Senge: Chapter 9: Personal Mastery

Senge: Chapter 9
Personal Mastery
PERSONAL MASTERY: Introduction
• The Spirit of the Learning Organization

• Mastery and Proficiency
• Why we want it
• Resistance
• The Discipline of Personal Mastery
• Holding creative Tension
•Prepared by James R. Burns

Introduction, Continued
• STRUCTURAL CONFLICT: THE POWER OF YOUR POWERLESSNESS

• Commitment to the Truth
• Using the Subconscious
• Personal Mastery and the Fifth Discipline
• Fostering Personal Mastery in the Organization

Personal Mastery = Personal Growth &
Learning
• People with high levels of PM are continually expanding their ability
to create the results in life they truly seek.

Mastery and Proficiency
• Goes beyond competence and skills

• First, we must continually clarify what is important to us.
• Second, we must learn how to see current reality more clearly.
• The gap between what we want and what our current reality is
generates creative tension

What its like to have lots of PM
• For such people, a vision is a calling rather than just a good idea
• PM is not something you possess, it is a process--a lifelong discipline
• People with lots of PM are more committed, they take more
initiative

Employers want PM for their employees
because
• Full personal development has a strong impact on individual happiness
• Work should be seen as an opportunity to build something to last,
something of value
• PM is a means toward the organization’s ends

Resistance
• Many individuals and organizations do resist PM

• No one will ever be able to measure how much PM contributes to
productivity and the bottom line
• Cynicism: humanistic management over promised itself to firms in the 1970s

More Resistance
• Could it threaten the established order of a well-
managed company? YES!!
• TO EMPOWER PEOPLE IN AN UNALIGNED
ORGANIZATION CAN BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
• Without this alignment, organizational stress will
increase
• “People don’t resist change. They resist being
changed..”

The Discipline of Personal Mastery
• PM is a discipline, a series of principles and

practices that continually expand PM
• Most adults have little sense of real vision
• Our personal vision must be positive
• An example of diminished vision is focusing on the
means rather than the ends or results
• The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not
only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of PM

Holding creative Tension
• The gap between our vision and our current reality is

called creative tension
• The principle of creative tension is central to the
principle of PM, integrating all elements of the
discipline
• Still creative tension often leads to anxiety, sadness,
discouragement or worry.
• But these negative emotions are emotional tension
and not creative tension
• Watch out for the eroding goals archetype

“STRUCTURAL CONFLICT”: THE
POWER OF YOUR POWERLESSNESS
• Many of us have a dominant belief that we are not

able to fulfill our desires
• a by-product of growing up
• We believe in our powerlessness--our inability to
bring into being all the things we really care about.
• Page 157 illustrates the conflict--out vision pulling
us forward, while our belief in powerlessness pulls
us back

Eliminating self-limiting beliefs
• Many of us do not believe that we are worthy or

deserving to have what we truly desire
• Manifestations are: loss of energy, not able to
finish the job, unexpected obstacles develop,
people let us down, we don’t believe we can do it

Strategies for coping with self-limiting
beliefs--Bro Ray Fritz
• Letting our vision erode
• Conflict Manipulation
• Will power

Focusing on what we don’t want: conflict
manipulation (negative vision)
• The way many athletic coaches manipulate and motivate
their players
• The way many managers point out the highly unpleasant
consequences if the company’s goals are not achieved
• Do you really want to live your life in a state of fear
of failure?
• For such people, there is little joy in life

Third-strategy--WILL POWER
• We psych ourselves up to overpower all forms of

resistance to achieving our goals
• We motivate ourselves through heightened volition
• This dogged determination gets things done at
work, but doesn’t turn the trick at home

The bottom line of Self-Limiting Beliefs
(SLBs)
• They are hard to change--psychologists widely concur

To change SLBs, we need a COMMITMENT
TO THE TRUTH
• Tell yourself the truth

• Continually broadening our awareness
• Continually deepening our understanding of the
structures underlying current events
• First, must recognize the structural conflict--
recognize the patterns

Structures of which we are unaware hold us
prisoner
• Discovering these structures at work is the stock-
and-trade of people with high levels of PM

Truth--seeing reality more and more as it is
• Pure observation--Buddhists
• Witnessing--Hindus
• “What a tragedy that many must die before he
wakes up”--Koran
• “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set
you free”--Christianity

Using the Subconscious; Or, You Don’t
Really Need to Figure it all out
• People with high levels of PM can accomplish

extraordinarily complex tasks with grace and ease
• The subconscious is intimately involved in PM: through
it, all of us deal with complexity
• The aspect of our mind that is exceedingly capable of
dealing with complexity is called the subconscious

Subconscious--
• What distinguishes people with high levels of
personal mastery is they have developed a higher
level of rapport between their normal awareness
and their subconscious
• Subconscious capacity is larger by a factor of 10 as
compared to the conscious

The Core Values of PM
• Integrate reason and intuition

• See your connectedness to the world
• Be compassionate
• Be committed to the whole

Fostering PM in an Organization
• You can’t force employees into PM--to do so is the

most sure-fire way to impede the genuine spread of
commitment to PM
• Leaders must foster a climate in with the principles
of PM are practiced in daily life

The Organizational Climate
• establishing visions, being committed to the truth,

challenging the status quo
• Will reinforce the idea that PM is truly valued in the
organization
• Will reinforce the idea that PM is a continual, ongoing
process
• Work to develop all five disciplines at the same time
• Leaders should be a model

The Climate, Continued

If you can’t picture it, you won’t make it
• You have to know where you are headed

• Choose your companions as if your life depended
on it
• Leaders know when to put their foot down, and
when to back down

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Senge: Chapter 9

• The Spirit of the Learning Organization

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• STRUCTURAL CONFLICT: THE POWER OF YOUR POWERLESSNESS

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Goes beyond competence and skills

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Many individuals and organizations do resist PM

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• PM is a discipline, a series of principles and

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• The gap between our vision and our current reality is

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Many of us have a dominant belief that we are not

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Many of us do not believe that we are worthy or

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• We psych ourselves up to overpower all forms of

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Tell yourself the truth

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• People with high levels of PM can accomplish

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• Integrate reason and intuition

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• You can’t force employees into PM--to do so is the

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• establishing visions, being committed to the truth,

•Prepared by James R. Burns

•Prepared by James R. Burns

• You have to know where you are headed

•Prepared by James R. Burns

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