Our Way of Being shapes how we see the world, what it means to us and what we feel about our experience of it.
Your Way of Being contains your perceptions and attitudes, which are deep-seated and out of awareness, the drivers of your behaviour and communication. They are learned through the history of life experiences. It’s your response to how the world appears to you and how you access a deeper awareness of it. It shapes your worldview through the language you use, the emotions and moods you express, the body states you adopt and the relationships you experience as a result.
What you do and how you do it influences the choices you make and the way you interpret the resulting impact on you and the world. A Life Leader is looking to make sense of the meaning behind the words, the driver behind behaviours that get results that matter to you.
Getting at the drivers of meaningful engagement.
It’s your Way of Being that helps or hinders what you can achieve with your life and your leadership skills. Understanding what produces a Way of Being and how to adapt it helps you perform better and become your best self. Both have a significant role to play in your personal and professional development. The focus here is on the interrelationship and coherence between language, emotions/mood and your physiology.
LANGUAGE/CONVERSATION
Language consists of silent listening and speaking. It’s use is not just to describe reality, it creates stories in the mind that give meaning to what is observed or imagined, giving an intention to the resulting actions. Conversations you have with others can also have a powerful influence over what you decide to do and how you do it. Deep listening is vital because it’s present in all human interactions. Used effectively it can enhance your communications and relationships. Speaking is also key when used intentionally. Learning how to use basic Speech Acts, will expand what’s possible when working in partnership with others to deliver shared outcomes.
EMOTIONS/MOODS
You are always in a mood or emotional state of some kind. It predisposes you towards certain behaviours and not others. It shapes every conversation, intention and relationship, and also plays an important role in learning and productivity. Moods are feelings that dominate your mind, whilst emotions tend to come without warning and dissipate quite quickly. When you cannot let a thought go, its because it is driven by a mood state.
BODY/PHYSIOLOGY
It may not immediately be apparent that your body posture and energy level play a key role in the quality of your interactions and performance. You communicate more through your body than your words. Actors learn how to emote feelings and attitudes in the way they hold their body, use gestures, eye movements and rhythm in their voice tone and pace as they shift from one mood or emotion to another. Your body holds these memories so you can reproduce them at will. to
RELATIONSHIPS/ CONNECTIONS
Your Way of Being impacts on how others react to you. It can affect how others see you. For example, you may come across as someone who is warm, engaging and sincere or as aloof, devious and selfish. Your “being” is revealed in the way you converse and cooperate. Do you turn up as someone who is enthusiastic and a creative thinker, willing to collaborate to make things happen?
Working for deep, sustainable change
By focusing on a person’s Way of Being it is posssible to identify their enduring concerns and dissatisfactions, and the impact they have on authenticity, trustworthiness and performance. You have an innate capacity to sense and take care of what really matters to other people, their dignity, values, relatedness, care and resilience.
AUTHENTICITY
You are the producer, director, scriptwriter, and lead actor in your life story, the author of your actions and behaviours. Being authentic is being and acting consistently with who you hold yourself to be; for yourself and others. If you say and do things opposite to how you feel it will have a negative impact on your health and your relationships. When you fail to come across as “real” you lose people’s trust. You need to be yourself in every way or you will come across as insincere.
It simply means being honest, open, transparent and consistent when expressing yourself naturally and being comfortable in your own skin. It’s about having the confidence to not hold back in expressing your feelings and having no fear of failure or embarrassment. You are not comparing yourself to anyone else.
“Until you make your life your own, you’re walking around in borrowed clothes.” – Warren Bennis
CREDIBILITY
Personal credibility is the foundation of all trust. Are your intentions sincere and do you care about what you promise? Do you remain reliable and capable, even when mistakes are made? Your Way of Being needs to demonstrate respect, being prepared to listen, to clarify expetations and confront reality with genuine concernand straight talking.
These characteristics are also important when trust has to be restored or gets tested. For example, when facts and truth get distorted or information is withheld in order to cover up mistakes. Trust gets undermined by denial, blame, excuses, misunderstandings, over-promising and under-delivering. Trust is built when information and mistakes are shared and learned from because accountability is valued. Difficult issues have to be confronted with honesty and creativity.
ACCOUNTABILITY
This involves taking responsibility for the decisions, actions and outcomes that have been agreed upon with another person or contracted with an organisation. In other words, did you deliver what you promised? The problem here is that you can easily commit to taking action without fully understanding what you agreed to. Caremust be taken to listen and clarify what exactly was offered or requested and the criteria for agreeing on a satisfactory outcome.
Even as an employee or family member there are unwritten agreements about what you expect of each other to fulfill your responsibilities and make life flow as smoothly as possible for everyone. There are agreements on the consequences of failure and how to put this right.
BREAKDOWNS
There is no doubt that life can throw you off balance when the normal flow of expectations breaks down. It’s how you deal with uncertainty, confusion and emotional disruptions. You look for ways to tap into your innate ability to focus and think positively, find emotional resilience and get clarity on what really matters to you. This is you adjusting to new circumstances by taking responsibility for your life, not allowing life to lead you into unconscious choices and actions. Living in a VUCA World generates anxiety and fear of the unknown. It demands passion and perseverance to spotlight the detail and scan the bigger picture.
In our high-tech world of online communication and video conferencing, relationships become more casual and superficial. Breakdowns happen from the disconnection felt at a human level, concentration wains, feedback is ignored and attention spans are shortened. When you get distracted and conversations become superficial as you lose the thread.
ADAPTIVE LEARNING
Noticing how you notice new things is the way you make sense of your world and make new distinctions. This is how you learn to change your Way of Being by observing how your language, and emotions. moods and physiology determine the actions you can take and the results you then get. Your learning becomes adaptive when you can see the story and the interpretations you are making that aren’t getting you the result you want, and see what changes you can make to your Way of Being to make a difference. In a VUCA World, you have to react to novelty and adapt within shorter time spans. This demands more of your sensemaking than your analytical skills.
Going forward
Human Ontology is teaching us that we are essentially the product of our senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling) that are revealed through our thoughts in language, our emotions in moods and our body in behaviour. It’s your Way of Being that determines how authentic you appear to others. It’s your Way of Being, how you turn up to lead your life. It’s your life experiences that produce the metaphors you think with. Like “banging your head against a brick wall.” A feeling follows from a thought. To come across as authentic you have to “be” authentic. Similarly with leadership.
Making better use of your imagination, you can generate new insights and sudden realisations that will help shift you towards new ways of thinking and acting to get a better result.
Reference
CONNECT by Lyn Boyer. 2011 Leadership Options
INVISIBLE POWER by Ken Manning, Robin Charbit and Sandra Krot. 2015 Insight Principles
COACHING TO THE HUMAN SOUL – VOLS (1, 2 & 3) by Alan Sieler 2003 Newfield Australia
THE UNOPENED GIFT A Primer in Emotional Literacy by Dan Newby & Lucy Nunez. Self Published 2017
METAPHORS IN MIND: TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SYMBOLIC MODELLING by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins 2003 Developing Company
THE INNOVATOR’S WAY Essential Practices for Successful Innovation by Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham. MIT 2010
LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE by Chalmers Brothers & Vinay Kumar. New Possibilities Press 2015
BECOME by Sameer Dua. Harper 201
LEARNING TO LEARN & THE NAVIGATION OF MOODS by Gloria Flores. Pluralistic Networks Publishing 2016
