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Sure, it’s easy to train here or there, to remove stiffness and improve fitness. But what about your kokoro, your spirit? Through your training, you work hard to remove stiffness of that also. That is what we do, day in and day out. ” he said, his stern expression warming up a bit. “Now we’re getting somewhere. ” It was a difficult task. Later that evening, I reflected on this fateful conversation and wrote the following personal stand: • Destiny will favor me if I am prepared in mind, body, and spirit.

I guess my cheerful, somewhat cocky attitude (which I often mistook for confidence as a young man) didn’t impress him. So I took a moment and reflected more deeply. I thought about my upbringing, all the competitive sports I’d played, my education, even the long treks I took with my father in the Adirondacks. What did these experiences teach me to stand for? I wasn’t sure. A stand, I suspected, was your character speaking. So what was my character? I thought back to the schoolhouse of real learning I had attended over the last four years—the Seido Karate dojo—and realized my evolving worldview and ethos was most influenced by the warrior principles I was introduced to under Grandmaster Nakamura’s watchful eye.

When their results fall short of the model’s promise, these budding leaders lose faith and go looking for the next model. Servant leadership, situational leadership, visionary leadership, gung-ho leadership . . these are popular models, and they all treat leadership as a simple skill. But what if leadership is not a skill or a collection of behaviors? What if it’s a character? We wonder why things don’t work or continue to feel wrong when we spend so much time seeking the holy grail of leadership models instead of looking within, instead of building that character.