Episode
Wax On Wax Off: Why knowledge isn't enough to change how you lead under pressure
- Podcast
- The Buoyant Leader
- Published
- Jun 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 473
- Processing state
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Summary
In the original Karate Kid movie, Daniel spends what seems to be days of wasted time performing menial chores for Mr. Miyagi. Four days of waxing the car, sanding the floor, refinishing the fence, and painting the walls. The reveal comes when Daniel blows up and accuses Mr. Miyagi of taking advantage of him: “I’m being your goddam slave is what I’m being, man. For four days I’ve busting my ass and I haven’t learned a goddamn thing!” That’s when Mr. Miyagi shows him how he's been learning karate all along, and he’s now got powerful defenses against punches and kicks firmly embedded in his muscle memory. From that movie, my generation learned about putting in the reps. Being a buoyant leader — one who maintains a regulated nervous system when things get tough — requires three things. And the third one has everything to do with reps done right. Knowledge First, you have to know what to do. How to have the difficult conversation. How to think strategically. How to guide someone who’s struggling without disempowering them further. Fortunately, knowledge is easy to acquire. Four gazillion business and self-help books are published every week, with dozens of frameworks for everything, and they mostly work fine. But you’re not going to have a leadership breakthrough just from reading another leadership book. The Body Has to Be Ready You also need your nervous system to read safety rather than danger in the moment of action. When you’re triggered into fight or flight, what you know how to do becomes severely constrained by what your body thinks it needs to do in order to survive the next 30 seconds. The problem is, most of us are carrying a heavy load of unmetabolized stress all the time, which means we’re just a sideways glance or a critical Slack message away from flipping in…