How to use the 4 psychological stages of competency to your advantage
Sarah sighed into the phone, “I struggled to fit the mold.” The heavy weight of unmet expectations still hung on her. She was my new ghostwriting writing client, a beautiful 50-year-old woman who is quite successful, but who’d spent her life as an underdog. She spoke of the pains of having strict parents, who’d fled a bloody revolution in China, and brought high standards with them.
She’d worked hard in school but still brought home Cs, and the occasional B if she was lucky. It stood in painful contrast to her whiz-kid brother, who attended Yale and became a renowned heart surgeon. Yet today, Sarah is one of the country’s most skilled and effective executive recruiters, running a booming agency that’s bursting at the seams with new business. She has become a sought after and highly paid expert in her field.
All of this despite her parents worrying she’d ever make anything of herself. In the ensuing months, I asked her many questions about how she did it. Notably, she said, “I’m not afraid to work hard and learn. I know my limits. If I’m in over my head with something, I get someone smarter. I don’t have an ego about getting help.” Her success became a triumphant middle finger at all the bad report cards.
Though I lack her level of success, part of me related to her. I write for a living but had miserable experiences in high school English. After going to three high schools because of military moves, and having to read the same Jane Austen books on repeat, I lost all spirit and enthusiasm for the subject.
I groaned as my teacher set graded essays face-down on my desk. Faded red ink shined through, begging me to flip the paper over and smell the napalm. My teacher was a grey haired crank, a stickler for the rules, with a deep and preoccupying hatred for creative interpretation of said rules. His name even sounded strict: Mr. Sturgill. My one proud moment in his class was a final essay, “How to Fly a Kite” which he gave me an A- on, not realizing I was telling him to go fly a kite.
With my writing students, and even readers, I see a common curiosity and eagerness to improve and grow at new things. But with writing students especially, there’s a often a looming and adversarial voice of doubt they wrestle with. It whispers to them, “You aren’t a writer.” And, “You aren’t good enough. Just stop now.” It’s easy to validate that voice when your performance feels stagnant.
In my corporate finance career, I learned that companies are essentially learning entities. They take in information, and refine their processes and best practices to produce better outputs. When I quit my finance job to write full-time, I took that mindset with me and it has paid dividends. You can use systemization for nearly any skill. I’ll use writing as an example, but make it easy to extrapolate.
Bridging skill gaps
Most skills are a stacking set of sub-skills. Writing including editing, using metaphors, descriptive language, ideation, formatting, story craft, escaping writers block, and more. If you break out skills into their sub-skills, you can isolate and improve your soft spots to lift the whole.
For writers block, I have a step-by-step process to dig myself out. I keep it in an easy-to-find One Notes tab. I review and refine that process (and others) every month or two. It includes of lists of ways I’ve escaped writer’s block in the past, including websites with articles, writing exercises, and brainstorming tools to use.
I remind students that, regardless of if we are talking about art, coding, pottery, or any skill, change isn’t linear. It’s completely normal to be stuck at a certain level of competency, and then abruptly level up. It’s like that moment you suddenly realize how to solve a math problem. It all falls into place.
There are four stages of psychological stages of skill competency.
- Unconscious incompetence (your art is bad and you don’t realize it)
- Conscious incompetence (your art is bad and you know it)
- Conscious competence (your art is good but it takes a lot of work)
- Unconscious competence (your art is good and it’s second nature)
If you feel stuck at stage one, I’d recommend you get a mentor. The leadership model of development applies the above stages through the teaching view:
- I do, you watch;
- I do, you help;
- You do, I help;
- You do, I watch.
A good teacher is effective at diagnosing where you are on this spectrum. They may not use these labels, but they can intuitively know and help specify where to make changes. They’ll also demonstrate unconscious competence. They’ll show you, in some tangible or visual way, what the skill should look like in its finished form. Don’t assume you need a grandmaster to teach you. In fact, your best bet might be someone who is a stage or two better.
For example, if you are stuck at stage 1 (unconscious incompetence), someone at stage 2 or 3 may have immediate memory of how they got to the next stage. In other words, don’t conflate ability with ability-to-teach. In chess, for example, a grandmaster may have an encyclopedic knowledge of openings and endgames but no patience for beginner mistakes or slow-paced games.
Stage 2 (conscious incompetence) is a dangerous phase. It’s when your hopeful idealism is slammed with a double shot self-awareness. It’s when you realize, “OK. I actually sing like an alley dog.” Stage 2 is when people often quit because they feel an avalanche of doubt, and see the true height of the mountain in front of them.
My aforementioned client, Sarah, transcended this competency spectrum. She found amazing mentors, learned tricks for recruiting, for meeting key personnel, for vetting out candidates better than her competitors, and learned to recognize key phrases and what their subtext meant. She knew she was in a people game, so she improved her people skills. But she worked hard and reflected on her mistakes and refined her process over time. Rejection was a constant of this entire journey.
Lastly, know when to step away
I have an inner stubbornness that rears its head at inopportune moments. As a kid, if I lost a video game, I’d immediately want a rematch and would play indefinitely until I won or near-collapsed. It was totally unhealthy, like a goldfish eating itself to death.
I’ve allowed that mindset to poison my writing in weaker moments. I’ve sat at my keyboard on a Friday night, agonizing with a draft. Every sentence I added made it worse. Then, the night was over and I was furious at myself for accomplishing nothing and wasting the evening. I eventually realized that stepping away, doing something else, resting, and clearing my head before returning resolved the problem in most cases.
Persistence, curiosity, and self-reflection are powerful factors in competency. Remember to break a skill down into its component parts, and isolate your weak points. In piano lessons, we often did this with a metronome, freezing the song at a 5–10 second section I stumbled over. Then, I played it over and over at a slow speed until speeding it up.
We live in a skills economy, and even if you aren’t developing a skill for work, you stand to benefit greatly from an evolving system that plays to your strengths, fortifies your weakness, and allows for mistakes and forgiveness.
You show me someone with an open mind, a desire to learn, and a fighting spirit, and I’ll show you someone who is on the road to mastery.
