On Becoming

You've been in the middle of becoming far longer than you may have named it.

Is becoming a state we reach or something we're always in the middle of? Is it something we direct, or something emerging through us? The answer I keep returning to in my coaching work is that it's all of this.

We are born with an innate expression in us that wants to become: a temperament, a set of longings, a particular you that wants to unfold. And the world we exist within has its own shape too: it meets our expression and responds. This feedback shapes us in turn. So we are shaped by both inner and external forces beyond our control, and yet we are not powerless. We also have the capacity to choose how we act and respond. We can sense our inner longings, and honor or ignore them, and we can adjust to the world in various ways.

Becoming, then, is a complex emerging process between our innate gifts, our ability to listen to our inner voice, our expression into the world, and the wider environmental response we experience in the form of friction or ease, pain or reward.

So becoming is something we participate with in every moment. Still, most of the people I work with arrive carrying becoming as a long-term project: something to plan, build toward, and eventually (one day) complete. This framing of becoming is exhausting as it's founded on a sense that we are not yet who we are meant to be. And yet there's always more work to do, another version of yourself yet to become. So we never quite arrive at that sense of a final destination, and we spend life chasing an elusive state. The ongoing act of becoming is where we will always be.

My teacher Steve March puts the loop sharply:

"Every goal reached reveals the next gap. Every pattern identified surfaces three more. The horizon keeps moving. And underneath the motion, the sense of not-enough-yet stays exactly where it was."

— Steve March, founder of the Advanced Coaching Program

The deeper cost of this endless pursuit is your relationship with the "you" you are today. When your focus is always toward a future version of you, it's hard to be present to who you already are, and today becomes something to get beyond.

To step into a different relationship with your becoming is to stop chasing, and to slow down and notice the process of becoming already unfolding in this moment.

The practice of relating to the ongoing process of becoming begins with learning how to listen to the inner sensing of your being in the present moment. Through self-awareness you can notice the parts of you pulling in different directions, the emotional signals that something requires attention. And by building relationship with these you can begin to clarify what matters most, and how to take possible action back out into the world. Listening inwardly, deepening self-understanding, and then enacting new possibilities. This is the ongoing cycle of becoming — one we learn to apprentice rather than direct.

"Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness."

— Eugene Gendlin

Many of the people I work with arrive stuck right here, caught in the desire to be in control of becoming. A well-intended part of us wants to be done with it, to speed it up and drive it to completion. But pushing for control over a process that is inherently beyond your control sets up an exhausting reality to live within. We get frustrated with ourselves and the world, and feel stuck. The understandable intent to support our becoming becomes a hindrance to it. This is one of the most common things I sit with in coaching.

The part isn't malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what it learned to do to support your becoming early in life, and it hasn't yet learned that the nature of reality is not quite as it sees it. It has a valid perspective, and it's not the whole truth.

The shift we can invite is to come to know this part: its good intentions, and its unintended habit of getting in the way of itself. As you build relationship with it, you can support it in seeing that your nature is to become; that you've been doing it since the day you were born. You might explore with it how it can best use its energy to work with the process rather than against it. All of this without forcing the part to change its mind, staying with it long enough that it begins to shift through the relationship you offer.

Over time, a particular kind of trust grows: that you are becoming in every moment, and that you can participate with this process and help it reach its fullest expression.

What's becoming through you is both given and yours to shape — an exchange always in motion. Our work is to tend to it.