In Health Education, there is a set of principles and methods called Community Organizing. This is where a community is helped to identify problems within a community, mobilize resources, and implement strategies for reaching the collectively-set goals. Now, often this process is similar to how a consultant works in a business: they come in, determine what the “problems” are, and drop that on your desk for you to figure out. You can imagine how helpful that is.
However, there’s a flipside version where a person acts not as an outside “other” but rather engages the community, asking questions and seeing what they identify as the “problem.” Often, this is not what it seems to be, and an outsider would not peg the problem as such. Further, this person engaging the community is a facilitator, helping people to help themselves with resources identification, and community representation. But more than that, the facilitator aims not to problem solve but to leverage strength. Often, when a community can identify what they are good at and aim to get even better, things that were “problems” organically work themselves out.
There is a lesson here. So often in our drive for more “health and fitness and function” we look at all the things we aren’t doing or aren’t doing well. There is some good in this (see my last post about the low hanging fruit). However, if you only go around inside your head looking for all the things you’re not good at, you’re not going to think you’re good at anything. Instead, why not look for the things you do well and look to maximize that?
A personal example: I am an exceptionally elastic human being. That is I have always been very, very good at jumping, sprinting (once I get going), and the like. I had a 39″ vertical leap in high school in spite being rather weak. After realizing I was “weak” I spent 12 years trying to become brute-strong and, though I am stronger, I am also less explosive than I once was. In an effort to turn a weakness into a strength, I diluted the strength. I’ll paraphrase a Charlie Francis quote:
You don’t plow a field with a Ferrari
Learn from my mistake! If you’re good at something, push that “thing” as far as you can go. If you’re good at not eating after 6pm and are reasonably lean, don’t worry about some dietician who says you “need” to eat 6 meals a day. If you’re an explosive athlete, keep pushing that instead of what some bald, goatee’d powerlifter thinks of your deadlift strength. Find your strength and focus on that rather than anything you may be “weak” in!
Skyler Tanner 