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Volume 1

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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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.

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.

The Objective

Why Being Matters

You are already serious about growth. You lead, you build, and 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 has not 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.

This is what Being Matters means. It matters, genuinely and significantly, that people turn their attention to who and how they are being.

Beneath Behaviour

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, and lead with confidence.

All of this can be useful. It can also leave the source of the pattern completely untouched.

Being Matters turns attention toward that orientation. It asks what is shaping the behavior before the behavior ever appears.

The questions beneath the questions

How am I making sense of what is happening?
What assumptions am I carrying into this situation?
What am I protecting? What am I avoiding?
What do I become when I am under pressure?
What kind of impact am I having beyond my intention?

Table Of Contents

Chapter Overview

Chapter 1 : How we make sense of the world

Ashkan Tashvir

Chapter 2 : How Being shapes what we do and what follows

Ashkan Tashvir

Chapter 3 : Building or burning out? Entrepreneurship as a vehicle

Ariya Chittasy

Chapter 4 : Organisations as human systems

Lucy Faulconer

Chapter 5 : Being human, beyond us and beyond now

Dr. Anna Carr

Chapter 6 : Vulnerability: The pathway to a better world

John Williams

Chapter 7 : Authenticity: Living by design or by default?

Tanja Caprioli

Chapter 8 : Standing without armour

Jeanette Mundy

Chapter 9 : The stories we carry into relationships

Atefeh Tashvir

Chapter 10 : Beyond parenting: How the parent system shapes human becoming

Melissa Chittasy

Chapter 11 : Living well with limitations

Wayne Stickel

Chapter 12 : From functioning to thriving

Louise Smallwood

Chapter 13 : Why collaborative teams are at the core of every great company

Jacqueline Hofste

Chapter 14 : When the business outgrows the owner

Anthea Stevanovic

Chapter 15 : Because we can does not mean we should

Caroline New

Chapter 16 : Coaching and the transformation of Being

Aydin Yassemi

Chapter 17 : The leader's legacy: From authority to coaching

John Smallwood

Chapter 18 : The joy of coaching: When work becomes an expression of Being

Marlous Teh

Chapter 19 : Identity has a geography: How place shapes who we are, how we lead, and what we guard

Dr. Jordan Alexander

Chapter 20 : Why attachment to identity lies at the heart of human suffering

Dr. Ehssan Sakhaee

What Is 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.

Why highly capable people burn out while pursuing meaningful goals.

How our interpretation of reality shapes what we notice, avoid, and justify.

The point where responsibility accidentally becomes control, avoidance, or resentment.

How vulnerability and authenticity affect the performance of human systems.

What allows work to shift from a burden into an expression of care, contribution, and integrity.

The Strategic Leader

You have achieved what society calls success, but recognise that leading from 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 bring more authenticity to that care.

The Conscious Creator

You are building a business, a practice, or a life, and you refuse to settle for surface-level answers about why humans struggle to connect and thrive.