The Power of Being: Part Two
Being.
Often, when we think of “being”, we think of stillness. Being is seen as the opposite of doing. Where doing has an energy of productivity to it, being, doesn’t. In this paradigm of opposites, doing is about movement and accomplishment, being is about stillness and silence.
This paradigm isn’t wrong. And, there is another aspect to “being”; namely, the aspect of energy.
When I am facilitating leadership development workshops, one of the things I tell participants is that leadership is not about what you do, leadership us about how you be. This is often met with curiosity as folks try to understand what it means to be, in the context of leadership.
Being, is about the energy that you bring to a space. And the possibilities are endless.
You can be loud.
You can be quiet.
You can be supportive.
You can be stand-offish.
You can be curious.
You can be closed-off.
You can be observant.
You can be connected.
You can be insightful.
You can be grounded.
And the list goes on, and on, and on.
The thing is this; how you be influences and impacts the world around you. It influences your team. It infuses the space in which you find yourself. It sets the tone for the places in which you work, play and interact.
In other words, how you be is a matter of importance.
The challenge is this: odds are you’re not consciously choosing how you will be. Instead, your being-ness happens by default. And your default setting is rarely an impactful one.
Luckily, you can get conscious about it. You can decide how you will be, energetically, in any given moment of any given day. When you consider the impact you want to have, the outcome you want to achieve, the things you want to do, how do you need to be? What energy do you need to embody
Taking a moment to answer this question is a practice that can serve you far better than simply deciding what you need to do. In other words, when you create a plan of action for anything, giving some thought to the energy you’ll bring to that plan can make your sense of achievement more complete. Because the result will be achieved not only by what you did, but by how you showed up.
Bottom-line: Success isn’t just a function of what you do or accomplish. It’s also a function of how you show up in the world. Start giving thought to how you want to be; the results you achieve will be exponentially greater and more meaningful than what you experience by action alone.