Beyond Personal Mastery: A new perspective on personal and career development
Jim Bright, from Bright and Associates, presented 'Beyond Personal Mastery' at the Transforming Careers, Unleashing Potential International Careers Conference, held in Wellington on 19-21 November 2009.
Beyond Personal Mastery is derived from the Chaos Theory of Careers.
Highlights from the presentation
- Jim Bright presenting at the conference
Beyond Personal Mastery
This is a framework for career development, based on the ideas that:
- shift happens – the world is complex and ever-changing...and so are people
- the most important events in our lives happen as a result of unforeseen, unplanned events
- our actions enable us to create and benefit from these unexpected opportunities
- there are limits or parameters for each individual’s potential – but within those limits there are infinite possibilities
- career professionals can help clients identify their potential and explore the many different ways to express it.
Two main components
"There are two fundamental and complementary ways of achieving personal change: you can take action and you can change your mind. Taking action can change your mind and changing your mind facilitates action." - Beyond Personal Mastery website
Action steps
- Inspiration – exposing yourself to new ideas and experiences, increasing chances for inspiration.
- Patterning – actively looking for patterns, links and themes across new experiences.
- Learning – thinking about what is relevant in these patterns – understanding what’s important to you.
- Emulating – copying and reproducing – an important step, as you need to master a task or action before you can move beyond it to create something more.
- Combining and adding – seeing the links – using your mix of experiences, patterns and knowledge to create something uniquely suited to your own circumstances.
- Strategising – this comes further down the list than traditional career development frameworks! However, Bright points out that you can’t set goals until you have a sense of where you’d like to get to.
- Doing – which provides you with further inspiration and learning experiences...and so the cycle continues...
Thinking steps
- Optimism – if you don’t believe that there are possibilities out there, there’s no motivation to seek them out.
- Openness – to new experiences and ideas – essential for change, movement and hope.
- Self-efficacy – the belief that you can achieve something: too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
- Vision – having a sense of how you fit – can you see yourself actively participating in the area/activity of interest?
- Playfulness and risk – moving beyond fear of doing it incorrectly to try out new things – knowing it’s not the end of the world if you fail.
- Flexibility – seeing the different possibilities/angles in a situation.
- Persistence – having a sense of purpose – the ability to keep going with a new idea or activity, expecting to meet resistance.
