I woke up this morning thinking about the four levels of competence. I heard about this from Lena’s violin teacher, but it applies to learning lots of things besides a musical instrument. Here they are:
- Unconscious incompetence. You don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know.
- Conscious incompetence. Whoops. You discover you don’t know, and start exploring to see what works.
- Conscious competence. Now you’ve figured out what works, but it still requires intense concentration. So you do it over and over until it gets easy.
- Unconscious competence. The holy grail. You’re so good at it now, you don’t even have to think about it; you just do it automatically.
This makes so much sense. It is very helpful to realize “where you are” in the hierarchy when you’re learning something new. I think actually the most important step is #2, exploration, and it’s also the hardest. Experimenting to see what works is almost intolerable for Lena, who likes to do things perfectly or not at all. Being able to discuss it in these terms has helped a ton. Oh, she still gets frustrated, but she has a much better understanding of the learning process and she knows she will get to the next level eventually.
I just wish this paradigm applied to parenting. Before I had kids I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had done tons of babysitting; I was a psych major; and my first job out of college was working with kids. I had no idea of how much I didn’t know.
When I beheld my newborn child for the first time, I had an almost physical sensation of my brain being rearranged somehow. Instantly I realized a lot of things, including the fact that until that moment I had been blissfully ignorant. Suddenly I was oh so conscious of my incompetence. And I started exploring to see what works.
Thirteen years later, I still feel consciously incompetent, and I’m still exploring. I doubt that I’ll ever make it to conscious competence, let alone the holy grail.