What would be different if you had a Mastery Mindset?

When you shift to Mastery Mindset you know you can’t lose because you are working to get better at what every it is you are doing. It allows you to have self- grace under any circumstance. It also implies that all experiences are helpful and that you can learn and build your knowledge overtime. I remember when we were going through some corporate re-organization and I asked my boss who was the President of the Division what is the best advise he had for me. I will never forget it. He said, keep your head down and keep working. He was really talking about having a Mastery Mindset.

Deliberate Practice

Here is how to build out a Mastery Mindset. When you create a deliberate plan to reach your goals or increase confidence in an area of leadership you will have a plan that focuses on mastering the task. Say you want to become a better speaker, the plan might be about practicing creating a presentation, delivering it in front of the mirror, recording yourself on video and then getting feedback from a trusted advisor. You also might enroll in some sort of educational program to master presentations.

The best thing to do to get started is ask the following question:

What is the kind of things you need to practice in order to achieve High Impact as a leader?

What is to brainstorm a list of everything you could do to master what it is you want to master. Then you have a lot to choose from what to do first and always have a list to go back to and enhance the mastery you are achieving.

Creating Guaranteed Success

In today’s world, we live in a place where there is so much volatility, uncertainly, complexity and ambiguity which is known as VUCA. With this in mind leaders often have to think about success in a new way. The best way to create success is to look at it in three ways.

Goal A: Minimal Goal: A goal that will create success for you and or your organization. Let’s say you want to lose 10 pounds and another win would be just to lose 5 pounds. This allows you to speak clearly and confidently about your goal and the direction you are headed.

Goal B: Optimal Goal: The ideal place that you would like to be, which would in this case loosing 10 pounds. This allows you to create an optimal outcome and also allows you to be ok with this scenario.

Goal C: Stretch Goal: A stretch goal is what might be possible if all the right conditions are met and for loosing weight in this case it would be 15 pounds. What is great about this is that sometimes things change and the impossible becomes possible.

What is great about this thinking and approach is that it creates some sort of success no matter what and it allows for variables outside our control or changing circumstances.

Summing it all Up

Having the courage to get started is possible when you shift to a fearless attitude and taking a step forward. You can’t just wait for confidence to happen. A good leader will choose to create it by trusting themselves, knowing that no matter what they will learn from the experience. They let go of any concern about what might happen. Confidence is an outcome of Mastery. Mastery is about putting a plan together to achieve something and working towards that set of goals. All of us are able to master anything and everything! ( I get confidence just saying this)