Mindset Monday - The 3 Levels of Mastery

This is episode 273 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. I'm your host, Kari Schneider and we are back with a brand new topic, one that I think will have you performing at amazing levels. Once you have a clarity on this topic, it is mastery. The three levels of mastery. Why does this matter? Because whenever we're trying to learn something new, we're trying to perform at a new level, new level, new devil. Any new level requires a different level of expansion. And if we're trying to master anything, be really, really good at anything, it requires these levels. And these three levels of mastery are cognitive mastery, emotional mastery, and physical mastery. With those three levels of mastery, that is how we can truly master anything. So what does that look like? So what I want to do today is give you some examples of what mastery really looks like in business, in personal lives, and where we tend to get hung up, where the main drawbacks end up being so that when you are trying to master something, you have the information, you have the clarity to know where to look and what to refine. When we're trying something new, it can be such a thick ball of wax that we don't know what to work on that's going to make the big difference where we're actually struggling, where we're actually having the hang up and making it to the next step, next stage, next level. And when we clarify the 360 stages of mastery, then we can really see, well, oh, I guess it was my emotional mastery or, oh, I think I have to practice it more. What does this look like? So let's just take a look at the definition of mastery. First of all, mastery is this. This comprehension, this understanding, a deep understanding of a skill or an accomplishment. And in understanding something truly deeply and, and mastering this skill per se, I don't think that is a stop point. I don't think that there is an end point. I believe that mastery is something that's continually practiced and continually refined. It's something that there is typically some new little nuance or learning or improvement or refinement that can be found in that particular thing. Now, does it mean that we stay in one area forever trying to find the minutia of improvement? Not necessarily. It may mean that we move on to something so much bigger or another step or something completely different because we feel like we've mastered it to the level that we want to master it, and now we want to try mastering another level of something else. There are always new levels of anything. So those three levels again of mastery are cognitive, also intellectual mastery. So cognitive or intellectual mastery, emotional mastery, and physical mastery. So let's break those down just a little bit. Cognitive mastery is understanding the nuts and bolts of something. You understand how it might work in a way that you can visualize it, you have a general awareness of it. It involves grasping those theories, grasping the concepts, grasping the know how. So, for instance, when I was a kid, I had this desire to be able to use proficiently a pogo stick. So I wanted to. This thing you bounce up and down on, and you can balance on it, and it takes this level of athleticism, but skill at the same time and balance. And I saw some kids doing it, and I saw it on tv and I really, really wanted it. And my intellectual understanding of it was I could grasp that there was a rubber kind of stopper on the bottom of this metal stick, and there was a spring, and there were two spots to put your fe were handles at the top. And you jumped up and down with your feet on the foot pads with just this pogo, this, this little rubber stopper hitting the ground. And I intellectually understood by watching, by looking at this, that I'd need a solid surface, that it likely wouldn't work on gravel or sand, and I would be able to learn how to do this thing. So I had a grasp, I had an understanding, I had an intellectual or a cognitive model of how it could work. But that doesn't mean I could do it. Just because I saw people do it. Just because I understood how the thing worked and how you jump up and down on it, that's the stuff you do. Doesn't mean I could do it. I hadn't mastered the skill. So what's the next level of mastery? The next level of master is emotional mastery. And emotional mastery basically works out connecting the feeling of your emotional state that's going to be required to continue with learning or practicing or doing the skill. So what? I had zero understanding of the emotional mastery that would be required because I'd never done it. I saw a friend do it, I saw it on tv, but I had never actually jumped on a pogo stick. Well, lo and behold, somebody gets me a pogo stick as a kid for my birthday. Wow. I'm a happy camper. What happens? I get on that pogo stick and I fall down and I try again and I Could get one jump. I could jump and then tip over, jump and then tip over, jump and then tip over. And this happened over and over again. Now to my little young self, my little brain. I wasn't understanding the emotions I was going through at the time. But now when I look back, I have a much clearer assessment of what was happening and what was happening. As I was getting frustrated, I was. I want. Wanted to give up. There was self doubt. These other kids could do it. I couldn't do it. So I was going through a real gamut of emotions. I had questioning why I got this thing. I didn't think I could do it. I was feeling the. Then I would feel the determination of trying again. I had some perseverance. So there were a number of levels of emotional experience that I had going on. A little bit of anxiety even about trying again. Was I going to hit my knee again because I had a couple of hard falls. So there was a whole spectrum of emotion as I was navigating, making this attempt at this, this little pogo. I was going to call it a stupid little pogo stick. Clearly I have some angst around this pogo stick. So I felt the anxiety, I felt the self doubt, I felt the determination, I felt the perseverance. I felt the. The discipline of going again another day. And I didn't give up. I felt a level of commitment, especially because someone bought me this thing. I felt a level of hope that I could do it at some point if I kept trying. I felt a level of. Of possibility as well. And then I was able to do two jumps. Two. I was like boom, boom. And then I fell over instead of just boom. And then falling over. Yay. I could do two jumps on the pogo stick. And what did that tell me? I made progress. I made progress. And that led to another level of emotional mastery. So now my intellectual mastery has increased because I understand more about the feel of the spring. I understand how. How I could actually bounce almost when I would was tipping over and still make a second bounce is how I made my second boun. I understood more about the mechanics of the. The piece of machinery. And then I had a greater level of emotional mastery because I had made it to two bounces. And now I had more determination. I understand. I understood more of what it was going to take to be able to do more bounces. So I had more of a level of emotional mastery and my physical mastery, the actual partaking of the action. The physical mastery is the execution. It's taking what I was learning about of equipment and how it worked and taking what I was learning about my own emotional spectrum to be able to keep trying. And then it was putting it into practice over and over. So all three of these components, this three levels of mastery were being worked and worked and worked how? Only via the physical mastery, only by doing it. Now, I wasn't a physical master at it. I could only get one jump and then finally two jumps. However, it was by doing it that my, my intellectual mastery was increasing. My emotional mastery was increasing at an exponential rate. And the physical mastery was increasing as well. The actual skill of holding on, of mastering the balance, all of that feedback loop was happening time after time, every time I made the attempt. So the physical mastery is what was growing. Everything, the skills and the physicality of doing the movement, the skill and the emotional mastery and even the intellectual mastery of understanding more of how it worked, more of the feel of it. So long story short, I don't know that story is actually long story long is that I finally was able to do the pogo stick. I could jump on it, I could jump around, I could stay on it for quite some time, but it literally went from doing two jumps to then jumping to about five jumps or six jumps. And then finally I could just stay on there and go for indefinite amounts of time, boing, boing, boing, boing, and keep going until that thing needed to be needed. Some WD40 on the spring and on the, the, the part, the piston that was going up and down. So the point here is that there's a spectrum of experience that everyone goes through in mastering anything. In mastering anything, I put promise you that we tend to make it mean that we can't do something or we can't master something when we don't get it initially. But if you break it down to understanding that there are three main levels of mastery, cognitive, emotional and physical. And it's doing the thing, the physical mastery, that really makes the biggest growth in all three levels. When you understand that and you feel stuck in trying to master something, that's when you can get more growth. That's when you can get more progress along the path of mastery. So we've got this actually putting it into form with the physical part of it. This comes true in what I'm doing right now. I'm podcasting, I'm recording information for you with the intention of helping you grow in whatever area you are working towards in your business, in your life. This is about self mastery for leaders. That's why I record this, this. But I'VE been doing this for five years. This is over 200 and probably 70 episodes at this point. What that means is that I may be not a podcast master by any means, but I've certainly become more proficient and I've progressed immensely from when I first started. Five years ago. When I started podcasting, I did not. I had intellectual understanding. I understood what needed to happen in the podcast in order to potentially, potentially get it to air. However, I didn't have the emotional mastery. I figured I'd have to bring a level of emotion and energy to a podcast, but I had no idea what that would be like doing that for hundreds of episodes. I also didn't understand what it would be like to continually look for people to interview, to continually come up with the ideas for podcasts, to continually perform and make sure it comes out in a consistent way for the audience. So today, today, this is what happened today. I started recording this podcast and I was about 10 minutes into recording the podcast and the Internet went down or had a glitch and it stopped recording and I lost it. So, and I don't mean I lost it as I lost my head, I mean I lost the recording of what I did. Now if this had happened in episode 10 or 20 or even 30, I probably would have been in an emotional state that I couldn't have re recorded it away. Yet at this point, I've developed a level of professionalism or a level of consistency, a level of emotional stability, having an emotional baseline for my podcast that I could just get back on and re record and not have any loss of being in that space of emotional frustration or not wanting to start again or wanting to give up or having self doubt or any of those things. I just, okay, it didn't work. Do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. Oh this. I flubbed it, we lost an interview, something didn't record, technology didn't work. Do it again without the loss of the emotional span of making it wrong, being frustrated, getting angry, all of those things that don't work, and being able to produce a consistent podcast. So my emotional mastery has grown massively. From the beginning of the podcasting until now. My intellectual or cognitive mastery of the podcast podcast has grown immensely. We've had to use different platforms, we've had to use different microphones, we've had to navigate people being in different countries, in different time zones and scheduling issues. There are all kinds of things we've had to master on the intellectual side of things that that has come from doing it. The Physical mastery that has come from practicing it and working through it, and refining our questions on the interviews, refining our topics to our audience, and refining what people really want to hear about. We've had to do a lot of mastery, however. It's come from the mistakes. It's come from the growing pains. And when you can identify where are the growing pains, where are the mistakes coming mostly? Are they coming because I wasn't in the emotional state I needed to be to execute a high level of podcast? Was it coming from not understanding how to do it well enough or knowing the technology well enough? Was it coming from not having practiced enough or done it frequently enough? Where were my mistakes coming from? And you can ask this of yourself in any area, whether it's hiring at work, whether it is building a new level of company, whether it is. Whether it's firing somebody whenever it is, whatever is happening for you in your world or your communications, take a look at the mastery. What part of it are you struggling with? With? I had clients recently needing to go through hiring. Multiple clients needed to hire. However, in this hiring process, I was noticing that one client had done the same thing a couple of times. What they were doing, they thought they found the key person. And at that time I said, well, we're going to have to have a role description for this person and then an invitation for them to come on board after they read the description of the role. But what happened is instead, the client decided to invite the person on board before defining the role specifically and having them read it and sit with it and then agree to it. Instead, there was this fast action on bringing the person on board. And then what happens later is because that person didn't have a clear role description, because that person didn't have a clear understanding of what they were stepping into, problems came up later. So where was the problem in the mastering? If we were to master hiring somebody, where was the problem? The problem in this instance was emotional mastery. Because the person knows how to hire. They know there needs to be a job description. They know the steps of hiring. However, the emotions of not wanting to lose this person, the emotions of now, that's not an exact emotion. Let's say the emotion would be scarcity. It felt like if they didn't act now and invite this person on board, they might lose this person. Or another scenario I've seen is that because there might have been a retirement or worse, a firing, then there's a gap. There's a gap and there's a need, and so there's an Urgency to hire. And when there's that urgency that tends to bring on this, a scarcity type emotion. And people are hiring perhaps faster than they would ordinarily. I remember that when I moved my business and I was hiring in a new city, that put me in a position of hiring in a way that was very different when, than when I first started my business. And when you have a different emotional state, it leads to a completely different experience of doing that same practice. So in this instance of scarcity or urgency in hiring, that leads to potentially skipping some key steps like redefining the role or adding or subtracting from the role, or making sure that the person has the role before they apply or before the interview so that there's clarity on both parties before the interview happens. Actually having an interview, an interview process, a second interview process if needed by other parties so they have a different perspective. When some of these steps are skipped, then we are, we are in a position of hiring somebody that's not. That leads to potential problems, some steps or skips where red flags could have come up and some issues could have been mitigated. So if we were to master that process, we can look back and see, oh, it was in the emotional mastery that had me skip the step of providing the role description, providing the interview process. So those would be some of the key steps in mastering anything that you're doing in business. Anything that you want to be really good at, whether it's your workouts, whether it's your health or fitness or your, your family interactions. Anything you want to be really good at. Take a look at where the breakdowns happen. Oftentimes they're going to be in an emotional area. Sometimes they're going to be in the intellectual area. So what do the main breakdowns tend to be? So if we look at the cognitive or the intellectual mastery challenges, what they tend to be are overload. We live in an information age. There's so much information coming at us that if we look up anything we want to know about, we could have documents and pages and pages to learn about, to understand a particular thing. So what can happen as a challenge in the intellectual mastery is having too much information. If we have the ability, whether we're using a professional, whether we're using AI to narrow it down to the key concepts that can be very helpful in starting the process of mastery because we need to start with simplicity and if there's information overload, then we'll get bogged down in the intellectual mastery and we will never take any action. I See this in people starting businesses. I see this in people taking on something new. They feel so bogged down in learning about it that they don't actually ever take any action. So these are the challenges in mastery with the cognitive is overload. There can be some difficulty grasping certain concepts. That can be another challenge in the intellectual. And sometimes you don't need to grasp that concept fully in order to move forward. So remember that in intellectual mastery, it needs to be simplified, especially if it's a new thing that you are introducing to your world, your life, your business. Keep it simple, don't overload. And then lastly, translating that theory into practice, it has to meet your life, it has to meet your relationships, it has to meet your business. If it doesn't meet your business, if you're trying to put a round peg into a square fitting, it's not going to work. So those are the main challenges of cognitive or, or intellectual mastery. When we look at emotional mastery, the main things that come up are mindset or attitude. You can feel right away when you've got the attitude that's questioning or the attitude that's low level, or the mindset that's fixed and not open to learning. Another one is our own emotional regulation. When I did that example of the pogo stick, you could hear that my little childhood emotions were all over the place. From optimism to believing I couldn't do it, to determination. It's going all over the place. As adults, when we're taking on emotional mastery, this is where we want to have emotional baseline. I call this a baseline for decision making, a baseline for leadership. I've seen this baseline over and over, over. When you are starting something new, you need this emotional regulation. So decide where you're going to hold your baseline. You might have three key emotions that you can tap into that will hold your baseline. If you want to hold openness or a, a determination or a willingness to try. Those types of emotional stability or emotional options will hold your emotional baseline with stability need. And then lastly, keeping that motivation or consistency with that emotional mastery, you may need to bring support. If it's something new, we're all going to have difficulty regulating our emotions, especially if we haven't done this challenge before. And then lastly, when it comes to physical mastery challenges, this is skill. This is skill execution. It's normal when we try something new in the physical realm of mastery, whether it's a podcast, whether it's hiring, whether it is doing a pogo stick, whatever it is for you, and we actually go to do it, that's when we learn the most about our own skill set. If we don't have the skills, we're going to see it right away, and that's where we have to bring more skills on. So skill execution, skill acquiring. That's what's going to happen in the physical, physical zone. And that can be a big challenge. If we don't have the skills to start with with and then being able to be adaptable and flexible, this comes in with how our emotional mastery can support us. If we can adapt an attitude of flexibility, then it's going to enable us to continue to try a skill that we're not good at so that we can make mistakes and move forward. And then lastly, there may actually be a physical limitation. When we look at physical mastery, we may have a physical challenge. For instance, as a little kid, I was a little, little kid, meaning I was very small for my age. That meant that when I got that pogo stick, I was smaller than most kids who would go on to that size of pogo stick. That meant I physically had a harder time getting up onto it, hanging onto it, and then navigating it and controlling it. So I was physically limited. Now, a lot of the things that we're talking about with mastery, there isn't a physical limitation. We're talking about skills such as hiring or firing or growing a business or having family communications. So there's levels of all three levels of mastery in all of those things. But we're typically not limited by a physical limitation, although that can sometimes be the limitation. So remember, when you're looking at mastery, there's going to be some challenges in the cognitive. You might feel like you've got an information overload. There's going to be some challenges in the emotional. You might feel like you're not holding an emotional baseline. And there's going to be some challenges in the physical. You may simply not have the skills yet in that area. All of that's okay. The beauty of it is now you can have greater clarity in seeing what zone might need a little more support to support your progress in mastering whatever you're looking to master. Because I believe that you can do it. We are all about growth. We're about, as empowered humans, we're about taking care of ourselves, taking care of others, taking action. You know, having that personal power and being up to something that's larger than ourselves. When we're up to something that grows us or something that's greater than ourselves, that means we are growing. And it's going to take some level of mastery in some area of our life. So by taking a look at this, these three levels of mastery you can narrow down exactly where you can focus in order to get the most from mastering what you are looking to master. So keep going. You've got this and we've got your back. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Go on and master the thing that you are looking to progress towards. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. 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