I have learned from many sources - in the seventies and eighties, I studied Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung and others as I was preparing for a career in psychology. However, as an aside and nod to the power of great literature, I still believe Shakespeare was the greatest psychologist of all.
When I started transitioning from psychology to business, I learned a great deal from reading George Gilder and Peter Senge, among others. I have written here about Peter Senge’s influence.
One of the threads that ran throughout the ideas of all these thinkers was the relationship between the group and the individual. A group is as strong as the individuals who make up the group. An individual who is making an individual effort to improve her knowledge, understanding and overall physical, mental and emotional health adds to the group effort; an individual who is not doing these things may benefit from the group but is usually a drag on the group effort and weakens the group. If enough individuals within the group are dragging the group down then there is little success and eventual failure.
Groups are a collection of individuals, but the true power and effectiveness of a group, when all individuals are working toward what Senge calls Personal Mastery, is way beyond what any one individual can accomplish. This idea is nothing new, and anyone who has played sports on a team that gelled and rocked knows the power of group effort.
As obvious as it is, though, my experience has been, over and over, that most group efforts fall far short of their potential because so few people actually put the effort in Personal Mastery.
Senge writes: Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skills. It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening, although it requires spiritual growth. It means approaching one’s life as a creative as opposed to reactive viewpoint.
By “mastery” Senge doesn’t mean dominance but rather he is referring to proficiency.
He goes on to say: A “master” craftsperson, for instance, doesn’t dominate pottery or weaving. But the craftperson’s skill allows the best pots or fabrics to emerge from the workshop.
Then he goes on to describe Personal Mastery as a discipline, a process, a point at which we never “arrive”, a continual learning mode.
But important to what such mastery means to me is what prevents it from becoming a reality that is second nature. A big part of what Senge describes as obstacles is holding “creative tension”, in other words – accepting where you are as opposed to where you want to be, all the while using the “creative tension” as a motivation to strive daily in a disciplined effort toward improvement. He suggests than many people react to the tension by either pretending they are far more advanced toward their vision than they really are, which causes them to miss important learning opportunities, or they give up and settle for something less.
I see this with real estate agents all the time – they give up before the miracle happens. They never develop the discipline first, and they never learn to live comfortably in the “creative tension”.
Mike From Savannah