Personal Mastery

PERSONAL MASTERY

We have crossed the threshold of constant change. A threshold that forces us to abandon the comfort of the familiar in-order to overcome the anxiety which comes with the unknown – this unknown “change” package (sometimes revealed as a preview of life’s coming attractions/trends) constantly forces new learning on us – the act of finding the stuff you love (through the play  instinct, acting from inner necessity), and getting so good at expressing your personal discoveries that you become an indispensable human being; achieving personal mastery.

Personal mastery is not really a goal or destination, but rather a journey, a process. It is a process that involves continual introspection, personal development and learning. In the words of Charles Handy:

“Change, however, does not have to be forced on us by crisis and calamity. We can do it for ourselves. If changing is only another word for learning, then the theories of learning will also be theories of changing. Those who are always learning are those who can ride the waves of change and who see a changing world as full of opportunities, not damages. They are the one most likely to be survivors in a time of discontinuity. They are also the enthusiasts and the architects of new ways and forms and ideas. If you want to change, try learning one might say, or more precisely, if you want to be in control of your change, take learning more seriously.”

The very root word for “learning” in Chinese is made up of two symbols. One translates as “study”; and the other as to “practice constantly”. Thus we only learn what we study by doing it.

Peter Senge said: “People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never “arrive”. Sometimes, language, such as the term “personal mastery”, creates a misleading sense of definiteness, of black and white. But personal mastery is not something you possess. It is a process. It is a lifelong discipline. People with a high level of personal mastery are actually aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, and their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident. Paradoxical? Only for those who do not see that the “journey is the reward”. The journey is the reward. It is not what you achieve at intermittent points; it is what you become in the process of reaching for incremental personal mastery.

I call this journey personal mastery. In other words, to take the master’s journey, you have to do as George Leonard said:

”practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so - and this the inexorable fact of the journey –you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau (i.e. to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere)”

Educationist, John Gardner asks an interesting question, as revealed by Peter Drucker:

“Why do some men and women stop learning and growing, while others remain vital to the very end of their days? One of the enemies of sound lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception people have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all efforts drive them. People want to believe that there is a point at which they can feel that they have arrived. They want a scoring system that tells them they have piled up enough points to be accounted a success. But the metaphor is wrong. Life is not a metaphor that has a summit, nor is it, as some suppose, a riddle that has an answer. Life is an endless unfolding and, if people wish it to be, an endless process of self discovery”