After leaving a big corporate gym where he worked as a personal trainer, André Miller started training clients out of a gym built for performance athletics, “a gigantic space that had an indoor football field.” “It had no windows,” he says. “It was all fluorescent lighting.” The place was “geared towards your supplements.” From inside it, he was telling his clients to go to the farmers market.

He had started going there himself. “If you really want good produce,” he says, “you got to get it direct.” He spent a couple of years “harping on people with that” before he saw the problem:

“I started realizing, I can’t just tell people to go to the farmers market. I have to be the farmers market. When I say you should be eating these greens, I have to be able to put those greens in that person’s hand right then and there if I’m going to help the person because a lot of times when you tell somebody to do something, they’ll come back and they’ll come with the guilt. ‘I didn’t do what you said I was going to do,’ and so I needed to cut through all of that.”

The client returns carrying an admission where the greens should have been. His answer was to close the distance between saying and having, and it grew into what he calls “this awakening”: that “the farm and the gym need to be one and the same.”

The awakening became a farm. By the time of this conversation he had two acres of his own, “producing a very large amount of food.” People change, he says, “on a person to person basis,” and he has built his work around it:

“I can put out something mass media, but it doesn’t have the same effect as if I can take one person, if I can walk them around my garden, me and them alone. I can have a much deeper impact.”

He tells of one such walk, with a lawyer from California: “It’s just me and him one on one walking around the garden talking about things.” The garden walk looks like the farmers market idea carried further: the advice arrives with the greens, and the person is standing among them.

Putting greens in someone’s hand works one person at a time. Even a ripple the size of a tidal wave, he says, “only washes one person away at a time,” and “you can really only pull one weed at a time.” He says all of this in a recorded conversation, to listeners who are not standing in his garden, and he still tells them things. The episode opens with him urging them to “start farming this whole place out as hard as we possibly can.” That is the mass-media kind of telling, the kind that by his own account does not have the same effect.

A field note is that kind too. It can pass along what he found; it cannot put anything in your hand. If you teach or coach, you may know the guilt he describes from one side, and if you have ever been told to do something and not done it, you may know it from the other. What he changed was not whether he told people things, but what came with the telling. Where in your own practice are you only telling, and what could come with it?

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “André Miller: Systema, farming, and philosophy,” published March 10, 2021.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.