Why aren’t there more Freds?
The Finding Fred podcast is a great place to learn more about Fred Rogers. Host Carvell Wallace does amazing work. But as a coach who helps leaders struggling with challenges, I wonder: Why aren’t there more Freds?
The ten episodes of the series are full of stories that show that Rogers really was the person you saw on television. Like the one about how Rogers, on a trip to Moscow, changed his schedule to visit a lonely young boy.
Or the one about how he personally built a relationship with a young girl facing extraordinarily risky brain surgery, flying to visit her after she fell into a coma and performing a puppet show just for her. He left his puppets for her so she wouldn’t be alone when she woke up.
These episodes are extraordinarily moving, cathartic even. Prepare for big body sobs.
And yet, even as I listened to these stories, I recognized something important. To be sure, we can stipulate that Rogers was uniquely gifted and both equipped and privileged to use those gifts in powerful ways.
At the same time, though, we also need to recognize that nothing that he did was all that out of the ordinary.
I know many pastors (Rogers himself was a Presbyterian minister) who do all these things on a daily basis. In fact, many pastors I’ve talked with have said the powerful stories Wallace tells—even the one with the girl in the coma—are actually on the less complex side of the pastoral spectrum.
What makes these stories stand out so much to us now is that we’ve become so distanced and disconnected from the type of care Rogers was providing that we’re dumbfounded when we actually encounter it.
Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I wonder if our reactions to Rogers follow a similar logic. The difference is that he wasn’t practicing some advanced type of caregiving. We’ve regressed.
Rogers seems magical because when it comes to giving and receiving care, so many of us have become muggles. Connection and care are our birthright, but we’ve created a world where these necessities are often impossible or professionalized to the point we assume they’re beyond our capabilities.
What if we could reclaim his magic as our own? What if we could see Rogers not as someone to marvel at but as someone we can actually become?
I see these questions as a frontier for leadership in these times. And I see coaching, especially coaching that asks leaders to do the radical self-inquiry they need to show up well, as a form of care that creates care for others.
Coaching offers a way of showing up for one another in the way Rogers did. I try to show up this way for my clients, in the hope that they will show up for the people they lead in that way, too.
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