We have discussed culture, creating a vision, bringing together a team but what is it that can catch us out?

Most of us, feel “If only I work harder, learn more and perfect my skills, with the combination of passion and work ethic, I can be an expert and will feel good enough.”

As discussed previously, the concept of patience and exploration are important skills of leadership. We need to shift from being an expert at everything, competency and doing it alone, to mastery, wisdom and achieving things collectively.

Children naturally practice mastery, uninterested in their performance when they are young enjoying experimentation and having fun.

As they become oriented toward performing well in education, children who meet a challenge, often feel that they are not good enough and abandon learning.

We know there is a whole range of knowledge, skills and competencies that people need to develop in order to succeed in a role. But, if we focus on growth and development and life long learning, we could find joy even when we are not good at it yet!

I would like to address the myth that work needs to feel impossibly hard and a destination to be achieved. Where there is challenge, which requires effort and learning, often with conflict between people, through mastery, we can enjoy the process, connect with our colleagues and problem solve together.

The path to mastery

While we are exploring and learning, the process transforms who we are. We grow and develop, connect and can share our ideas and knowledge.

Mastery requires endurance, dedicated time and continuous effort. It takes hundreds and thousands of repetitions, trial and error before we succeed.

As a leader myself, there have been times when panic has set in. Imposter Syndrome undermines my efforts and I find myself frozen with anxiety, unable to be creative or share my guilt that I was letting everyone down.

By opening up, using a coach who created a reflective mirror, I explored new opportunities, stopped competing and put aside my short term goals to find a new direction.

Inspiration has come from understanding psychological safety, servant leadership, values led systems and distributed wisdom. This is supplemented by the joy of empowering others and using problem solving as a fun exercise.

Why is mastery out of vogue?

At an individual level, our pull for perfectionism, gathering knowledge, creating correct systems and success projection tend to get in the way of being flexible, adaptable and always learning.

We feel guilt and shame for failing and letting people down. Rather than ask for help when we hit a barrier, we often feel we are stupid for not being able to solve the problem and hide when we make mistakes.

Real mastery requires us to become lifelong learners and coaches, facilitators and mentors for other’s journey.

• Purpose gives us energy
• Wisdom gives us energy
• Belonging creates energy
• Growth generates energy

Compassion fatigue and burnout are features of a dysfunctional workforce!

How do we develop mastery?

Benner: From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice Novice is a good model of educational progression and we need to build on this foundation.

When we start a job, we acquire knowledge and develop skills, meaning we can follow a task to an end.

Then, we perform group of tasks with understanding, growing capability and confidence in the role. As our intuition develops, we become truly competent.

When we are competent, we grow the capacity to do more and find space available for us to help others. This is when we become an actual contributor to the broader team and meet the proficient criteria.

By contributing, others start seeking us for ideas, opinions and we become able to create solutions, connect the dots or bring teams together.

Experts grow from our own personal insight, becoming an influencer and modelling adaptability and can demonstrate mastery.

In The Nurture Wisdom Academy we deliver training in relation to roles:

• Nurture Ripple Induction and Competency include acting as a ripple of positivity. Our thoughts, actions and words have the power to affect great change far beyond ourselves. The small decisions we make every day – to laugh, to smile, to share a kind word – create an impact that spreads far and wide, impacting much more than our own lives.

• Cultural Architect forms our proficiency programme building proficient practitioners with an 18 month building knowledge, skills and behaviouurs, whilst acting as a change agent, Cultural Architect consciously role modelling values and behaviours including psychological safety.

• Expert Academy – Our mastery enables us to become aware of our latent power and grow trust in our collective ability to overcome hurdles and we can act as influencers to create ongoing transformation.
• Our Alumni – Through walking with us we do more than build technical competence, we cultivate principles, psychologically safety, and reflexive leaders who embody our core values of Ambition, Belonging, Creativity, Psychological Safety, and Nurturing Be part of our growing alumni network committed to lifelong learning, peer support, and influencing systems change.

In conclusion, in mastery, we will be both a leader and a follower in our individual and collective transformational journeys, igniting and inspiring change to create a journey of discovery.