The Process of Becoming
I've been reading Carl Rogers' book On Becoming a Person. This morning, it was the first chilly morning of the season, so I got cozy on my couch with the book, my dogs, and my tea. I landed on the chapter titled "To Be That Self Which One Truly Is," and I found myself drawn to a particular passage that I will share here:
"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 not trying to be more than they are [...]. They are not trying to be less than they are [...]. 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), "To Be That Self Which One Truly Is," pp. 175–176
Sit with that for a second. Moving toward being. Not arriving at being. Not achieving it, checking it off, graduating into it. Moving toward it — continuously, imperfectly, as an ongoing 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.
I chose those words deliberately, at that particular threshold. Finishing a doctorate is the kind of milestone that can quietly convince you you've arrived, that the letters after your name mean the work of growing is done. I wanted something permanent on my body to argue with that idea before it could take root. The degree was real. The becoming wasn't over. It still isn't.
I'm not the same person who got that tattoo. I've grown, stumbled, rebuilt, reconsidered things I was once sure of. Some days I live this belief about always being in process with more grace than others. I'm not claiming I do it perfectly, or even consistently. But the commitment underneath it hasn't moved: I am not a finished project, and neither is anyone I work with.
Why this is the work
This is the thread that runs under everything I do with clients. Healing-centered leadership isn't a technique you apply and then set aside; it's a posture toward yourself and the people you lead that assumes none of you are fixed points, that all of you are complex beings carrying heavy weight. The leaders I work with, however accomplished, however senior, however exhausted, are still becoming; the goal of our work together isn't to help them arrive at some polished final version of themselves, but to help them move, with more awareness and less armor, toward the self they actually are underneath the roles, the "oughts," the facades Rogers is naming in that passage above.
This becomes somatic work because those oughts and shoulds are stored in our bodies. They are storied in our bodies. And it takes practice to notice where the body has been holding a performance long after the performance stopped serving anyone. It's about learning to listen — to the deepest recesses of your own physiological and emotional being, as Rogers puts it — instead of only to the voice that tells you who you're supposed to be.
The spiral
If you've spent any time on my instagram (@healplaylead) or seen my logo, you've probably noticed I return to the spiral again and again. I made a version of it recently out of newly fallen leaves, to create a small, temporary piece that captures something I can't always say in words.
A spiral isn't a circle. A circle brings you back to exactly where you started. A spiral brings you back to the same territory — the same old wound, the same recurring conflict, the same familiar edge of your own capacity — but never to the same place. Each pass around is a little wider, informed by everything you learned on the last loop. You meet the same question again, but you meet it as someone slightly more awake and aware than you were the last time.
That's becoming, as I understand it. Not a straight line of improvement. Not a circle of repetition. A spiral: return with revision. Coming back to old material with more presence, more clarity, more of yourself intact. A spiral = growth.
Nature seems to agree with this shape more than almost any other. It shows up in a nautilus shell, each chamber larger than the last but following the same underlying proportion. It's in the unfurling of a fern frond, tightly coiled before it opens. It's in the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower head and the scales of a pinecone, both following the same spiraling mathematics. It's in the shape of a hurricane viewed from above, in the arms of a spiral galaxy, in water finding its way down a drain, in the coiled architecture of your own inner ear. When a shape recurs this insistently across such different scales (from a seashell to a storm system to a galaxy) it's worth paying attention to what it might be telling us about how growth actually happens. Not in a straight line. In a spiral.
Where this leaves you
Wherever you are in your own becoming (mid-transition, mid-career, mid-unraveling, mid-rebuild) I'd offer you the same thing Rogers refers to, and the same thing that's been sitting on my arm for fifteen years: you are a process, and you can lean into that to learn more about who you truly are. Still being in the midst of the process is not a failure to reach the destination. The process is the entire point.
If you're circling back to something old right now (a pattern, a relationship, a version of leadership that no longer fits) and you want support meeting it from a wider turn of the spiral than you did last time, that's exactly the work I do. Reach out to schedule a conversation about coaching. I'd love to hear where you are in your own process.
* A note on language: Rogers wrote this passage in 1961, using "he" as the default pronoun for the individual — a convention of his era, not a statement about who this process belongs to. I've changed the pronouns to "they" throughout this quotation because the process of becoming oneself is not a male experience. It belongs to all of us.
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