The 4 steps to mastery

In an August video post about the Power of Affirmation, I briefly discussed neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). I also said I had a few topics about NLP I wanted to discuss, today is one of those.

According to NLP, the learning experience is divided into 4 stages.

1 - Unconscious Incompetence: This is when you don't know how to do something and you also don't know that something even exist. For example a young kid walking everywhere in the house with muddy boots, he's not conscious about house cleanness and does it all wrong. But he doesn't know, it's completely unconscious. Poor example but I think it fits.

2 - Conscious Incompetence: This is I think the hardest step to go through and probably the show stopper for grown up wanting to learn something new. This is when you know you want to learn something, know about what you want to learn but also know that you can't really do it right, yet. For example, this is me trying to play the guitar, I know the chords, I know the melodies and all that stuff but I can't play the guitar. This step demands a whole lot of effort to master.

3 - Conscious Competence: Now you're starting to know what you're doing. You've mastered your skill but you still need all your attention to perform it. Lets stick to my guitar example. We'll pretend I've practiced playing for quite a while now, I can play many many songs and it sounds pretty good. But I need to look at my hands when I play and if my attention is taken away from my playing it throws me off completely. An other example could be when someone starts driving they must keep their full attention on the road, look for signs, lights, other cars, think about the break and accelerator pedals.

4 - Unconscious Competence: This is mastery of a skill. When it's become second nature. Like driving after a few years, it becomes partially unconscious. Yes, you need to keep your attention but I'm pretty sure you don't stop to think about how to put your signal light on. All the car functions have been programmed to a reflex level in your brain. The only way to attain this level of learning is by repetition, you can't get to this mastery stage by reading on a subject or skill.

This was a very short description of the learning process. I hope you enjoyed this little bit of information. NLP is filled with useful pieces of knowledge which can be applied on your day to day lives. Sometimes, simply understanding how certain part of us is working will help us growing.