Lesson 2: Personal Mastery - how I discover this from the toughest question

The toughest question I had to answer was "why do you want a child?". Before you read on ... just think about this? No one would ask you this question, if you had a natural birth child.

My wife and I were asked this question when we decided to adopt a child from China. Our decision to adopt came after the heartaches of failed IVF. The adoption was our final option to a 10 year dream of having a child.

We had 2 weeks to think about our individual answers to the question "why do you want a child?". Thinking all the time if we gave the wrong answer, our dream would be gone forever. We agonised and cried most nights talking about our answers. It was worse for me, as a man; as a science graduate, as an IT project manager. My life's experience conditioned me to think logically and there was no logic to having a child.

A child burns your money, burns your time, burns your emotions, burns your patience ... and if you're not careful, they may even burn your house down. It really challenged this dream of mine. My eventual answer (thanks to the internet) was

"A hundred years from now, it would not matter how big my house was; what kind of car I drove or how much money I had in the bank ........ but that I was important in the life of a child"

That's not the end to the "toughest" question. There was a tougher challenge to come.

When we eventually held our first daughter in our hands in Shanghai - a second question came into my head .... "Is that it? Have I now realised my dream?" Afterall, she is now a reality. We can touch her, feel her, see her and hear her soft breathing as she sleeps.

"Reality" also hit home big time when I went back to work full time as an I.T. Project Manager. I went back to the same old routine - getting up early, coming home late and working at weekends. So, I found myself not seeing very much of my daughter. And I thought ..... is this reality, is this what I have to put up with now? Afterall, my daughter is no longer a dream, she's here in our hands, in our house, so the dream has ended?

It took me 9 months of soul searching before I realise the "dream" lives on. Yes, my daughter is a reality but I also made a public commitment to my daughter with my answer to "why do you want a child?".

The dream is "to be important in the life of my child". I was not going to be "important" if all I do is to catch a few hours at weekends. It was then that I decided to give up my IT career and pursue a different career. And here I am now ... the founder for Leaders Cafe Foundation.

What I have shared here is my own journey of PERSONAL MASTERY. What I did is neither right or wrong. What I did helped me to turn my "emotional tension" into creative energies to help me focus and maintain my drive towards realising my dream of being important to my child. To me, that is what Personal Mastery is about. It's about managing the personal tension that is created between our dreams and the reality of our situation.

There is nothing wrong with a bin man (the reality) wanting to own a Ferrari (the dream). It's the ability to handle the enormous tension between your dreams and your reality that will dictate whether you can achieve your dreams. Rather like an elastic band being stretched, the bigger the dream, the greater the tension.

That's why the need to understand what success means to you is so critical. The more specific you are about your success, the more likely you are able to understand and handle that tension.

For more about Personal Mastery - see the learning bites topic in the right hand panel.

Lesson 1: What is your ideal self?

Many of us are familiar with the term "personal vision". How many of us have actually got one? The "text book" way of finding your personal vision tends to ask you to:

• think about what you want to achieve in all areas of your life; family, friends, work, colleagues, wealth, community and church; or to

• think about what these same people will say about you at your funeral

Neither are easy to do. Why? Partly it's because we are scared of the future. Do we really want to set down markers on "what success means?" in terms of family, friends, work, colleagues, wealth, community, church and so on. For example:

• Family - be there every time when my children are performing at school. Spend time with my wife. Seeing my parents at least once a week/month.

• Friends - call my inner circle of friends once a week. Answer their emails/facebook in 24/48/36 hours?

• Wealth - become a millionaire by the time I'm 25

• Work - deliver all my projects on time, on budget and to quality standards every time

I think you're getting my drift on this one. Once you start to think seriously about this, it is a scary exercise to go through. By seriously, I mean you must set yourself SMART Objectives for Success (SOS). For those who is not familiar with SMART, it stands for

• Specific – specify what success you want to achieve.

• Measurable – your success has to be measurable.

• Achievable - Are the success you set, achievable and attainable?

• Realistic – Can you realistically achieve the success with the resources you have?

• Time – When do you want to achieve the success?

How many people find it difficult enough to set SMART objectives for the people you lead at work. How much more difficult it is to set SOS for yourself, especially when it's more than work?

That's why those in the know understands the phrases - "leadership starts with personal leadership" or "you can't lead other until you can lead yourself" or "the most difficult person to lead is yourself".

We are not so much scared of the future as being scared of setting SOS that we fail to met .... in other words, we are scared that we will let ourselves down as well as the people we love and admire. The reasons are understandable and human, because ...

• Life is inherently difficult and chaotic - with too many surprises for anything to be certain. So, why risk any commitment? It would only make us look foolish and cause us pain when people point out you haven't met your SOS.

• We are hard-wired to avoid suffering. You can't help it. The thousands of years of human evolution has hard-wired us to defend ourself from getting hurt (more on that under Growing Yourself). This is because .....

• Pain and discomfort lower our self-esteem

All of this means we come up with tactics to defend our self-esteem and prevent it from being lowered:

• We adopt a "learned helplessness" state - where we belief the future is out of our control.

• We focus and spend all our energies on one or two areas where we have been really successful. For example, we spend long hours at work and receive a bonus and recognition. Meanwhile, home life is suffering and you're getting grief. Now then ... which area is better for my self-esteem, ah ... yes ... work. So we do more work, and more recognition comes. We are at home less - more grief at home. And so the viscious circle begins.

There is no right or wrong choice ... it is a matter of making choices that takes you closer to your future, your personal vision.

To make the choice in the first place, you need to fully understand your SOS. Without that, you've simply measuring distance in fog by pacing. You've no idea where you got to nor where you started from.

To help you to think about your personal vision and SOS .... try and answer this question

What is the toughest question you have been asked upto this point in your life?

If you want to get something out of this, don't be tempted to go to my answer (which will be posted shortly). Think about it seriously and hard.