Leadership Step by Step by Joshua Spodek

Author:Joshua Spodek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Management Association, AMACOM Division
Published: 2017-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

The Model

I love the sport of ultimate frisbee, one of my great passions when I played competitively. For those who don’t know, it’s an intense, active sport, as athletic and exhausting as soccer or rugby. My freshman year, my college team made it to Nationals to finish fifth in the nation. As a freshman, I didn’t contribute much, but the experience established my passion.

In college, we drove to tournaments in vans. After the last game each day, we would gather by the vans to change out of our cleats and sweaty uniforms, covered in dirt and often blood, exhausted, and hungry.

I would say, “Guys, we all want to shower, eat, and sleep. Instead of changing here, let’s get in the vans and change on the way to the hotel. Then we can shower, eat, and sleep earlier.”

No one ever followed. I couldn’t understand why. My logic made sense. Why were they not convinced?

My teammate K.J., once explained, “Josh, what you’re saying makes sense. But the way you say it makes me not want to do it.”

I was somehow influencing people to do the opposite of my goal. Convincing didn’t work.

Why was I trying to convince, anyway? If it didn’t work, why did I keep at it? I think my tendency to lead through logic and convincing came from growing up learning to contrast reason with emotion. I learned that reason was systematic, and so concluded that emotions were unsystematic and irrational, even weird. They were for artists to express, not people to get things done with. Why bother trying to understand them, anyway? It seemed like trying to predict a coin toss. To conceive of empathy, compassion, and self-awareness as useful or well-defined skills I could learn was alien. Let artists deal with emotions, I figured.

Despite presenting emotions as irrational, my culture also enshrined the pursuit of happiness—an emotion—among its highest values, with life and liberty. In surveys, people ranked happiness as what they wanted most. In what they wanted for their kids, parents ranked happiness first.

With this confused and contradictory picture of emotions, no wonder I avoided thinking about them in favor of logic and convincing. In fact, learning more about emotions made them make less sense. For example, I learned that the root of the word happiness is hap—the same root of, perhaps, happenstance and haphazard—meaning “luck or chance.” What does it mean for a culture’s highest goal to be based on luck? Why pursue something that changes by chance?

My culture also told me that love, that other most valued emotion, came when struck by Cupid or Eros—outside agents. Fate and destiny are other outside forces, sometimes personified, predetermining our futures. We implore muses to inspire us, more outside agents (and the origin of the word music). Inspiration generally implies divinity, another outside force. Enthusiasm, from theo, meaning “god” (as in theocracy), means “with a god in you,” again another independent agent. Cupid loved Psyche, another supernatural agent whose name, meaning “a supernatural soul,” came to name the field of psychology.

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