Welcome to the Virtual Personal Mastery Resource Portal. To support your continued learning, we’ve created a page where you can find electronic versions of all charts, guides, videos and other relevant resources.
Coaching Guidelines:
Seminar Tools:
Image Management In My Situation chart
The purpose of this exercise: Part 1 – Recognize your anxieties/fears and how they are likely to drive unproductive behaviors. Part 2 – Define clear goals and a set of practices to help you show up as your best self. We will cover part 2 in the latter seminar sessions.
When to use this chart: Use this tool when preparing for a difficult conversation, a tense meeting or a high-stake presentation.
Pattern chart
The purpose of this exercise: Discover the root cause of what drives your repeated behaviors and emotionally connect to their impacts. Trying to will your way through the behaviors leaves you powerless or leads you to do the opposite behaviors and create new costs in your wake. That is because, in both cases, you are still acting at the mercy of your fears. This realization can empower you to define practices at the level of your behavior’s root cause and enables you to question your fears in the moment in order to act in the direction of your goals. (We cover this in the later part of the seminar.)
When to use this chart: Use this tool when you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern of behavior.
ABC Sorting chart
The purpose of this exercise:The ABC sorting process helps you untangle your perceptions from your interpretations and emotions.
When to use this chart: Use this tool when you “feel” upset, confused, depressed, etc. Initially, we encourage you to use it for any pinches.
Egosystem Chart
The purpose of this exercise: The Egosystem chart illuminates the deepest danger your Ego is always scanning for (your Driving Idea) and the greatest fantasy your Ego is always trying to prove (your Unconscious Goal). It forces you to walk an impossible line, act out (Alert Mode and May Day) and creates costs to yourself and to others.
When to use this chart: The content of this chart can be refined as you continue your introspective journey. We don’t suggest you redo this chart on your own but instead encourage you to remember its key components so you can use them in your daily life. Alert Mode and May Day are useful red flags. If you notice you have fallen into these behaviors, it is a good time to step back and look at your state of reaction and your pinches. The Driving Idea and Unconscious Goal will often come up as key ego threats as you unpack your pinches. Also, watch out for these two as you reflect on big life choices.
Victim / Victimizer Chart
The purpose of this exercise: The Victim-Victimizer chart brings into focus the way in which your counterproductive behaviors unintentionally perpetuate the same suffering that caused you pain as a child.
When to use this chart: The content of this chart can be refined as you continue your introspective journey. We don’t suggest you redo this chart more than once (unless prompted by us to do so) but instead, really connect emotionally with its conclusion.
Never Again Chart
The purpose of this exercise: The Never Again chart enables you to clarify where you feel at the mercy (ATM),what you are fed up with in the various domains of your life and see how you may actually perpetuate those very counterproductive behaviors. From there, you can illuminate a “Never Again” that will create a line in the sand for you to shift out of these behaviors.
When to use this chart: The content of this chart can be refined as you continue your introspective journey. We don’t suggest you redo this chart more than once (unless prompted by us to do so) but instead, really connect emotionally with its conclusion. The Never Again chart can be used as a helpful check-in with yourself. As we all continue to grow, often our behaviors and personal frontiers shift and evolve. Thus, what we are fed up with, how we perpetuate and a powerful “Never Again” statement can also change over the years.
AFI Shifter
The purpose of this exercise: The AFI Shifter is intended to help you summarize and visualize the unfortunate reinforcing cycle which keeps us at the mercy of continuing our counterproductive reactions. This will be an iterative process in the next two sessions. At this stage, we want you to disrupt the counterproductive automatic cycle by noticing the cues that launch you into the cycle and reminding you of the costs that you absolutely want to stop creating. In the next session, we’ll explore new practices that will help you show up in a different way.
When to use this chart: You can redo this chart when feeling “stuck” in or at the mercy of one of your areas for improvement.
Pinch Sorting
The purpose of this exercise: We’ve created the Pinch Sorting chart to help you recenter and act from a creative place any time you feel At the Mercy.
When to use this chart: We can pinch ourselves quite a bit! Use this chart as often as possible to build the muscle of sorting your pinch. Turn moments that you feel At the Mercy into opportunities for introspection. By becoming clear about what’s actually going on, clarifying your activated Ego Drivers, and looking for other factors you may have previously missed; you can regain your creative agency instead of staying At the Mercy of your feelings toward yourself, others or the broader environment.
Pinch Sorting Instructions – Ego High
The purpose of this exercise: We’ve created the Ego Stroke Sorting chart to help you recenter when you feel a wave of high (different from a sense of accomplishment and gratitude) that will inevitably lead you to protect and promote your ego, and a space of competition with other people.
When to use this chart: Use the “flash” process for fleeting moment of small high (e.g., someone pays a compliment, you get a small vindication,…) and the “express” process for moment of significant high (e.g., getting a promotion, being publicly acknowledge by a power figure,…). Enjoying acknowledgment is not a counterproductive. To the contrary, it is a power moment of celebration and of reinforcing an impact that you are having or contributing to. However our ego can inflate our contribution to the point of excluding others, make us be at the mercy of the fear of losing that approval and put us on a treadmill to strive for more of it at the expense of our most important goal and the connect way that we want to pursue them. By sorting that stroke, you can allow yourself to appreciate the moment and reinforce your sense of purpose while keeping on track with the creating the context you want for yourself and others.
Express Pinch Sorting
The purpose of this exercise: We’ve created the Express Pinch Sorting chart to help you quickly (in 5-8 min) recenter and act from a creative place any time you feel At the Mercy. This chart works for small pinches. If your state is not improving with this chart or if you know your pinch is more intense, use the full size Pinch Sorting chart.
When to use this chart: We can pinch ourselves quite a bit! Use this chart as often as possible to build the muscle of sorting your pinch. Turn moments that you feel At the Mercy into opportunities for introspection. By becoming clear about what’s actually going on, clarifying your activated Ego Drivers, and looking for other factors you may have previously missed; you can regain your creative agency instead of staying At the Mercy of your feelings toward yourself, others or the broader environment.
Flower Chart
ATS Goal Process
The purpose of this document: Follow these steps to define goals that help you connect with what you want to create from a place of being “at the source” (aka an ATS Goal) versus a place of being “at the mercy” (aka an ATM Goal).
When to use this: Every interaction, every meeting, every email we respond to… in fact every moment we engage in something, we have a goal, whether it is conscious or (usually) unconscious. If you don’t define conscious ATS goals, you are likely to follow your unconscious ATM goals (which are generally concerned with your sense of self-worth). At any moment, choose what ATS goal you want to inspire your actions and use this guide to help you define that goal. You can also refer also to this sheet if you are looking to define goals for an Image Management My Situation Chart, thinking about your Fears & Goals, working on an AFI Shifter, contemplating your Seed Chart and so much more.
At the Source Goals
Mattress Chart
The purpose of this exercise: Uncover how the fear of failing along with the perpetual hope for the “high” of recognition leads you to hedge, specialize yourself and even self sabotage. By recognizing the mechanism at play in your life, you can find compassion for yourself, stop holding yourself back from what you truly want and engage in your life outside of the performance treadmill.
When to use this chart:
Use this chart to connect with the ways in which you have or continue to hold yourself back from what you really want. Your mattress, camouflage and mattress prep will likely feel very familiar as they will be the things you say or do when you avoid or approach a “failure”.
Reread your chart whenever you feel potentially challenged in your abilities or when there could be a risk of failure or setback (like when starting a new stretch role or high stakes project).
Note: As we all continue to grow, often our behaviors and personal frontiers shift and evolve. Thus, what shows up on our Mattress chart in moments of fearing failure can change over the years.
“TIP” to Prep
The purpose of this exercise: This tool will help you prepare for and preface an upcoming conversation, meeting or presentation. By identifying the topic of the conversation, your Dreaded Images, your reactions and your purpose; you can more effectively center on what needs to be communicated or discussed. You will also find some space for other prep notes or to take notes during the meeting. This way you can bring the document to your meeting.
Note: Page 1 and Page 2 provide the same content but are presented in different forms. Depending on your preference, use the list or a chart format.
When to use this chart: Use this chart anytime you feel apprehensive about an upcoming conversation, meeting or presentation.