Growth

When we learn something new, ideally we progress through several stages.  Before we begin, we are unconsciously incompetent.  We don’t even know what we don’t know.  It doesn’t last very long, because we absorb a bunch of information and suddenly we have reached the next stage.

 

It’s called conscious incompetence.  In other words, we know we don’t know what we are doing.  I am fond of conscious incompetence because a lot of growth happens in this phase.  We discover that we have way too many body parts to control at once.  We have to build new mental maps of our bodies and space.  Some people find this very frustrating.  Those people often quit, deciding that they don’t have a talent for whatever it is they are trying out.  It can be hard to look foolish or to accept that we are, for the moment, bad at this new thing.  However, learning to accept this temporary situation allows us to grow through it.

 

If we keep working, we eventually arrive at the next stage, which is conscious competence.  We know what to do and we manage to do it as long as we concentrate.  We develop a lot of mantras for our performance in this stage (“Abs in, back straight, eyes forward.”).  This stage can last a long time because as we progress, we find more things to refine in our form.

 

Our eventual goal is unconscious competence.  This does not mean that we can do whatever we are doing in our sleep, but rather that correct form is embedded in our minds and bodies in such a way that we don’t have to think about every separate bit of our form.

 

The key to moving through the various stages lies in our mindset.  If we believe that we are learning skills and that mistakes are a normal part of learning, we set ourselves up for positive learning experiences, even on days when things are not going particularly well.  This is the growth mindset.  Conversely, if we take every mistake as a sign that we have no gift for what we are doing, we are adopting a fixed mindset and limiting ourselves to what we can already do rather than allowing ourselves to stretch and grow into new abilities.

 

Let the mistakes go and keep playing at the new skills.