How do you gain mastery? The definition of mastery is “comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment.” What’s more, how do you master life’s mystery and energies?
In this article, we will first explore gaining mastery of a particular subject – then expand to discussing how to gain mastery of your life as a whole.
Examples of masters are Shin Lim the magician who recently won America’s Got Talent, Roger Federer or Serena Williams in tennis, or Izhak Perlman for his violin ability. To master something, you must put together certain elements, then you will not only begin to act like a master, but live with mastery in that realm.
First, a suggestion: Don’t sell yourself short on becoming masterful. Before we get specific in our examination of mastery, let’s say one need not rise to the very best artist or athlete on earth to gain mastery.
There’s no requirement to be part of an exclusive group of superhumans to become masterful. Mastery is open to virtually anyone who is willing to follow a certain path that leads to advanced accomplishment in a certain area.
One consideration to understanding mastery is that sometimes there are external 
measurable standards to guide you, like speed or wins or skill level. Then there are internals that are harder to measure, which come from the unique expression and life experience of each person.
Let’s look at the four key components to help one gain mastery.
1. Pursue Your Interests
Mastery starts in a very natural place ─ simply pursuing your own interests. Those may include your favorite pastimes, hobbies or natural talents, gifts you came into life with.
First you need to recognize those areas of interest, skill and talent ─ then follow up on them.
2. Allow Time and Space
Then you need the time and space to pursue those interests. This means prioritizing the time in your schedule to learn, study and practice more.
It also means finding a physical space to do the activity, whether working out at a gym, practicing an instrument at school, studying at home, or doing interactive sessions online in your area of interest.
3. Focus and Overcome
What do you do then to master the time and space you carved out to pursue your interests and talents? You focus and follow through, dealing with the inevitable obstacles you may face.
Before you set your sights on mastery, you dabble, you wander, you settle for and may even give up. With mastery in mind, your internal and external world changes.
With mastery in mind, your internal and external world changes – problems become challenges; losses become learning experiences; defeats build character and determination. You stay with it and rise again to move forward and someday triumph in your pursuit of mastery.
4. The Long Term of It
A person once told us she tried to become a holistic practitioner for a few months but it didn’t work for her. The lesson here is not to quit on your dreams early if they are truly a deeper interest you want to develop and really gain some fluency in that area.
Many people give up too soon. Don’t look for mastery in a few weeks or months.
You can accelerate your learning and skill level. But at some point, you can’t shortcut the mastery process. Ultimately, mastery is about knowing and acting from a higher level, which means you find the right ingredients over time to get there. It can take a while to get results. As Tony Robbins observed, most people are disappointed in what they accomplish in a year, and yet amazed in what they can do in a decade.
If you want to master something like coaching and healing, say, it will take months and probably years to do so. That doesn’t mean you can’t make quick progress and get aha’s and remarkable results, even early on in your pursuit of what interests you.
This big-picture view goes along with the key of making space and putting in the time to focus and practice. You have a natural advantage ─ an organic inclination to go in the direction that interests you.
If you stay with it, it’ll become more and more interesting, more multidimensional, leading to fulfillment and even transcendence at times. With enough practice, study, and experience, your interests become a calling, where life is calling you to greater depths and higher heights.
You progress gradually and then, seemingly out of nowhere, there come times of dramatic breakthroughs. The only requirement is for you keep to going long enough, pursuing your interests for the long term.
Mastering Your Life
Jungian Therapist James Hollis put it this way in his book Living an Examined Life: “The attainment of personhood is not self-aggrandizement. It is answering a summons to step into oneself,to honor one’s interests, talents and calling, whether recognized bby others or not.”
Here then is a review of the four components of mastering something, like excelling at art, sports, coaching or healing:
Pursue your interests
Allow time and space for it
Focus and overcome challenges
Stay in it for the long term
Let’s apply these four essential elements to becoming a master of your life. We will do this by posing some coaching mastery-invoking questions:
* How much do you keep learning in areas of your interest (are you an avid lifelong learner)?
* Do you create time and space to do fulfilling activities on a daily/weekly basis?
* Do you follow through and stay resilient when facing difficulties?
These are important questions. We suggest you print them out, reflect on them and come up with specific answers. Then you can consider more actions going forward to pursue your life’s mastery. As you take an honest look at yourself, you can note any areas of perfectionism or criticism, as if you were seeing it in another person. In other words, step back and see yourself as if you are watching someone else that you neutrally observe.
Note areas to improve and be sure to congratulate yourself on how far you’ve come, and that more is to come. Mastery is not a finished state. It’s an ongoing process. It’s not perfectionism ─ it’s aliveness, complexity and mystery.
The Masterpiece of Your Life
Go out then and create the masterpiece that is your life, or at least be proud that you are doing your best in the process.
To master your life, you need to keep your heart open. This allows for the love, intuition and connection to spiritually direct you. Then the four components we’ve discussed can come freely into play. With an open heart, you can embrace life with all its ups and downs, harmony and disharmony, success and failure and unknowables.
The Final Evaluation — Mastering Life’s Energies and Mystery
At the end of life, how can you tell whether your life was something of a masterpiece? This means a clear-headed evaluation of your life’s journey, without vanity or living up to some imaginary critic’s standards of your life’s value.
Everyone’s life is unique, but the question becomes: did you create a copy of what others have done, what you’ve been told to do, what was societally acceptable? Or did you, at some point, wake up and listen to the music? Did you hear the whispers of your soul, and start following its deep, nonjudgmental wisdom?
Let us suggest two questions that can help here:
- Did I open my heart and do my best to live from that place?
- Did I live my dream?
Your dreams will be developed by the four components we have discussed; namely, following your interests, using time and space accordingly, staying with it for the long term.
For now, go forward. Who knows what masterpiece you will be able to create with your life?
Your effort, energy and persistence will tell. If you stay with it long enough ─ in this case, a lifetime ─ who knows how much mastery you will have? It’s well worth finding out! In so doing, you live life’s mysteries and it’s profound energies are revealed to you for your use and transformation.
