The Balance and Dance of Being and Doing

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein

In between our being and doing, lies the clarity we seek, the purpose each has within, no exceptions. Starting new things, trying each day creates the path to knowing. Quiet contemplation allows for being to do its work, for unknowing to enter. If you’re stuck, start doing. If you’re caught in too much doing, go back to being, to a deeper consciousness, to the longing.

“It is not surprising, then, that though we feel intermittently gifted, our gifts are ever-present. For if enlightenment stems from clarity of being, then talent is no more than a clarity of doing, an embodied moment where spirit and hand are one. The chief obstacle to talent, then, is a lapse in being. It is not that people have no talent, but we lack the clarity to uncover what it is and how it works.

Talent, it seems, is energy waiting to be released through an honest involvement in life. But so many of us check whether we have power with the main switch off-the switch being risk, curiosity, passion, and love.

With this in mind, happiness can simple be described as the satisfaction we feel when we are in ultimate accord, however briefly, in being and doing. In those unified moments, our purpose is life and our talent is living in its most immediate detail, be it drying the dishes or raking the leaves or washing the baby’s hair.

So when I can’t find my purpose, I beg myself to sit in a field in the sun watching ants in hopes that I will meet my clarity. When I am convinced I have no gifts at all, I implore myself to search for the switch, to try something out of view, to gamble on what is remotely calling.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Ask, Listen, Understand

“Listening is an activity. It's not passive. We are creating the world by listening all the time.” – Julian Treasure

It is a busy, noisy world – within and without. Searching for clarity, focus and answers in circumstances, other people and “someday” destinations, we come up empty again and again, pivoting to the next scheme, shortcut or workaround with a continued external focus.

By adding more to the overflowing piles of starts and stops, we blur and block any chance for clarity of thought and simplicity of direction, our true north. The answers and insights that we seek externally are actually rooted within, in our own intuition, dreams and inklings.

Pause daily, take inventory and create order from what already exists. Start from where you are right now and move forward, a step at a time. Ask questions and wait quietly and openly for answers to enter. Invite them in, seek understanding through inquiry.

The concept of appreciative inquiry was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastav in the early 1990’s. The five original principles include:

1. Constructionist: WORDS CREATE WORLDS

2. Simultaneity: INQUIRY CREATES CHANGE

3. Poetic: WE CAN CHOOSE WHAT WE STUDY

4. Anticipatory: IMAGE INSPIRES ACTION

5. Positive: POSITIVE QUESTIONS LEAD TO POSITIVE CHANGE

Through the years, additional principles have emerged including:

1. Wholeness: WHOLENESS BRINGS OUT THE BEST

2. Enactment: ACTING ‘AS IF” IS SELF-FULFILLING

3. Free choice: FREE CHOICE LIBERATES POWER

4. Narrative: STORIES ARE TRANSFORMATIVE

5. Awareness: BE CONSCIOUS OF UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS

By employing appreciate inquiry principles along with active listening, the right actions become apparent and clarity unfolds naturally. Clarity coming from asking and action, from finding out what works and what doesn’t work through implementation and execution.

Birgit Ohlin, MA, BBA, Coach offers six tips for active listening that are valuable to listening to others as well as yourself: 

1. Nonverbal involvement – eye contact, nodding head;

2. Pay attention to the speaker, not your own thoughts;

3. Practice Non-Judgment;

4. Tolerate silence;

5. Paraphrase;

6. Ask questions

Julian Treasure’s 5 Ways to Listen Better Ted Talk offers simple exercises to improve conscious listening by paying attention to the quiet, the subtle and understated to access understanding:

1. Silence - just three minutes a day is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again;

2. "The mixer” - listen to how many individual channels of sound can that you can hear. It's a improves the quality of your listening;

3. Savoring – enjoy mundane sounds and find the "hidden choir" that’s around us all the time.

4. Listening position – play with filters as levers to get conscious. Filters include active/passive; reductive/expansive; critical/empathetic;

5. RASA – receive, appreciate, summarize and ask

Weave quiet into each day, ask questions to foster clarity and insight to inform meaningful action that creates progress.

“When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding.” – Alice Coltrane