is without regard for the person(s) being led.)

And unlike leading an annual camping trip, quarterly company off-site, or even leading a woman on a first date once or twice a week, none of that compares to partner dancing which provides 10-14 opportunities per hour of dancing.

That's 10-14 opportunities an hour for things to go wrong and you to practice recovering. 10-14 opportunities for you to see if you communicated clearly (did she in fact turn to the right when you intended?), opportunities for you to get a feel for another person and learn how to lead them, this one individual, in such a way that your leadership is felt as an inviting invitation rather than a coercive command.

Without such a tight feedback loop developing a feel for leading is much less likely.

I assume most people don't care deeply about dancing but if you care about developing the dexterity to lead well, learning to lead in a partner dance might just be the most direct way to practice. And then you can take that leadership into whatever arena you'd most like to.