Self Mastery Secrets taught by a Business Ninja

Self Mastery - My Proprietary Model

Self Mastery forms the basis of success, yet when you search the internet or popular press for information about this vital topic - all you will find is the usual empty positive thinking rhetoric.

So what is the good of man as such? Aristotle notes that we all agree that it is "happiness." Note that the Greek term eudaemonia, which is translated as "happiness," does not mean what we normally associate with the English word. In Aristotle's terms, eudaemonia is "living well and faring well." This is quite different from the feeling of well-being that we think of as constituting happiness. Recent scholarly translations use the phrase "human flourishing" instead.

I believe that one's happiness to a lesser extent includes the sum of past high quality goals (results) that have been achieved, where one is in life now, but to a greater extext it is caused by the process of striving for more with the knowledge that one is confident in ones ability to constantly maximise one's own chances in achieving it.

Therefore I equate self mastery with self efficacy, the ability to take the most effective actions towards things that will better your life and happiness regardless of mood or circumstance; the posession of rock solid character (rooted in reality) and an undefeatable spirit.

Two years ago when I decided that I needed to master the self, I was extremely disappointed that the only materials I could find about Self Mastery was all this positive thinking crap.

I had just gone through an extremely difficult period, and was tired of not knowing the answer to some fairly big questions

• Why am I not doing the things that I know I should?
• What are the keys to personal effectiveness?
• Why does anything matter, whats my purpose - especially from a non-religious perspected.
• Whats the core aspects of Mastering the Self?

I've spent an extensive amount of time searching, asking, and yes - Starting to Master Myself.
Many books were read. Many of my own notes scribbled down. Lots of trial and error. Deep thinking.
Eventually I distelled my most cutting edge knowledge into this here, my own proprietary Model of Self Mastery. I managed to reduce it to 8 key directions that needed to be understood, mastered and applied.

Self Mastery and Intuition

Do you trust or dread your own "gut feeling guesses" when you are under pressure to make a high stakes decision?
Can you delegate the nitty gritty of huge complex situations with many layers of logical abstraction to your sub-conscious mind, and still make good decisions, and make them in an instant?
Do you find that your sub-conscious mind is regularly helping you to solve your most important problems, always surprising you unexpectedly with great solutions (AHA Moments), flashees of inspiration and brilliant ideas when you need them most?

The most important aspect of developing your intuition is conditioning your mind over a period of time, by simply taking the first step, that of regularly forcing yourself to trust your intuition. This sends a message to your subconscious that you will be taking its intuitive messages and snap judgements serious in future - forcing it to step up and improve the quality of such. Another great book about both the correct uses of snap judgements as well as the pitfalls when snap judgements are used incorrectly, I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.

Self Mastery and Character

So much of the quick fix, appearances-over-substance culture has taught us to develop our personalities. Or rather, our PERSONAS, the face- the mast- that we put on for the world, rather than developing true inner character to which we are always congruent.

Whilst their are mindsets that are critical, most aspects of character can only be developed over a long time, through diligent attention, through hard work, through going through major life trials, and being guided by a personal mentor who's character you respect.

Some key questions to ask yourself, to test your own character (you can answer this silently to yourself)

• Do I care what others think of me?
• Is my self image tied to my immediate appearances of success in the present? (Such as current bank balance, car, house or trophy wife/girl friend)
• Am I easily intimidated by fierce people?

Self Mastery and Self Esteem

I life-time experience of being beaten down, a history of being powerless over external circumstances or internal moods, failing to achieve very important goals at critical times in your life, all leads to a lowered self esteem.

Conversely, a lowered self esteem will lead to you getting beaten up by circumstance and other people much more often than you should be. So if you are caught in such spiral, it is critical that you break out of it. Again, REAL self esteem (as opposed to short term pep-talks, feel-good-delude myself positive thinking and empty pop psychology) takes time to build up. But real self esteem is also extremely resistant to whatever horrid circumstances life and other people may throw at you.

Even a moderately weakened self esteem could lead you to subconsiously sabotaging your own success, or even when you are successful, lead you to cling to feelings of inadequacy that is not inline with your achievements. Thus the person of low self esteem either never achieves success, or when he does, he does not get to enjoy the fruits of his achievements fully.

Self aspect has two fundamental aspects: (1) A believe in your self efficacy - that you are capable of doing the things needed to get the results you want in life (2) That you are basically OK, and deserving of a good life.

I believe strongly in Nathanial Brandons 6 pillars of self esteem. Its a reality driven approach. The core of a good self esteem, is the fundamental believe that you are sufficiently aligned to reality in order to be maximally succesful in life.

There exists a strong link between Integrity and Self Esteem most of which is beyond what such a short page can do justice to. Lying to others leads to lying to yourself, which in turns lead to losing touch with reality in its fullest sense, which leads to lower quality decisions (based on delusion rather than reality), yielding sub-optimal results, breaking down your self esteem. Even if you get away with deceitful actions, and benefit from them - some part of yourself will always know what you truly are, and this will chip away much more at your self esteem than anything anyone else could ever know or say about you.

Self Mastery: Mindset, Success Principles and Universal Truths

Theory of Reality

The single most important contributor to success in business and many other areas, is the theory of reality. I recommend that you look at my page on this topic, Theory of Reality.

Kaizen

Kaizen is a very simple, yet profoundly powerful way of thinking about the world and about success as a process rather than a destination. Please consult my Kaizen page for more information.

The 80/20 Principle

A key insight is that efforts and results do not correspond in a perfect 1-to-1 ratio. In fact some hugely intensive and laborous task contribute very little to the results that matter, whilst other very easy to do things generate massive results. Please consult my 80/20 Principle Thinking page for more information.

Self Mastery and Resilience

A large percentage of the time, life runs relatively smoothly, but occasionally life throws you a curve ball. Depending on your level of personal development, it will take larger crisisees to offset your balance and throw your life into turmoil. If you challenge the status quo, or try to achieve a high level of success in an ethical manner in a world filled with dishonesty, you probably get thrown a lot of curve balls - but you also learn to handle them so that most of what would be considered major shake-ups by others would be just routine "handling" stuff for you.

Resilience is your ability to take blows, and not to be easily knocked down. Finally, when you are knocked down - and this happens to everyone at some stage, that you are prepared for the road to recovery. The more resilient you are, the faster you can recover from major major life traumas, and carry the least amount of past scarring forward with you into the future.

Examples of major life shocks include: Losing someone dear to you; Losing a lot of material wealth fast; Having your trust violated by someone close to you or a long time partner.

Some things that improve resiliency

• Maintaining perspective
• Rock solid Self Esteem and Self Efficacy
• Supporting and nurturing relationships in your life (could be friends, significant other, family or even the animals in your life)
• Access to someone (a mentor, a friend, or even a book) that has gone through a similar experience, who can provide guidance

Self Mastery: Specific Skills, Knowledge and Subject Mastery

Specific Skills and Meta Skills

Part of mastery, is the ability to master certain specialities, and to structure your life in such a way that you are alway capitalising on your strengths.

Sitting on top of specific skills and knowledge, is the meta-skills - universal, cross functional abilties. These include things such as the abilty to rapidly gain new knowledge, master new fields, and thinking tools and techniques.

Flow

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Visual Thinking

To get the very best ideas, and to solve complex problems fast and efficiently, and to communicate them effectively, you need to be an aggresive user of visual thinking, visual problem solving, and visual information arrangement techniques and tools. Some of the tools include such basics as large white boards (especially for group sessions), digital whiteboards and even distributed web based whiteboards such dabbleboard. Other important tools are concept mapping and mind mapping software. Thinking techniques could include matrix thinking, free association, and concept mapping.

See how Jack Dorsey used simple paper based Visual Thinking to come up with the idea for Twitter, which is now valued over $1bn
For an introduction to visual thinking,watch this Video on YouTube - Back of the Napkin
To see why visual thinking works and how it is used for corporate strategy formulation in a group setting, view this TED video on how the brain creates visual meaning

Stages of Learning

One of the most widely used model is the one inspired by NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), which states that four stages of competence are:

1. Unconscious Incompetence - The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.
2. Conscious Incompetence - Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
3. Conscious Competence - The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
4. Unconscious Competence - The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply).

However I believe in a simpler more practical model:

1. Novice - Can't see own mistakes, afterwards have to be briefed by expert to identify areas for improvement.
2. Beginner - Afterwards can list own mistakes, and with expert guidance improvements can be suggested.
3. Intermediate - Can identify mistakes themselves as they make them, during activity, and course correct in real time.
4. Accomplished performer

Self Mastery includes Mastery over Moods and Emotions

We all know how moods can overrule logic, and cause us to do things that are not "logical". However I believe it often happens that when we inspect these emotional impulses, we find that they are often driven by underlying logic - proper good sensical logic - just not the logic we were aware of, or consciously desired.

There exists technical differences between mood and emotion, and its important to understand the differences between them.

Moods

Emotions

Self Mastery and Discipline

In their book Switch - Why change is hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, they talk about why a lack of self control is not always due to lazyness, but more often simple fatique. In corporate circles, management commenly refer to the term "Change Fatique" to mean the same thing. When your mind is dealing with too many conscious decisions (things that haven't become routine yet), or too much uncertainty (difficult decisions, or simply lack of knowledge), or overwhelming options, then it tends to lead to procrastination. In the book they use the wonderful analogy of The Rider (The logical mind - knowing what we should do), The Elephant (The emotional mind which often pursues instant gratification and gut feelings), and the Path (The environment, or the direction on which you need to keep your elephant in order to reach your goal).

Discipline is like a muscle in another way (not only does it get tired if excercised too much in a short time span), but it also develops over time. The more you develop Self Discipline and solid habits, the more it starts to build on itself and become stronger. Making minor commitments with yourself is a good way to build up to larger spheres of discipline.

I have been struggling with burnout for 2.5 years partially because of multiple life shattering events and working in a
role that demands a lot of emotional labour. No-one has been able to constructively assist me; professionally or
personally. I came across your website by accident when I was doing a Personal self inventory of all the attributes of
me as a [unhappy] vs [happy] self. My \'aha\' moment was just one word \'self mastery\' that was going to be the
scaffolding for a bridge between the unhappy to happy self. Hence I came across your website. I realise now that my past
experience of change have encompassed all three areas you mention. Thank you for publishing it.