Health & Leadership

 TTTT: “My physical health doesn’t affect my ability to lead others.”

Truth: ‘Good leadership starts with leading yourself well and then letting that overflow into the lives of others.’  ...paraphrased from Steven Furtick

I once believed there was a dichotomy separating my leadership and my physical health.  I was reading leadership books and having lots of leadership conversations.  I served as a volunteer leading the children’s ministry at my church.  I was young.  I made lots of mistakes and I did a few things well. 

I knew my physical health was lacking, but I didn’t believe that it had any impact on my leadership.  I thought- ‘if it isn’t important to me, why should it be important to anyone else?’  As I have improved my health year over year, I have been shocked by how much my physical health is connected to every other component of health.   

It sounds crazy until you experience it for yourself, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gained new insights about a social interaction on mile 3 of a run.  Or how many times I’ve been doing cool down stretching and had an unprocessed trauma from several years prior surface to my mind.  Or how many times I’ve walked out of the gym and felt lighter, more so than the 3-pound workout that I just finished.

Fighting to finish a run when all I want to do is quit, strengthens my mental fortitude and emotional resiliency.  Being able to complete exercises that I couldn’t do before bolsters my confidence and prepares the neurological pathways for adapting and learning new things.  It has been SO rewarding to see the ways that improving my physical health has improved my mental, spiritual, and relational health!

In the present, my physical health is proof of all the ways I have grown and developed.  That’s pretty easy to see and accept, but the inverse is also true.  In the past, my weight was proof of all of the areas of my life that were broken and being neglected.  I’m dealing with the excess weight that I carried for years, but I’m also learning the lessons that I didn’t learn and dealing with the pains and sorrows that I hadn’t dealt with. 

My commitment to my physical health has required me to level up my discipline and make decisions with a long-term mindset.  These were skills that I didn’t have before AND they are skills that are essential to leadership.  It’s not that being overweight automatically made me a bad leader, but the reality is if you lack the skills to maintain your own physical health then you lack the skills to maintain the health of an organization.  That’s the truth that I needed to hear.

If a leader is significantly overweight, it’s an indication that there is a shortage of self-discipline and/or a shortage of self-care.  Either way, this will lead to a shortage of sustainability.  If the leader is out of balance, the organization will eventually suffer for it.

Now that I am physically healthy, I have a hard time respecting leaders who are clearly unhealthy.  Not because they’re fat, but because it’s evidence that their life is out of balance.  In the secular culture, you can possibly minimize the importance of self-discipline …depending on who’s in the room.  But as a Christian, the only way you can minimize the importance of self-discipline is to abandon scripture altogether.  You can’t get through Paul’s writings without being confronted by the theme of self-discipline. 

Again, I’ve been there.  I know there are many factors that contribute to a person becoming visibly and clearly unhealthy- relationship baggage, toxic work environments, insecurities, childhood trauma, lies from the world.  These are the things that make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, these are the things that are wreaking havoc on your relationship with food, and these are the things that are holding you back from being the leader that God has called you to be.  Turn the tide, put in the work, make the changes, develop a new lifestyle for yourself.  It’s worth it!

The better you lead yourself,

the better equipped you are
to lead others.  

 

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:11

“A man without self-control
    is like a city broken into and left without walls.” Proverbs 25:28

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, ²⁰ for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

“…let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” Hebrews 12:1
Yes, it is a metaphor, but it describes sin as the weight that is holding us back.  The metaphor extends to personal application- the excess weight that is holding you back is a by-product of what is broken inside of you.  “The race set before us” is referencing all the places where we serve and lead others.  Deal with the baggage SO THAT you can better run your race.

As always, please let me know if there is anything I can do to encourage you in your pursuit of health. 🤍

Here is a link to the original post explaining the goals and intentions of the TTTT campaign. 

Tell the Truth Tuesday