Personal Mastery
Personal mastery is the art and practice of becoming who we can be, enabling us to do what we want to do and to achieve what we want to achieve.
Fun & games
If we were to see and treat ourselves as unique human systems, personal mastery is any architect's dream.
Keeping to the analogy, the practice involves the envisioning of an ideal system with optimal functionality.
The architect is the only one involved in the requirement acquisition — no conflict there 
— no other stakeholders to take care of.
The next step, obviously, is an inventory of the current situation, identifying the gaps and starting the design of a migration strategy.
To provide the architect with a healthy challenge, any human system comes with its own legacy systems built into the architecture (habits and belief systems going back to childhood conditioning and cultural heritage, for example).
The only constraint the architect will have with migrating the legacy systems is that building a ‘shadow system’ will not be possible. The good news is that the human system is a robust, adaptive, self-organising system that can cope with many double functionalities and even internal contradictions.
In laymen's terms, we cannot clone ourselves to test how some changes work out in a safe, out of harm's way environment, but the human system, as a system, has its own inherent intelligence that guides itself in finding a manner of balance under ‘untested’ and ambiguous circumstances.
Implementation is a real joy:
We can start multiple projects and with a bit of a wise choice of sequence we will not only not have a problem with thinly spread resources, all our projects will work synergistically.
One of the nicest things about architecting ourselves is that ‘feature creep’ is not only allowed, it's actually encouraged.
Like with any other complex system, when architects do the initial rounds of investigation and requirement acquisition they do not yet have a deep grasp of the system in all its complexities. The more we work with the system, the more we interact with it, the deeper our understanding becomes.
It is an iterative process in which the more we come to know, the better questions we ask, the deeper our knowledge becomes, etc.
Very often in such iterative processes we have these moments of “aha, I could have better done it in another way, or even defined it differently”. The charm and fascination of personal mastery as architecture is that there are no limitations on re-defining vision, requirements, functionalities, capabilities and features, as long as the overall vision of moving towards how we can be, remains — and is guarded as — the very basic premise of the architecture.
Challenges
If personal mastery is so fantastic, how come we don't we all naturally practice it, all the time?
Part of the answer can be found in the structure of our legacy systems, where we find our mental models, belief systems and emotional habits.
Typically, many of our beliefs are self-limiting and will block us from even elaborating a personal vision, for example.
“I can't have what I want anyway”; “It doesn't really matter what I want”; “If I manage to get what I really want it will be really scary”; “I don't know what I want”; and “I know what I want but I can't have it at work” are all examples of difficulties people have with doing a personal vision exercise1.
Adopting a good architect's mind-set in this regard can give us the tenacity to tackle our ‘legacy systems’. It might be a hard problem, but that is all the more the reason to go and solve it.
Also coded into our legacy systems are our habitual behaviours.
When we grow up we are encouraged to pursue excellence (academically, in sports etc.) but usually, acquiring the habits that daily support the pursuit is not part of our education: we do not practice self- observation and reflection, for example, or the investigation of our perceptions and mind-models nor how to improve our emotional reactions2, as part of our growth-curriculum.
From an architecture point of view we might not even be aware of the existence of the technologies enabling and supporting our vision.
The good news is that the technologies are there, in abundance, some already for thousands of years.
Choosing the right technologies to optimally support individuals - with their unique systems characteristics — in the development and implementation process of their personal vision, requires expert advice; in the same way that an architect is needed to make sound choices between the hundreds of available technologies and tools.
The vision itself is also part of the iterative personal mastery process: it keeps developing with our perceptions of ourselves and of who and how we can be.
Assuming that human potential is boundless — which we do, with a lot of strong supporting evidence — the ‘final’ version will be as good as the commitment we are willing to put into it.
