The Process of Becoming

I've been reading Carl Rogers' book On Becoming a Person. On the first chilly morning of the season, I got cozy on my couch with the book, my dogs, and my tea, and landed on the chapter titled "To Be That Self Which One Truly Is." One passage stood out:

"It seems to mean that the individual moves toward being, knowingly and acceptingly, the process which they* inwardly and actually are. They move away from being what they are not, from being a façade... They are increasingly listening to the deepest recesses of their physiological and emotional being, and find themselves increasingly willing to be, with greater accuracy and depth, that self which they most truly is." — Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961)

Moving toward being. Not arriving at it, achieving it, or graduating into it. Moving toward it, continuously and imperfectly, as a direction rather than a destination.

The tattoo

Fifteen years ago, right after I finished my doctorate, I got six words tattooed on my arm: always in the process of becoming. It's a line from Paulo Freire, the educator, philosopher, and activist whose thinking has greatly shaped my own philosophy about learning, transformation, and liberation.

Finishing a doctorate can quietly convince you that you've arrived. I wanted something permanent on my body to argue with that idea. The degree was real. The becoming wasn't over. It still isn't. I am not a finished project, and neither is anyone I work with.

Why this is the work

Healing-centered leadership isn't a technique you apply and set aside; it's a posture that assumes none of us are fixed points. The goal of coaching isn't to arrive at a polished final version of yourself, but to move, with more awareness and less armor, toward the self you actually are underneath the roles, the "oughts," and the facades.

This becomes somatic work because those oughts and shoulds are stored in our bodies. It takes practice to notice where the body has been holding a performance long after it stopped serving anyone.

The spiral

If you've seen my Instagram (@healplaylead) or my logo, you've noticed I return to the spiral again and again. A circle brings you back to exactly where you started. A spiral brings you back to the same territory, but never to the same place. Each pass is a little wider, informed by everything you learned on the last loop. Return with revision. A spiral = growth.

Nature agrees: the nautilus shell, the unfurling fern, the sunflower head, the hurricane, the spiral galaxy, the coil of your inner ear. Growth doesn't happen in a straight line. It happens in a spiral.

Where this leaves you

Wherever you are in your own becoming, you are a process. Still being in the midst of it is not a failure to reach the destination. The process is the entire point.

If you're circling back to something old and want support meeting it from a wider turn of the spiral, that's exactly the work I do. Reach out to schedule a conversation about coaching.

* A note on language: Rogers used "he" as the default pronoun, a convention of his era. I've changed the pronouns to "they" because the process of becoming oneself belongs to all of us.