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.