Thinking to Doing to Being

The Thinking-Doing-Being sequence is the crux of personal transformation, and it's grounded in neuroscience and neuroplasticity.

Personal transformation begins with us thinking in a new way (Thinking). This is when we imagine or envision a new possibility for our lives, be it related to career, hobbies, habits, communication, friendship, or any other area. We start taking baby steps, which feel alien to us. We have to think about everything we do, because it's unfamiliar to us.

The next step is to continue acting in a new way, engaging in new behaviours related to our vision (Doing). This creates new feelings, memories and mental associations. this is willed, conscious behaviour and it slowly opens our eyes to our untapped potential.

Eventually the new thinking-doing pattern becomes automatic, integrated into our habitual self (Being). We're no longer taking conscious action. We simply are that new person, we just act in that new way.

If this sounds abstract, think of an area in life you've become proficient in, like driving, languages or your career, and it's guaranteed you went through the Thinking-Doing-Being sequence. What at first was foreign eventually became like a familiar friend. In fact, you competed this sequence hundreds of times as you worked towards mastery of the skill.

In going through the Thinking-Doing-Being sequence, we harness the power of Hebb's Law and its converse. Hebb's Law in its informal version states that neurons that fire together wire together. This explains how habits form and how they remain ingrained.

To begin with, change is slow, because new neural patterns must form to store the new information. The new action feels alien (Thinking) But the constructing and rewiring gets easier with time. The more we think, do and be in a new way (Doing), the more we get used to the feeling of this, and the more it becomes ingrained into us, down to the neurological level. The new action or behaviour or habit is now second-nature, neurologically and psychologically. We have learned a new way of being (Being).

The converse of Hebb's Law, stated informally, is that neurons that fire apart wire apart. This tells us what happens neurologically when we break or change habits. By no longer engaging in a certain habit, whatever it may be, the circuitry dedicated to it fires less. This weakens that circuit, which weakens our habit.

Eventually, like our habit, the circuitry fades away, and it's no longer part of our habitual behaviour. We have unlearned an old way of being. In fact, we have gone through the Thinking-Doing-Being sequence in reverse. If you don't use it, you lose it.

This process depends on neuroplasticity, the process through which the brain adapts and changes. Neurons are continually pruning and sprouting as need dictates. Our brain reflects our identity and behaviour by adapting itself to everything we do, such that as we change, the brain changes too.

You can think of this as "out with the old, in with the new", or as death and rebirth. When we replace one way of being with a new one, we rewire the brain, and eventually Be that changesd

new person.