Personal development: Balancing doing with being

Personal development can involve both what we do and how we understand ourselves. Here, I’m going to look at some of the interesting things that can happen when we give more attention to this ‘being self’.

There are many ways we can connect with the being self. Coaches often work with their clients explicitly to explore values, life purpose, personality type and so on. Underlying these approaches are some implicit ideas that, at first glance, are counter-intuitive to the idea that coaching is about working to achieve change.

The first of these is not striving. When we stop to consider who we are, we implicitly stop working on what we’re trying to achieve. Not striving, ceasing our struggle against reality, allows other things to surface.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman highlighted that deliberate thinking and problem-solving require mental effort, and that we often rely on shortcuts in our thinking. While these shortcuts can be useful, they can also lead us towards conclusions that aren't always accurate. Sometimes, therefore, continually trying to think our way towards a solution may leave us mentally tired without necessarily bringing greater clarity.

The second idea is acceptance. This is subtly different from not striving, and it is not the same thing as resignation. If not striving is about stepping off the futile hamster wheel of struggle, acceptance is about recognising the current reality that thereby comes into view.

Acceptance is taking stock of where you are, being open to all that is good and bad about the situation and how you feel about it for better or worse. Understanding your current relationship to a situation can make it easier to consider how you want to move forward.

Bringing the quality of acceptance involves a degree of curiosity. It may help you notice attitudes, assumptions or conflicting feelings that weren't immediately obvious. You may discover contradictions there: factors that are making you seek to change things but other factors that keep you attached to the status quo. Acceptance can help us consider what may be driving the desire to change.

This brings us to the third idea, which is to know yourself. This is as much about knowing where you’ve come from as where you’re going. We each have many parts to us which do not always add up to a coherent whole. Who we are is influenced by our family upbringing, cultural background, the community in which we grew up, the nation in which we live, our career choice, the friends we make, our political affiliations and so on.

The values, commitments and aspirations that we develop are an amalgam of all these influences. They are not always consistent with each other. Some values that we express we may not practise; others may not be known to us as values but are recognised in how we behave.

Spending time in coaching exploring values may, at first glance, seem like a deviation from the agenda of change. But it is central to understanding the being self. It sheds light on the motivation that has brought the doing self into coaching. It disengages the autopilot that is working towards a pre-defined outcome and often leads the client to reconceive the goal in quite fundamental ways.

Further, greater awareness of the influences on our thinking and greater clarity about our values may help us make more considered decisions in complex situations.

Finally, it’s really important to make space for nourishing activities. These are activities that have nothing to do with the task at hand. If we’re working hard towards an objective, the most difficult thing is to step away to have a break. But doing something different may actually be useful. Stepping away can sometimes give us a different perspective, and we may return to the task feeling fresher or with new ideas.

You might find it useful to think about activities that give you pleasure, such as going for a walk, watching telly or cooking a nice meal, and those that give you a sense of mastery or accomplishment, such as tidying up, keeping on top of your finances or fixing something. It’s as well to make your own list of what works for you so that you have it to hand before you sink into the blinkered focus of action orientation.

Personal development is much more than working towards a goal. It’s really valuable to have an objective. But the learning along the way may be as important as the destination. And sometimes, this learning takes us to a destination that is different to the one we set out to reach.