7 Aligned Strategies to Gamify Self-Mastery

For this 4th edition of the Joyful Sovereignty Weekly, my intention is to widen your view of Self-Mastery. To provide the context needed to start your Self-Mastery journey powerfully.
Read The Previous Edition Here

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Moving towards a meaningful endeavor can sometimes be serious. That can take away from the enjoyment of the process.

I know this from experience.

The seriousness of the Special Forces mission set carried over into my life after I got out.

I was focused and determined on my path. Intentional, yet serious about my actions.

Years later, I connected the dots of pursuing a meaningful endeavor and gamification.

There's a way to be sincere on your endeavors in life, while embracing a playful approach that leads to good living and impact.

Perhaps you've approached aspects of your life in a serious and heavy way.

If so, the following may bring to light something useful for you.

Life is a game.

The cool thing about the best games, there is always another level.

The point isn't to move through each level as fast as possible, but to enjoy the richness as you progress.

Gamification brings about a light-heartedness. A playfulness that can be a reminder of your childlike innocence.

Yet now you have all this wisdom. You can meld the wisdom and experience you have now, with the childlike play you once enjoyed.

The following 7 strategies are complementary and build off each other.
Let's dive in.

Decisiveness.

We will explore this in a moment, but first let's discuss an analogy of apprenticeship.

In the olden days, you would apprentice under a master of a craft.

It would take you 8-10 years under this master before you could go out into the world and be the master of your craft.

This isn't the olden days and you aren't mastering a skillset.

You are mastering yourself.

Through this journey, you're "fading in" the song of mastery. Simultaneously, you're "fading out" the song of apprenticeship.

You are a DJ of empowerment.

You become the DJ by self-authorizing your journey to Mastery.

The music you dance to in life is your choice. What music have you been dancing to the past decade?

Any room for improvement?

Let's go back to decisiveness. This is likely the most important tiny piece to this.

The moment you decide on something whole-heartedly, life begins to respond.

Ever notice those things you've tried before in the past where you "tried" to do something. Often met with resistance, delays, lack of alignment and it seemingly not working out.

Now look back at a moment in your life where you truly decided. You decided no matter what, you were gonna do the thing.

Notice even the energy of the description. One is more decisive, while the other is a bit wishy-washy.

When you fully decide; answers, insights, people, connections, ideas and solutions come to you with great ease.

Not always, but often times it does.

Here's my view:

We can look at Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as having an algorithm. Social media and other platforms have similar foundations.

We as humans have a much more advanced "organic algorithm of consciousness".

Once we decide on something or set an intention, life works to give you that experience. And not only does it give it to you, it gives it to you EXACTLY how you need it.

Simple example is one person starts a business and it becomes a 7-figure success in one year. While someone else it might take 3-4 years to hit a recurring 6-figures per year.

These two people have a different journey.

One may hit success in their endeavor for a particular reason. The other may go the "longer route" so they gain some kind of wisdom and experience.

You have your own journey to self-mastery. Decide on your journey and your organic algorithm of consciousness will serve you the perfect path, just for you.

Letting go of the comparison game is beneficial at this stage of the journey.

Appreciating the uniqueness of your path is also recommended.

Here's the thing. You don't just decide once, you continue to decide.

With your energy and actions.

To be very clear, the actions themselves isn't what will give you the "results", but it is part of the process.

Each day, energize your intentions and decisions that lead you to the life you desire.

Keep energizing your decisions and life will deliver exactly what you need.

This is universal guidance on this path. It's not only useful for your journey to self-mastery, but life in general.

What follows below are aligned strategies to implement this guidance specifically.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Jumping into the arena of life is your task.

It may be tough and lead to "failures", but it will be worth it.

The Arena of Mastery is your new domain.

Imagine an arena with 3 main sections, each a different color. You pick the colors. You pick the style of arena.

You may have an ancient Roman arena. You may have a modern one. Anything you want.
Each of those 3 main sections has 5 different sub-sections.

This is your playground.

Let's break it down.

The three main sections are different areas of life that will be useful for you.

1. Work-related (vocation)
2. Curiosities and excitement
3. Continued expansion and growth

1 - Work-Related
Whether you own your own business or work for someone else, your skills support your vocation.

You haven't reached your potential in your life's work. You have plenty of room to grow and experience cool new things.

What skills are you great at that makes you feel alive in your work?

How can you improve or put more focus on this enjoyment of your work more?

These answers will help you build your Arena of Mastery.

2 - Curiosities and Excitement
What are the things that make you feel alive?

What are the things that really excite you?

Perhaps it's something that comes from your childhood. Perhaps it's a more recent development.

Bring to light these activities and topics. When you do, you can do more of it. This is probably the most important aspect, as it will energize you.

3 - Continued Expansion and Growth
This is essentially self-development, focusing on specific ways you grow. This could be philosophy, spirituality or other personal growth avenues.

Whatever works for you.

This puts fuel into your other areas and keeps things fresh as you move forward on your path.

Sub-Sections For Each
We discussed the sections of your Arena, now let's go over the sub-sections.

Create 5 topics or skills that excite you will create an environment of "good stuff".

Imagine that every hour of your day is filled with activities you're curious about, excite you or bring you joy?

You can engineer your day to be like that. That is what the Arena of Mastery does for you.

If you remember in our previous edition of the Joyful Sovereignty Weekly, we discussed the effect of dopamine.

Each time you feel excitement, you are likely receiving dopamine in your body. This is a reward chemical that feels great.

When you create an Arena of Mastery, you are engineering your life to frequently and consistently be rewarded for doing the things you enjoy.

See how this can be beautiful cycle of "good stuff"?

I chose Arena of Mastery for a specific reason. It takes courage to get into the arena of life.

There are activities and skills that you love, but aren't energizing because of many reasons.

Maybe you feel insecure about it. Or you "think" it's not useful to you.

Perhaps you've let other people tell you what should excite you and you believe them.

Maybe something else.

In any case, there is very likely a hidden aspect of yourself that will take courage to express.

Getting into the arena of life can be difficult process. You may have others not supporting your path, or even worse tearing you down for going after your dreams.

Have the courage to Be yourself. Go after what you feel is part of your journey.

Structure and systems are wonderful tools that can be very useful to you.

Systems run your life more than you may realize. Your body is a series of biological systems that interact with each other.

Language is a system of characters, words and structures. That structure allows us to understand each other.

Understand your systems and structures, then refine them. Once you have a foundational system for self-mastery, you can tap into the creative side.

You can have fun creating the structures, but it's usually not the aspect of the process that MOST excites you. Unless creating or refining system is your jam lol.

It is satisfying to establish these structures and systems. Yet, the flowing creativity that you can weave around the structure is what makes it even more beautiful.

Look at the arts. You learn the structure of painting, dance, drawing and music first. Then you can "remix" the structure to a unique style.

You may feel some resistance to "having too much structure", and that is understandable.

Consider this.

You may be operating under "structural disempowerment" this very moment. Meaning, you have an underlying structure of life that is frustrating, unexciting and "dull".

You have structure regardless. You have the opportunity to architect your structure to "good stuff".

The cool thing?

Once structure is in place, you forget about it for the most part. Your focus and energy goes to the fun, creative and exciting.

If you feel challenged by transforming the structure in your life, I encourage you to go for it and see what happens.

When we discuss systems, we can bake-in stuff to measure.

We won't dive deep into this, but wanted to plant a seed for you.

What you measure, you can gamify to self-mastery.

Creating a systematic approach establishes a solid foundation to move forward. This system isn't designed to lock you in and control your life. It's intended to give you just the right amount of structure you need to then flow with life.

Creating measurables in your journey, you can reward yourself for reaching that milestone.

That's fun.

That's gamification.

We'll discuss this topic more in the future.

Let's recap.

You've fully decided to embark on this journey.

You've developed your Arena of Mastery.

You've begun to structure your self-mastery journey.

Now you're ready to make significant changes in your environment. This is where you begin to shift your external world.

As you look in your environment (home, work, car, etc), do your surroundings support your Arena of Mastery?

Whatever isn't supporting you, begin to remove it.

Do this as fast or slow as you'd like. Some things will be a quick and easy process. While others will require a bit of finesse to remove.

Take as much time as you need. Assess each activity and thing in your environment accordingly.

Once you remove, you can then fill in that void.

You can gamify your environment with intention.

This is where things can get fun.

Look at where you spend most of your day. How can you setup reminders, totems, sticky notes or images that externally support your journey of self-mastery?

Implementing this strategy in this order is important. We have built up our Arena of Mastery and now have the core "material" to begin to transform our environment.

This external action aligns with our internal world, feeling really great.

On a subconscious level, these totems and reminders have a powerful effect. The subconscious is seeing them without you needing to focus on it consciously.

When you ARE reminded on a conscious level, guess what happens?

You feed yourself a little shot of dopamine!

You're rewarded by being surrounded by good stuff.

Your external actions also let others know you are making some changes. You are expressing who you are becoming and these messages to others are powerful.

Speaking of others...

We are social creatures. We love to do things with others. This journey to Self-Mastery is no different. Same thing with the game of life.

How boring would it be to play a game with only yourself?

If you look at this journey, there are a lot of ways you "do things with others".

1. Guides or mentors that help you in some way or another.
2. People that are generally at your level in the game.
3. People you can help with something you've already mastered and they are working towards.

Each of these dynamics is important for slightly different reasons. Let's discuss them.

Guides & Mentors
These can help you time-collapse your journey. No, there are no shortcuts to self-mastery. Yet, there are "paved paths" that can support your journey.

You don't have to do it the hard way. Sure, you will do some things the hard way. But not everything should be hard lol.

Discernment is critical here. By establishing your Arena of Mastery, you better understand yourself and what you want.

This makes it easier to identify who can guide you.

Once you identify those who COULD guide you, reach out and see if it will be a good fit for both of you.

This could be a paid thing, or it could be free. Many mentors will support you without a need to be compensated with money.

You heeding their advice and progressing is reward enough for most mentors.

Peers
Find those who you can do the journey with.

This makes it more fun and enjoyable. You can learn from them. They can learn from you.
You can hold each other accountable.

Here's something fun and interesting. When you have peers, you spark mirror neurons within your brain.

"A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an individual performs an action and when the individual observes the same action performed by another individual."

When you see your peers do something you find useful, it has a very similar effect within your own brain.

That means you don't have to "do" as much, because you can learn from those around you.
Expanding via osmosis.

When your peers win, you win.

When your peers are having fun, you have more fun.

And when you are at the top of your game, you support your peers.

Speaking of support.

Help Others
When you teach something, you take that knowledge deeper within yourself.

As you help others on this self-mastery journey, you solidify your own wisdom.

Doing this journey with others also takes your journey "outside of yourself" to the next level.

This expression takes your "decisiveness" to the next level too. The second and third order effect is that life brings you even more of what you desire, faster.

People outside of your sphere of influence will bring you what you need, seemingly out of nowhere.

How cool is that?

Mastery develops with experience. This isn't just a mental game of understanding something. You need to live it.

This is where you will create unique experiences based on your Arena of Mastery. Create aligned connections and witness something novel emerge.

These intersections begin to define your uniqueness. Your style. Your personal niche.
With this, you will develop a quest.

Think of a quest like a mini-adventure or project in your life.

Developing a quest does three things simultaneously:

1. Helps you understand yourself on a deeper level
2. Helps you develop the skills you need on your Path
3. Gives you the experience to validate your hunches

Think of this quest like a story. It will have a beginning, middle and end. Then fill in the gaps of this story. 

The details of planning a quest is beyond the scope of this edition of the Joyful Sovereignty Weekly. But the soon-to-be-released Self-Mastery System will dive deep in how to implement this. Plus all the other strategies shared here.

For most of your life, you've been playing the game of life at a disadvantage.

You didn't really know what the rules to the game were. When we are born, we don't come with instruction manuals.

We have to stumble around (feeling like we're in the dark) and figure stuff out.

We all do that.

We have the help of others and the wisdom they hold. Yet, they are playing a slightly different game than us.

Some rules to the game are universal in nature. While others are highly specific to us.

Your "job" is to move through life and feel out which "rules" apply to you, and which ones don't.

The only way you can know, is to know.

It's that feeling deep inside you that is undeniable. It is unmistakable. It is THE ANSWER.

If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, then they just don't know you.

Your conviction is the indicator.

Here's the key to the game:

When you know how you play the current game of life, you can then bend the rules to what you need. Or create new ones.

When you identify the rules, you know that you have the ability to play a new game altogether, if you desire.

That's just it, if you desire. The world is in your hands now.

You can make drastic changes and it's all good. You know what you are changing and life unfolds for you accordingly.

You can also choose to continue to play the game you're playing right now. Maybe with minor adjustments.

The point is, IT'S UP TO YOU.

That's the nature of Self-Mastery.

This weeks action is simple. Pick 3 things from this article that resonated with you and begin to take action on them. Start small. Take incremental action. See it through.

And do your best to have fun with it!

That’s it for this edition of the Joyful Sovereignty Weekly!

Wish you a great rest of your day!

Best,

Lane

P.S. If you enjoyed this edition, share this link on your social media or with a friend who you think would enjoy reading this.

P.P.S. Look out for the Gamified Gratitude System releasing very soon! It’ll be a free download.

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We will dive into Self-Mastery even deeper. Providing a different perspective for you.

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If you’re looking to create an ecosystem for your life towards Joyful Sovereignty and seeking guidance and accountability, join the waitlist for my upcoming Self-Mastery System by clicking here. 11 March, I will release the launch details!