Ah, Senge … your post brought back many memories. Did you buy the workbook? Senge is heavily anchored around process thinking, process mapping and the like. I’ve used the teachings from the workbook many times, doing process mapping, when I was a management consultant. Onto personal mastery.

When I left management consulting a little over three years ago, I dove headlong into that very question, to develop a framework that I could coach from. Almost 600 pages later, to include, ironically, many a Senge inspired process maps, I had a few workable frameworks that I felt really good about.

One of the concepts I bumped into and then later developed a framework around, was “personal leadership”. It’s a hot concept right now with more and more MBA programs and the like, incorporating its concepts into their curriculum. More than anything, it mirrored my own beliefs about leadership and effectiveness, personal and professional mastery.

There are many frameworks to explore under the global concept of “personal leadership”. What hit me was, even though my management consulting practice focused on triage, solving big problems, my clients often spoke of the personal impact I had, which I didn’t get, to be honest.

Well, flash forward, and the answer was there in personal leadership.

Rather than learning how to be a great leader on the job, why not learn how to be a great leader in all aspects of life? And not so much, charge the hill, take the mountain, leadership- but more kin to owning your own journey in this life.

I really liked the idea of taking an internal approach to external effectiveness, the kind of peak effectiveness that follows you no matter where you go or what you do. Which brings us full circle to the lovely space you’re exploring.

I’m not a big fan of the term of mastery. I think it puts a lot of undue pressure to live up to an impossible standard. Life and work is filled with lots of highs and lows, moments where we’re rocking it, other moments when we fail. That’s what it is to be human.

But, if we can assemble a core sets of tools and concepts that helps us to be the best version of ourselves, no matter what we might be going through at the moment, that seems a lot more doable. I think this is the secret sauce to Covey’s seven habits.

For my work, I created ten fundamentals that anchor personal leadership that I call, The (10) Fundamentals Of Personal Leadership. The first of ten looks like this:

#1 Take Ownership
Don’t make excuses and don’t blame others. Take personal responsibility for your life. All of it. Own your mistakes. Rise above your obstacles. And don’t avoid the truth. Face it head-on. Because ultimately, it’s your life. It’s your path to walk.

So whether your Richard Branson, a yoga instructor, a painter, a brain surgeon, or anyone else – habitually taking ownership as a way of life is key. It’s the thing that I see people most struggle with thus it’s position as the #1 fundamental. Absent ownership, we can’t effectively build our brands, fix our marriages, heal our hearts, boldly walk on the paths we crave to explore, so on and so forth.

So it’s far less about mastering business, relationships, being (fill in the blank), and it’s far more about embracing key concepts that will stand the test of time, that will always serve us no matter our mindset at a given moment or our skill level at a given in a given area.

I have moments when I am an epic being. I have moments where I am a total asshat. I have a lot of moments in between the two extremes. Such is the human journey. In my view, its all about learning how to be optimally effective, no matter what we are facing in a given moment.

I can be terribly lonely at a given point in time, but if I Live In The Solution (the 5th fundamental), and if I dedicate myself to learn how to more Meaningfully Connect (the 7th fundamental); and if I Take Ownership of the issue , with time and work, I’ll get more effective at solving my isolation problem. And I get to do that as an imperfect, broken, occasionally awesome meat suit.

Just my ten cents