The Truth (About DEUCE)

The funny thing about our experience is that we think it’s the truth. Even your experience of your time in the gym is, at best, an interpretation of the truth. In layman’s terms, your truth is your limited, biased opinion about the truth.

Consider the experience of the new student, whose motivation to lose weight finally outweighed his insecurities about going into a gym to be subject to training that is a scary mystery. Walking into the gate feels like a threshold that marks a commitment (for the evening) to which there is no turning back. This small victory is difficult to celebrate because he can’t un-know that he’ll need to overcome this fear hundreds of more times with similar struggle to see any physical changes. To him, there’s a glimmer of hope that someone, a fellow student, a coach, anyone, will make this experience slightly less frightening.

Meanwhile, just as powerfully clear is the experience of another student who’s trained for several years now and feels at home in the gym. He crosses the threshold of the gate with the same routine confidence he expresses at work. Nuisances annoy him like having to warm up with newer athletes and getting sub-optimal rest during a strength element not realizing that it was the community that led him to this level of fitness to begin with. For a moment, the gym becomes the one place in his life where he dominates and he competes against then judges people who wouldn’t even assume there was a competition at all. He’s sticking it to Gary on the toes-to-bar and Gary is just grateful to move around a bit because it helps him crush life outside of the gym. Unbeknownst to him it’s a big world out there and his abilities don’t fill stadiums and sell Pay Per Views like his ego suggests.

At the same time, the coach watches the minutes tick off toward the start of class. The role of space holder has started. She knows the art of her job is to connect effectively, protect her energy from students who want to share, and stay sharp for the tightrope walk of maneuvering the next hour with style and grace that her colleagues are all attentive to and protective of. She has to teach, keep the room safe, and make it all look easy. Only she knows that coaching an hour of this training is more similar in effort to the training itself than nearly anyone would give credit. She’ll do it all with a smile on her face, because she loves it. It’s also work.

Considering these three arbitrary fictional experiences, which is the truth about DEUCE? Of course, they all are true. We’d be even closer to the truth if we aggregated even more perspectives, as well. Raise your awareness to the notion that when you finally think your experience is the truth that the irony is you’re more wrong, by definition, than you’ve ever been.

Why ought we consider more than our experience as the truth? The answer is two fold. Firstly, it’s simply a more accurate perspective and, secondarily, more perspective allows us to hold more space to lead and show more compassion.

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach