On Mastery

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Blame being labeled “gifted” as a child or just being deficient in industriousness, but for whatever reason, I tend to invest myself in something and then, after a year or three, set it aside.

I did this with being a doula. I started when I was still working full-time, attended 21 births in two years, then stopped shortly after I got pregnant with my first child. Morning sickness and then parenting a newborn were excellent reasons for stepping back from being up all night with laboring families, but they were also an excuse for stepping away from something that I found physically and emotionally challenging. I had an aptitude for being with women while they were birthing their babies, but I didn’t have an aptitude for the self-care I needed to recharge afterward. Instead of sticking with the work and getting better at both, I stepped away.

I did this with teaching yoga. I had less of an aptitude, but I had a love of yoga, especially Anusara and other modalities that focused on alignment and how different parts of the body work together. But as a yoga teacher, I felt like a fraud. My fellow teachers seemed to have an intuitive sense for how to string poses together into an effective class. They also were largely former dancers, so I had a bit of an inferiority complex about my lack of flexibility and grace, which wasn’t helped by an instructor during my yoga teacher training who described me in front of the entire class as “beyond clumsy.” That’s something I’ve moved past intellectually but that still stings, despite all my reasoning with myself that it shouldn’t. Still, flexibility can be improved and the skill of putting poses together in a way that flows can be learned, but instead of working towards those things, I stepped away.

I did this with my most recent full-time employment, too. The job was structured in a way that made balancing the different aspects of my life incredibly difficult for me. It was rewarding, working in education with children and parents, but I wasn’t exercising or sleeping enough, and the job itself was stressful and demanding. After eight months, instead of investing more time and effort into figuring out a way to structure the job to support my overall well-being, I stepped away.

Noting this pattern, I also noted an area where I didn’t step away when things got difficult: parenting and homeschooling. I’m not bragging when I say that I have remarkable perseverance as a parent. I homeschooled one child through high school and the other through eighth grade in three different states, during two cross-country moves, and throughout a pandemic lockdown. When challenges arose, I set myself to finding a solution rather than seeking a way out. This is the kind of perseverance that I’d like to bring to the post-homeschooling and post-intensive-parenting period of my life. Operating under the idea that insight can be gained by investigating exceptions, I wondered: What’s different about parenting and homeschooling that kept me working, even when things felt really difficult? Which of the qualities and skills that I developed while parenting and homeschooling can I apply to my professional life?

While I was trying to identify these translatable elements, I read Gary Keller’s The One Thing. It’s not an awesome book; it could be much shorter than it is, and the quotation selection feels haphazard (seriously, Mark Twain did NOT originate the quotation attributed to him, which any Twain reader would know immediately), but there are some pieces that just hit right for me in this moment. I particularly resonate with Keller’s discussion about pursuing mastery.

The basic idea is that, once you’ve identified your purpose in life, mastery of the way you choose to fulfill that purpose should be a guiding factor in choosing what next steps to take. So if I decided that my purpose was to bring new perspectives to people to help them live richer and more connected lives, and I decided that how I want to do that is by using my voice, both literally and metaphorically, through writing, acting, singing, and other modes of creative expression, then my next step is to figure out what small, incremental actions I can take to attain mastery in those areas. This could mean, as Keller suggests, using time-blocking to set aside big sections of each day to work towards mastery. I could use this time for researching audition and performance opportunities; establishing a regular, intentional practice; working with a coach for individual feedback; taking a class to build skills and connections in a group setting; journaling to reflect on where I am and where I might take my practice next; writing a blog post about mastery—anything that helps move me towards mastery and, through that mastery, towards fulfillment of my purpose.

It’s all rather lofty language for, “make time to feel like you’re not doing well so that you can improve.”

The other thing that speaks to me in this focus on mastery is Keller’s suggestion to dream big. The reader is encouraged to imagine not just what it would look like if they were “good enough” in their chosen area or even if they were the best they could be, but what it would look like if they were the best it’s possible to be in that area. That is, admittedly, a bit of a danger zone for someone with perfectionist tendencies, but for a perfectionist who tends to get lost in the weeds because she thinks small and keeps her goals small, I think it might be an effective way to get me to think beyond the stuff that keeps me stuck and put setbacks into perspective. Theoretically, if the goal is really, really big, each setback is comparatively smaller. If I’d had a clear purpose and a big goal when I was doing my yoga teacher training, would the “beyond clumsy” comment have been such a big setback? (Of course, while we’re contemplating counterfactuals, if I had been in my 40s instead of my 20s, I might also have reacted to the comment differently.) If this could truly put my setbacks in context so that I feel empowered to move through them rather than just moving on to the next thing, it could be really valuable to me.

So, moving forward, I’m going to dream big, envision mastery in my chosen field, and then plan my next steps from there. Narrowing down my chosen field might also be helpful, but one thing at a time.