Understanding the Mastery Skill

The MASTERY skill is used to step change your level of emotional literacy because just being aware of a feeling is not enough to change it. We need to be able to distinguish between different (and similar) emotions and accurately label each one.

Most people are unable to discriminate similar emotions. This is simply because they haven’t spent any time reflecting on what emotional states they are experiencing. Therefore, the first step to developing better emotional literacy is to start objectifying what is normally a subjective, inner experience. This ‘subject-to-object’ (S2O) manoeuvre facilitates a much greater understanding of any phenomenon.

Think of the MASTERY skill like a wine appreciation course. Wine experts have developed very sophisticated palettes that can easily differentiate between a shiraz and a malbec. Often, they can tell where the wine was made, what year it was made and even the type of soil the grapes were grown in. But that level of sophistication required training and practice. The same is true of emotions. Being able to differentiate and discriminate between a range of emotions allows us to appreciate how each emotion feels in our body. This can, in turn, make it easier for us to access that emotion and recreate it when needed.

It is important to be able to discriminate our emotions for two reasons:
Access. If we know the exact ‘features’ of a particular feeling that we are trying to recreate and know exactly how we experience it in our body, we can have conscious access to that emotion. And if we have conscious access to it instead of just haphazard, unpredictable unconscious access to it, we can turn that emotion ‘on’ when we need it. For example, confidence is a potent emotion that impacts performance negatively or positively. If we don’t know what confidence is as an experience and have no appreciation for how it feels in our body, we don’t have access to it. If on the other hand, we have developed emotional literacy and have practised the emotional MASTERY skill, we will understand how to re-create a state of confidence whenever we need it, whether in a tennis final or front of the shareholders.

Action. The purpose of emotion is to provoke action and every emotion is designed to provoke a different action. As such, emotions have distinct survival advantages. If, however, we are unable to differentiate which emotion we are feeling, we will likely select the wrong action for the situation we’re faced with. For example, when we see a grizzly bear, it triggers an emotion (our heart rate becomes erratic, our palms become sweaty etc) and we feel fear. The fear is designed to provoke an action, i.e. running away, which will hopefully save our life. That’s the purpose of the fear. If we don’t feel fear or misinterpret the emotional signal as anxiety, we are likely to remain immobilised for too long and risk an attack.

If we are unfamiliar with our emotions we tend just to cluster them as positive or negative then our actions are often blunt, clumsy and ineffective. We need to be able to differentiate between the signals we receive so we can interpret their meaning more accurately and make better choices more often.

For example, when we are in a meeting, if we can’t tell the difference between frustration and disappointment, we’re much more likely to make the wrong choice and do something counterproductive.

The purpose of disappointment is to provoke us to step back so we can evaluate the situation more closely. In contrast, the purpose of frustration is to cause us to step forward and change something. If we can’t tell the difference between frustration and disappointment we will step forward when we should have stepped back or step back when we should have stepped forward.

Most of us don’t know how we are feeling at any moment and even if we do, we are unable to accurately tell the difference between those emotions – especially those that are similar to each other. If we can’t distinguish between emotions, we have no emotional literacy and our health, happiness and performance may suffer as a result.

The MASTERY skill is therefore a technique to build our emotional repertoire so we can tell the differences between the emotional data we are privy to. You may for example know the intellectual difference between frustration and disappointment but MASTERY teaches us how to recognise the difference in our body so we can differentiate between the emotional states as an experience.

Think of the MASTERY skill like a wine appreciation course. Wine experts have developed very sophisticated palettes that can easily differentiate between a shiraz and a malbec. Often they can tell where the wine was made, what year it was made and even the type of soil the grapes were grown in. But that level of sophistication required training and practice. The same is true of emotions. Being able to differentiate and discriminate between a range of emotions allows us to appreciate how each emotion feels in our body. This can, in turn, make it easier for us to access that emotion and recreate it when needed.