Words are cheap. Leadership requires appropriate behavior modeling.
“Adults will ‘tell’ kids to eat their fruits & vegetables, and to prioritize hydration.
All while they drink alcohol excessivley behind the scenes & use ozempics to curate their faux image of health.
You think you can fool them, but you can’t.
‘Leadership by example’.”
-Ray Zingler on X
They don’t listen.
They watch.
They interact.
And then they imitate.
That’s how (actual) learning takes place.
But we think that just because we’ve sat them down in chairs for 8 hours a day for 100 years and use a memorization, regurgitate, and then forget approach, that learning best takes place by being told information by a proctor in a 4-walled room.
And then if your kid lacks compliance, they’ll recommend drugs for them to force compliance.
It’s fu*king insane.
I didn’t want to use the F word, but that was the lightest word I could come up with to describe it.
You can tell kids all day long about the value of health, eating right, hydrating, getting their rest.. all the good stuff.
But if you say that on Monday and you’re funneling them through the drive-thru 4 times a week, what do you think carries more weight? Your words on Monday? Or the genetically modified energy (“food” I guess you can call it) engineered to tickle their pleasure receptors that they are ingesting regularly?
“Prioritize hydration! Carry a water jug around with you!”
Do they see you doing that? Do they understand the value of it?
Maybe you don’t need as much as they do (though I can assure you, you need more than you think) lead them by example. Fill your jug up. Show them the way.
Fitness?
What fitness?
They watch their superiors regularly consume alcohol, and irregularly exercise, and then, like magic, pounds start shedding off? All while they know you haven’t worked for that result?
Do you think you can fool them?
Do you think they don’t know?
“Weight los..” you don’t even get the second ‘s’ of loss typed in on google and ads to get Ozempics less than 2 miles from your house pop up.
Is that the way?
Is that “leading them by example”?
Doing things the right way?
You tell them no shortcuts, but you take short cuts.
How do you think that impacts the premature brain, with a sponge for a prefrontal cortex?
It’s not just “telling” them to take the easy way out.
It’s etching the very notion onto their DNA.
If you’re going to talk about leadership…
You must LIVE it.
Everyday.
