This blog post originally appeared in May 2011
As we come to the end of our series on Self Mastery, we take a look at one of the great results of spending time on developing yourself. Finding your sweet spot, enlarging it and regularly operating in that space.
The work of Martin Seligman and his colleague Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi have helped us to create a frame for finding your sweet spot. We acknowledge most of you have invested a significant amount of time developing capability – mostly intellectual skills – and you do not know enough about your personality preferences and character.
For those who work feeling stressed, guilty or resentful it can so often be because they are operating counter to their personality preferences and character. Such leaders are finding their sweet spot very infrequently because they are defining who they are by their capability.
As leaders decide to spend more time developing greater self mastery they create higher awareness of the personality preferences and character they bring to the way they use their intellectual capability . For those who want even further awareness they also explore ways to develop their emotional capability. When they do this they discover an enlarged sweet spot.
The ultimate sweet spot is where your capability is an integral ‘part’ of who you are but it is not what defines you. Your personality preferences and your character define how you interact and behave and you do this in a way that allows you to be at your best at all times. Feelings of guilt, resentment, anxiety are pushed away as you are ‘in the zone’ with how you choose to live with confidence, conviction and courage.
