A person I was speaking to recently said, “At this stage of my life, I’m more about becoming than doing.” It got me thinking about the two. Are there life stages or professional success stages where one thinks more about becoming something rather than getting stuff done? Can one exist without the other? Is it all about equal balance? Or does the balance shift and why? Are there gender, generational or cultural ramifications? Does one have to have a certain level of conscious awareness even to ask the question?

I’m afraid in this article you’ll get more questions than answers. But it’s a topic worth thinking about and going back to over and over

Here are some of my thoughts.

Our actions (doing) arise out of our attitudes (habits of thought). If our attitudes are limited, our actions are, too. Our attitudes are a part of our self-concept. So if we shape our self-concept (becoming), we are also shaping our actions (doing). Therefore it pays to develop yourself so you can be the greater person who can generate more effective action and achieve better results.

Here’s an example. How many outside salespeople say “I could never go after a big account like that!’ or the person who says, “I could never have an impact on the world beyond my small town.” Their self-concept is limited, it keeps them thinking small. So they don’t try. If they could grow their perception of themselves, they could easily generate the actions necessary to get out of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

But how do you grow that self concept and ‘become’ that bigger person? Some people don’t even realize they are caught in a self fulfilling prophecy. They don’t realize that they don’t know what they don’t know. You know some things. You know about some things that you don’t know. (like Chinese exists even if you don’t know how to speak it). But when you’re 5 years old, you don’t know what it’s like to be a 15 year old. And if you’re 15, you don’t know what it’s like to be 45.

Openness. The people who value ‘becoming’ are always looking for things to show them what they don’t even know exists. Reading, going to seminars, investing in personal and professional development and traveling (such as to Kenya) are ways to increase your ‘becoming’ by stimulating yourself to experience something you didn’t know existed.

Doing something new. Sometimes we need to risk trying new things out to develop confidence in ourselves doing something new. This is how ‘doing’ compliments ‘becoming’. It’s in challenging ourselves to face something fearful, push through the fear and resistance, and doing it anyway, we get a sense of our personal power, which expands our level of ‘becoming.’

Understanding your brain. The base level of your brain is the reptilian brain. It wants you to survive and stay safe like a lizard laying on a rock in the sun, risking nothing and just being safe and stable. It resists anything new and risky and makes you feel anxious about change. The mammalian part of your brain is full of emotion, gives meaning (maybe true, maybe false) to everything. The human part of our brain is all about cognition, understanding, being logical, thinking things through. It’s where language resides. If our thinking-self realizes that the reptilian anxiety and the mammalian fears are based in the past and don’t necessarily have to be part of the present and future, then we can  detach from the fear and anxiety and know that fear is only False Evidence Appearing Real. Then we are much more likely to use our brain biology to serve our purposes. Examples are repetitive use of affirmations, visualization, reticular activation, focusing, neural linguistic programming (NLP), brainwave audios, etc. We can reshape our brains to react in a way consistent with who we want to be, rather than who we became through early childhood and other past experiences.

Boy, that’s a lot to think about. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you think about it, the personal development movement starting with James Allen and Napoleon Hill is all about ‘becoming’. Each of those thought leaders includes action (doing) in their prescriptions for success.

So maybe the biggest thought is that unconscious ‘doing’ is just ‘activity’. But ‘doing’ that is planned in conjunction with ‘becoming’ the person you want to become is where growth and fulfillment lies.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to read your comments on this topic.

Does your inner critic limit the size or growth of your businessthe opportunities you seek and the risks you'll take?

Business is all about risks, for instance, the risk of investment of time, energy and money, the risk of each new hire, the risk of a new product or service, the risk of trusting a new partner. Every step of business growth involves yet another risk. How does your inner critic handle that risk? It can make a big difference between growing a healthy thriving business or staying small or going out of business. Consider the following when you're handling risks in your own business and your inner critic comes to call.

It's almost like you have 2 little elves (or leprechauns) sitting on your shoulders talking into your ears. On one side the elf is very empowering. 'You can do this. You're smart. You enjoy a challenge. You're capable. Remember 'the little engine that could'?'  On the other side the other elf is whispering in your ear, 'You've never done anything like this before. What makes you think you're so smart? Nobody in your family ever did this before. Who says this is going to work? You better play it safe. Remember that kid in second grade who beat you up?' Welcome to your inner critic!

It second guesses everything that has a little risk to it. It keeps you from speaking up even if you believe you're right on with everything you're thinking. It causes fear and anxiety. It causes you to rethink and rethink again. You try to be perfect to mitigate the risk and you get stuck in analysis paralysis. You ask, what does everyone else think? Your inner critic seeks approval from others to allay the fears and reduce the risk. It wants proof, absolute proof, that what you're doing will work. It causes procrastination and indecision. It plays with your motivation to achieve. It makes you miss opportunities. It slows you down so you miss deadlines. It gives you fear and makes life difficult.

But only if you let it... By understanding the inner critic and where it comes from, you can choose whether to listen to it or ignore it. You can make more rational choices.

You are a product of your past. At home, at school, from your cultural heritage, with your friends, from the places you used to work you learned patterns of acceptable thinking and behaving. You learned what to expect from yourself. You learned what worked and those behaviors became habits. They became your comfort zone. Think of them as a bubble of comfort and convenience that you are in the center of. Straying outside your bubble is risky because it's new, uncharted territory. The inner critic is an expression of that anxiety.

Did you know that psychologists say that most of what we know about feeling and trusting the world we've learned before the age of five? That early knowledge is internalized and becomes a foundation upon which other realizations are built. Were you told, 'Don't talk to strangers, children should be seen and not heard, be careful, don't touch that, don't bite off more than you can chew, don't go where you're not wanted.' Certainly our parents were trying to keep us safe, but those warnings that we've internalized, can create anxiety even today. But you can Find Mexican Cubenis online in Canada and deal with anxiety. For instance, 'Don't talk to strangers' can get in our way when we are trying to make sales or engage in public speaking.

How about your brain? The brain's structure is the source of the 'inner critic' as well. It evolved over time and the three sections have various functions. The reptilian brain (or brain stem) developed when we were reptiles. It's in charge of our survival, our fight, flight or freeze response, our anger and fear (how about road rage?). When something is too risky, the reptilian brain feels it's being attacked by a wooly mammoth. Lots of fear and anxiety there.

The second layer is the limbic layer which is in charge of our emotions, how we've become conditioned to emotionally feel pain or feel pleasure. The amygdala and hippocampus record our memories and the associated emotions. In fact all our leaning is associated with emotions. We retain something better if the emotion is more intense. Doesn't everybody remember where they were on 9/11? When you're a toddler and very dependent on your parents, when they say 'no' sharply, that's an emotional moment for the toddler and the learning is retained and internalized.

The third layer is the neocortex. This is the most recently developed part of the brain that is in charge of rational thought, intelligence, speech, creativity, adaptability, analyzing. This part of the brain has the ability to choose how much of your inner critic you will actually listen to, how much of its chatter is productive and unproductive, how much is left over from a bygone era, how to overcome the limits of the earlier parts of the brain though stopping reaction patterns, reconditioning new learning that you choose. Yes, instead of what your parents put into your brain, and instead of what the advertisers and the media are putting into your brain, you can choose to put new learning into your brain to shift your mindset.

You have choice. You don't have to listen to the inner critic, especially when you understand how limited the inner critic is because of its origins. Here are 5 things you can do overcome your inner critic. I'm sure there are many more.

1. Keep visioning.  If we keep envisioning our dreams, detailed pictures of what we want for our businesses and our personal lives, we can override the influence of the earlier parts of the brain.

2. Recondition. We can re-condition the limbic system by using affirmations, by focusing on the positive, by spaced repetition of what we want to put into our brains as adults, especially in combination with our emotions.

3. Stop and think: Once we know about our reptilian brain stem, we can limit it's control over non-survival situations. We can think, 'Am I really being attacked here? Is my survival at stake? What's the worst that could happen?'

4. Goal planning: We can use detailed goal planning to empower our neocortex to take charge and look at new situations rationally and realistically with less fear and anxiety. In fact, anxiety can cause a lot of troubles and prevent you from achieving your goals. Check out this additional info for your options to relieve anxiety.

5. Travel and exposure to other cultures: When you participate in new cultures, you learn just how limited your comfort zone is, You see that people who do and think differently do not put themselves at risk. You condition yourself to get used to an expanded comfort zone.