who am I being?
Glenn Gould, credit Fred Plaut/Sony Music Entertainment
In all things, morning ‘til night, Waking ‘til sleeping, I am making tea.
Tea teacher Wu De / Aaron Fisher (paraphrase)
1.
To name oneself is to shape one’s entire life. When one becomes “parent”, one never un-becomes it. When one calls oneself “engineer” or “carpenter” or “artist”, they are taking up the mantle of not simply a career or job, but an entire way of seeing and being in the world.
Identity-naming is critical. What all the spiritual bypassing, ego-vanquishing, pseudo-Buddhist advocates get wrong is that in order to extinguish the ego (if that is, in fact, one’s goal), one must first get to know it. The ego arises naturally from the experience of being human. Just as humans have hearts and limbs and consciousness, they have a sense of Self. When we try to eliminate the ego without first understanding how it works, it keeps rearing its head while we try fruitlessly to let it dissolve away.
And there are people on the other side of the spectrum: those who cling so tightly to their identity labels (whether by conditioning or by choice) that they prevent themselves from evolving — the true work of the human lifetime.
The brain works on patterns. It creates an understanding so it can conserve its inputting and processing power. Labeling a thing tells how us to understand and interact with it until we decide to rewrite that neural process we’ve created.
2.
Human individuals come into existence, and then we label them. Systems, projects, businesses, groups — these work the other way. We label them, and then the label determines how they unfold.
In the last few days I’ve talked with several leaders in my town’s uniquely robust arts scene. “Nobody’s special,” as my dad always says about businesses, and each of the leaders expressed that they were experiencing the same issues, primarily a lack of agreement and buy-in among their boards of directors regarding the mission and purpose of their organizations.
My dad’s right. I’ve observed this at every single company I’ve worked for, from the Fortune 500 that refused to hone in on a brand identity and ended up serving no one with its scattered product assortment and inconsistent store experience, to the prestigious performing arts company that was losing audience by the minute because it failed to communicate its value proposition (if it was even understood internally). All of these organizations had a nice mission statement, consistent branding, a set of so-called “values” they espoused, and much more. But what was preventing them from connecting with a customer?
Natalie Goldberg says that all readers read a piece of literature in order to get to know the author. Fiction and non-fiction, entertainment or study — we approach a book with the intention of feeling someone’s heart beating on the other side. I’ve felt the same with music. I listen to Glenn Gould not simply because he’s a technical master with interesting interpretations, but because when I listen it feels like someone I know, saying words that we’ve shared before. I’ve played Bach and Glass almost exclusively for the last 20 years for the same reason: they speak my language (or perhaps I speak theirs), and they communicate it the way an old friend does.
Customer relations are the same. We buy this oat milk over the other one because the packaging conveys something about health, or because the price is right, or because it's the only one that comes in a large enough quantity to last the two weeks. Each of these reasons says something about ourselves — that this brand and I both value clean eating and living, that this brand knows I don’t have a lot to spend and they make their product accessible to me, or that this brand knows I have a big family to feed and they care about that.
We buy from brands we trust, run by people we feel we know, because we are asking something from them: We are asking them to help us become who we feel we truly are.
Alain de Botton wrote in The Architecture of Happiness, “While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies. […] What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
Maybe it’s hard to conceive that oat milk reinforces our most dearly-held beliefs about ourselves, but this is simply how we operate. We label ourselves, and then we organize our reality around that label.
“I’m not the kind of person who spends extravagantly on that.”
“I’m treating myself to this because I deserve it.”
“I could never pull off that look; it’s not me.”
These are not simply preferences. These are statements that demonstrate what we believe about who we are — the kind of person who does or doesn’t do something.
Our thoughts — particularly our thoughts about our most essential Selves — shape our world. And in order to feel safe and secure within ourselves and our social groups, we constantly take actions to reinforce those beliefs, particularly with what we buy.
3.
What does this look like in our work?
If you don’t know your organization’s identity and mission, then your clients can’t possibly know it either.
And if your clients don’t know who you are or what you value, then they will never buy from you, because you don’t help them understand themselves.
This is where the most common business advice requires some nuance. The entrepreneurial podcast bros will tell you that all you need to hustle yourself into a successful business is to solve other people’s problems. See a need? Create a product to fill it, and market it to people with that need.
That’s all 100% true. But it doesn’t address the fact that you’re a person with a heart and soul who’s been put on this earth with particular gifts for particular reasons, and that there are things that will make you come alive and things that won’t.
I’m a systems thinker. It’s very easy for me to see how processes need to be improved so that outcomes can be better. But does that mean I should be building project management software, or reforming our healthcare system, or designing factories, or cooking in a kitchen? With my skill set, I could be excellent at any one of these. But are any of them the thing that wakes me up and gives me life every day? No.
So could I design some of the best project management software on the planet? Probably. But I guarantee it would have no life or interest behind it, and because of that, it would never sell.
4.
Once you’ve decided who you’ll be (“you” being you, your business, your organization, etc.), the next step and last step is actually being it.
Origin stories are great for this. The choir I sing in was first created decades ago for a very specific purpose: it united several church choirs in the area for a performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem.
How something is first created matters a great deal. The very first step we take on any project cuts a groove that the project will sit in for its entire life. That doesn’t mean there’s no evolution, but it’s rather like the breath of life that comes from God — When this thing was first spoken into existence, what was its character? Identity? Purpose? That sets a tone, regardless of how it evolves over time.
So perhaps the entire point of this choir is to bring people together. I see it among the membership: I observe that a primary motivation for people to join the choir is because it creates community. They get to be with like-minded people and elevate themselves through the performance of choral masterworks, and they gain new, lifelong friends while doing so. If that were truly the mission and purpose of the organization, then we’d ask ourselves:
As I choose the music we’ll perform, am I building community?
As I write program notes and give lectures, am I building community?
As I write this marketing text and design this website, am I building community?
As I hold auditions and welcome new members and be in the sacred space of rehearsal, am I building community?
As I design outreach and fundraising events, am I building community?
This is the rigor of integrity. Are you being who you say you are? Or are your actions demonstrating some other values and intentions?
As a mindfulness teacher with an interest in Zen, this kind of calling excites me. The Zen temple is an absolute wringer. When I stayed at the San Francisco Zen Center’s various campuses, we woke around 4:30am for meditation and from the moment our eyes opened, our only task was wakefulness. Cleaning bathrooms and chopping onions and pulling weeds and bathing: Are you awake? Or are you somewhere else, or on autopilot, or dwelling in the future or past?
Most people don’t live like this, though (including myself, when I’m outside of a monastery). We operate on conditioning, and opinions, and reactivity. We have an idea of who we are, but we’re not truly living it every moment. We say one thing, and then we do another.
I heard the tea teacher Wu De (born Aaron Fisher) describe this several years ago. He said something like, “In all things, morning ‘til night, waking ‘til sleeping, I am making tea.” It means that in every single thing he does, he knows who he is. He treats everything with the sacredness, attention, welcoming, and beauty of the tea ceremony. He greets everyone like an honored guest. He enters every room as a temple. He holds every object, drinks every drink, sets every table just like that never-to-be-repeated-again experience of ceremony.
For me, as a lifelong artist, one of my principal values is beauty. I want everything around me to be a work of art, and, to bring this full circle, I am willing to spend more money on things that match my aesthetic taste in order to reinforce that belief about myself. I am an artist, and the decor in my home tells me so every day. Wu De would likely never spend money on video games, for instance, because they contradict his values of attention, presence, and peace.
So when I am shopping, I am an artist. When I am cooking, I am an artist. When I am in a meeting, I am an artist: I create an elegant agenda, I turn off my phone as I would in rehearsal, I pay attention and follow the leader, I participate with exacting rigor and precision, I create something beautiful.
In all things, I am making art.
5.
The critical thing when determining the mission and identity of a group project is not to try and crowdsource your purpose. It’s absolutely essential to be regularly surveying and researching why people engage with your brand, but make no mistake: Mission and identity come from leadership within. Just as in our personal lives, it only ends in disaster when we let other people tell us who we are. That’s what high school is for: seeing and testing which mold you fit into. Some of us never outgrow that, and it shows in our businesses.
Why are so many leaders unwilling to take a stance on who they are? Simple scarcity mindset. We’re afraid that if we finally decide and say out loud that we’re here to do this thing and not that thing, we’ll lose all the people who’ve been supporting us for that thing in the past. We’re afraid that we’ll alienate the customers that helped us grow. And while that may be true, it’s not a bad thing. Because the inverse is also true: we’ll gain new customers who take us to the next level.
And it’s absolutely guaranteed that if we try to grow by serving both these customer groups, doing both this thing and that thing, speaking one language to appeal to these people and another to appeal to those people, then we’ll lose them both. Why? Because if your clients don’t know who you are or what you value, then you don’t help them understand themselves, and they have no reason to buy from you.
Value is created in the mind of the consumer. Literally nothing has inherent value in this world, not even human life. Value is created by people who perceive something then make a judgment about whether or not they believe it should exist in their world.
Do you believe your thing should exist in their world? Then it’s your job to prove it to them.
Be who you say you are. Do what you say you’ll do. And diligently, unceasingly, aggressively, stop doing everything else that is not you.
Resource: Alan Chapman’s adaptation of the Hierarchy of Needs is an excellent tool for reflecting on your personal and organizational values. Let’s talk about it.
