Personal Mastery

  • Defined as the capacity to design and live a life based on commitments to your values and goals for the future you say is inspiring, compelling and powerful.
  • Doing so is the opposite of living in your unreconciled past, where you become a powerless victim, blaming everything and everybody and the circumstances for a lonely, meaningless existence.

The antidote to a loss of control over your life: A Personal Life Vision

Shared visions emerge from sharing personal visions.

This is how they derive their energy and how they foster commitment.

“My vision is not what’s most important to you. The vision that       motivates you is your vision.”

This statement stresses that caring is personal.  It is rooted in an individual’s own set of values, dreams, and aspirations. This simple truth is lost on many leaders, who decide that their organization must develop a vision by tomorrow.

Organizations intent on building shared visions continually encourage team members to develop their personal visions.  If people don’t have their own vision, all they can do is “sign up” for someone else’s.  The result is compliance, never commitment.  On the other hand, people with a strong sense of personal direction can join together to create a powerful synergy toward what I, and we, truly want. Organizations build “shared” vision by people sharing their Personal visions.

There are positive actions that can be taken to create a climate that encourages sharing personal visions.  The most direct is for leaders to communicate their own personal views of the future in such a way that others are encouraged to share their visions.  This is the art of visionary leadership - how shared visions are built from personal visions.

Adapted from: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

              Peter M. Senge – author, Doubleday/Currency - publisher

 

The Key Questions for all of us:

“Why are you on the Planet?”
And
“Are you a mistake of Birth, or does your life have meaning?”

To create your answer, go to work on this exercise:

    THE PERSONAL LIFE VISION STATEMENT

A PERSONAL LIFE VISION statement is a brief reminder that represents a personal view of a reality that you are committed to work toward.

Each of us has the ability to take a stand for the value and meaning that we are committed to creating in our world. For some people it is their “calling”, for others it may be their dream. For all, it is a vision of a future that we as individuals are committed to achieving.

 Visions, however, only exist during the act of creation. Visions are dreams of tomorrow and disappear when not actively being created.

The PERSONAL LIFE VISION statement is a tool to use to actively keep your vision of the future alive.

Tips on writing a PLV:

  1. Review your “Life Vision Development Exercise”.  Underline the key words or phrases.
  2. Review your notes from the “Core Values” exercise.
  3. Create a statement that represents your commitment for the future:
    1. Start with, “My Personal Life Vision is...
    2. The statement should be long enough to evoke your commitment, yet brief enough to recall without notes.
    3. The statement is by you, but not directly about you, a view of the future that includes you but are not your personal goals.
    4. Do not use the words “I” or “me”, or phrases that imply the first person you.
    5. For two or more concepts, use bullets, not a paragraph. 
    6. Make each concept into a complete sentence.

REMEMBER, THIS IS JUST THE START; YOU WILL WANT TO BUILD ON AND EXPAND ON WHAT YOU HAVE DEVELOPED!