Ten Mastery Tips for You and Your Family
Written by SPARK Member Liliane Grace, award-winning author, speaker, writing coach and editor.
When my nine-year-old son and his friends were running around wearing capes and calling out Harry-Potteresque spells, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if kids knew they could do magic for real?”
I mean, how many kids are going to go strolling through the local forest and find a dragon’s egg? Fantasy stories are fabulous – I love them – but how amazing if you knew how to transform your actual life…
Magic
Magic is something that seems to violate known laws. Think of someone from an indigenous culture looking, for the first time, at an airplane or a TV and remote control – they would surely think those things are magic. But we know there’s science (laws) behind airplanes and remote controls.
Likewise, when someone is handed a frightening diagnosis and holds a vision of being healthy again, and then actually achieves it, that’s a kind of magic, too. So, too, is achieving a business goal when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen.
Mastery
Another word for these achievements is mastery. Mastery is the ability to respond to life’s challenges rather than reacting to them.
When I was young, I was fascinated by the idea of personal mastery. I read about the power of the mind and was inspired by true stories of people who had achieved something that had seemed impossible.
So when my nine-year-old son and his friends… capes and spells… I thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if kids knew they could do magic for real?”
And I wrote a novel called The Mastery Club – See the Invisible, Hear the Silent, Do the Impossible, about five adolescents who form a club to support and challenge each other in achieving their goals and dreams; five twelve-year-olds who learn about their extraordinary potential, and apply it.
Children and teenagers set goals
The Mastery Club won an international award for youth fiction and was endorsed by some of the biggest names in the personal-growth community – people like Jack Canfield and Dr John Demartini. But, more importantly, children and teenagers read it and set goals and formed their own Mastery Clubs. Teachers read it to their classes. Social workers and psychologists used it with their clients.
And I developed a program based on the ten lessons in the book that has been taught in schools and privately, and is now available as an online course that parents and their children can undertake together.
Here’s what one mother said: “Setting out our goals together at the beginning was a really special moment for us. I didn’t know she had any goals and had never thought to ask! It was a moment of deep quiet connection between us - I’m grateful for that. Thank you.” – Ashe Davenport
This daughter went on to surprise her mother with a string of achievements.
The Mastery Club Online Adventure unpacks the following 10 tools and attitudes:
Our power to create: What we tell ourselves is like a magic wand. For some two thousand years no one thought a human being could run a mile in under four minutes… until Roger Bannister did it in 1954, and then the record was broken over and over. The first module is packed full of examples like this about how our thoughts influence our reality.
Goal-setting: We take the SMART system a little further, sharing finer distinctions and breaking it down into simple examples that you and your child can apply to your personal goals and dreams. Each module thereafter reminds you to identify a new action step you can take to progress your goal.
Visualisation: Athletes routinely use this tool; it’s used for pain management; and it’s rooted in solid science. You’ll learn the science and experience a guided visualisation during which you focus on your own goals.
Treasure Mapping (aka vision boards): Sit down with your child or friend and create a magnificent visual representation of your goals and dreams. Just glancing at it as you go past can be powerful. People have manifested material things, holidays, spouses…
The Three Forces: Learn about the challenges that always arise when we set a powerful goal, and how to work with the dynamic so it serves us. The story of the Boy and the Butterfly is just one inspiring reminder.
The Law of Polarity: We live in a cosmos that expresses literally everything through polarity and balance. Nothing is only positive or only negative. Play the Good Stuff, Bad Stuff Game and prove it to yourself (and your family/friends).
The Law of Resonance and Vibration: Everything is sound, vibration; and we ‘read’ each other’s energy. If our energy isn’t in the right place, we haven’t got a chance of winning. In this session, we explore how we create our good and bad moods.
You Have to Become a New Person: The ‘old you’ won’t achieve the goal; the ‘new you’ will. As Ralph Marston says, “The value of an ambitious goal is not measured by what it will bring to you. The worth of a goal is measured by what it will make of you in process of following and attaining it.”
They’re Not Just Ideas: application is the key. What if, instead of nagging your kids, you were working through a program like this with them? Both of you, supporting and challenging each other in succeeding at your important goals…
Don’t Give Up… But Do Let Go: The analogy of the plant says it all: you don’t pull your seedling out the day after you planted it to see how much it’s grown; you have to trust and keep nourishing it even while there doesn’t seem to be any progress.
It’s a cliché that we weren’t born with an instruction manual – no manual for how to ‘do life’, sustain a loving relationship, parent, run a business… But here is something like that for you: a set of principles and guidelines for realising your personal goals while deepening relationships with your child or friend.
We all need a support-and-challenge team
We need someone(s) who will believe in us when we’re down and call more out of us than even we thought possible. To some extent, Dani and Spark play that role by providing a supportive space and calling us to maximise our potential. She believes in us.
The Mastery Club Online Adventure provides a guided journey for you and your family or friends. One affordable price buys access for a family and/or you and a buddy (because the whole point is that it’s a club).
The time commitment is about an hour a week – one short video and a module with lessons as short as five minutes and as deep as you’re prepared to go.
Your child can read the novel, or you can read it together – it’s included in the price of the course.
Then you sit at the kitchen table and transform your lives.
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For more information, reach out to liliane@lilianegrace.com or visit the website.
Liliane Grace is an award-winning author, speaker, writing coach and editor. Four of her novels are for youth: The Mastery Club, sequel The Hidden Order, Quest for Riches – Four teenagers discover the keys to wealth and prosperity (financial literacy through story about the four ‘money personalities’), Power of the Light (in which a boy’s father is diagnosed with cancer, and the fantasy world that helps him transform the situation). Liliane has also written two children’s picture books – The Boy Who Barked about behavioural expert Dr John Demartini and The Boy Who Found His Pulse about the Wholefood Cowboy, Don Tolman – and a ‘conscious chick-lit’ novel for women, Wanted: Greener Grass, about love, fulfilment, and the hero’s journey.
She is currently writing a musical about health (HIPPOCRyTIC OATH), and hosts the podcast, ‘Remedy and Revelation – uncovering truth and healing, one story at a time’.
Liliane lives in Queensland on a subtropical acre and is learning to garden, with a wallaby and the odd snake… Her three children were largely home-educated and she has a beautiful granddaughter. When not writing, ‘business-ing’, gardening or being with family, she loves to dance.
