The Leader Goes First

I tell y’all what: the only thing harder than doing this work is NOT doing it.

The Forge is the coach training program I’ve been in for two years, after an initial training year at Accomplishment Coaching. I filled out my feedback form for this past Forge year today, and it was as thoughtful and intentional as all things Forge usually are; nothing standard or boilerplate about it.

This question hit me: “If you are a yes to returning for another Forge year, what did you have to overcome to become a yes?”

The usual answers (money, time) leapt to mind, but the truest answer was “the energetic commitment.”

Because the thing is …the leader goes first.

(This is a phrase that I’ve heard so often in coaching that I don’t actually know who to attribute it to…if you do, let me know and I’ll edit them in.)

I’ve always had this vague conception of it as concerning “the good stuff”: being willing to speak into the space, holding the silence and breathing deep for the client, asking the powerful question, saying the vulnerable thing, being the first to jump in the whitewater raft or off the zipline platform, being the first to apologize or own their side of the street, being on time with assignments.

I can do those things. Not always gracefully and certainly not always perfectly, but with a right good will.

And…the fish breaks down from the head too. Meaning that the leader will also be the first into their breakdown.

Breakdown in coaching isn’t like…a mental health breakdown…it's a term we use for when your old way of being in the world stops working. Other coaching lineages might use other terms. I remember Martha Beck calling it “the dark wood of error”, but it’s all the same concept: the way you used to get results stops working, or doesn’t work as well, or you stop wanting those results. In short: things fall apart. Sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly.

The great news is that what follows breakdown is breakthrough…the sudden expansion of your self to have a new way of being in the world.

And in coaching we declare our breakthroughs before they happen. Not because we’re masochists, but because breakdowns are *going* to happen when we take on this kind of work. You cannot create something brand new with the same old ways of being. And quite often what it takes to create is letting go of something old and discovering something new within yourself.

My breakthroughs this year were Trust, in August, and Grace, in January.

And only now, in retrospect, can I actually see the thread.

Because my leaders were going first. This was the Forge where…all of sudden….everyone, and I mean everyone, started playing for the miracle. The content of those miracles was completely different but what it required? Whew, y’all, the COURAGE. The immense courage. The Trust. The Grace. The devotion, grace, connection, joy, peace…I could keep naming the breakthroughs I saw people generate, so so so many of them devoted to healing a family lineage and breaking old generational patterns.

Sometimes the last chapter changes the whole story in the most magnificent way.

See, the leader doesn’t go first just because it’s “best practice” or they “should”. They go first because they create the clearing for everyone else to follow. The leader clears the energetic trail. They blaze the path.

Adam and Bay went first. And *how*. They carried so much and held space for us with such immense love.

And then the senior leaders went. And then us LPs went next. And then our participants.

And now our Phoenixes are going. And there will be people in their lives that follow *their* trails because when we take on this work we begin to live like gems tossed in the lake, as ever expanding rings of light radiating out until we can’t see where the ripples end.

And that’s the final cosmic jest of “the leader goes first” isn’t it? Who is the leader, really? It shifts as the container shifts! And what remains is the dynamic where your breakthrough becomes mine, becomes yours, becomes mine again. A Mobius strip of miracles, with no real end and no real beginning, just the immense privilege of being the one to hold the energy for that moment.