Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose

Do you do things out of a desire to do them?

Traditional businesses use the carrot and stick as a form of motivation. They offer you a reward to meet a certain target/challenge. This reward serves to narrow your focus and blunt your creativity.

A new way to motivate engages vision and involves autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy: the need to influence and drive our own lives.

Mastery: the ability to not respond to every impulse that arises while developing core capabilities.

Purpose: the desire to use skills & talents in the service of a greater means.

These are the building blocks for a new business operating system.

Autonomy:

The traditional form of management may be good for compliance but not for growth and development. If you want engagement and whole-hearted participation then self-empowerment works better.

For example, take Google. They have something called 20% time during which they can work on anything they want. They have complete autonomy over time, task, team and technique. Over half of the new products are born during 20% time such as Gmail and Google News.

If you get better results by introducing more autonomy, then it makes sense to use this as a key element of the new operating system. Not only will the business get better results but people will feel better about themselves and what they have to offer (skills & talents) the business. It therefore, encourages growth and development.

Success AND Happiness

What really matters to you? Do you want to be successful, and why?

Success = results

But what is your motive for success? Is it because...

• You feel great and have so much direction and purpose and now you want to build a million $ business that will bring you greater happiness and meaning.
• You are struggling for money and if you build a million $ business you will have money to support a family and the resources to further develop yourself.

OR

• You feel terrible but if you build a million $ business, you would feel better.

Shift your mindset and ask yourself what do you really, really, really want and then apply this to your life and business on 4 different levels.

1. What is your minimum requirement to be happy? E.g. what do I want my home space to feel like. Feel into what you want to break down conditioning.
2. What is your preferred level to be happy, if you can afford it?
3. No limits. If you had 100 million $ in the bank, what do you want?
4. Your now situation in reality. Is your now meeting your minimum requirement?

Are you making decisions based on fear or truth? I coach people to get the results that will bring them more success and happiness.

Vision and Purpose

Your vision and purpose for the life you would like to live stems from:

1. Knowing what it is you want
2. Knowing the price you will have to pay for it
3. Paying the price

You need a light focused persistence and the ability to respond to coincidence to live your vision and purpose.

Vision is stepping into the future, while purpose is the relationship to your skills and talents. You need both, and ultimately both have to be transcended and included so you can continue to grow.

Awareness of the stages through which vision and purpose develop is important. The majority develop vision and purpose because of the psychological self-contraction. Vision and purpose is built on the Cinderella Fantasy of say earning more money to solve problems or escape suffering.

Your vision and purpose changes once there is a shift in consciousness at the level of sustainability through training and a deep relaxation of the self-contraction. In traditional Enlightenment, your reason for participation evaporates and there’s not much vision and your purpose is to live out your own karma until you die.

As you begin to engage from an Enlightened perspective your vision and purpose shifts once again. Vision and purpose is now about deliberately and intentionally aligning what you want with your skills and talents with freedom from the need to escape your own suffering.

You know where you excel and you use this to create the future you envision. Your focus is on your strengths and becoming a master at what you do. You can’t master that which you don’t know. Light focused persistence turns your skills into expertise for which people pay money.

Say you have a gift for communication and an interest in entrepreneurship. Vision and purpose could manifest in communicating your knowledge to entrepreneurs through workshops, presentations, ezines and public speaking. Your interest propels your vision forward while your purpose enables you to develop a business through communication.

Your vision and purpose starts off as a subtle intuition and as you hone your skills and develop your talents, what you want takes shape and you craft this creation because it’s what you really want to do and you are willing to pay whatever you have to for it. Even if this means sweating blood.

Being passionate about what you do

What are you passionate about? We need to aspire to do something great and something purposeful so that we are able to grow and evolve. “We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What are the benefits of being passionate about what you do? You will be able to work with your true skills and talents as these are closely aligned. Some of the benefits may include more money, better and healthier relationships, more happiness, more fulfillment and greater meaning and purpose.

What are the requirements for living such a life? You need to know what you want and what you are prepared to sacrifice for this. You need self-discipline in your quest for what you truly want and strive to the level of mastery in what you are able to offer otherwise your passion will peter out like the fading light at dusk.

What are the consequences of not following your passions and aligning your skills and talents? A deepening sense of anxiety will creep into your life as you push up against an uncomfortable feeling that expands within you. If you neglect your passions and do not grow and heal along the way, you deny yourself the right to happiness and fulfillment.

How do you develop your passion while aligning your skills and talents? Find out what you really enjoy doing. Observe where you spend your time. What gives you the greatest sense of joy and satisfaction? If you don’t know what you’re passionate about, try different things; go travelling, read novels, take up a sport, meditate, contemplate, go to art galleries, journal.

Once you have found your passion align it with what you’re good at. You may be passionate about sports and have photography skills which enables you to align the 2 in photographic sports journalism. Know what you’re good at, find your passion and align the 2 to develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose!

Simple & Effective Relationship Communication

Are you done with the endless, repetitive and soul destroying fights and arguments you find yourself having with your life partner, colleagues, supervisors and other idiots at large. Are you interested in knowing how to have a conversation that not only solves problems but also radically improves the probability of actually having your real needs met and builds the relationship.

Awesome, let me invite you to go pour yourself a cuppa java, put your feet up and contemplate a more useful way, to have an argument.

Let’s get clear, everybody loves arguing but few enjoy the bad feelings, breakdown in trust and future problems it causes. It’s one thing to find a culprit and quite another to dissolve tension, create sustainable solutions and get what you need.

So right out the blocks you need to be aware of whether you’re a victim and lynch mob or a creative solutions engineer, you're either one or the other. It’s time to choose ...

Now in order to have a meaningful discussion that’s actually going to do that job, it’s imperative that

• You find a time when both of you feel relaxed and open to investigating and communicating about issues which probably will quickly lead to an argument if not handled creatively and intelligently. I.e. there’s no point in having a potentially explosive sex conversation late at night when you’re both tired, grumpy and vindictive.
• As inviting as this may seem, an investigative argument is not about who’s right and wrong but about creating (not finding) a solution, which of course means you need to own your baggage and real needs and be fully open to participating in the creative process, regardless of how pissed off you may feel. Can you get over yourself?

You can, cool, let’s forge ahead.

Rules for effective communication

In any communication there’s a sender and a receiver. The sender will define an issue as an unmet need. Don’t discount your partners need because all issues are valid. Whoever has the unmet need, owns the issue.

• Have an attitude of ownership because you’re not blaming your partner for your unmet need. As the receiver you must acknowledge that it’s not your issue so you can be in a space to be receptive to your partners need.
• Only focus on one issue at a time so that you don’t get caught up in a multitude of problems.
• Take turns being the sender so that only one person speaks at a time, and when you speak, speak with moderation, don’t yell at your partner.
• As the receiver listen with curiosity and an open mind. By not pre-judging your partner your relationship will be more fulfilling. Often a scarcity mindset drives one into conflict, but if you assume win-win in communication, then your relationship will flourish.
• Nurture the space between the two of you, this is the relationship, and it must be kept clean with honesty and you are both 100% responsible for this space.

The Receiver

80% of the role of the receiver is about your attitude. You need to be compassionate and supportive to your partner.

• The best role you can play is that of the coach/mirror. Be curious and listen intently to your partner so you can provide a space for them to express their issue.
• The sender expressing their issue may result in you hitting a wall of judgment, difference in interpretation on an issue, defensiveness or a reactive feeling such as anger, fear, anxiety or shame.
• It becomes much harder to communicate effectively from this fight or flight mode of response. You need to understand your reactive response, realize you’re up against a wall, feel into your uncomfortable feeling fully and then consciously back-up.

The Sender

As the sender you need to identify and communicate your issue clearly and concisely. There’s a difference between experiencing something and being clear about what it is you’re experiencing.

• Often you have an internal reaction in your gut that feels uncomfortable; this is not a good position from which to communicate your issue. Again, backup to be able to express your issue in a calm manner.
• Understand if you are a talker or a thinker and likewise if your partner is a talker or a thinker. The talker needs to talk immediately about the issue, while the thinker needs more time to contemplate the issue before talking to their partner. Often the talker is the female and the thinker is the male.
• It’s up to the sender to communicate the issue and it’s up to the receiver to reiterate what the issue is about, this can be done through mirroring or coaching which will result in getting and giving validation of the issue ie. “Yes, you’ve got it!” on the senders’ part.

Requesting

Requesting focuses on the positive, but let go of the outcome/the how, and as the receiver you can then ask: “Do you have a request?” Or, “what you need from me is….”

• The best way for the receiver to respond to the senders request is with a resounding “yes” or if you can’t meet that need then say so and offer a reasonable alternative.
• Propose something that would work for you as well as meet the need of the sender, which is negotiation.

Negotiating

Negotiation is a win-win where both parties are 100% happy with the outcome.

• Brainstorm and be creative or contemplate the solution to come up with something that works for both parties so that it sticks.
• Be patient if you don’t find the answer straight away, you don’t know what you don’t know, the answer will come eventually through talking and brainstorming and being open minded.
• As the receiver never say “no” to the senders request, rather counter propose something you can do that meets your partners needs.

Agree & Follow Through

Once you’ve both agreed on the action to take, assuming positive intent from both parties, then you must follow through with the action. Be patient with the process, if you practice these steps over time you will bounce back from the wall quicker. Behavior follows patterns, so when you make this choice to better your communication, you will build a useful skill to restore connection any time you need to and this will result in a successful and fulfilling relationship.