DO-ING VS BE-ING

For forty years, being the person who gets things done has defined me. It is no longer enough.

Five years ago, preparing to leave Equinor, I gathered a small group of close friends and asked them what they actually saw when they looked at me. My best friend Sophie didn't hesitate. If there was anything important that needed doing — anything at all — she'd turn to me. Without fail, I'd get it done.

I've held that for five years. Partly because it was generous. Partly because it was true. I have been a doer as long as I can remember. Impact as measure of value. Spare minutes filled without thought. An idea taken all the way through to action. It is, I genuinely believe, one of the central ingredients of whatever professional success I've built. My ego is tightly wrapped around it.

Here's what I've been sitting with lately. I told myself that doing was still impactful — in speaking, in moderation, with clients. And on one level it is. Doing remains essential there, and clients continue to notice it. But being the best executive coach I can be requires something different. It requires me to stop, slow down, and learn how to simply be.

There’s more to it than that. I’ve come to realise that the ceiling in my coaching and the ceiling everywhere else are not different ceilings. They're the same one. Being isn't what's missing from one corner of my practice. It's what's limiting all of it.

Making this pivot turns out to be harder than almost anything I've done.

Intellectually, I understand it. I know that walking the dogs with my own thoughts is more valuable preparation for a coaching session than any podcast. I know that the insight available in stillness is qualitatively different from anything I can extract through activity. And yet every time I stop, something in me reads it as failure. As laziness. As the opposite of my mother's instruction — to do everything to the best of my ability.

What I'm slowly learning is that being is not the absence of effort. It's not Instagram or the newspaper or anything that fills silence without actually engaging it. It's sitting with my own thoughts, breathing through discomfort, exploring what lies beneath the obvious. Hard work of an entirely different kind.

The habits that built the career can become the ceiling. I suspect I am not alone in this. The very quality that made you effective — the relentlessness, the follow-through, the bias toward action — is precisely what, at a certain level, starts to cost you. What got you here and what will take you further are not the same instrument.

I've glimpsed what being can do. When I manage to arrive in that space — really arrive — it doesn't just make me a better coach. It makes my moderation sharper, my keynotes more present, more honest. The doing becomes better because the being underpins it.

I'm not trying to become someone else. I have no interest in abandoning forty years of hard-won capability. But I've been over-indexing on one at the expense of the other, and I know it.

Learning to be is the work now.

For further reading, read my blog here