• Mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

• When you hit a challenge, go back to the basics.

• To practice regularly, even when you seem to be getting nowhere, might at first seem onerous. But the day eventually comes when parcticing becomes a treasured part of your life. You settle into it as if into your favorite easy chair, unaware of time and the turbulence of the world..It will still be there ofr you tomorrow. It will never go away.

The face Of Mastery Goals and contingencies are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

The Five Master Keys

1. Instruction
2. Practice
3. Surrender
4. Intentionality
5. The Edge

Tools For Mastery

• Why solutions fail, and what to do about it
• When you make a change, first you get better, then backslide. Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it's for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed--and it's a very good thing they do.
• The condition of equilibrium, the resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture--and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning.
• Homeostasis doesn't distinguish between what you would call change for the better and change for the worse. It resists all change. After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as "normal"; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat.
• Five guidelines focused on mastery, they could also be applied to any change in your life.
• Be aware of the way homeostasis works. This might be the most important guideline of all. Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn't necessarily mean you're sick or crazy or lazy or that you've made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing--just what you've wanted. Of course, it might be that you have started something that's not right for you; only you can decide. But in any case, don't panic and give up at the first sign of trouble.
• Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. So what should you do when you run into resistance, when the red lights flash and the alarm bells ring? Well, you don't back off, and you don't bull you way through. Negotiation is the ticket to successful long-term change in everything from increasing your running speed to transforming your organization. The long-distance runner working for a faster time on a measured course negotiates with homeostasis by using pain not as an adversary but as the best possible guide to performance. Th change-oriented manager keeps his or her eyes and ears open for signs of dissatisfaction or dislocation, then plays the edge of discontent, the inevitable escort of transformation. The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa. It also demands a determination to keep pushing, but not without awareness. Simply turning off your awareness to warnings deprives you of guidance and risks damaging the system. Simply pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the possibility of backsliding.
• Develop a support system. You can do it alone, but it helps a great deal to have other people with who you can share the joys and perils of the change you're making. The best support system would involve people who have gone through or are going through a similar process, people who can tell their own stories of change and listen to yours, people who will brace you up when you start to backslide and encourage you when you don't.
• Follow a regular practice. People embarking on any type of change can gain stability and comfort through practicing some worthwhile activity on a more or less regular basis, not so much for the sake of achieving an external goal as simply for its own sake. A traveler on the path of mastery is again fortunate, for practice in this sense is the foundation of the path itself. The circumstances are particularly happy in case you've already established a regular practice in something else before facing the challenge and change of beginning a new one. It's easier to start applying the principles of mastery to your profession or your primary relationship if you've already established a regular morning exercise program. Practice is a habit, and any regular practice provides a sort of underlying homeostasis, a stable base during the instability of change.
• Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. We tend to forget that learning is much more than book learning. To learn is to change.
• Get energy for mastery
• A human being is the kind of machine that wears out from lack of use. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy. Often the best remedy for physical weariness is thirty minutes of aerobic exercise. In the same way, mental and spiritual lassitude is often cured by decisive action or the clear intention to act.
• Here is how to get started:
  1. Maintain physical fitness.
  2. Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive.
  3. Try telling the truth. Truth-telling works best when it involves revealing your own feelings, not when used to insult others and to get your own way. All in all, it has a lot going for it--risk, challenge, excitement, and the release of all of that energy.
  4. Honor but don't indulge your own dark side. Anger, for instance, contains a great deal of energy. So when your feel your anger rising, you can choose to go and work furiously on a favorite project, or to transmute the beneath your anger to fuel that you can use on your journey of mastery.
  5. Set your priorities. Before you can use your potential energy, your have to decide what you're going to do with it. And in making any choice, you face a monstrous fact: to move in one direction, you must forgo all others. To choose one goal is to forsake a very number of other possible goals.
  6. Make commitments. Take action. The journey of mastery is ultimately goalless; you take the journey for the sake of the journey itself. But, as I've pointed out, there are interim goals along the way, the first of which is simply starting the journey. And there's nothing quite so immediately energizing on any journey as the intermediate goal of a tough, firm deadline--as is known to anyone who has faced an opening-night curtain, a business-deal closing date, or a definite press time for an article or book.
  7. Get on the path of mastery and stay on it. Over the long haul, there's nothing like the path of mastery to lead you to an energetic life. A regular practice not only elicits energy but tames it. Without the firm underpinnings of a practice, deadlines can produce violent swings between frantic activity and collapse. On the master's journey, you can learn to put things in perspective, to keep the flow of energy going during low moments as well as high. You also learn that you can't hoard energy; you can't build it up by not using it. Adequate rest is, of course, a part of the master's journey, but, unaccompanied by positive action, rest may depress you.