THE POWER SELF-MASTERY

‘One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself’-Leonardo da Vinci

Why Self-Mastery Will Help You Get What You Want

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and seeing reality objectively - PETER SENGE

If I have come to learn one thing through my entire career as a business woman, it’s that as human beings we are continuously learning to deal with life. What we want, what we don’t want, what we have and don’t have and what we can and can’t do.

When I started my business, all I knew is that I needed to survive, I was a young single mum and my driver was to take care of  myself and my daughter and that was not going to happen on a single wage. My journey into business was to earn enough money to pay the bills. I very quickly learnt the basics of running a business and loved it. I made it my mission to get better at running my business every day, and I became a student of personal development.

I discovered the concept of “Personal-Mastery” through my coaching training. It wasn’t about how I did my work, it was about who I was being when doing my work. I learnt to pay attention to and understand my emotions, my thoughts, actions, values and  habits and started listening to the stories I told others about myself. I learnt to be more awake to how I was living my life.

Personal mastery helps us to choose. Choosing is a courageous act: picking the results and actions which you will make into your destiny  - PETER SENGE

6 Steps You Can Take to Achieve Self-Mastery

1.  Become more self-aware

Awareness is about being present to your thoughts, feelings and actions. The more aware you become aware of your inside world, the more aware you become of how you react to your outside world. Through your awareness, you will be able to change the way you see the world.

2.  Understand your values

Our core values help us choose how we want to spend our time, right here right now. We can’t get time back, so when we are able to understand what’s important to us – what we want, what we value above our basic needs,  our values help guide us in the right direction.  One of the reasons some people can’t set goals, is that  they don’t understand or know their personal values, what’s import to them.

3.  Live Intentionally

95% of what we do every day comes for our subconscious brain – our automatic habits that we have created by our repeated behaviours and actions. When we intentionally plan our day our week or our month, we are awake to the decisions we make, we consciously decide on our next steps and don’t fall into auto pilot. Be present to what is going on in your life and intentionally plan for what you want.

4.  Have meaningful conversations

  Conversations are multi-level not linear. What we think, what we say, what we mean, what others hear, and how we feel about it afterwards are the key dimensions behind conversations. What you say to someone isn’t necessarily what they hear – we translate what we hear based on our own beliefs and experiences and come up with what we believe we heard. Conversations help us connect with others, understanding where we are in a conversation and how our words and our tone affect others is key to building trust and influence fast.

5.  Habits

     Our beliefs create our thoughts, our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings determine our behaviour. Our repeated actions become our habits and our habits determine our destiny. We all have good and bad habits – The work to change our habits is to examining our thoughts and feelings which are creating our habitual behaviours. Figure out which ones are getting you to where you want to go and which ones aren't.

6.  

   Accountability/Responsibility

 At the centre of our most basic human powers is our ability to respond (responsibility) Conceptually, we divide this ability to respond in two areas: responsibility for ourselves and responsibility to others. The first describes accountability and the second describes relationships. (Michael Hall – Author - Figuring out people).

We are responsible and accountable for our own thinking, speaking and behaving. We have the capacity to make a choice of how we respond to situations and events. The practice of holding ourselves accountable comes from taking full responsibility for our lives. Take some time to figure out the areas of your life you are being under responsible for and  for whom you may be being over responsible for in a relationship. Being over responsible for someone else is disempowering to that person. 

Here is some extra reading on The Difference between accountability and responsibility

Ondina x