ABOUT
Allen Weaver, PhD
Performance and wellness coach, speaker, and researcher. Palm Springs, California.
Allen holds a doctorate in human performance from Middle Tennessee State University, where his dissertation examined leadership self-efficacy and the predictors of leadership potential, and where he served on the research team that conducted a peer-reviewed validation study of an executive performance-training program. He spent fifteen years in senior learning and leadership development roles at Target, DIRECTV, and AT&T, and is a co-owner of Bourbon Fat, a culture and transformation creative agency.
HOW I LEARNED WHAT MATTERS
my first marathon ended in the medical tent.
It was Chicago. I was entering the dissertation phase of my doctorate, I hated running, and I went after training the way I went after most things in my late twenties: with everything I had. I read every plan I could download. My knees started hurting in a way they never had before. I kept going anyway, because that was what I thought preparing meant. Adrenaline carried me twenty miles. Cramps took the last few. I crossed somewhere north of five and a half hours, and the medics laid me on a cot and started a saline drip.
Five years and three marathons later, I finished Phoenix in five hours. I was older, and I had trained less for each race than the one before — by the fourth, two short runs in the week and a longer one on the weekend. I dropped more than thirty minutes by training less, with less intensity and more intention. The discipline never left. The goal never left. What left was the assumption that more of either was the answer.
That is not a running insight. It is the pattern I have watched for two decades in the leaders I coach: capable, credentialed people answering exhaustion with more, and wondering why it costs them their judgment.
every journey starts somewhere
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