Day Crafting: Are you Being or Becoming?

Jan 22, 2025 9:59 am

Do your days lean more towards being or becoming? (Or perhaps, just busyness.) Being involves occupying the present moment and experiencing contentment with who you are and your circumstances. Becoming, on the other hand, is about the journey – focusing on what you’re moving towards or away from. Techniques of change become part of the daily, becoming rhythm.

While being and momentfulness are rich components of wellbeing, they often overshadow the equally valuable practice of navigating change. Whether gradual or dramatic, change requires us to engage with new challenges, leading to growth, higher confidence and a richer sense of flourishing.

For you, is change left to necessity – reacting when you must? What if you brought intentionality to it? Just as the craftsperson approaches their material carefully and precisely, we can approach change with a toolkit of practical methods. (I've just published a workbook on this.)

Habits and Rituals: Small, deliberate practices that gradually reshape our behaviours, nonconscious and consciously, respectively.
Resilience and Identity: Building the internal frameworks to support adaptation, even when external circumstances shift.
It also includes: Strengths-based change, rites of passage, asset-based community development, stoicism and expanding your influence.

Like all Day Crafting workbooks, there is a lot of practical value to find. This final workbook in the Apprentice series explores the challenging and nuanced skills of becoming. It provides tools to craft transformative days that balance the immediate joy of practice with the long-term satisfaction of making.

Quotes from Day Crafting: The Change Workbook

Change is the deliberate causing and solving of imbalance, or the reaction to imbalances that happen to us; the changes we choose and the change that chooses us.
Remarkable Days are important aspects of the story of who we are, but days full of problem-solving, growth and achievement are critical for a flourishing life.
If the process becomes more important than the product, change becomes a craft rather than a chore.
Even if we don’t pursue change, it’ll be required of us as our circumstances shift.
Change draws on our resources of energy and time. It destabilises our maintenance, challenges our quality of inner life, and resonates with our purpose.
Change becomes easier when we focus on the daily practice, one step at a time, rather than the distant goal.

You can download a sample of the workbook from the Day Crafting website.

Short course on Day Crafting Change

Matt, one of the test readers, suggested the idea of a short course to explore these tools together. Are you interested in joining an action learning journey with a small group of fellow Apprentices to explore change?

When: There will be four sessions, two weeks apart, happening on the second and fourth Mondays of the month, over Zoom from 7.30pm UK time and starting sometime in the next six weeks.

Requirements: There would be a nominal payment of £30 for this, and you would need to purchase (and review) Day Crafting: The Change Workbook from your local Amazon – and you need to have read the Introductory Workbook and have some Day Crafting practice under your belt.

This short course will be a great way to navigate change with a caring group of lovely fellow apprentices.