Articles / News
Source: Senge, Peter M
Personal Mastery
“Personal mastery” is the phrase used for the discipline of personal growth and learning. People with high levels of personal mastery are continually expanding their ability to create the results in life they truly seek. From their quest for continual learning comes the spirit of the learning organization.
When personal mastery becomes a discipline - an activity we integrate into our lives - it embodies two underlying movements. The first is continually clarifying what is important to us. We often spend too much time coping with problems along our path that we forget why we are on that path in the first place. The result is that we only have a dim, or even inaccurate, view of what’s really important to us.
The second is continually learning how to see current reality more clearly. We’ve all known people entangled in counterproductive relationships, who remain stuck because they keep pretending everything is all right. Or we have been in business meetings where everyone says “We’re on course relative to our plan,” yet an honest look at current reality would show otherwise. In moving toward a desired destination, it is vital to know where you are now.
The juxtaposition of vision (what we want) and a clear picture of current reality (where we are relative to what we want) generates what we call “creative tension”: a force to bring them together, caused by the natural tendency of tension to seek resolution. The essence of personal mastery is learning how to generate and sustain creative tension in our lives.
“Learning” in this context does not mean acquiring more information, but expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life. It is lifelong generative learning.
People with a high level of personal mastery share several basic characteristics. They have a special sense of purpose that lies behind their visions and goals. For such a person, a vision is a calling rather than simply a good idea. They see “current reality” as an ally, not an enemy. They have learned how to perceive and work with forces of change rather than resist those forces. They are deeply inquisitive, committed to continually seeing reality more and more accurately. They feel connected to others and to life itself. Yet they sacrifice none of their uniqueness. They feel as if they are part of a larger creative process, which they can influence but cannot unilaterally control.
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 acutely aware of their ignorance, their incompetence, their growth areas. And they are deeply self-confident. Paradoxical? Only for those who do not see that “the journey is the reward.”
Comment
Group Training Manager: Roger Smyth
"Of all the initiatives I have been involved with, one of the most rewarding has been the series of workshops which were run by Sean Donnelly on Career Strategy using the book 10 degrees to North, it is different and the response from those who attended was AMAZING. In a very real way many lives were changed and individuals took charge of their own careers."
It will stay with them for a very long time.