Master yourself: you'll master the world!

I love this quote so much that it became my mantra for a while.

I can’t stop myself thinking how big the fact that by investing in my personal development I’ll get to master the entire world. Wahoo this is powerful! Finally a way to gain control over my life

The Universe seems to be in my hands.

Ok, to start, let’s look into what mastering myself means: Personally, since I have started my coaching journey, I became a different person. I now spend a lot more time in my head thinking through situations or people’s reactions towards me and others. I’m now conscious that I am responsible for all my choices no matter if they are good or bad, furthermore, I have an influence on the outcome. Meaning that when I’m annoyed with something (usually a feeling), I backtrack to the decision I made to learn from the frustrating result and try no to replicate.

It is a lot easier for me to backtrack when I make bad choices as they are usually the ones I beat myself up about. That's right, I pay more attention to my mistakes, implying that I get a lot more affected by my bad decisions rather than take the time to appreciate the right ones. By the way, this is another aspect of personal development I’m investing in “Seat back and appreciate what you have accomplished; celebrate.

Getting back to our topic, mastering yourself starts by taking the time to notice all the emotions you feel and appreciate what it creates inside (‘Notice what you notice’). If you feel happiness, take it. If you feel unhappy, avoid it in the future, however, to do so effectively, you need to put your finger on the specific trigger, for example, you could feel stressed about talking to your boss. However, you need to find out the reason behind the stress. Would you still feel stressed if you were having a drink between colleagues? The answer is likely to be ‘no’ so what’s happening? The bottom line is, you need to master the communication with your boss as he won’t do it for you. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he has his personal brand to leverage with is own boss (you see the pattern?)… All that to say that playing the victim doesn’t help. So time to learn to master yourself!

I now understand that if I take the time to improve my emotional intelligence, listen to myself and others; I will start mastering all situations! It is even simpler than that; you have to consciously choose the way you respond. To picture the concept, let’s use a typical trigger: someone on your commute doesn’t move down the carriage, or read the paper comfortably while people are still outside, also trying to go to work with no space to get in. You have the choice to influence their reaction to the way you communicate with them. You have the power to change their response and master a little part of their world. How amazing is this, by deciding to be kind to someone who is being a severe pain you are influencing the outcome and they are not even aware of it. Bear in mind; I’m not talking about sarcasm here, I’m talking about genuine kindness as sarcasm won’t help positively here or anywhere else.

Which is an interesting point to make, probably worth making earlier on the page: my version of “Master the world” is on a positive way as aggressiveness from individuals is severely draining the energy out my body. I have not a lot of time for negativity anymore, only when I choose to change the outcome for it to become positive. I’m still relatively new to it, so it takes a lot of my energy. However, I know that with practice it will get easier.

What about you? Where would you start the work? What do you have enough of putting up with it?

To continue your progress towards mastering yourself, apply for a free initial consultation at alinedeclercq.com/contact