Have You Mastered It Yet? Part 6 of the 5 Steps to Mastery

What are the different steps to mastery? How do you become a Master?

Each step is different, yet they all require your time and energy, which is good news. Your efforts are not wasted - nature wastes nothing - they all increase your inner power.

The Five Steps to Mastery
The five steps to mastery and the secrets of success in moving to each next level are:

1. Ignorance. You start out knowing nothing about the subject. To move from ignorance to the next step - informed about it - you need to be willing to listen or read.
2. Informed about. You've listened to the information so you know about it but since you don't yet understand it, it may look wrong. To move to the next step - understanding - you need to be willing to think about what seems wrong, to mentally investigate it.
3. Understanding. You've thought about it, but only investigated it mentally so far. To move to the penultimate step - authentic knowing - you need to get out and do it yourself, to gain your own experience.
4. Authentic knowing. Plenty of your own experience gives you authentic knowing. But this is not mastery, although enough experience does give you wisdom. So how do you get to the fifth and final step - Mastery?
5. Mastery. Once you have the wisdom of experience, you teach others, the final step. Once you've taught enough people, you know it from all angles since you've explained it from all angles. Then you've become a Master.

Reaching the Next Step
Listen. Without being willing to listen to the information, hearing someone out, you remain ignorant. To move out of ignorance, you need to become informed about what they have to say.

Investigate. You're informed about what they say when you've read or listened. But until you understand their information and its implications, self sabotage will tempt you to dismiss anything that appears wrong. So investigation is crucial to breakthrough to understanding. Your willingness pays off, and your mind stops complaining it's wrong.

Experience. But understanding is not authentic knowing. Unaware people self sabotage here, they get stuck at understanding which they mistakenly confuse with genuine knowing. But no matter how experienced your teacher is, experience is personal. You cannot inherit or be given authentic knowing, you get it only by experiencing it for yourself.

Teach. To become a Master, authentic knowing just from your own perspective is not enough. You need to know it from all angles. You change your life by teaching, by explaining from different viewpoints. When you appreciate it from everyone's perspective, then you've completed the last step to mastery, you're a Master!

Willingness is Essential
The changes for each step require willingness. Another secret of success is to be willing to fail, to make mistakes as you get your own experience. Experience is internal, it can't be inherited or passed on. You can't learn to swim at a seminar, you need to get in the water and get wet.

Unless you're willing to change, you stay the same, of course. This is obvious physically, but it's equally true internally. Inner progress - developing wisdom - needs you to improve your thoughts, learn new distinctions, get your own experience, and to become more aware of each step to mastery. As the old adage says: To grow is to progress is to change.

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching."

- Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE), Greek philosopher, logician, teacher of Alexander the Great.