Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy: First Followers for our Personal Revolutions

This lil clip discusses how to form a movement in under three minutes. I first saw it three years ago and this bit has stayed with me ever since: "It's the first follower that transforms the lone nut into a leader."

Of course there's no such thing as a 'nut' in my mind - there's just someone doing something that others don't understand yet. One of the founding documents in the service-user/survivor movement, colloquially known as "The Fish Pamphlet", features a quote on the front cover that sums this point up better than I ever could:

"An individual having unusual difficulties in coping with his environment struggles and kicks up the dust, as it were. I have used the figure of a fish caught on a hook: his gyrations must look peculiar to other fish that don’t understand the circumstances; but his splashes are not his affliction, they are his effort to get rid of his affliction and as every fisherman knows these efforts may succeed." ~ Karl Menninger

So often the person we think is acting like a nut is actually responding to something that everyone else simply hasn't noticed yet or something they have learned to live around and accepted as 'just the way things are'. They are like the canaries in the mine, the ones who spot that something is amiss before the others do. It's like our inner activist has set up a protest against the things that grind us down. Imagine if we all had first followers for our personal revolutions too! I'm not talking people who come in and try to lead the way back to an old life, but people who make space for the dance we need to dance at that particular time and follow us in support of the new places we want to get to.

Here's to finding the courage we need to be our own first followers and allowing ourselves to dance our own dances! And here's to all the supportive people out there who have the courage to step out of the silent crowd and join us!

[Edit: added a few more tags]