We Learn in Stages

We learn in stages. Learning often starts with Unconscious Incompetence – that’s where you don’t know what you don’t know. Think about being a child – you don’t know there are skills involved in driving a car, tying your shoelaces, or writing your name. Before I studied happiness coaching I didn’t even know that it existed – so I didn’t know what I didn’t know about coaching for happiness. You didn’t know what you didn’t know about a subject before you learned it either.

As we hear about, see or experience something new we move into the stage of Conscious Incompetence, that’s where we know what we don’t know. It’s the stage where your awareness is raised. You get a sense of what you don’t know about strengths and how to use them to manage better or how to deliver feedback differently.

When you move into Conscious Competence, that’s where you are deliberately and consciously practicing the new things you learn. This is the time where it’s important to pay attention to how you change and the new learnings that you practice.

The last stage is Unconscious Competence – that’s “Auto-pilot” that’s’ the when your practice is so automatic that you hardly notice that you are doing it – when you know it so well you do it without having to think about it. The goal is that you get so good at listening for and giving feedback about strengths that it’s almost unconscious.

Be mindful of these stages as you – or others – learn. Be patient with yourself – and others – as you move from one stage to the next. The more you use and practice your learning the better you’ll get.

Remember that old dictum – Practice makes perfect? In this case “Practice makes Profit.” You, your team and your company will profit from your new skills as you make them a regular part of your Positivity Practice.