Live Well, Lead Well, Be Well: The Order Is the Point

The meeting request said cameras on. No exceptions.

I remember looking at the grid of faces on my screen, some of them clearly exhausted, a few of them propped up by whatever was left in the tank that week, and feeling a split open up inside me.

My job, as I understood it, was to take care of these people.

The job I was being handed was to make sure they performed. Open. Visible. Measured. Ranked.

I gave the team grace. I gave senior leadership results. And somewhere in between, I forgot to give myself anything at all.

That season is where I learned that “live well, lead well, be well” only works in that order. And that for a long time, I had been living it backwards.

What it looked like from the outside

This was during the pandemic, when I was leading in University Recreation and Wellness, and on paper I was leading the way I always said I wanted to.

I was checking in on the staff member who had gone quiet. I was offering flexibility when someone’s kid was home and the wifi kept dropping. I was trying to keep a remote team feeling like a team when all we had were little squares and spotty connections. I was reaching out to the people I could tell were struggling, the ones who would never say so in a meeting.

And it was working. I could feel it working. Student staff and full-time staff would tell me, in small ways, that it mattered. That they felt seen. That they could breathe a little.

So I could not understand why I was the one quietly coming apart.

The other meetings

The answer was in the other meetings.

The ones where the questions were not about how people were doing, but about whether we were staying open. Whether everyone’s camera was on. Which staff were being “perceived” as low performers, a phrase I still cannot say without flinching.

I was being asked to lead one way and live another, at the very same time. I was pouring grace and care and patience out to my team with one hand, and absorbing pressure and optics and judgment with the other. And only one of those was running on a full tank.

Care costs something. It is not free. Every check-in, every moment of grace, every time I held space for someone else’s hard week, I was spending something real. I just never stopped to ask where it was getting refilled.

It wasn’t. That was the whole problem.

Live well is the foundation, not the reward

For most of my career, I treated “live well” as something I would get to later.

Later, when the project was done. Later, when the semester slowed down. Later, when I had earned it. I had quietly organized my life around the belief that taking care of myself was a reward for working hard, and the work was never quite done enough to claim it.

But you cannot save wellbeing for the off-season. There is no off-season.

Living well is not the prize at the end of leading well. It is the ground you stand on while you do it. Your values, your rest, your boundaries, your family, your faith, the things that make you you when no one is watching the screen. That is the foundation. And when the foundation is thin, everything you build on top of it is thinner than it looks.

I looked fine on top. Underneath, I was running on fumes and willpower.

You cannot lead well from an empty tank

Here is what I came to understand, slowly and the hard way.

How I lead is downstream of how I live.

When I am rested and grounded, I lead with patience. I ask better questions. I assume good intent. I have room to absorb someone else’s bad day without it becoming my bad day too.

When I am empty, I lead from fear. I get reactive. I start managing optics instead of people. I start treating my own exhaustion as proof of my commitment, which is one of the most dangerous lies a leader can tell himself.

The version of me that was checking in on struggling staff and the version of me that was slowly cracking were not two different people. They were the same person, and the second one was paying for the first.

You cannot pour from a cup you never refill. You can do it for a while. You can do it through a crisis, through a pandemic, through a season that asks too much. But not forever. And not without cost.

Be well is not only personal

For a long time I thought “be well” was the soft part. The self-care part. The part you put on a slide.

I don’t think that anymore.

“Be well” is partly personal, yes. It is the sustainability that lets you stay in this work for the long haul instead of burning bright and burning out. But it is also a responsibility. As a leader, I help set the workload. I set the norms. I decide, in a hundred small ways, whether wellbeing is something my team is allowed to have or something they have to apologize for needing.

Cameras on, no exceptions, is a wellbeing decision, whether we call it that or not.

So is grace on a deadline. So is the meeting that could have been an email. So is whether “perceived low performer” is a label we hang on a tired human being, or a signal that something in the system is failing them.

A leader does not just live well and lead well for himself. He makes “be well” possible, or impossible, for everyone watching.

The order is the whole argument

Live well. Lead well. Be well.

It is six words, and I have been asked more than once why I don’t make it longer, more complete, more like a real philosophy.

The order is the philosophy.

You live well so that you can lead well, so that the people around you can be well. Get the order wrong, and the whole thing collapses. Lead first, live on the scraps, and hope wellbeing shows up eventually, and you end up exactly where I was. Caring for everyone, depleting yourself, and quietly wondering why something so aligned with your values was costing you so much.

I had the right values the whole time. I just had them in the wrong sequence.

What I’m still practicing

I would love to tell you I have this figured out. I don’t.

I still catch myself reaching for “later.” I still feel the old pull to prove my commitment by how empty I am willing to run. Self-awareness, I am learning, is not a one-time insight. It is a discipline. It is not self-indulgent to know what is happening inside you. It is the most basic requirement of leading anyone else.

But I know the order now. And when I feel the split start to open up, that gap between how I am being asked to lead and how I am actually living, I know what it means.

It means the foundation needs tending.

Live well. Then lead well. Then, and only then, watch how many more people around you get to be well too.