I am a human being, not a human doing. Don’t equate your self-worth with how well you do things in life. You aren’t what you do. If you are what you do, then when you don’t…you aren’t. – – Dr. Wayne Dyer
Are you a Doer or Be-er?
As someone who specializes in coaching people to achieve high performance results in all areas of their life you might think that I measure my results and my clients solely by their level of achievement.
In fact, that couldn’t be farther from the case. The truth is that many of my clients are already high achieving individuals who have simply lost their ability to accurately measure their own results. These folks are the doers. They may be good at building businesses, calculating their net incomes, estimating their engine’s horsepower and assessing the square footage of their first and second homes, but they always come up short.
You see the challenge with these measures are that they have no real end. You can always have more so where do you stop? At some point, stopping is even looked as some kind of failure as if you could not handle your own success.
That is why you rarely see successful people stop what they are doing and just enjoy their life. They become driven by the need to achieve or do more and they often end up very unhappy in the process. On the journey to “success” they have let their life slip out of balance and they forgot how to be.
These folks often complain to me that they don’t have real friends, that they have let their relationships suffer and that they often feel like a fraud. For them, it is not about developing a plan for further accrual as much as it is creating a strategy that allows them to pause more often to connect and appreciate the intangible aspects of their lives. Connect with themselves without all their success and wealth, connect with their feelings and their real reason for being here and connect with those closest to them on a deeper level. Now when we sit down for a coaching session to discuss results, we are considering the whole person not just their balance sheet.
Here are 3 simple ways to re-integrate being into your every day life.
Conscious Breathing – I always advise people not to forget to breathe. It may sound funny, but most of us forget to be conscious about our breathing. Our body remembers to breathe for us as part of it’s job to preserve our life but conscious breathing is different. During conscious breathing we gently focus our minds on our breath and notice how it expands the lungs on the inhale and relaxes us on the exhale.
Even as few as 5 breaths can calm down a stressful moment and reconnect us to ourselves in the here and now.
Active Observation – Because our minds can only consciously take in so much information at one time, our unconscious is constantly filtering out information that it does not think is useful. Considering the millions of bits of information that are bombarding us at any moment in time, this is an important protective function that also can prevent us from being present. Try this out. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in. When you exhale, open your eyes and try to notice as many things as you can around you. The big ones and the little ones, the obvious and the invisible. Try not to judge in any way other than to notice they are present with you.
Notice what it feels like to be aware of everything just for the moment and how it changes your sense of presence and purpose.
Concentrated Connection – The next time someone is speaking to you, a co-worker, boss, employee, friend, partner or child. Try this out. Take a breath and look deeply into their eyes while listening to the words they are saying. Take them in deeply with each inhalation and if you find other thoughts coming into your head about how you might reply or what else you need to do just notice those thoughts and come back to their eyes and their voice.
Notice if you can sense a difference in how connected you feel and how they respond to you when you are fully present in this way.
Are you a doer or be-er? Why have to choose. Try to be more conscious every day and experience the joys and richness of being both a doer and be-er whenever you want.
Clients hire me for coaching them into getting more from their personal and professional lives and to achieve their highest levels of performance. I employ the most powerful neurological tools available combined with cutting edge management technology and mindfulness practices that enables you to quickly move toward and achieve your highest ambitions.
Visit me at www.hundredproofperformance.com to inquire about a free strategy session.