E106: Self-Help - Harnessing the Power of Intentional Mastery: A Path to Achieving Excellence - William Buist (Intentional Mastery)

Learning has become a superpower in the modern world we live in. But learning at a deep level is something that is extremely challenging. In this episode we explore the topic of Intentional Mastery and why it matters.

Key topics covered in this episode:

👉🏽 What does Mastery mean, and why does it matter?

👉🏽 Can you fast-track Mastery? Are there shortcuts?

👉🏽 What are the common strategic mistakes?

William Buist

William Buist enables business owners to become the masters of their markets, operate more effectively, and stand out from all their competitors. With a strategic focus on building better business daily, his clients are at the heart of their work, making better decisions and empowered to excel.

William thrives at supporting his clients as they develop a better, resonant understanding of their strategic intentions to create a company that is more aligned with their purpose. He knows that by asking the right questions, effective decisions will result. Those judgments will be based on a deeper, more complete understanding because of an unbiased analysis of the appropriate elements.

William prides himself on his well-honed skill, posing questions that unlock blocks and barriers. William is a speaker, business mentor and author of “Intentional Mastery: Step Beyond Your Expertise and Build Better Business”. He is a keen photographer, walker and skier.

🔥 Our Sponsors: How do you know where to invest your efforts when helping your Agile teams? You could simply ask them, but what if you need a more scalable and robust approach? One platform that I personally use and recommend is Comparative Agility. It has the world's largest Agile maturity index with over 4m data points from over 14,000 organisations. You can try it out completely FREE at the following link, and be sure to let me know your thoughts:

👉🏽 https://bit.ly/3Zi5OXw

⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

👉 Sign-up to Newsletter: https://www.superpowers.school/subscribe

👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/paddydhanda/

★ BUY ME KO-FI ★

If you enjoy the podcast, then you can donate a small amount here as a token of your appreciation: https://ko-fi.com/paddydhanda

Transcription:

[00:01:03] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, thank you for joining me for another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dander, and on today's show I have a fellow Britt. He is an author, a business mentor, a speaker and he's called William Bust. Did I get that right? Will

[00:01:22] William Buist: you, did you did Patty?

Yes. Thank you very much and delight to be with you today for our conversation. Looking forward to it. Oh,

[00:01:29] Paddy Dhanda: so am I, and I don't wanna spoil the topic that we're gonna go into just yet, but I'm really intrigued because you and I, we've literally only spoke for about five minutes beforehand and just some of your background really got me curious.

And I think it's gonna be, Extremely useful for the audience of this podcast. So I'm really excited about that. But before we go into that, first of all, where are you sitting right now?

[00:01:57] William Buist: I'm in an office that we are very fortunate to have. It's a small office in the garden of the house I live in, and that house is about 15 miles south of Oxford in between Oxford and Newbury, right in the middle of England.

About as far from the sea as you can get.

[00:02:11] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, wow. I wouldn't be complaining if I was sat in that environment because it looks amazing. And William, in terms of your background, could you share like your area of expertise in terms of how you've been helping people and also how you'd ended up in this

[00:02:27] William Buist: area?

Yeah, of course. I started my career. I left university and I guess like quite a few people, I left university without really having a clear idea of where I was gonna take a career. Some people are very fortunate. They fall into the thing they love and they know from day one what they're going to do.

And I wasn't one of those and I ended up in the insurance industry. So I had a career in insurance. I was an underwriter. The underwriters are the people who work out how much to charge for something that hasn't happened yet. It's an easy way to describe it. And I was in the industry for about 21 years, and towards the end of it I was working a lot with project teams and leading project teams.

So there's a lot of kind of, The leadership stuff that we maybe will come on and talk about happening there. And I got really interested in looking at how people in work develop the knowledge of what they do and the skills that they have and how they use experience. And in 2004, I set up my own business and started working with small business owners to bring some of that thinking, to help them develop strategies and to think about how they wanted to.

As I call it, build better business. And I carried on being curious about that way people learn. And that led me to think about what I call these days, intentional mastery. And I'll split that into the two halves. So first of all, the mastery bit, that's about how people go from knowing very little about a topic.

If you are wanting to learn to code a computer you've got to understand the computer languages and you may know none of them. First of all you look for knowledge and you learn about the different types of languages and what they do. You then go on, as a novice, you start writing code, but that's likely not to work very well to begin with 'cause you haven't got that much experience or skill at it.

So those novices, as I call them, Searching for skill development and when they've got that, they become practitioners, people who can do what they do really well. But again, to use computer language as an example, there may be code really well in one language, but they can't yet transfer that insight, that knowledge into a different language.

In my day I learned a little bit of coding and it thing called cobalt, which you may remember long time. Nowadays there's a whole host of different languages and I don't know pretty much any of them, which is fabulous. But then from that practitioner level, people go on, they build experience and they become an expert, and they become that person that we know they really know their topic well.

I think there's another stage and that. Last stage is the step towards mastery, and that's that when somebody arrives in the room who really knows a subject inside out, a great depth, can answer any question, is never phased. They've got experience across a wide range of stuff, and importantly, I think they have insights into.

Not just that topic, but how to share it with others, how to see the benefits of it. They can talk with equal comfort to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about their topic, as well as somebody who is already an expert and they just stand out in their market. So that's the mastery bit. I think the other thing and the reason why the book that I wrote is called Intentional Mastery is because I don't think you can make that shift from practitioner to expert to master unless you are completely deliberate about it.

You make a conscious effort. To become the best person in the world, perhaps at the thing that you do. And I've seen business people good practitioners run great businesses successfully, but they're just a kind of run of the mill business. They're another insert name of business here, another accountant, another computer agency, another marketing agency.

But there's a few who say, no, that's not enough. I need to stand out. I need to be really at the top of their game. And they take those intentional steps. And then you get the businesses that really thrive in their niche, and they might be quite small. They're just serving a very particular niche area.

Or they might be successful in the sense of growing and employing lots of people and becoming internationally known. So that building better business, part of what I talk about is really the better bit is down to the business owner and what is better for them. There is no universal definition of what's better for everybody.

I don't think.

[00:07:14] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that gives me some really good insight then into your kind of specialist subject. And in your experience, I'm sure you've worked with many different people, are we in a state where people are successfully getting to this level of a mastery? Or are you finding that actually it's only a handful of people that are achieving

[00:07:37] William Buist: this?

I think there's some places where you can see mastery very clearly and very obviously. The simplest example of that is in sport because we see premiership, footballers on the television. If we watch Match of the Day or we're just in the middle of summer in 2023 and England just drew the cricket and there was some fabulous cricket played as well in the Ashe series.

 These are people who really are at the top of their game and what I would call the masters of what they do. They're very easy to spot. I think they're much harder to spot in business particularly if you've got some masters who are within a big business. That itself