'4 Stages of Competency' helps in learning new skills

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14: About 10 years ago, I learned of the ‘4 Stages of Competence’ on a PGA instructor’s course.

This model has really helped me gauge and measure myself when learning new skills or so I thought.

According to the model, you move from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

The four stages:

• 1: Unconscious incompetence.

The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.

In short, you don’t know what you don’t know. A beginner not knowing how a ball gets in the air or that it should.

• 2: Conscious incompetence.

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

This is the stage where you know what you don’t know.

A beginner now understanding that to get the ball in the air, requires a descending blow, but not able to do it yet.

• 3: Conscious competence.

The individual understands or knows how to do something.

However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration. You know how to do it, but you have to think your way through it.

The beginner now can consistently hit the ball with a descending blow, getting the ball airborne every time.

• 4: Unconscious competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). This is the stage where you can do it without thinking.

You just know what to do. The experienced player just hits down and through taking a divot every time without being aware of trying to do it.

A good example of this is learning how to putt.

When you first learn a putting stroke, you very quickly learn that you don’t know how to do it (conscious incompetence). 

As you practice you can start to think your way through it (the conscious competence stage). 

As putting becomes a habit for you, eventually you can control distance without thinking, aiming effortlessly while you think about getting the ball close to the hole and not technique (unconscious competence.)

Now the problem occurs when you get stuck in the third phase consciously competent, focusing on technique not the task in hand.

I have to say this is where personally I end up, with a mind of an instructor, not a player.

Focusing on the target should only be the desired result.

As Nike put it a few years ago, ‘just do it’.

Now what I am not saying is technique should be forgotten, but that there is a final stage of development after you have taken lessons and done your practice and that is of just doing it!

Finally one of my best students, who has taken many lessons and was doing very well enquired what he should be thinking of when he played golf the next day.

I said, “Your focus should be on getting the ball in the hole, nothing else!”

Now there is some advice I need to take myself.