Think you learn better as an adult? I would THINK so! And many women leaders tend to have a higher awareness, although sometimes it’s being aware that there’s an uphill battle. Yow.
Ever wondered what process we take through a path of becoming aware, then doing something about it?
Consultants, teachers, leaders …. all are in a position of passing skills along to others. Developing them is a part of our job. But ya know ya cain’t jus say “DO IT!” You must lead them through the awareness levels.
“We don’t know what we don’t know.” And that’s where it all starts!! We call it CONSCIOUS COMPETENCY.
In the case of not knowing that you don’t know … UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCY!
More in the video!
At Skirt Strategies we focus on a different leadership goal each month, providing a training tip via video and weekly training assignments for subscribed members.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Katie Snapp here from Skirt Strategies! This instructional video is about a concept that outlines the way that adults learn. It’s called – “The Conscious Competency Model.”
We believe strongly in it at Skirt Strategies because its fundamental thought is around being aware on what you do in order to get better. Here’s what it looks like.
It begins with two dimensions. One of them is ability and the other is awareness. We’re also going to call ability competency and awareness consciousness.
At some level, all of us don’t know that we don’t know. We’re not good at something and we don’t realize that we’re not good at something. We call that unconscious incompetency.
When my daughter was little, she used to think the way to tie her shoe (a really basic skill) was to twirl the laces around her finger. Sooner or later, she started to realize she got a different result that I did when I tied her shoe and she went on and learned how to do it obviously. But up until at that point, she was what we’d call – “Consciously Incompetent.”
Have you ever been to a class before where you get part way through and you realize, “Wow! There’s a lot more here than I ever thought. I didn’t realize I didn’t know so much.” Well, consciously incompetent.
So that moves us over into the quadrant in the model of consciously being incompetent. And although it sounds like that might not be a good place to be, it’s really a critical area for adults.
Think about it. It’s what moves us on to want to learn more. It creates a little bit of pain. And so we get to that area of consciously being incompetent through training, education, awareness, feedback, just generally paying more attention to what we need to be doing differently or better.
Now, I assumed you guess that we’d all like to be competent, right? So there’s the consciously competent corner of the model, the upper right hand corner of the quadrant that identifies when we’re good at something and we know.
Think about being a leader and really kicking butt. That’s where you want to be – consciously competent.
How do you think you get there? Well, if you said through training or education, that’s not actually true. There may be some areas of training or education. There are some classes where you do get to practice. But for the most part in training and education, you’re simply learning what you don’t know. You’re simply becoming aware of something.
To get better at something, you have to practice it, implement it, just generally do it. And that might take routine over and over and over again or you might get it right off the bat.
That’s a great place to be as a leader, obviously. And it’s also a great place because now, you can teach others because you know how to do something better, right?
So let’s take the skill of riding a car. And you took the car to work this morning, I assume and do you remember actually putting a brake on when you hit the red lights? No.
Through routine, repeat doing something habitually over and over again. You don’t have to think about it anymore. It becomes unconsciously competent. You’re not thinking about doing something well. You might think that’s a great place to be and in many cases it probably is. But there’s a couple of reasons you don’t want to be unconsciously competent.
First of all, there’s no pain around trying to get better. So, if you want to improve, you have to kind of be aware of what you want to do to improve. Secondly, if you’re a leader in any position of influence – whether you’re an official manager, supervisor or not, to translate tasks or lessons learned to other people or just to communicate well, you’ve got to be aware of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it well.
Think about it this way. Let’s say that you’re sitting at your desk and somebody comes near you and says, “Hey, let’s take a look at this thing together online.” “Okay. No problem.”
So you get together online and you start shooting through some website areas or whatever it might be. And the person next to you says, “Well, how did you do that?” “Shoot, I don’t even know. I’ll have to go back and redo it.” You have to bring it into consciousness in order to pass it along to somebody else you’ve communicated intelligently about it.
So at Skirt Strategies, we feel pretty strongly about awareness and developing ourselves. If you get our weekly video tip – which is instructional and it’s called, “The Hot Flash,” you know that we based a lot of our methodologies on learning the fundamentals and then taking that into an advanced level to get really good.
Those of you that want to get a little bit better – might consider being a member at Skirt Strategies where you can review your skills on a weekly basis and hold yourself accountable, use the online network for getting better.
We enjoy this topic because we’re all about awareness, improvement and getting better at what we all want to get better at – which is a great, strong feminine leaders. Thanks!
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