Taking Your Life to the Next Level

So many people I talk to today are fed up with living their lives the way they are right now.  They’re desperately looking for changes, whether that be in their career path, their financial situation, their health or their relationships.

Whereas a few years ago they may have been considering making changes or fantasizing about making changes, now they’re growing increasingly more frustrated with their situation every single day and they feel like if something doesn’t change soon they’re going to explode.

Does any of that sound familiar?

Today I’d like to share something with you that I believe can help you to take your life to the next level, if you’re ready.

First, a little primer on competence.

The Four Stages of Competence

When people learn new skills they go through four phases of learning a new skill.

Stage 1 – Unconscious Incompetence

In the first stage called the “unconscious incompetence” stage, people are unaware of the fact that they are incompetent in the skill they are pursuing.  This is the “You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know” stage.  So, for example if you are a regular reader of Blogs you may be fantasizing about the idea of starting your own Blog and becoming a professional Blogger making six figures per year, but actually you know very little about running a successful Blog.  You could be a very competent Blog reader, but a completely incompetent Blog author – and not even be aware of it.

Not that there is anything wrong with being in this stage.  It’s a stage we all have gone through many times in our lives and we will continue to go through it for most of our lives.  A few other examples could be someone who watches ice hockey their entire lives but has never strapped on a pair of skates.  Because they watch the sport all the time they actually start to believe that they could probably be a decent player if they ever tried playing but the reality is that until they strap on a pair of skates and get on the ice, they have no idea how competent they are.

They could strap on a pair of skates, get on the ice and instantly realize that it is a lot harder to play ice hockey than the professional athletes make it look on TV.

Stage 2 – Conscious Incompetence

In this second stage you awaken to the fact that you are actually incompetent in the skill you are trying to learn.  Maybe you finally did strap on a pair of skates and realized that it’s not that easy to keep your balance on ice.  Or maybe you start your own Blog and realize it’s not that easy to keep writing articles on a regular basis.

After trying to do any skill you want to develop for just a short period of time, you become conscious of your incompetence pretty quickly.  Of course you may actually surprise yourself and realize that you are a lot more competent in certain areas of the skill than you thought.  For example, you may find out that Blogging is actually quite easy for you, or ice skating comes naturally to you.

In this stage what you’re actually doing is becoming aware of the areas of incompetence in the skill you’re trying to develop.  Sometimes the things you thought you’d be good at you actually suck at, but other things you considered difficult may come naturally to you.  Either way, you are now conscious of where you are incompetent.

Stage 3 – Conscious Competence

The next stage we enter is the conscious competence stage.  Getting to this stage can take some time.  Depending on many different factors it could take hours, days, weeks or years to develop conscious competence in a skill.

Your learning curve of going from conscious incompetence to conscious competence in any skill will usually be different from other people and very seldom will it be linear.  In most cases you’ll develop your abilities and proficiency in spurts, then plateau for a while and then hit another spurt of growth etc.

Once you reach this stage, you now feel confident that you are competent in the skill you wanted to develop.

Stage 4 – Unconscious Competence

The final stage is where you become so competent in a skill that you no longer even have to think about it.  You just do it with no thinking.  For example, an Olympic swimmer doesn’t think about what to do with their hands while swimming in the water.  They just swim.  A professional hockey player doesn’t have to think about what to do in order to stop on ice, they just stop.

Probably the easiest example of unconscious competence is driving a car.  Once you’ve been driving a car for a while, you hardly have to think about it.  You push the gas, the brake, turn on the turn signals, shoulder check, etc. all automatically.  You don’t have to think about it at all.  In fact you can be driving and holding on a conversation at the same time because driving doesn’t require much of your conscious thinking mind at all.

Taking Life to the Next Level

Ok, so what do these four stages have to do with taking your life to the next level?

Well, a huge reason why a lot of people get stuck in life and can’t seem to find a way to take their life to the next level is because they are afraid of going through those four stages again.

When we were younger, growing up, going to elementary school, high school and for some post secondary, we were “forced” by our teachers to develop new skills.  Just when you developed a skill to the point of conscious competence or unconscious competence, they threw something new at you to learn.

This was accepted as normal.  Students new to a subject were all incompetent in it but it was Ok because everyone else had no clue what they were doing either.

Think of your first music class, or your first computer science class, or your first math class.

We were all pushed and put through a process of constantly learning skills and accepting the fact that we might suck at something to start with before we get good at it.

The challenge is that once we enter our adult lives, a lot of us develop unconscious competence in a certain set of skills and our lives become a lot more comfortable – for a while.

We get a job, and eventually we become so good at it that we can just go to work and do our job without really even having to think about it.  We know what we have to do, we know where to go for lunch, we know who to ask for what, we know exactly what we’re doing.

This is a very comfortable and cushy place to be in for a while.

However, eventually when it comes time to take our lives to the next level, we must accept the fact that to make changes we will have to learn new skills and some of those new skills we’re going to suck at for a while.

For example, recently I’ve been working with a mentor to help me develop my intuitive abilities.  One of the skills that I am working on developing as part of my mentoring is Zen Meditation.

Even though I’ve done a lot of work on visualization, and guided visual meditations, I have never tried traditional Zen Meditation until now.

At first I thought it would be easy for me (unconscious incompetence) since I’ve done other types of meditation before, however once I tried doing Zen Meditation I quickly realized it’s a lot harder for me than I thought.  After my first try I quickly became aware of my incompetence.

This is where most people give up, because being incompetent in something doesn’t feel good.  So they quickly retreat back to their old ways and methods of doing things.

To take your life to the next level, you must become comfortable at being incompetent in any new skills you must develop to take your life to the next level.

It’s not that developing new skills is difficult for people, it’s usually the fact that they feel stupid and embarrassed being incompetent for a period of time.

You must have the persistence to push through the first few stages of learning, at least until you get to the Conscious Competence stage.

The challenge is that people usually get so comfortable with doing things their own way they refuse to learn new, more efficient, more effective ways of doing things.

One scene in a movie that I think paints an effective illustration of this is the final battle scene in the movie “The Last Samurai”.  The Samurai that have spent their entire lives learning and perfecting their skills with the sword enter a battle field where they get slaughtered by the more effective machine guns used by the other side.

Although the point of the movie has really nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, that scene does paint a picture that kind of illustrates my point.

Imagine that all the skills you’ve developed in your life so far are kind of like the Samurai warrior learning to use a sword.  You are competent and comfortable using your current skills like the Samurai is competent and comfortable using a sword.

However, what if taking your life to the next level requires you to learn new skills?  What if your current skills aren’t going to be effective in getting you to the next phase of your life? Are you prepared to learn new things even if it means being uncomfortable for a while?

Or are you going to continue to try to take things to the next level, employing only the skills you’ve developed so far in your life because you’re too scared and embarrassed of looking incompetent at a new skill for a short period of time?

Remember, at some point in our lives we all sucked at everything – even walking.

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