In our fruitless efforts to control, predict or change the uncontrollable “life” we feel more and more disempowered.

Personal Mastery is the art of regaining safe and stable grounds from within. It is a way to empower ourselves and regain the driving seat of our own lives instead of being driven by life. In other words: we start to own our life by not focussing on the circumstances but by BEING powerful in the face of circumstances, whatever they might be.

Personal mastery is gaining access to the only territory we have a direct access to:  ourselves. Our thoughts, our believes, our feelings and our emotions.

Personal mastery is NOT about self-improvement, becoming a better person, more successful, effective or useful. It is more on regaining an inner spaciousness and simplicity by becoming aware and present. The goal is relearning how to make choices and how to start owning our own identity and life, so we feel more aligned, alive and powerful.

Personal mastery does not demand a special talent or specific circumstances. It is the simple insight that we cannot change the world but change how we view and perceive the world. And that we create our own world by projecting our beliefs, hopes and expectations on everything that is happening. And that the only way to change the world is to change our experience and interpretation of it. How to do it?

  1. Becoming aware of our own beliefs, thoughts attitudes and expectations that we are projecting onto the world and that we are getting mirrored back every single day, e.g,: I am not good enough, smart enough, etc. Presence will be the key to insight.
  2. Asking this one question: Is this belief/thought/attitude helpful or not? Is it empowering or weakening? Do I want to stick with that belief in future or do I choose a different one? (Byron Katie would ask: Is this really true? But I don’t think this is helpful, whatever is true or not – is just a story)
  3. Choosing a new possibility, e.g: I am more than enough, abundance is who I am
  4. Practicing and working with this new possibility. Adopting it if it serves well.
  5. Questioning old beliefs and re-starting the process.

This process is simple but not easy, as we are so attached to our old beliefs and driven by the belief, that old beliefs are the fundaments of who we are and our identity.  We rather stick to suffering than risking the illusion of our fixed self to vanish. We fear to “loose” ourselves. Many times we just see the price but not the gain, which would be a more empowered self.

To overcome that difficulty you simply have to remember that your basic belief, even if grounded deeply in your childhood, has always been nothing more than a story and creation, made up by you or somebody else (a parent, teacher e.g.)  in the first place. It was never “true”, never real. That belief simply became real because you bought it, got used to it and adopted it as real until you fully embodied it – and just because it has been repeated so many time it is not truer. But you got affirmation for your own beliefs in your “real” life out there and suddenly it became a fact.

The moment you become aware of the storyness of your own beliefs you can chose new ones and start to playing with them, testing them. Our identity is not fixed, never has been, it is very malleable and we can form it into whatever we want.

This is my small Personal Mastery guide for everyone, I have tested it and it works.

(We also apply that work to the work with leaders, as they are mostly unaware that they are projecting their own beliefs (e.g.: If I don´t control it it wont work .. people cannot be trusted.. ) onto their organizations and that those beliefs are guiding their own decisions, unconsciously. By singling them out, we can look at them, test them (useful or not) and transform them. This is how systems transform: when they are perceived differently by their core Management Team.)

An even better way to explain Personal Mastery is this really fun video: