The Way of Being - Why How You Show Up Shapes What Becomes Possible
By Victor Seet — Ontological & CliftonStrengths Coach, Singapore
For years, leadership was something I did to influence others. The conversations I had with others. The decisions I made to effect change. The strategies I rolled out for the team. I optimised the doing relentlessly, and for a long time it worked.
Then I noticed something uncomfortable. The same type of conversations, held by me on a good day and a bad day, produced completely different results, even when the words were almost identical. My team was not actually responding to what I was saying. They were responding to who I was being while I said it. I noticed how my wife responded to me in different situations. Similarly, I noticed how my kids responded to me.
I started paying attention to Way of Being. And it remains, in my experience, the most overlooked variable in workplaces today. It is also, I have come to believe, the real reason most behaviour change does not last.
What Way of Being Actually Means
In ontological coaching, Way of Being is not a personality, a mood of the day, or a set of values you wrote on a slide. It is the structural coherence of three domains that have settled in every human being over time.
Language is how we speak, and what we say to ourselves when no one is listening. Mood is the emotions we carry, the ones so familiar we no longer notice them. Body is how we hold our shoulders, our jaw, our breath, our posture, the way our chest tightens before certain conversations.
These three are always operating. We just rarely notice them. As I shared in an earlier piece, most of what shapes us stays transparent until something cracks the lens. Way of Being lives in that same transparent territory. We are being someone right now as we read this article. We just are not paying attention to it.
And here is what makes it structural rather than situational. Our Way of Being did not get assembled this morning. It got built quietly over years, out of what was rewarded, what was punished, the survival strategies that worked when we were young and somehow stayed. By the time we are adults leading a team, our Way of Being is the deep coherence underneath every interaction we have. It does not change because we read a good article or attended a workshop.
Why This Matters More Than We Admit
At work, we are often very good at the what. We optimise. We restructure. We KPI. We send people for training. We create new processes and systems.
What we tend to miss is that two leaders with identical strategies will produce wildly different cultures, because they carry different bodies into the room, speak from different moods, and run different internal language. The strategy did not change the outcome. The Way of Being did.
This is also why so many leadership development efforts produce a short-lived high. The workshop teaches a new behaviour. The leader returns to the office. The body is the same. The internal language is the same. The mood is the same. Within two weeks, the new behaviour has been quietly absorbed back into the old Way of Being, and nothing has actually changed.
Behaviour change without Way of Being change will be shortlived. I believe I have done enough CliftonStrengths workshops to say that. And I say transparently that the workshop feedback I get is very consistent. The workshop feedback is fantastic. The check-in feedback a few months later says everything went back to normal.
Whatever insights learnt and applied from the workshop is sustainable for a quarter at most.
The Invisible Triad at Work
Let me make this concrete with two examples.
A senior manager says she keeps getting feedback that her team finds her intimidating. She does not understand it. She does not raise her voice. She does not scold. So we slow down. We examine her body. Her arms cross frequently. She leans to the front most of the time in our conversations as if she is ready to pounce. Her shoulders are pulled up. Her jaw is set. We examine her language. Her words tend to be corporate speak, and formal. She often begins with "actually" and "no" and uses a lot of “you”. We examine her mood. She is in a low-grade impatience most of the day.
She had no idea. Her team has been reading her body and mood long before they hear her words. None of this is what she is doing. It is who she is being.
Another example. A founder tells me he wants to build a more innovative culture. He runs ideation sessions. He sets up Slack channels. He buys whiteboards. Innovation does not come. So we look at his Way of Being in those rooms. His body disposition shows his energy is often channelled downwards, like roots going deep into the ground. His language is heavy with "but" and "the issue is" and often evaluative. His mood is suspicion dressed up as rigour. His team has learned, without anyone saying it, that ideas get torn down and punctured quickly.
Why Structure Matters: The Limit of Insight
Here is the part many coaching conversations skip past. I have done that often too.
In a good session, a client can have a moment of genuine seeing. “Oh! I have been intimidating my team. Oh! I have been shooting down every idea. Oh! I have been listening to respond rather than to understand.”
The lens cracks. Something opens.
But the seeing alone does not change anything yet. Because the structure that produced the old way of seeing is still intact. The body has not moved. The mood has not shifted. The internal language is still running its old loops. In a week, and sometime days, the structure quietly reasserts itself, and the insight from the previous coaching session feels like a memory.
This is why Way of Being work cannot stop at insight. The insight is the doorway. The work is the slow expansion of the structure itself - new bodily practices, new mood disciplines, new linguistic moves, until the structure can hold a different way of seeing as its new default.
This is also why ontological coaching takes time. I have stopped doing one-off or even a pair of coaching sessions. We can open a new way of seeing in a single conversation. We cannot install a new Way of Being in a single conversation. The structure is older than that and will not be hurried.
A Closing Invitation
The question is not, what should I do differently this week?
The deeper question, the one that takes time to even hear properly, is this. Who am I being at work, in my marriage, with my children, with myself? And is that who I want to be?
The answer rarely comes in one sitting. But the willingness to ask it, gently and honestly, is already the first crack in the structure.
In the next piece, I will explore what sits on top of Way of Being - the Observer we become because of it, and why shifting how we see is both the easiest and the hardest part of this work.
Continue Reading — The Ontological Coaching Series:
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Written by Victor Seet
Activator • Communication • Strategic • Self-Assurance • Command
