I had planned to write this week about how I use Why Choose, but realized that I needed to back up into how I approach developing skills generally. So here’s that!

Learning to drive

Those of us who know how to drive a car can probably do it while we’re having a conversation with somebody, or while we’re thinking about the things we’re going to do when we get home. The actions of driving a car are totally automatic for us, including checking mirrors, controlling acceleration and steering, and keeping awareness of the locations and speeds of all the cars around us. We’re masters at this, it’s incredible. And it hasn’t always been that way.

Chances are, learning to drive went something like this:

We sat down behind the wheel for the first time, totally confident that we can drive. We’ve seen people doing it every day, how hard can it be? Plus we’ve put in thousands of hours of Mario Kart. We’ve got this.

We don’t got this.

Immediately we find out that we’re terrible at driving. We can’t control our speed, the steering wheel doesn’t respond how we were expecting, there’s a huge list of things we need to be checking all the time and we can’t keep track of them.

So we get instruction, we work on it, and gradually we get to a place where we can comfortably circle a parking lot. But it’s still so hard. Driving at this point takes every ounce of mental energy we have, and we still haven’t even gotten onto the road yet.

But then we really start practicing. We put in the hours. Intentionally at first, begging to go drive so we can get better, then unintentionally, putting in hundreds, then thousands of hours of driving in the course of our daily grinds.

Then suddenly we realize it’s unconscious. We’ve got this for real. We’re listening to music, having conversations, all while maintaining full awareness of the cars around us and making thousands of tiny adjustments to speed and steering.

Those steps are the template for learning nearly any skill. And remembering that it works, that growth is inevitable with consistent practice, has been the core of how I’ve approached maintaining a mindset for skill development. It’s really about paying attention as we move through four stages of competence:

Stage 1 - Unconscious Incompetence

“I think I can do that.”

Most of us are living just fine at this stage with most skills. We haven’t tried building a Large Hadron Collider or making a soufflé or writing a novel, so we have no idea just how incompetent we are at those things. Since we’re never tested, we can tell ourselves that we might be able to do them. The tougher version of this stage is when we’re at unconscious incompetence with something we do all the time and think that we’re good at. Maybe we’ve actually always cooked eggs terribly, or we’ve never listened to a recording of ourselves singing. In so many areas of our lives we never find out that we’re bad at stuff. There’s a comfort here, and we don’t always want to move on from that blissful ignorance.

But there are tons of activities and experiences that push us out of unconscious incompetence. From seeing someone perform at a level we thought was impossible, to failing in front of a co-worker or manager, to bombing at a comedy open-mic. Each one of these experiences is truly humbling, showing us a weakness in ourselves that we didn’t know existed.

YAY!!!

When we see this transition not as a failure, but as a normal stage in skill development it becomes something to be celebrated. Not from a shallow, “I should enjoy my failures because that’s what I keep hearing,” perspective, but from a deep understanding that getting out of unconscious incompetence is a critical step in the journey of skill development.

Stage 2 - Conscious Incompetence

“I know what quality looks like, and this isn’t it."

With a fixed mindset, conscious incompetence is where many people give up. The story we tell ourselves is, “I’m not good at this,” so we don’t try again. But with a growth mindset, there is no expectation that we should be good at stuff we’ve never practiced. Instead of feeling bad, we need to keep acknowledging that we’ve already made progress. In fact, we’ve already achieved one of the most difficult steps, which was moving out of unconscious incompetence. We’re doing great.

That said, working our way out of conscious incompetence can be tough. Usually during this transition we’re doing research, finding coaches, defining success criteria, and making attempts that don’t meet our own standards. There’s no formula for figuring out how long we’ll be here, but believing that we can learn is critical for getting through it. Moving quickly usually means finding methods of honest self-evaluation.

Stage 3 - Conscious Competence

“I can do it, but I still have to think really hard about it."

Continuing to represent for Conscious Incompetence

Conscious competence means that we’ve been learning and learning, and we think we can do the thing now. Identifying that we’re at this stage usually comes in one of two ways: (1) We’re meeting our performance criteria but it’s still so hard to do or (2) we’re performing well but we’re mostly thinking about ourselves while we’re doing it. That second one’s a big deal in something like improvised music, because we can’t listen to what everyone else is playing while we’re still thinking about how to play our own instruments. The same issue comes up in teaching or facilitating, where we might be competently executing our lesson plans, but we don’t have any additional mental space to think about how the people in the room are actually doing. We’ve got to get better at the skill if we want to perform in a meaningful way in those spaces.

The nice thing, though, is that now that we can do the thing, we can start practicing.

Wait, what do you mean “start” practicing? What have I been doing?

One of the points of confusion when you’re developing a skill is what “practicing” means. There’s an old musician aphorism that, “A good musician practices until they get it right, a great musician practices until they can’t get it wrong,” but I found that it was actually more like, “Practicing starts after you can do it right.” The process of getting to conscious competence probably wasn’t practicing, it was learning, full of mistakes and bad habits and poor performance. Real practicing is executing correctly over and over and over, gradually needing less mental energy to perform the skill each time.

In the language of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, we’re moving a task from the processing-intensive System 2 part of our mind, where we’re almost entirely consumed with effort, into the automatic System 1, where we’re performing without really thinking about it at all. In my own language, It’s hard to stay bad at something you do every day.

Practice can take many forms, but the one most of us are familiar with is doing one job consistently over a long period of time, whether it’s writing performance evaluations, scheduling meetings, making coffee, or riding a bike to work. The "daily grind” is very often a process of practice, where we reinforce habits and make our tasks automatic. This is another place where there’s an opportunity to rethink our experiences. Rather than feeling “mindless” at work, we can celebrate our ability to move ever more complex tasks into our unconscious minds, freeing up space to think more deeply about something else.

The transition out of this stage is where the hours and the years come in. The move from conscious competence to unconscious competence can be tedious, but when we pay attention to it, it is one of the most satisfying human experiences there is. We’re gradually, through consistent effort, moving a skill from conscious effort to unconscious execution. We’re truly making the skill a part of ourselves.

Stage 4 - Unconscious Competence

“I can do it and do other stuff.”

A good sign that we’re at unconscious competence is that we suddenly have “headroom”, or the ability to pay attention to other things beyond the thing that we’re doing. This is when we can have a conversation while we’re driving, or read whole sections of books while thinking about something else, or react to other actors while we’re on stage. My favorite example, though, came from a friend who worked as a bartender:

“After about three years of making drinks, I had this moment where I looked down and realized that I had three Spanish coffees on fire, I was in the middle of mixing two other drinks, and I wasn’t thinking about those things at all. Instead, I was tracking where every server was in the restaurant, I knew what everyone sitting at the bar needed, and I could respond to anything that was going wrong that night.”

He couldn’t do that on day 1, or even day 60. It took years to develop headroom. Hearing that story was one of the things that helped me move away from playing music and into the professional world. I realized that what I loved wasn’t playing drums, it was the feeling of moving skills into unconscious competence, and that if I paid attention, I could have that feeling while doing anything, from rollerblading, to programming, to designing strategies, to illustrating blog posts, to whatever comes next.

Up next: Developing practice systems