Being Matters
A Collective Exploration of the Human Condition
For leaders, builders, and practitioners ready to examine the layer beneath behavior, choices, and outcomes.
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Why Being Matters
You are already serious about growth. You lead, you build, you show up with genuine commitment to the people and things that matter to you.
And still, certain patterns return. Certain ceilings reappear. The layer that produces those patterns simply hasn't been examined yet.
That layer sits beneath behaviour. It shapes your decisions before you are aware of making them. It determines what you see as possible, who you are in a room, how you respond under pressure, and what you build when no one is watching. It is the structure that everything else rests on.
When this layer is brought into focus, something changes:
Pathways become visible that simply weren't there before.
Patterns that seemed fixed begin to shift.
The work you were already doing starts to compound at a level that wasn't previously available.
This is what Being Matters means. It matters, genuinely and significantly, that people turn their attention to who and how they are being. That examination, done with honesty and rigour, is what creates transformation that stays.
The Being Matters Series
Being Matters is an ongoing book series that brings Ashkan Tashvir’s wider body of work into conversation with the realities of human life. Tashvir is an author, philosopher and entrepreneur whose work spans ontology, human development, leadership, organisational design, technology and systems thinking. He is the creator of the Being Framework™, an ontological paradigm used by leaders and practitioners in more than 50 countries to examine how our ways of being shape our actions, relationships, performance and impact.
The series explores how this work applies across leadership, work, relationships, community and society. It is a shared undertaking involving practitioners, leaders, coaches, entrepreneurs, educators and professionals who have engaged with Tashvir’s ideas and are bringing them into contact with their own disciplines, experiences and areas of expertise.
Its purpose is not simply to explain a framework or present a collection of abstract ideas. Each volume seeks to make the work tangible, accessible and relevant by exploring what it reveals when applied to lived experience. Through personal accounts, professional insight and reflective inquiry, contributors examine the human forces operating beneath behaviour, decisions and outcomes.
In doing so, the series provides readers with different entry points into Tashvir’s work. It shows how the Being Framework and his broader philosophical and systemic thinking can illuminate the challenges people encounter in their lives, relationships, organisations and communities. Rather than prescribing simple answers, Being Matters invites readers to look more carefully at how they interpret the world, how they relate to the situations they face and how their ways of being influence what becomes possible.
Volume One begins at the centre: Being. Anchored in Ashkan Tashvir’s Being Framework, it brings together contributors from diverse backgrounds and fields, each writing from their own experience, practice and area of concern. Their perspectives are united by a common inquiry into Being and the role it plays in shaping how we perceive, relate, respond, lead and participate in the world. More than an anthology of individual essays, Being Matters: Volume One is a collective exploration grounded in a shared philosophical and developmental foundation, offering readers an accessible doorway into the Being Framework by revealing how profoundly Being matters within real contexts, real challenges and lived human experience.
THE AUTHORS
Meet The Authors
Ashkan Tashvir
Philosopher, author, and creator of the Being Framework, working across ontology, leadership, sustainable systems, and human development
Ariya Chittasy
Director of Engenesis Ventures, working with founders and business owners across 45+ countries
Lucy Faulconer
General Manager of Being Profile, with practitioners across 53 countries
Marlous Teh
General Manager of Engenesis Coach Academy, coach trainer and TEDx speaker
Aydin Yassemi
Organisational coach and facilitator with 35+ years across enterprises, NGOs, SMEs and global agencies
Dr. Jordan Alexander
Leadership strategist, executive coach, and researcher integrating ontology, identity, and place
Wayne Stickel
Facilitator, coach and speaker working with authenticity, resilience and dignity amid adversity and physical limitation
Louise Smallwood
Performance and leadership, team results coach, specialising in uncovering blind spots to transform executive leadership and results.
Jacqueline Hofste
Leadership coach with senior corporate experience, helping leaders build authenticity, intuition, and effectiveness in teams
Caroline New
Tech leadership coach with 30+ years in the ICT sector across global brands
John Smallwood
Former ASX-listed CEO and leadership coach specialising in human performance and executive coaching
Jeanette Mundy
Leadership coach and senior ontological practitioner with 40+ years empowering women across business, learning, and community sectors
Atefeh Tashvir
Personal development and relationship coach working with women through the Being Framework
John Williams
Leadership practitioner with 30+ years exploring courage, vulnerability, masculinity, and the human patterns that shape how people lead
Melissa Chittasy
Writer and mother exploring parenting as a practice of truth, responsibility and generational change
Dr. Ehssan Sakhaee
Senior university lecturer and facilitator of professional practice and leadership
Tanja Caprioli
Ontological coach exploring authenticity, authorship, identity, and the hidden cost of living by default
Anthea Stevanovic
Business consultant and strategist known for helping owners create clarity with systems, structure, and sustainable growth
Dr. Anna Carr
Facilitator, coach and researcher working across leadership, stewardship and social change
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Overview
Why Behaviour Alone Is Not Enough
A great deal of personal and professional development focuses strictly on behavior:
Communicate more clearly.
Set better boundaries.
Build stronger habits.
Lead with confidence.
All of this can be useful. It can also leave the source of the pattern completely untouched.
A person can learn the language of openness while still listening through defensiveness.
A leader can adopt collaborative processes while still relating to people through control.
A founder can speak about purpose while being driven by fear of failure.
The behavior may change for a while.
The deeper orientation remains the same.
Being Matters turns attention toward that orientation. It asks what is shaping the behavior before the behavior ever appears.
The Strategic Leader
You have achieved what society calls success, but you recognise that leading from a place of "auto-pilot" has a hidden cost for both you and your team.
The Impactful Carer
Whether raising a family or serving a community, you carry a profound responsibility for others and want to ensure you are being the most authentic version of yourself.
The Conscious Creator
You are building something — a business, a practice, or a life — and you refuse to settle for surface-level answers about why humans struggle to connect and thrive.
The Professional Practitioner
You are seeking a more rigorous, foundational way to support transformation in others without relying on motivational fluff or fragile psychological hacks.
The Questions Beneath The Questions
This book begins where many conversations about growth end.
Most people arrive at development through a practical problem.
At first, these look like separate, isolated issues. But beneath them are deeper questions that this book will guide you to answer:
WHAT'S INSIDE
A Multi-Dimensional Inquiry
In this foundational volume, nineteen contributing authors and practitioners approach this terrain from different angles across leadership, work, family, relationships, identity, and community.
Rather than a collection of separate essays, the depth builds across every chapter, moving toward something cumulative, structured, and permanent.
What You Will Explore Within These Pages
Who This Work Is For
Note: You do not need prior knowledge of the Being Framework to read this book. It is designed as an accessible, yet uncompromisingly deep entry point into the work.
The Strategic Leader
You have achieved what society calls success, but you recognise that leading from a place of "auto-pilot" has a hidden cost for both you and your team.
The Impactful Carer
Whether raising a family or serving a community, you carry a profound responsibility for others and want to ensure you are being the most authentic version of yourself.
The Conscious Creator
You are building something — a business, a practice, or a life — and you refuse to settle for surface-level answers about why humans struggle to connect and thrive.
The Professional Practitioner
You are seeking a more rigorous, foundational way to support transformation in others without relying on motivational fluff or fragile psychological hacks.
THE FRAMEWORK
What Is The Being Framework?
Being Matters is anchored in a body of work used by individuals and practitioners in over 53 countries to build genuine, lasting capability across work, relationships, and life.
The Being Framework is a way of understanding the human qualities that shape how we act, lead, relate, and produce results. It looks at the layer beneath behavior, analysing how someone is relating to themselves, to others, and to the situation in front of them before an action is taken.
The framework distinguishes 31 Aspects of Being across four layers. These are not fixed personality traits. They are fundamental human qualities, such as responsibility, authenticity, vulnerability, care, self-expression, and courage, that can be examined, developed, and transformed.
Order Your Copy of
Being Matters - Volume 1
Join a global community of thinkers, leaders, and practitioners moving beyond surface-level habits and into the core of human performance.
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