MaXIMIze - Increasing Awareness - Moving from Unconscious Incompetence to Unconscious Competence

I think I have mentioned Entheos before in this forum, perhaps in my previous blog posts. Brian Johnson, the CEO of the Entheos Academy, has a series called Philosopher's Notes, where he synopsizes books by various philosophers and such, capturing the Big Ideas encapsulated in them and showing how these ideas are very relevant to us living our best lives now. Recently, I was listening to his talk on Flow, a book by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, and Brian introduced a quad principle of moving from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.

Serendipitously, I recent bought and read a book titled Reinventing Yourself by Mario Alonso Puig. In Chapter 11, titled "Hope for Victory and You'll be Victorious," I was introduced to these ideas again, as well as the story of the man - Matthias Alexander - who, as a way to overcome a physical difficulty that threatened his very livelihood, discovered this method to work through roadblocks very successfully.

Let's tackle the four parts of this principle one at a time.

Unconscious Incompetence - the state of being where one does not know how to do something and is not even aware that he/she does not know how to do something or the value of doing so - deal with personal finances for example.

Conscious Incompetence - the state of being where one knows he/she does not know how to do something and that something is a valuable skill to learn - balancing accounts, saving appropriately, not buying on impulse, paying bills on time, etc.

Conscious Competence - the state of being where one has learned the new skill and is consciously working to apply it consistently - taking the time to think about need versus want when making a purchase.

Unconscious Competence - the state of being where the skill has become so ingrained in one's psyche that it is an automatic response - saving 10% of one's income.

To understand and remedy an issue, one has to realize he/she has an issue. So, in the case of personal finances, if we are having difficulty getting to our personal goals in that area, whether it be as simple as buying a new outfit or as complex as saving for one's retirement or a child's college costs, we need to first realize we have an issue. Then we need to work to remedy the issue by learning and applying the appropriate skill-set needed. And, as we continue to learn and apply those skills, we can see the progression from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

This falls right in line with our discussions on goal-setting and identifying and dealing with roadblocks in relation to achieving our goals.

What steps are you going to take today to move from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence in your life?

Next week, we will address falling off the wagon - and how we go about getting back on without too many bumps and bruises.

Until then, namaste!