The Productivity of Being
It has taken me a painful mid-life, second half of life journey to realise how many years I spent stealing from my ‘being’, to fund a life of ‘doing’. The debt collector finally caught up with me. I write from the (hopefully) wisdom of learning to pay myself back into the black.
It’s one thing to cross a bridge. It’s a whole other thing to build one, so that others can cross too. The same is true of ideas. How do we help people get from where they are, to a new understanding of something that is important; To build bridges from what we know (or think we know) to what we don’t yet know, or know as clearly as we could?
In teenage years I remember the first times that we were encouraged to do a class debate.
The ripe-chestnut of a topic was always, ‘Does the end justify the means?’ It seemed such a grand and philosophical title back then and in some ways it still is. Does what you end up doing, justify the process (being) used to achieve it? The call to elderhood and eldering in one’s midlife is a call to, among other things, recover or discover being as the very centre, ground and funder of all doing. I guess the modern recognition of mindfulness is a good example. It invites us to something important, very important, regarding being, but many us viewed it as optional, soft, niche, irrelevant to real working life or a little woo-woo, because we couldn’t see any substantial connection between the being and the doing, the point, the outcome, the results.
What I’ve had to learn (still learning) is to try and build a bridge between being and the results in our doing, so that we become even bolder, more confident, more resourceful, wiser, more tuned-in, more sustainable, more influential, as we give greater attention to our being. How do we build a bridge of wisdom from being, to more effective and meaningful doing?
Put another way, if I’d really understood when I was 21 how being was the greatest positive impact investment that I could make towards my doing in life, I would have made a greater priority and investment in my being and my becoming, earlier in my leadership journey.
Let’s start on one side of the bridge – the being. What is being? What does it mean to be? In essence our being is who we are becoming, who we truly are before the ego builds its shiny and impressive walls. This ‘being’ has been variously been called our ‘true self’, rather than our small self, or our ‘provisional self’ or ‘ego self’; Our heart – who we exist for, and our character – the pattern we are engraving[1] through our choices and behaviours.
On the other side of the bridge is the doing. What are we building, accumulating, and achieving in life?; Our impact and influence. It is no new thought that our doing manifests (makes visible) who we really are, our being. That, as Heraclitus once said, our character is our destiny. Our being shapes our lives more than almost anything, because whatever life throws at us, our responses, our choices, the behaviours we choose, will shape what happens next.
What are the paths on the bridge leading us to? How does being tangibly show itself in our doing? I’m sure there are a lot more impacts, but let me headline[2] 14 of them. The first 3 were highlighted by Simon Sinek in response to the question, ‘what are the most important attributes of leaders?[3]’
1. Courage: Churchill once said that the value of courage sits underneath everything. Without it nothing difficult happens within us or within the world. Courage means to draw from the well of your heart, your essence, to do what is not comfortable, to speak truth to power, to achieve against the push back of life’s multitude of pressures.
2. Integrity: Who am I when no one is looking? (‘No one’ could be your partner, your boss or your customers) Do my words and actions, my aspired and lived values, match? Are all of my strengths and vulnerabilities integrated, so that I can make all of me available to my activity? Do my words to others match my own example? Am I walking the talk? As someone once said, ‘you can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into’.
3. Communication: Seeking first to understand before seeking to be understood requires generous listening and listening well is an issue of heart more than skill. It needs us to want to go beyond our own ego noise to see you, to hear you, to leave you feeling seen and heard. And when I speak, is it to serve or be served?
4. Ethics: Ethics is not the same as the law. The law is the base line of protection for everyone. Ethics is about doing the right thing and we can judge the right thing by asking ourselves ‘if I was the one being impacted by my decisions, would I make this decision?” If I knew I was in Grenfell Tower when it caught fire, what cladding would I choose? If Elon Musk was HIV+ would he stop people who are HIV+ now getting their life saving medicine?
5. Trust: Am I worth trusting? (Trustworthy)
99.5% of the US economy (and everywhere else) is based on trust, says economic researcher Tim Hartford[4]. Trust is an issue of heart and character. Do I keep my promises, tell the truth, apologise when wrong and listen deeply? Stephen Covey once said, ‘Trust – or the lack of it – is at the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education and government[5]’. If you are in any doubt study the root cause of the financial crash in 2008.
6. Principle Centred Leadership (PCL): We all centre our leadership in something. It could be ambition, success, power, accumulation, or it could principles that are true and timeless and, like gravity, work in any time, place or situation. PCL is like a compass rather than a map. It places values and meaning at the centre of all leadership activity.
7. Influence: Leadership is about influence and the influence we seek is firstly about the ability to empathise and understand another person’s needs and agendas; To ‘Pull’ before we “Push’. Am I using my personal power to raise others up, or push them to conformity and heart-less compliance?
8. Contribution: Some would argue that the desire to contribute meaningfully to the world is a humans highest calling. Dr Ranjan Chatterjee calls it’ Status’[6]. You can be busy, work long hours and still contribute little to your own or others or organisations well-being. Contribution is an issue of the heart – for whom do I exist? What can I give to relationships or organisations to help them achieve their highest potential?
9. A larger story: How do we break out of the confining boxes or glass ceilings and constricting narratives we have created, to excavate whole new ways of thinking or being? How do we break through those barriers and ceilings within ourselves? We become as big as what we worship – what we get our worth from. As we grow and open up to greater perspectives within ourselves and within life, so we can offer more. Transcendence is vital for potential.
10. Potential: Potential is the manifestation of what lies within a person to bring their uniqueness to bear on the world. The acorn becomes the oak tree. The fulfilment of potential, from which everyone benefits, is realised by dedication to discern and nurture that truer, inner voice of who you are; to foster awakening in all dimensions of our humanity.
11. Transformation: Transformation of any kind involves letting go of what went before, grieving it, journeying through a loss of old identities and not-knowing, to a truer and more expansive place. Organisations and individuals only engage on a programme of transformation because they believe it will be better on the other side. All transformation, whether personal or organisational, requires a deep journey within, rather than a rearranging of a few things on the surface. Deep structures only surrender their grip when approached with kindness. The whole process relies on who we are, not how much money we throw at it.
12. People/Relationship Management: Anyone will tell you who their best and worst managers were and how their work flourished or suffered under each one. The saying is true, ‘you probably won’t remember what your colleagues/managers did, but you definitely won’t forget how they made you feel’. Everything from conflict resolution, to coaching, goal setting, to performance management reviews demonstrate the character of the manager far more than any qualification or title they have. Angry managers, conflict avoidant managers, shaming managers – all of the managers internal ‘stuff’ spills out on the people around them. Empathic managers who left you feeling seen, transform who you are at work and home.
13. Self-Sustainability: Every leader has a degree of narcissism[7]. Burn out, driveness, ego centredness, are all trying to heal some inner deficit or wound and unless we do the inner work on ourselves, will continue to damage and constrain our own lives. Learning to run at a pace that we can continue is the result of inner work.
14. Love: That word that everyone seems so fearful of using in the workplace! The opposite of love is fear. When we live from, lead from, a place of fear, we close down, tighten up, stop learning, stop innovating, stop sharing, stop an abundance mentality to life, in favour of a scarcity mentality.
Not investing in our being, our becoming, has an unbelievable impact on our doing in life. And the opposite is true. When we deepen the journey of being it will have a life changing impact on every dimension of our doing in life. Being and doing are a dynamic interaction. Being shapes doing, doing calls us into a deeper exploration of being.
….and so I’ve learned (am learning) that the journey of being and doing is like going backwards and forwards across the bridge we have now created; mutually supportive, mutually challenging and mutually enriching. At the end of the day it isn’t so much about either-or, either doing or being, neither balancing the tension between being or doing, as much as learning to live from a different place, a place where doing comes out ofand is moderated by our deepening journey of being.
If you want to explore this further, I provide elder-mentoring for individuals. If you want to explore this more in your teams or organisations, then let me highly recommend you contact jill@leaderbeing.com or rachael@leaderbeing.com at www.leaderbeing.com
Trevor Waldock Feb 2025
[1] The root of the word ‘character’ is to engrave. Every single choice and behaviour cuts a mark that identifies us to others.
[2] There’s a whole book in here somewhere!
[3] https://youtu.be/FxS5n_gP4PM?si=FICe0vB91ixRdsqi
[4] The Economics Of Trust Tim Harford 09.25.06 Tim Harford, a columnist for the Financial Times & author of a number of books including Undercover Economist (Abacus 2007)
[5] Principle Centred Leadership Stephen Covey Simon & Schuster 1992
[6] https://drchatterjee.com
[7] Read almost anything by the renowned Manfred Kets De Vries https://www.insead.edu/faculty/manfred-f-r-kets-de-vries