Have you ever stepped back and asked yourself, “who do I need to be right now to make the best of this situation”? If you have, it was likely a moment of some importance to you.

In times of importance, you may consciously choose a version of yourself to handle matters more effectively.

Imagine if you consciously chose your Ways of Being and Acting regularly, rather than just on special occasions.

That’s what this article is about: the active choosing of specific Ways of Being and Acting to bring about target outcomes in your life, work and relationships.

This is an ebook-length article that takes about 20 minutes to read, an hour or so to dig into and a lifetime to implement.

In it, we discuss:

• Why choosing Ways of Being is important
• What are Ways of Being
• A model that groups ways of being into different aspects of your life
• A comprehensive list of Ways and their shadow pairings
• An implementation framework for the three most common scenarios
• A personal worksheet to get you started
• Resources to learn more

If you’re interested in this topic, you’ll find everything you need to get going. I hope you’ll invest some time in heading down a path that has fundamentally changed my life.

Why Choosing Ways Of Being Is Important?

The short answer for Why Choose Your Ways Vs Reacting is because our instinctual reactions are the expression of our most primitive and least self-aware impulses.

Reactions are driven by our ego, emotions, and protective instincts. Worse yet, we often invent negative stories in the moment to explain what’s happening.

These reactions are frequently self-destructive, inappropriate, damaging to relationships and reputations, costly and sometimes outright dangerous.

In stable conditions, many of us already choose our Ways of Being. These are the skills we developed to get along, succeed and function in daily life. Unfortunately, we often choose our Ways just enough to meet our day-to-day needs.

Reactions happen when situations shift outside our norms and comfort zones. They occur when we are coping with stress, physically threatened or when we make up stories that feel like a threat to our ego.

When the perceived threat exceeds our emotional capacity, we react. Then we get to clean up whatever mess we caused afterward.

Choosing our Ways is about expanding the range of situations we can deal with consciously without reacting.

The greater the risk and the challenges we take on in our lives and careers, the greater the need for these practices. Conversely, the more competently we handle ourselves in high-stress, high-risk situations, the more likely we are to take on greater challenges.

In the end, it’s not how you act when things are easy that defines you; it’s who you choose to be in the storm.

This is why cultivating a library of powerful Ways of Being isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential to becoming the kind of person who rises to the moment.

The Act Of Choosing Versus Reacting

At the root of this conversation is training yourself to pause long enough to choose an appropriate response, rather than simply reacting instinctively in the moment. This pausing practice opens up a world of opportunity for generating purposeful outcomes in all aspects of your life.

Each act of choosing provides an opening to select a Way of Being appropriate to the situation. The pause creates an opportunity to be purposeful and constructive.

What Are Ways Of Being And Acting?

Ways of Being and Acting are connected like two sides of the same coin. Your Ways of Being reflect what’s going on for you internally (your mood, attention and presence). These ways of being give rise to your Ways of Acting. This is how you respond – what you think, say and do. For readability’s sake, I’m collapsing Ways of Being and Ways of Acting down into “Ways of Being” or “Ways” for short.

In every moment, you have the option to either react instinctively, using your unconscious patterns of behaviour, or you can actively choose who you need to be, to serve a higher purpose.

Ways of Being Are Cumulative

Let’s look at Being Kind as an example.

There are hundreds of different behaviours you can use to express kindness. No individual act of kindness constitutes being a kind person. However, a regular pattern of kind behaviours becomes a practised Way of Being Kind.

We all have Ways of Being that people use to describe us. She is kind, he is honest, she is untrustworthy, etc. One incident does not represent a pattern. It’s the frequency and consistency of our behaviours that earn us our labels and results. No one is a particular Way all the time. We do, however, exhibit some Ways with great regularity, and these patterns of behaviour are cumulatively responsible for our results and who people believe us to be (our reputation).

Getting Started With Ways Of Being

Many years ago, my business coach helped me connect with my core values and purpose in life and work. We focused on uncovering who I needed to be, to live into my values in ways that supported my purpose.

I’ve spent years learning to express those values by choosing who I diligently show up as. As I started to understand and adopt the practices, I wondered, “how could I apply the same principles to business development?”

This inquiry has shaped my life and career for decades.

Deer-In-The-Headlights Stares

After so many years of study and practice, I’ve become a fan of Ways of Being. However, when I mention the topic outside the coaching community, I often receive blank stares from people. This deer-in-the-headlights response reinforces my desire to shed more light on the Ways conversation. In particular, I want to highlight how it applies to marketing leadership and business development. To this end, I wrote a book called Being Profitable for business owners who want to transform their approach to sales and marketing. I hope you’ll take a look.

Let’s Start With Some Context

In our culture, there is a general expectation that people will be certain ways. Not that we all do it, but there is a general expectation of baseline Ways, such as:

• Being polite and helpful
• Being respectful and tolerant
• Being honest and trustworthy

In your business, you tend to recruit people who fit your culture and express Ways suited for particular job roles, for example:

• Being friendly and empathetic in a customer service role
• Being logical and innovative in a software development role
• Being bold and creative in a design role
• Being committed and forthcoming in a leadership role

You may not be consciously choosing your Ways yet, but you will have a set of given Ways that you value and live into as a matter of your upbringing, training and workplace culture.

The opportunity is to increase your effectiveness by actively choosing Ways of Being that support your core objectives. The more awareness, intentionality and consistency you can generate, the more effective you become.

The challenge for many is a lack of familiarity with Ways of Being. The tendency is to focus on what we need to do over who we need to be to accomplish our goals. Switching to a Be Do Have paradigm can be a game-changing experience if you can get over the mental hurdle.

Managing Ways Is An Ancient Practice

Choosing and practising Ways of Being is far from a new idea. It’s a practice thousands of years old. Unfortunately, the practice tends to get buried within discipline-specific conversations, such as philosophy, religion, ethics, performance coaching, behavioural psychology, and mindfulness.

How Does This Help You?

Learning to apply Ways of Being personally and in business represents a tremendous opportunity. Why? Because Ways of Being are free and completely within your control. There is no need for technology to practice them. They are fundamental to culture, productivity, relationships and brand development.

In simple terms, it works like this…You determine which ways are necessary to achieve a goal. You make living into those ways the expectation, the easiest to practice and the most rewarded option. The more you practice and make your target Ways your chosen expression, the easier it gets and the more progress you make.

Which Ways Are Vital For You?

Do you know? Have you explored your Ways of Being and their role in your life? While anyone will benefit from actively choosing their ways, people on some sort of mission will benefit most from the effort. What are you up to? What’s so important that you’re willing to examine and choose your ways of being to accomplish it?

• Are you an inventor or innovator bringing something important into existence?
• Are you founding or leading an organisation?
• Are you in a sales role where who you are Being generates your income?

Who do you need to be to generate target outcomes or to inspire and empower others to greatness?

A good starting point is to assess your typical Ways of Being. Are your ways consistent and aligned with your purpose, or do you find yourself reacting and coping with daily challenges?
If you want to be more mindful about your Ways of Being and consistent with your actions, which ways would you elect to focus on?

Ways Of BEING Model

As we expanded our list of Ways, we found it increasingly difficult to identify the most situationally appropriate Ways to focus on. Fortunately, the Ways naturally group into core focus areas. Our evolving model emerged from these natural patterns.

• At The Centre is your existential assessment of possibility and agency. In simple terms, this is what you believe to be possible for yourself, combined with how much control you believe you have to create the life you want.
• The Ways In The Inner Ring reflect aspects of your core presenting Ways of Being.
• The Ways in Your Outer Ring reflect how you approach different aspects of your life and work.

Each group of Ways contains several pairs of opposites. Each pairing reflects a gradient between a generative and what could be considered a less constructive or Shadow Way of Being.

It is essential to recognise that Shadow Ways are not inherently bad. Some can be situationally appropriate in a protective or combative context. What matters is your awareness and that you are actively choosing your Ways of Being.

It is often easier to identify your less desirable Shadow Ways to help highlight their opposites.

Once you select a target Way, you contemplate what that way would look like in practice. How would you live into that Way of Being? Consider asking Google or ChatGPT what it would look like if you were to adopt that Way of Being.

Consider the difference between your intention and action. If you were to practice that Way, how might it change your experience and outcomes? How might it change people’s experience of you? How might it impact your productivity, your team or your clients’ experience of you?

Make an action plan for how you will live into that Way, then try it on for a while to see how it feels. Get some feedback and make adjustments until you develop familiarity and a workable relationship with the Way in question. A coach can be instrumental in easing your learning curve.

Let’s Explore The Ways Of Being List

At the core of our model is your Existential Assessment of Possibility and Agency, which is our deeply rooted underlying belief about what is possible for ourselves. It is a vital conversation that shapes who we are, but it is beyond the scope of this article. If you want to learn more about existential beliefs, I am referring to Martin Heidegger’s Moods as described in his book BEING and Time. The book “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman is also relevant here.

The core work is the highest leverage area of focus for an individual. In my experience, it is the access point to transformational shifts in what you believe to be possible and who you show up as in the world. It serves as a launch pad for personal development and, by extension, business development. I’ll be writing a separate post on these core limiting beliefs soon.

Congratulations, you’ve reached the implementation stage of this article.

How Does This Work In Practice?

In this section, we’ll dig into the three implementation situations you’re most likely to face, to put theory into practice.

The Three Situations

Most of the situations we find ourselves in can be divided into three scenarios.

• Choosing Ways In-The-Moment
• Choosing Ways Of Being Strategically
• Choosing Ways Of Being In Organisational Development

Ways In the Moment

These moments are just like they sound.  They are the little, but important choices you make all day, every day.

The Strategic Use Of Ways

These are about the bigger, more course-setting choices that define your life’s direction. i.e., do I want to start a business, move to a new city or take that job?

Ways In Organisational Development

These are about your leadership practices, where you engage people in possibility conversations that state intention, invite input, lead to understanding, agreed-upon actions, and the development of processes and systems.

Before we get into the three scenarios, let’s discuss the core mindfulness practice.

The Core Mindfulness Practice

Ways of Being are rooted in mindfulness practice. There is one core mechanism at the heart of it all. Let’s call it Purposeful Choosing. It’s a six-step process you work through in your head.

Awareness → Pause → Purpose → Visualize → Practice → Review

1. Awareness is the first crucial step.

Self-awareness is a more accurate description. It’s about paying attention to bodily sensations and the emotional cues that precede reactions.

2. Pause is when you recognise the early onset of a reaction and hit the pause button before it occurs.

3. Purpose – is a conversation you have with yourself during your reflective pause. It’s where you ask yourself questions to clarify your purpose to help you decide how to Respond in a way that serves your best interests.

4. Visualise – is where you imagine yourself successfully responding and Being the most effective version of yourself.

5. Practice – This is you putting your plan into action. Ideally, you embody your chosen Ways of Being and Act in accordance with your values and objectives.

6. Review – It’s where you evaluate how well you went through this process. What did you do well, and what will you do differently next time? This is your continuous improvement loop.

That’s it, the not-so-secret sauce. It’s not hard to understand. The challenge is overcoming your resistance to the practice, paying attention to the cues, and developing mastery over the sequence.

A Challenging Practice To Adopt

For the longest time, I kept catching myself long after my reactions had occurred. I would beat myself up for unconsciously defaulting to my destructive patterns and get frustrated. Eventually, I became aware enough of my precursor sensations to pause.

Once I could pause reliably, the next challenge was overcoming the awkward and uncomfortable feelings I experienced during the pauses. Then I was clumsy and slow in deciding how to respond. To top it off, I was unskillful in my communication practices too.

I confess I found these steps difficult to master. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn. However, I can attest that the benefits are well worth the time and effort.

The good news is that it gets easier. If you persist, it will eventually feel completely natural.

Let’s break down what this looks like in practice.

Choosing Ways In-The-Moment

The in-the-moment practice involves inserting silent reflective pauses into conversations.

The trigger to pause involves training yourself to recognise the importance of a moment.

How you recognise such a moment starts with the bodily sensations. It’s an anxious tension of some nature. This is the warning that an emotion is coming. The emotion could be anything (anticipation, impatience, fear, anger). 

Once the emotion sets in, you’re heading towards a visible or verbal reaction or worse, a blow-up or breakdown.

Situations are diverse, and so are our emotions and unhelpful reactions.

You might react by rolling your eyes, being sarcastic, name-calling, correcting, diagnosing, criticising, moralising, ordering, reassuring, avoiding or any of the typical communication roadblocks.

If you’re not aware of your reactions, ask your family to describe your patterns. They’ll give you a list. 

This whole process happens very quickly, which is why it is necessary to recognise your early warning signals. They give you a moment to respond before you react.

Once you learn to catch yourself in the moment, replace the reaction with a pause.

During this pause:

• Take a breath
• Calm yourself
• Assess the cause

Ask yourself:

• What is triggering this feeling? 
• What am I resisting?
• What’s the story I’m making up?
• What is this reaction really about?

Once you connect with the source, start assessing how best to respond.

Ask yourself:

• What value do I place on this relationship?
• What’s the opportunity I could choose to live into?
• Who do I need to be to realize this opportunity?
• How might I actively listen more in this conversation?
• What’s the most thoughtful question I could ask?

When you’re ready, respond thoughtfully and purposefully.

This May Seem Impossible

How could you do all this thinking in a short pause?

You’d be surprised how fast you can think when you want to. With practice, all this can happen very quickly. Your pause might feel like an eternity to you, but it’s not.

It also gets faster because the root causes and your stories are highly repetitive. Once you know your patterns, you can skip the why questions and plan your responses quicker. 

Sometimes, if you are really caught off guard and unsettled, the pause might involve a 10-minute walk or cooling-off period. In big upsets, it could take days or weeks to respond in a fully conscious and powerful way. My longest pause required a few months of deep reflection and consideration.

In these situations, you explain that you need time to process. You request patience and let the other person know you’ll get back to them.

Take the requisite pause. Once you’re composed and prepared, respond with clear intent.

Yes, the other person must wait. But you owe it to yourself to pause long enough to make a wise choice about how best to respond.

Many find pausing uncomfortable. They feel the need to react and fill the silence. Don’t do it. Take your time.

What If The Situation Is Urgent?

What if the situation is life and death? Do you still pause?

Yes! You definitely pause before leaping into action. Take a moment to assess the situation, evaluate risks and priorities, and then take decisive action.

A momentary pause to scan and plan can make a world of difference in any situation.

This is what choosing Ways in the moment looks like.

Choosing Ways Of Being Strategically

This practice is more about addressing situations and achieving long-term goals than managing yourself in one specific moment. 

Choosing Ways Strategically is applicable when you’re taking on something big and important, say you’re starting a new business or making a large purchase decision. You may feel a strong desire to leap into action and make it happen, now!

There’s still a moment of recognition where you realise you’re caught up in your enthusiasm and are Being Impatient.

Given the risks involved, impatience can lead to impulsive and poorly considered investments. Being patient, focused and disciplined might serve you better, but you have to actively choose these ways and determine how to live into them long enough to achieve target outcomes.

Rather than learning to recognise emotion, you’re learning to recognise workability and alignment.

A better word for Pause in this context is Strategic Reflection.

Strategic Reflection is about increasing your awareness and grounding yourself in purpose by considering:

• Who am I Being right now?
• Am I being impatient, reckless or avoidant?
• Am I reacting or being strategic?
• Is this the best use of resources, considering my other needs?
• Do I understand my needs in detail?
• What risks do I need to manage?
• Do I understand the long-term implications of this decision?
• Should I be consulting with my partner, advisor or coach first?
• What does success look like, and how will I measure it?
• Who do I need to be, and what do I need to do to make an effective choice?

As with choosing in the moment, the point is to get you to pause and take the requisite time to make a thoughtful choice in the matter.

No, this is not analysis paralysis.

These questions do not need to create costly delays. The point is to get into the habit of asking yourself what level of consideration is appropriate given the importance, risks and long-term considerations.

Next, Visualise how you will feel, think, communicate and act to move this matter forward?

Who do you need to show up as?

What would you feel, think, say and do if you were committed to moving forward?

Once you see the pattern, you embody what you visualised and make it happen.

The last step is to Reflect on your daily practice.

How did it go? What went well? Where did you struggle? How will you improve your practice tomorrow?

Let’s Look At An Example: Being Intentional

Step 1: Clarify My Purpose

What specifically do I seek to accomplish?
What are the risks I need to manage?
What constraints do I need to work within?

Step 2: Declare The Way

I am choosing to be Intentional.
Your declaration makes it real.
Share your intent with others and ask for help and feedback.

Step 3: Envision What The Way Looks Like

Ask yourself:

What does Being Intentional mean?

How would an intentional person prepare?

They might:

• Write down their objective and create a road map to get from here to there.
• Assemble a team and invite them to turn the road map into a plan.

What feelings, thoughts, communication and actions will you practice?

Ie. Someone being intentional prioritises what matters most, avoids autopilot behaviours, minimizes distractions, enrolls others in their objective, is confident, inspiring and collaborative.

Visualise yourself in action Being these ways.

Step 4: Prepare to Act

Choose concrete things to practice.

Example:

• I will take time before meetings to clarify my desired outcomes.
• I will pause before responding to ensure I speak with purpose, not reflex.
• I will avoid multitasking and be fully present.

Step 5: Reflect On Performance

Ask yourself:

• Was I focused on my intended outcomes?
• Did I act from purpose, or react on instinct or habitually?
• What distracted me? How can I minimise that next time?
• What will my practice look like tomorrow?

Continue to improve your practice by maintaining a consistent approach. It will keep you engaged and solution-focused.

You choose these ways and act accordingly because there is great risk involved, and it requires a bigger version of yourself to show up.

How Many Ways To Work On At Once?

Overcoming the learning curve can be challenging. But once you find the groove, you can adopt several new ways at once and practice many situationally appropriate ways each day.

My pattern is to work on 2-3 complementary ways for a few weeks or months at a time. I stick to these new ways until they are second nature or until I become aware of more attuned Ways of Being that will better serve my purpose.

Choosing Ways Of Being In Organisational Development

What if your strategic priorities relate to an organisation?  What if the matter requires special expertise or involves a multi-disciplinary team? What does living into Ways of Being look like if you’re leading a company?

The short answer is it involves dramatically increasing your clarity and commitment around your strategic Ways of Being.

You could say your personal Ways of Being need to shift into a generative leadership mode.

You need to Be A Leader who enrolls others in the possibility that inspired you.
You want to invite participation, be collaborative, actively listen to contributors and collectively make a plan to bring about the necessary changes to create the new experience and results you seek.

You do not need to know how or to micro-manage everyone’s actions. You need to be a champion for the change and work to bring it about with the help of your extended team of staff, partners, advisors, consultants and contractors.

Organisational Change Requires More From You Than Management

You must work to adopt a set of Ways that generate the results you want through others.

For starters, you might consider practising the following Ways of Being more rigorously.

Being A Leader – is about living into a possibility and owning the journey

Being Intentional – is about knowing why and taking purposeful action

Being Clear – is about helping others understand why something is important

Being Inspiring – is about helping others see the role they can play in the change

Being Embodying – is showing up as a demonstration of the possibility

Being Committed – is about workability and sustainable practices

Being Enrolling – is about inviting collaboration and partnerships

Being Collaborative – is about getting the right people engaged in your mission

Being Receptive – is about accepting challenging input from others

Being Sustaining – is about enabling your team to do what they need to do

Being Informed – is about assessing workability and taking corrective action

What’s interesting is how much your Ways of Being determine the outcome of your team’s efforts. 

If you define the goals and constraints, your team will determine how to create the processes, experience and outcomes you desire.

In Addition To Who You Are Being

Leading change will benefit from the application of LEAN practices, process design, customer journey or experience mapping, KPI definition, staff training and very likely some changes to your technology stack, communication and operating procedures. But these techniques are outside the scope of this article.

If you’d like to learn more, consider exploring the fields of Phenomenology (the study of human experiences) and Ontology (which examines the nature of existence and reality). For a comprehensive and in-depth exploration of Ways of Being, Ashkan Tashvir wrote a nearly 650-page book titled BEING The Source of Power. It is the most comprehensive book I have found on the topic. The book delves deeply into the topic, which is ideal if you want to explore and master the practice or to coach others.

Other places to learn about Ways of Being include the Being A Leader course. You can also read about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT),  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or Mindfulness. One of the most ancient examples is the Noble Eightfold Paths in Buddhism, Stoicism or Kaizen from Japan. Martial arts training, elite fitness and athletic programs are often based on a similar practice of consciously choosing rather than sliding into unconscious patterns. There are so many resources available; you just need to find something you connect with that gets you over the mental hurdle and into a mindfulness practice.

Even Steven Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People can be viewed from the perspective of Ways of Being and Acting. For example, if you’ve internalised his second habit of “Starting with the end in mind” and made it part of who you are, it becomes part of your natural way of thinking and acting. You could call it “Being Intentional”. I realise a level of abstraction is required, but consider looking at a familiar book through a new lens. How might you turn an effective habit into a powerful Way of Being?