personal mastery self assessment examples

A warrior must cultivate the feeling that he has everything needed for the extravagant journey that is his life. What counts for a warrior is being alive. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete. Therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being alive.

As Mas low told his group of doctoral students:

You must want to be a first-class psychologist, meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.

Although many of us refuse the call to adventure, developing our innate capacities is our destiny.

Fighting this destiny brings depression and anxiety. Embracing this destiny leads to freedom and fulfillment.

We all have an intrinsic motivation toward growth.

This drive toward growth is easily observable in an infant’s will to master walking, basic motor skills, and language.

But what do we observe in most adults?

In some adults, we find curious individuals who remain committed to developing their brains and bodies, forging new skills for both work and play.

We find self-actualizing people in virtually every field of interest, including business professionals, artists, musicians, philosophers, painters, doctors, psychologists, athletes, and martial artists.

Many adults aren’t committed to continuous growth and development, but many of us are. We simply become consumed by life’s countless demands.

Sometimes, we give ourselves excuses to forego our developmental path. We say things like:

But is there something else driving us away from growth, blocking our personal evolution?

In Toward a Psychology of Being , Abraham Maslow explains there are two powerful sets of forces within the human condition: a drive for growth and its opposing force, a drive for safety.

Growth propels us forward toward wholeness of Self to discover our uniqueness (what Carl Jung called the individuation process ).

An opposing force leads us to defend our current self, clinging to safety out of fear of the unknown.

The force of safety keeps us where we are now, clinging to the past and afraid to take chances in order to improve our current conditions (internally and externally).

This safety seeking side is afraid of independence, freedom, and separateness—the very things our growth side is demanding.

What we focus on tends to guide the direction of our lives.

If we focus on the dangers of growth, our need for safety wins the day.

But if we minimize the dangers of our emerging uniqueness and fuller expression of the Self while enhancing our attractions toward growth, a world of new possibilities presents itself.

Maslow points out that we are confronted with an ongoing series of choices throughout life between safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity.

In Toward a Psychology of Being , he writes:

We grow forward when the delights of growth and anxieties of safety are greater than the anxieties of growth and the delights of safety.

There is a valid reason to fear growth. In addition to the rewards and gratifications, growth also brings pain.

Each step forward brings us into the unfamiliar, into possible danger.

Each step forward requires us to give up something familiar and satisfying.

Growth can mean a separation, a death and rebirth as well as the grief and mourning that comes with loss of the old.

We grow toward greater complexity. This means when we grow, we might have to give up something easier and simpler.

The path of growth often means taking on more demands and responsibility; it can mean a more difficult life.

Is there any wonder anyone would avoid such a path?

Does this mean we must throw aside our concern for safety in the service of our development? Absolutely not.

Safety is a more basic human need than growth. In the absence of a feeling of safety, the will to grow is not generally present.

Consider, for example, a young child clinging to her mother’s leg while she attempts to walk for the first time.

If the mother abruptly exits the room to answer the phone, the child would likely terminate her herculean effort.

Sometimes, choosing safety is wise and appropriate when it helps us to avoid more pain than we can bear in that moment.

But ultimately, we know that if we consistently choose safety over growth, in the long run, we find ourselves in a state of disappointment.

If we cling to safety for too long, we wake up one day and look back on a life that never was—an unconscious life filled with regrets and missed opportunities.

Moving in the direction of safety, we deny our unique destinies.

How do you know when you’re on the road to growth?

There are numerous subjective indicators:

When the force of safety dominates us, we show signs of self-betrayal and regression and we become fixed and rigid out of fear.

Here, we are consumed by a different set of emotions: anxiety, boredom, despair, inability to enjoy, aimlessness, emptiness, a lack of identity, intrinsic guilt, and intrinsic shame.

Fear and the need for safety won’t go away, nor should they. The drive for safety helps support our survival.

But courage and the need for growth are also part of what it means to be human.

In courageously walking the path of self-mastery, we can realize our true potential and live a uniquely meaningful life.

How Homeostasis Influences Our Growth and Development

We know that most people have a fear of failure. Those who do have a fixed mindset .

In a fixed mindset, failure can evoke emotions of shame, embarrassment, humiliation, frustration, worthlessness, and defeat. It damages an already fragile self-esteem.

But did you know that many of us fear success, too?

The reasons for this one isn’t as obvious. Success can bring a sense of achievement, internal and external rewards, and greater confidence.

It can also bring us a better quality of life and new opportunities.

So why fear success? And why do we often subconsciously self-sabotage our development?

In Mastery , aikido master George Leonard offers a powerful reason: homeostasis .

We fear success for the same fundamental reason we fear failure.

Movement in either direction—up or down—means moving out of the known and into the unknown.

Our internal systems are designed to maintain homeostasis . We are biologically wired to stay in balance, to stay within what is known and comfortable.

Our bodies, brains, and behavior have built-in mechanisms to stay within a narrow range and return to equilibrium when they move outside these narrow limits.

Homeostasis refers to the body’s automatic efforts to maintain a constant, “normal” state.

In our blood stream alone, homeostasis regulates the content of water, salt, sugar, fat, protein, calcium, and oxygen.

What would happen if your blood-sugar level dropped by 10 percent? Big trouble!

All self-regulating systems have ways of maintaining homeostasis and keeping us in familiar and safe territory.

Keeping human beings in a state of homeostasis takes billions of interconnecting electrochemical signals coursing through our brains, nerve fibers, and bloodstream.

To better understand homeostasis, consider your home’s heating system. You set the temperature at, for example, 65 degrees.

When the temperature drops below 65, a signal is sent through the system to kick the heat on until the environment returns to the set temperature.

Homeostasis is a vital function in all self-regulating systems.

The challenge is that homeostasis doesn’t distinguish between “change for the better” and “change for the worse.”

Homeostasis resists all change. In a way, we each have a pre-installed biological mechanism designed to hinder our growth.

For example, let’s say a 40-year-old man named Peter has lived a sedentary lifestyle without any exercise, stretching, or movement for many years.

He knows this isn’t good for his long-term health, and he’s beginning to feel its effects.

Peter decides to go for a light jog in his neighborhood.

He’s proud of himself for taking action, but around the third block, something happens: Peter starts feeling sick and a little dizzy, with a slight sense of panic.

He feels like he’s going to die. Peter stops running and slowly walks home.

“I tried,” he tells himself. “Perhaps I’ll join the gym one day.”

The sensations Peter experienced were homeostatic alarm signals detecting measurable changes in respiration, heart rate, and metabolism. His internal systems were telling him to stop what he is doing immediately.

Remember, homeostasis is designed to maintain your current state . After years of sedentary living, a light jog throws Peter’s internal systems into high alert.

Because Peter didn’t know about homeostasis, he interpreted those signals as a threat.

And unfortunately, he opted out of installing good routines and making beneficial life changes.

If Peter understood the principles of homeostasis, he could have persisted through the discomfort, slowly shifting his “normal state” to a stronger, healthier set point.

Homeostasis isn’t just biological; it operates in social and cultural spheres as well.

Let’s say Peter’s peer group tends to be sedentary. They all avoid physical exercise at all cost.

When he decides to engage in physical activity, his friends will likely exert a social pressure to stop his efforts.

Not only does Peter have to contend with his biological resistance, but he must also overcome the gravity of his social group.

Whenever you adopt a new, empowering behavior, you can experience this downward pressure.

Although you might expect your family or friends to support your new changes, group homeostasis often exerts pressure to maintain old patterns.

This process operates unconsciously, that is, they may not even be aware of their unsupportive behavior.

Despite the best intentions of your loved ones’, those closest to you may try to keep you where you are.

When you grow, you’re different. The homeostasis of your environment, including friends, family, and co-workers, is affected.

Growth can cause pressure and discomfort for others (since they have an unconscious desire for growth, too).

People in your environment may look at you differently. They may admire your changes; your efforts may inspire them.

But a part of them also may envy you and secretly despise you. Your friends and family may prefer the “old” you.

By being aware of these tendencies, you can allow yourself to feel these social pressures without enabling them to influence your behavior.

It can also help you become more compassionate toward yourself and others.

The path of self-mastery, of evolution, creation, and growth, can be a lonely one.

Discovering a great talent within yourself that demands nurturance can be exhilarating, but it can also bring feelings of danger and responsibility.

It may require you to stand alone, cultivating inner strength instead of seeking support from your environment. (Although you can find those that will support your efforts, too, especially if they are on their path to self-mastery.)

Standing strong can feel like a heavy burden, a thankless endeavor we might consider avoiding at all costs.

The path to growth and self-mastery is invariably difficult at times. It’s uncomfortable moving out of the known into the unknown.

Even if the known is not ideal or even desirable, it’s familiar to us. And since all humans have a need for safety, there will always be an attraction to staying within the familiar.

Make peace with homeostasis, but continually challenge yourself to establish higher homeostatic set points.

Honoring your need for safety, courageously guide yourself into the great unknown. Come to enjoy practice for practice’s sake. Transform yourself slowly, steadily, and daily.

Abraham Maslow highlights thirteen characteristics of self-actualization he observed in individuals with positive mental health. They are the markers of those walking the path to self-mastery.

Familiarize yourself with these characteristics so you can self-assess of you’re on the right track today.

See : 13 Characteristics of Self-Actualizing Individuals

No matter what you’re going to learn, you will go through four stages in your development.

When you don’t know what these stages are, at least two of them hijack your development.

If you know what to expect, however, you will reach the final stage of personal mastery.

See : The Four Stages of Learning Anything

Ten Self Mastery Secrets for Achieving Peak Performance

Once you understand the psychological drivers that block our growth, we can turn our attention to ways of overcoming them.

Here are ten self-mastery secrets for breaking through resistance and building momentum on your path to higher self-actualization.

Accept the fact that you have a resistance to positive change. It’s easy to beat ourselves up when we see that we’re standing in our way.

Feelings of shame and guilt, however, only delay our progress because when we feel bad, we tend to reinforce bad habits.

In contrast, self-acceptance and self-compassion allow us to take note of our resistance without judging or criticizing ourselves.

You’re going to need to find ways to negotiate with your resistance to change if you want to stay on the path to self-mastery.

Kelly McGonical’s The Willpower Instinct ( audiobook ) provides an excellent course guide for navigating through your resistance.

A clear vision will serve you in whatever areas you’re seeking growth and improvement.

Without vision, your efforts will be aimless and tend to meander.

Compelling is the operative word; make the vision something you want to move toward, something that inspires you (and not something you just think you should move toward).

Understand that lasting transformation doesn’t happen in a moment; it requires consistent practice.

No matter whether you’re learning a new instrument, practicing communication skills , or meditating , every new skill requires your brain to make new connections and enforce those connections through repeated practice.

Our brains are like a muscle, but as we age, it takes longer and longer to make lasting changes. Repetition through daily practice yields results.

Even when you know about the process of homeostasis, it will still influence you.

Backsliding is inevitable on the path to growth and self-mastery. If you know this, you’ll be less discouraged when you observe it in yourself.

Here again, self-kindness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion will serve your efforts; getting down on yourself will halt your progress.

We often demonstrate lots of enthusiasm and excitement when we begin on our growth path. We see a world of possibilities and positive change at our doorstep.

In these moments of excitement, we often push things too hard, triggering a homeostatic response on a high alert.

Self-mastery is not a sprint; it’s a long-distance run. In Qigong, they teach you to practice with 70% of your capacity. When you push or strain yourself, you induce involuntary tension in your nervous system.

Operating at 70% helps you stay relaxed and engaged while avoiding injury. This same principle will serve you in most areas of your development.

If you take yourself (or the process of growth) too seriously, you’ll invariably derail your efforts.

Your inner animal, or the primitive parts of your brain, will eventually revolt against you, sabotaging your efforts.

So take a light-hearted approach. Be willing to laugh at yourself. Be playful and find ways to make your practice something you enjoy doing (while still accepting the fact that it will bring discomfort at times).

In any path to mastery, you learn to practice for practice’s sake, not to achieve any particular objective.

But while a compelling vision keeps you focused and inspired, mini goals can help you measure your progress.

Your attention shouldn’t be on just achieving these aims; setting mini goals can help you stay engaged in your practice.

No matter what road to mastery you walk, you need a healthy reserve of physical energy to help manage stress, overcome resistance, and follow through.

Our willpower has a kind of fuel tank. It gets depleted when our energy supply runs low.

If you commit to daily practice in the morning, you’ll be more likely to follow through because you have more energy after a good night’s rest.

After a long day of work, our egos get depleted of their mental energy. Practice becomes more difficult.

Conscious effort in cultivating physical energy through proper diet, sleep, exercise, posture, breathing, and stretching will greatly serve you on your path to self-mastery.

Self-assessment is essential for anyone pursuing self-mastery. We invest a tremendous amount of energy lying to others and ourselves.

It’s easy to fall prey to ego inflation (seeing ourselves as bigger than we are) and ego deflations (seeing ourselves as less than we are).

Self-honesty and integrity free up all the energy our egos expend keeping up our house of lies. Start by honing in on your true feelings.

Try keeping a private journal where you can express your hopes, dreams, fears, and other emotions you may not feel comfortable sharing.

All great athletes have rituals for getting into a peak state to perform at their best.

Establishing rituals that you perform at the beginning of your practice sessions can be helpful.

Developing a daily practice is perhaps the most powerful ritual in itself.

Resistance to Self Mastery

The path toward self-mastery would be straight and narrow if it wasn’t for resistance. Resistance takes various forms.

When you understand the source of your resistance, you can navigate around and through it.

Those who achieve personal mastery learn how to avoid extremes.

They don’t seek passion and excitement regarding their development, living in moderation and making steady progress each day.

See : Why You Should Let Your Passion Die

Only with a love of learning and resilience through innumerable plateaus can we actualize our potential.

We truly must believe—with a deep conviction—that we can achieve greatness.

We must know in our hearts that we have the potential to actualize and the will and grace to make it so.

To have this resolve, we must first change your fixed mindset.

See : How to Change Your Fixed Mindset

Another thing that blocks the process of learning and development is the mind’s belief, “I know.”

This single belief stops learning, destroys creativity, and inhibits personal mastery.

See : How to Adopt a Beginner’s Mind to Improve Learning and Creativity

Laziness is something every person wrestles with to varying degrees. When you understand the “voices” behind laziness, you’re more able to navigate through it.

However, if you repress your laziness by trying to deny it and push through it, in the end, your laziness will hijack your personal development and peak performance .

See : An Achiever’s Guide to Overcoming Laziness

Peak performers in virtually any field sleep more, not less, than the rest of us.

It’s virtually impossible to walk the path of self-mastery when you’re worn down, drained, and disinterested. Fatigue creates its own form of resistance.

Getting quality sleep is a MUST for those interested in accessing their potential.

See : Powerful Secrets to Transform Your Sleep So You Can Actualize Your Potential

Our natural state is one of mastery . However, many things pull us out of this state.

After a while, we lose access to the state of mastery. Some people even start to believe it’s impossible to access. Of course, this isn’t true.

Use The Mastery Method to activate your higher potential at will …

What then can we do to promote our continued growth and development?

One reason many of us fail to actualize more of our potential is that we lack a personal development plan .

This plan can be simple. It can fit on a single page. But it must be created with an understanding of human potential so you’re aware of what’s available to you.

See : How to Create a Personal Development Plan

Discovering a great talent, capacity, or strength within yourself that demands nurturance can be exhilarating, but it can also bring feelings of danger and responsibility.

It may demand that you stand alone, cultivating inner strength instead of seeking support from your environment. (Although you can find those that will support your efforts, too, especially if they are on their own path to self-mastery.)

Even if the known is not ideal or even desirable, it’s familiar to us.

And since all humans have a need for safety, there will always be an attraction to staying within the familiar.

Honoring your need for safety, courageously guide yourself into the great unknown. Enjoy practice for practice’s sake.

Transform yourself slowly, steadily, and daily.

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

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What is Personal Mastery – A Look Into Personal Development From a New Perspective

6 Comments

An essential ingredient for super-happiness in life is discovering personal mastery. Personal mastery is something that we all want to achieve, whether we know it or not. It is about our journey towards continuous improvement and seeing life from a different perspective. Personal mastery is guided by principles such as purpose, vision, belief, commitment and knowing oneself. Ultimately, personal mastery is about understanding exactly how you think, why you do things the way you do, having clarity around your purpose and direction in life and taking steps towards continual learning and development to evolve and enhance oneself. It is not something that is achieved overnight, but rather something that each and every one of us strive towards in our journey of life, fostering a more satisfying, successful, happier and fulfilling life.

“Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills… it means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.”

Personal Vision and Purpose Personal mastery is about living a life with purpose and meaning. Personal mastery is about knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there, it’s like sailing through the ocean with the confidence and ability to set your compass, read your map and push full throttle until you reach your sacred island with the gold. A life without purpose and meaning is like sailing through the ocean with no direction and hoping that you may find an island that is good for you. Finding your purpose is the epitome of achieving personal mastery.

Loving Oneself Personal mastery is about being able to love yourself for who you are and being able to express yourself in its fullest. When you are realising personal mastery, you are not ashamed to say what you truly think and have full belief in yourself. Personal mastery is about having the confidence to express who you are and love every aspect of it.

Self-Discipline Personal mastery is about being disciplined and being about to commit to your goals and stay on your journey. Your journey of personal mastery may change over time, and that’s ok, but it’s about you setting your journey and not being swept away with the waves.

Proactive Behaviour Personal mastery helps to build proactive behaviour. You are reactive when you do not understand yourself, you do not understand your direction and you do not know where you want to go or how you want to get there. As you take the journey of personal mastery and you start to build your understanding and awareness of these, you will become more proactive and pick up pace towards where it is that you want to go.

Contribution to Others Personal mastery is not just about understand oneself, but also about being able to contribute back to society and to others. It is about understanding how you can best help the lives of others and taking steps towards achieving this.

Positive Attitude Personal mastery is about having the right mental attitude to make decisions and take action in your life. It is about seeing the best in yourself, in others and the world in general. Personal mastery is about converting negative energy into positive energy, shaping your thoughts and thinking positively and powerfully.

Overcoming Fears Personal mastery is about understanding your fears and taking steps to overcome them. It is about being able to reframe your thinking and shaping challenges as opportunities. The journey towards personal mastery takes away the fear, eliminates any self-limiting beliefs you have had in your life and enhances your confidence, leading to a strong sense of self-belief.

Balance in Life Personal mastery is about balancing your life and ensuring you are experiencing and giving everything that is important to you. When you are realising personal mastery, you are more aware of your time and energy and how you are spending that time and energy. Personal mastery helps you to make better decisions on where to spend your time and energy so you can balance your life more effectively.

Achieving Success Personal mastery helps you achieve absolute success in whatever it is that you pursue. When you start to truly understand and behave within the principles of personal mastery, you will start to see your success accelerate. Understanding yourself, knowing what your purpose is, thinking positively and utilising your talents, skills and strengths are sure-fire ways to guide you on your path to personal mastery and ultimately achieve success.

Absolute Happiness Personal mastery is about achieving absolute happiness in life. Happiness is, and ought to be, the ultimate goal of life. Your journey towards personal mastery is about finding what truly makes you happy, and living this out on a daily basis. If you can achieve this, then this is a massive step towards attaining personal mastery.

Ultimately, personal mastery is about creating your own life and driving your own destiny. You are in the drivers seat . You can make any choice you want to. Personal mastery is the journey towards understanding yourself, knowing where you want to go, and continual learning and development to help you achieve absolute happiness, success and life fulfillment.

For the Comments

Where are you on the path to Personal Mastery? Which areas do you feel you have mastered? Which areas have you struggled with? What’s the focus in your life right now for achieving personal mastery?

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About the author

Brendan Baker

Brendan Baker is Australia's leading personal development blogger and and helps people build and grow online businesses based on their passions. He has created the Launch Your Life Academy and Your First 1000 Subscribers . Connect with Brendan: Twitter , Facebook , Google+

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Interesting post Brendan. You may be familiar with the 3 big motivators according to Dan Pink (Autonomy, mastery and purpose) See here for excellent presentation http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc @pclaireaux

Pingback: The Happiness Model – Why Finding Happiness is Not the Way - The Start of Happiness

Very thought provoking Brendan, out of interest are these all your original thoughts or are you combining a number of things that you read into the blog?

My main constructive point of feedback here is how do you feel as individuals we achieve personal mastery or is it a matter of combining and continually developing the above attributes i.e.absolute happiness, balance in life etc..

Posts are all my own thoughts based on what I have learned, read and practiced over the years.

To me, acheiving Personal Mastery is a continuous journey of self-improvement, but its underpinned by the two key elements of knowing yourself and knowing your purpose. If you can find and understand this, then building on the other attributes helps you achieve what it is you want to do. However, is just achieving your purpose good enough? Its the ‘how’ you go about achieving that throughout life where the other elements of personal mastery fall into place. They are also tools for helping you achieve your purpose. If you can strike the balance and achieve them all, now THAT is a life you want to live!

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Destiny's Odyssey

Self-Mastery

Self-Mastery is the ability to recognize, understand, control, and make the most out of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual self. It is gained thorough awareness, understanding, and control over your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Essentially, it gives you control over the one thing you can control in any given situation: yourself.

Self-mastery over your own thoughts, emotions, words, and actions can change and transform your life and yourself. When negative thoughts arise, emotions can become unsettled and your resulting actions can have negative consequences. With It will also help you control your emotional impulses and allow you to make decisions based on rational thinking instead of heightened emotions.

Self-Mastery Process

The road to self-mastery begins with self-awareness. Self-awareness is having an insightful understanding of your personality, values, tendencies, and beliefs. It is the process of analyzing your thoughts, beliefs, actions, and emotions to help you determine your values and principles. The more you understand yourself, the more control you will have over yourself and your life.

Self-awareness leads to the accumulation of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge identifies what you know about yourself. It is with self-knowledge that you can understand your principles, values, and purpose and are able to apply it to your life. With self-knowledge, you are able to understand your strengths to build upon, as well as identify areas where you may like to make improvements. With self-knowledge, you discover who you are and when you are at our best.

However, one of the problems with awareness and/or knowledge is that it does not require you to take any action. Without action, knowledge and awareness does not lead to change. The good thing is that once you develop your self-awareness and the skills to understand your core beliefs, then changing your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors becomes much easier. Acting on your self-knowledge allows you to reach your fullest potential and to become fulfilled and self-actualized.

Benefits of Self-Mastery

Self-mastery can help you develop habits, beliefs, and attitudes in order to create and live your life to the fullest. When you have developed this mastery, you will have the ability to control yourself in any given situation. You will be able to move easier forward towards your goals with discipline, persistence and focus. You will know your purpose, and you will have the self-confidence and self-discipline needed to do things in a conscious, focused, and purposeful way.

One of the greatest benefits of self-mastery is that it helps you have clarity on what is important to you. It teaches you to live in the present moment and helps you create more room in your life for feelings of gratitude, love, fulfillment, joy, and happiness.

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Four Keys to Personal Mastery & Change

Four keys to personal mastery & change.

If we were able to peer long enough through the fog surrounding leadership, or listen hard enough above the cacophony of noise – at its core – leadership is about change. And at the very heart of leadership is creating and leading meaningful change.

Adaptive Challenges Will Trip You Up

Most of us know from experience however that leading change effectively is rarely a straight-forward undertaking as we navigate the complexity and sometimes murky waters of adaptive challenges. Ron Heifetz at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government first wrote about adaptive challenges nearly three decades ago. He drew the distinction between adaptive challenges – those that keep on keeping on – versus technical challenges where we know how to solve the problem. Examples of adaptive challenges are climate change, recidivism (are we ever not going to need prisons?) and changing the culture of an organisation.

They are the challenges that sometimes create confusion, frustration and sometimes conflict within us. For example, a High Court judge once told me about the dilemma in balancing the needs of the perpetrator, the victim and the community. And how personally tormenting it was looking in to the eyes of the mother of the victim who was pleading for justice – and then looking in to the eyes of the mother of the accused who was pleading for mercy .

…how personally tormenting it was looking in to the eyes of the mother of the victim who was pleading for justice – and then looking in to the eyes of the mother of the accused who was pleading for mercy .

These challenges are non-linear in nature in that our approach often doesn’t create the intended changes. It sometimes feels like we’re riding a wild river, where you attempt to make a correction but it takes you off in a different and unexpected direction! Our measure of success therefore may not be resolution, but just making progress. (For those interested in learning more, I wrote a book entitled Leadership Without Silver Bullets in 2009 (updated last year) which features many adaptive leadership principles, then I wrote about an immersive experience at Harvard in 2010). So adaptive challenges are more about the heart (values, loyalties, priorities) than the head (logical, well-known strategies), but both are important and shouldn’t be neglected.

A Simple Way to Kill a Dinner Party Conversation

I have found from experience that if you want to kill a dinner party conversation, simply mention the words ‘personal mastery’. Most people – sometimes even those who work in organisational development – either (a) don’t know what it is; (b) don’t care or (c) think it all sounds a bit weird.

Most people attribute the term ‘personal mastery’ to Peter Senge, who wrote about it in his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline. While a little elusive to grasp as a principle, Senge described it as “the discipline of personal growth and learning” , but added that it’s more than just growth and learning. It starts by clarifying what really matters most to us. It’s about creating a desired future and moving toward it.

Introducing the 4C’s of Personal Mastery and Change

In my consulting, coaching and facilitation career, I have worked across almost every imaginable industry at all levels up and down and across organisations. I have worked with leaders who were ‘walking egos’; others who knew no other way to behave except in aggressive or passive defensive ways; and others who were introverted and trying to find their voice in the world. I have also been privileged to have worked with many, many extraordinary leaders who want to make a difference in the lives of people and their communities.

Regardless of which type of leader I have worked with, many continue to struggle to be effective in the core responsibility of their roles – leading change. I need to draw the distinction between what Dean Williams calls ‘counterfeit leadership’ and real leadership, with the former – counterfeit leadership – looking like we’re leading but we really aren’t . Instead, we overlay a technical solution (one we know how to do because it’s usually our default) over an adaptive challenge. There is enormous pressure to deliver in organisations today, so it is no surprise that we sometimes take the easy road rather than the messier, zig-zag road of adaptive leadership.

The 4Cs of Personal Mastery are not meant to be a panacea, but rather seeks to highlight four key areas that can help create meaningful, deep change. It helps create the type of change that brings people along rather than alienates them. It aims to balance the logical with the emotional. It can also help create the type of change that is enduring rather than wallpapering a technical solution over a much deeper problem. It requires a ‘go slow to go fast’ approach, where there are no simple answers . For most challenges, if they were simple to fix someone would have done it a long time ago. These are the types of challenges that will benefit from the approach (see model below).

A Deeper Dive

In theory, you can start anywhere in the model. For example, you may decide that you need to be courageous to highlight a significant issue in your organisation, or you might decide that you need to be compassionate to really understand an individual, team or indeed the challenges and pain-points in an organisation. For the purpose of this article, we’ll start at Connection .

Connection – it is important to be able to connect with ourselves and other people. We need to know what is important both personally and professionally. These questions can help to clarify your thinking:

Commitment – A clear commitment usually starts with a clear intention. A clear intent helps pave the way forward for committed action. One feeds of the other. However, we shouldn’t have blind commitment to achieve the goal however as this doesn’t represent the flexible approach needed to lead change effectively. Yes, we must have tenacity and resilience, but not at the expense of everything else. To understand commitment , reflect on the following:

Courage – Courage is acting despite our fears and (perceived) threats. It means understanding how the team or organisational system is working and challenging the status quo. Perhaps Winston Churchill said it well when he said:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Reflect on the following questions:

Compassion – Compassion has been variably defined, but the version I connect with the best is Brenee Brown’s where she says, “Compassion is the feeling of wanting to ease the suffering of others. Self-compassion is the feeling and desire that we, ourselves, not suffer.” While the word suffering may sound a little dramatic, it can feel like that in organisations. You may connect better with thinking about alleviating pain or pressure points. Compassion is taking empathy to the next level. In empathy, I can feel what another feels, whereas compassion is feeling it and wanting to do something about it. That’s my interpretation anyway. And in terms of self-compassion, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that most people are their own harshest critics. We all need to practice a little more self-compassion.

Ask yourself these questions:

And So the Cycle Continues…

Once we have demonstrated compassion , we will connect more deeply with those around us, which then enables us to more fully commit to the right course of action. Our levels of courage demonstrated and compassion towards others may need to be amplified as our leadership work ‘levels up’ exponentially. As a result, it is reasonable to expect that as we follow the cycle in an upward motion, we will create more insight, influence and ultimately positive impact .

And one final comment if I may, don’t forget to demonstrate a healthy dose of self-compassion as you navigate the murky and rocky waters of change and experiment with different ways to bring the 4C’s to life.

View more articles like this: The five keys to creating conscious change and restoring wellbeing

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