Personal mastery

We need to be strong in a moment of crisis by saying, yes, it can be done. And if we’re in a race between bad catastrophe and some kind of beginning prosperity for all — when you’re in a race that intense, you don’t want to sit down on the ground and start crying. Oh, we’ve lost already.

The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in o

When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality.

Much as an investor benefits from diversifying their investments, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and purpose in our lives. The question is: how?

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in t

Using the SCARF model, you can have a better understanding of what needs aren’t being met and why you’re being triggered. This will help you not scratch the itch or react without thinking.

Status

Certainty

Autonomy

Relatedness

Fairness

“autotelic personality,” or the ability to create flow experiences even in the most barren environment—an almost inhumane workplace, a weed-infested urban neighborhood.

Use a Grounding Visualization Technique You can also use a visualization technique to bring your attention and focus to the body. One great example of this comes from Loren Shuster, chief people officer at the Lego Group, who explained that when he has important meetings or presentations, he takes five minutes to ground himself in his body by visua

There’s a cognitive bias that is coming into play when we do this. It’s called the curse of knowledge.55 Once we know something (like we do in this situation, we have a wealth of discovery work that supports our point of view), it’s hard for us to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge. In fact, our conclusions—our roadmaps, our backl