“Before you seek to master the universe, you must first gain mastery over yourself”.
Gaining mastery in the key areas of business, social and fitness life involves developing a set of principles of mind. These principles allows us to unleash your potential and stay focused when life gets busy and tends to make us lose focus. They give us the strength of mind to not be seduced by distractions or take shortcuts.
In this article we discover the 8 Principles that will allow you to gain mastery over the things that really matter to you.
Mastery Is Built By Reps
When you’re working out, everything is built on the rep. Success is built upon performing one rep as perfectly as you can, and then adding another, and another to build a set.
Whether your goal is to build muscle, lose body fat or improve your cardiovascular endurance, the rep is the basic component of your success. Learn how to do it well and then keep doing it and you will find success.
It’s the same in life. By breaking tasks, challenges or opportunities down to their most basic component, and performing that aspect to the best of your ability over and over, you will build the success that takes you to mastery.
If you need to give a speech at work, view your practice of if was reps. If you can do 50 reps over the course of a week leading up to your speech, you will knock that talk out of the ball park. The question is, are you willing to do the reps?
Work Your Butt Off
Real success never comes without hard work. When you’re in the gym, you need to be constantly increasing your workout intensity in order to force your body to respond. That means doing something every time you have a workout that makes it harder than the last time. If you just do the same as you did last workout, your body won’t have a reason to respond. So, never be satisfied with being the same. Make it your aim to be better than yesterday.
The same thing applies in your work life. Rather than doing what everyone else is doing, make it your aim to work harder than them, to be more prepared, more informed and more engaged. Be the hardest worker in the room.
When it comes to your social life, be in the moment. If you are spending time with the kids, be fully engaged, rather than keeping one eye on your text messages while you’re reading a bed-time story.
Working harder may require getting up earlier or spending less time in front of the TV. Are you willing to do those things?
Learn How to Optimise for Productivity
When you are faced with a dozen priorities all at once, learning how to optimise your time for productivity is essential. A key skill is to work in routines. By grouping similar tasks together and doing them in a routine fashion, you make them more time efficient.
Think about working out in the morning before work. Your routine should start the night before where you prepare your work clothes and hygiene needs and place them in a bag by the door. You should also prepare your shaker bottle with your pre-workout powder and put it in your gym bag. Then you should lay out your gym clothes for the morning. In the morning, jump out of bed, put on your gym clothes, grab your gym bag and work clothes and you’re out the door. After a 45-minute workout and shower, do all of your grooming at the gym before heading to a cafe for a light pre-work breakfast.
By tagging something you would like to do more consistently onto an already existing routine, you are more likely to do it. If you want to get into the habit of calling your mom for a weekly chat, tag it with something like watering the plants every Sunday afternoon. And, if you want to cut down the time you’re doing something, tag that with something you already do that has a finite time. For example, if you heat up your cereal in the microwave for two minutes in the morning, make that the time you check Twitter. When the microwave beeps, your Twitter time is up.
Prioritise Fitness
If you can achieve success with regard to your physical self, you can gain mastery in every other area of your life. The fitter you are, the more productive you will be. You will also have increased mental clarity and ambition.
Fitness success requires perseverance, self discipline, patience and stickability. These are the very qualities that are needed for success in business, as well in forging meaningful social relationships.
Being fit can change your outlook on life. It can make you more positive, more enthusiastic and more driven. So, prioritize fitness and you will become better in every other area in your life.
If you don’t make time for exercise, you will eventually have to make time for illness. Few things are as valuable as getting into the finest fitness of your life.
Focus
The ability to focus completely on the task at hand is a skill of mastery. The majority of people can’t do it. Take the gym, for instance. You’ll see people jumping on their phones between sets, having conversations that are unrelated to what they’re doing and generally being distracted by the things around them. Compare with the guy who’s totally tuned into the muscle group that he’s training. Between sets, he’s stretching and contracting the muscle group to induce a pump effect. He knows exactly how long to rest before jumping back into his next set. His laser like focus is going to produce specific results.
Apply that same focus to your business and social life. When you’re doing a job, be totally into the task at hand. Don’t be thinking about tomorrow’s workout or tonight’s dinner. Give the task 100% focus. Same thing when you’re socialising – focus on the moment and you will find joy in the now.
Small Wins Matter
Small and steady wins the race. What you do every day is far more important than what you do once every decade. As you live every day, so you are crafting your life. So, what you do over the next hour, is building your future. If you can get the next hour as right as you can get it, the rest of your life will take care of itself.
The little win with your family when you feel like watching TV, getting on the treadmill after your weights sessions when you just want to hit the shower, going the extra mile for a customer – all of these things set you up for the habits of mastery.
Ask For What You Want
There is huge power in asking for what you want. Often we can have what we want, so long as we ask for it. But if the world around you doesn’t know what you want, how it can deliver that to you?
This works both internally and externally. If you don’t set concrete goals, then your brain doesn’t know what you want and you will never get it. In your personal life, if you don’t tell your partner what you want, he or she won’t be able to fulfil it. And in your business, if you don’t speak up and ask your client what you want, such as the order, you won’t get it.
Failure is the Price of Greatness
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles; or where the doer of deeds could have done them better; the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood – Theodore Roosevelt
According to Roosevelt, the respect belongs to the person who has the guts to roll up their sleeves and get the job done. Spend the best days of your life, which are right now, in the arena of life, striving for your ideals and goals, trying to get what your heart’s desire said you should do, done. You may end up bloodied and bruised at times. You may even be laughed at and criticised – but you’ll be getting your dreams done.