How to Know You are Elevating Yourself (i.e., Along Your Being Side)

When we invest in our personal or professional growth, we typically develop along one of two dimensions of ourselves: our Doing Side or our Being Side.

Our Doing Side encompasses our knowledge, skills, capabilities, and behaviors — essentially, what we do and how effectively we do it. It’s the part of us that can be trained, measured, and optimized.

Our Being Side, on the other hand, reflects the quality of our internal operating system — who we are. This includes how we see and interpret the world, how we make meaning of our experiences, and how we show up emotionally, mentally, and relationally. It governs our mindsets, identity, and the level of maturity with which we engage life’s complexity.

Almost all development efforts — from our educational systems to athletic programs to organizational leadership training — are designed to enhance our Doing Side. These efforts are helpful and often necessary. But they are almost always incremental.

If we want to transformationally improve ourselves — to elevate the way we navigate uncertainty, connect with others, and lead ourselves and those around us — we must shift our focus to the Being Side. This type of development is called vertical development.

Unfortunately, most people and organizations are unfamiliar with vertical development. It’s rarely taught, even less often practiced, and often misunderstood.

In this article, I want to clarify what vertical development looks like in practice by identifying effective vertical development tactics. More importantly, I want to help you recognize the signs and signals that indicate you’re actually elevating along your Being Side.

Tactics for Elevating Your Being Side

Vertical development is not just about changing how we think — it’s about rewiring how we operate. At its core, vertical development involves upgrading our body’s nervous system: how we process information, regulate emotion, respond to stress, and interpret meaning. These internal patterns don’t shift with insight alone — they shift through targeted, repeated action that activates and reconditions our internal wiring.

The good news is, there are multiple access points for this kind of work. You don’t need to dive into the deep end on day one. But you do need to be intentional. Below are three tiers of vertical development strategies — each one designed to help you rewire and elevate your internal operating system.

1. Starter-Level Strategies

These accessible practices help you build self-awareness and emotional regulation by subtly retraining your nervous system to respond with intention rather than reactivity.

Examples include:

• Journaling: Whether reflecting on your setbacks, celebrating past perseverance, or conducting after-action reviews of failures, journaling helps bring subconscious patterns to the surface.
• The Accountability Mirror: A daily ritual of self-honesty and commitment. Look yourself in the eye, state your goals, and confront the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
• Meditation: A foundational tool for calming the nervous system, widening your window of tolerance, and building present-moment awareness.
• Gratitude practices: Shown to improve the brain’s default mode and salience networks, gratitude helps rewire us toward greater positivity and presence.
• Cold exposure (e.g., cold plunges): Purposeful discomfort that trains your nervous system to stay regulated under stress.
• Recording yourself: Speaking your thoughts — fears, limiting beliefs, or internal narratives — can help you process them more objectively and diminish their grip.

These strategies may seem small, but they create powerful neurological shifts. Over time, they help reset default responses that once served self-protection but now limit growth.

2. Deeper-Level Strategies

At this stage, you’re targeting the deeper patterns that govern how you make meaning. Specifically, you’re working to rewire mindsets — core perceptual defaults that shape your interpretation of the world.

Vertical development accelerates when you intentionally work on cultivating value-creating mindsets:

• Growth (vs. fixed)
• Open (vs. closed)
• Promotion (vs. prevention)
• Outward (vs. inward)

To develop these, choose one mindset to focus on and build a simple plan for daily engagement. Effective activities include:

• Reading or watching content aligned with the mindset you’re developing
• Journaling from the new mindset’s perspective
• Engaging in discussion or coaching to challenge your current lens
• Practicing targeted self-talk to reinforce new mental patterns

This kind of engagement helps recondition your internal wiring — not just what you believe, but how you see. Over time, this changes how you process meaning, stress, and complexity. Here is a free Mindset Development Planning Guide to guide you in that process.

3. Deepest-Level Strategies

When deeper emotional wounds or neurobiological constraints are at play, these strategies go beyond mindset work to directly recondition your nervous system and core brain networks.

Validated deep-level strategies include:

• Psychological Therapy: Especially modalities like CBT, exposure therapy, or EMDR, which improve the functionality of the brain’s salience, default mode, and central executive networks.
• Neurofeedback Therapy: Uses real-time brainwave data to train healthier neurological patterns and improve focus, regulation, and integration.
• Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: Still emerging, but showing strong evidence for helping individuals safely process trauma, shift perspective, and promote neuroplasticity under guided conditions.

These are not quick fixes. But for those carrying deep internal blocks — including many high-achieving professionals — this level of vertical development can be life-changing.

Signs You’re Elevating Along Your Being Side

While Doing Side development often shows up in performance metrics or skill certifications, vertical development expresses itself more subtly — in how we engage with ourselves, others, and the challenges we face.

Here are some of the clearest signs and signals that your internal operating system is being rewired — that you are, in fact, elevating along your Being Side:

1. You respond to challenges with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

That shift in reflex is a sign your nervous system is learning to prioritize growth over protection.

2. You’re increasingly aware of your internal patterns — and have language for them.

You can name your triggers, track your emotional responses, and recognize when limiting mindsets are active.

3. You create space between stimulus and response.

Whether in conflict or stress, you pause, reflect, and choose how to respond.

4. You seek out discomfort when it serves your growth.

You lean into hard conversations or internal work because you’re more anchored in long-term growth than short-term comfort.

5. Your identity is becoming less reactive and more grounded.

You feel less dependent on achievement, approval, or control to feel okay.

6. You process pain more openly and integrate it more fully.

You reflect on your past with compassion, not denial. You speak honestly about your story without being consumed by it.

7. You are more emotionally available — to yourself and others.

You can name and sit with your emotions, and create psychological safety for others to do the same.

8. You measure progress less by productivity and more by alignment.

Success becomes less about output and more about congruence with who you want to become.

Becoming Better from the Inside Out

Development along your Being Side won’t earn you a badge or certification. But it’s the foundation for authentic leadership, resilient self-direction, and sustainable performance amidst stress, pressure, uncertainty, and complexity. As your nervous system becomes more integrated, your identity more grounded, and your responses more intentional, you become someone who doesn’t just do better — you become someone who is better.

And in today’s world — marked by complexity, ambiguity, and accelerating change — that’s the kind of development that matters most.

If you want to explore doing some Being Side development work, either individually or for a group or organization, let’s connect.