The columns are not steps in a sequence you complete once. They are lenses. A single pattern can be examined through all five, and the work in each column deepens the others. Leaders who do this work over time find that the map becomes a new internal language for self-observation, one that replaces the blunt instrument of self-criticism with something far more precise.

B: Behavior

The behavior is where most leadership conversations begin and, in most development programs, end. What are you doing that isn’t working? What are you not doing that you need to start? These are reasonable questions. They become limiting when they’re treated as the full picture.

In the BEING Map, the behavior column is the entry point, not the destination. Its purpose is specificity. Leaders often describe their patterns in broad strokes: “I micromanage,” “I avoid conflict,” “I struggle to delegate.” The coaching work here is to get concrete. What does micromanaging actually look like? In which meetings? With which people? Under what conditions does the pattern spike and when does it recede? The more precisely a leader can name the behavior, the more useful the map becomes as you move across it.

E: Embodied signal

The body is often ignored and it’s where the most surprising work happens, particularly for leaders who have built careers on cognitive capability. The nervous system registers threat and identity conflict before the prefrontal cortex has time to form a response. By the time a leader has decided how to handle a difficult conversation, the body has already been activated for several seconds. That activation shapes everything that follows.

Interpersonal neurobiology tells us that the body is not a passenger in our decision-making. It is an active participant. The question this column asks is deceptively simple: what does your body do right before you fall into this pattern? The stomach that drops. The jaw that tightens. The chest that closes. The voice that flattens. Most leaders have never been asked to pay attention to this layer. Once they do, they gain access to a signal that arrives earlier than thought and therefore offers more room to choose.

I: Identity

This is the column that most leadership development skips entirely, and it is the one that matters most.

Every recurring leadership pattern is protecting something. That something is almost always an identity: a belief about who this person is, what they are capable of, and what would happen if they showed up differently. The behavior isn’t random. It is coherent with a self-concept. Which is why telling someone to simply behave differently, without addressing the identity the behavior is defending, tends not to work.

The identity column in the BEING Map works similarly. The question is: who do you believe you are in relation to this pattern? Leaders often surface things like: “I am someone who has to have the answer.” “I am someone who cannot be seen as weak.” “I am someone who has to hold everything together.” These are adaptive strategies that worked at some point and calcified into identity.

N: Narrative

The governing narrative is the story that makes the identity feel true and the pattern feel necessary. It is the internal argument that justifies the behavior even when the leader can see, clearly, that it isn’t serving them or their team.

These narratives have a few distinctive qualities. They tend to be old, often originating in early career experiences, family systems, or formative moments of failure or success. They tend to be catastrophic in their logic: if I don’t do X, then Y will happen, and Y is unacceptable. And they tend to operate outside conscious awareness, which is why a leader can intellectually agree that the pattern isn’t working while being completely unable to interrupt it in the moment.

When a leader can articulate it clearly, something shifts. The narrative loses some of its authority precisely because it has been named. It moves from invisible assumption to examinable belief.

G: Generative identity

The fifth column is where the map becomes generative rather than diagnostic. It is also what separates this framework from tools that are useful for understanding a problem but offer no clear direction for what comes next.

The generative identity is the expanded self-concept this leader is growing into. It is written in the present tense, framed as an “I am” statement, and grounded in who this leader is already becoming rather than who they are being instructed to become. The distinction matters. A generative identity that comes from outside, assigned by a coach or an organization, functions like a new behavior: it may be adopted temporarily, but it won’t hold under pressure. A generative identity that a leader recognizes in themselves, that names something they’ve already glimpsed, functions as an attractor. The new behavior grows toward it naturally.

This column also explains why leaders who do this work often report that the change feels different from previous development efforts. The new behavior doesn’t feel like performance or discipline. It feels like alignment. That experience is what identity-level change actually feels like.

This column also explains why leaders who do this work often report that the change feels different from previous development efforts. The new behavior doesn’t feel like performance or discipline. It feels like alignment. That experience is what identity-level change actually feels like.

The map in practice

Here is a complete BEING Map for a pattern that appears frequently in senior leadership: conflict avoidance.