In Daniel Rushkoff's book, Get Back In the Box, he writes about the role that the CEO plays in a company. There are two thoughts that I wish to talk about in this article from that book. The first is about compartmentalization.

Your most personal choices are, in fact, your business choices. And your business choices may as well be your civic choices. Whether you realize it or not, your product purchases and brand loyalties express your politics, and your relationship to money says a lot about your understanding of time, of power, and of belief. It's all one dynamic picture.

Mr. Rushkoff argues that one of the things which makes successful companies successful is that the company leader is personally investing his or her own values into the running of the company. He refers to the effort by some business leaders to divest their personality and especially their beliefs from the decision making process to be both industrial age mentality and a recipe for failure.

Whether this is true about running a business, I cannot say. However, it is true about living a flourishing life. Several words that used to describe the kind of life I am meaning have changed in definition so much that Americans seem to only be able to think of these words in terms of money. For example, Wealth used to mean how one thrived on the inside, while health refered to how one thrived physically. Wealth was derived from an old english term "wela" and referred to well-being or happiness. Prosper or Prosperous is another word which most Americans seem to rarely use except in terms of finances.

Mr. Rushkoff is alleging that the person you are in your mind should be the person you are as one who operates a business. I would say, The person you are due to the transforming effect of Becoming, should be the person you are in Living.

Another Thought from his book also applies to how you live your life:

Too many companies are obsessed with window dressing because they're reluctant, no, afraid, to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out.

This is exactly the problem with many people's efforts to manage and cope. There are very few people who are willing to both take the time to do some serious "soul-searching" and to then articulate what they have discovered about themselves. One aspect of Knowledge is "self-knowledge" and one aspect of becoming is knowing where you are before you commence the journey of transformation.

If you want to effectively deal with who you are seeking to be in the future, you have to be brave enough and patient enough to honestly assess where you are today. This assessment needs to occur over and over throughout the developing process. Even as a ship's navigator in the days of Napoleon made constant assessments of the ship's location, so must you do, if you are going to progress effectively towards the goal of being the kind of person you want to be.