Many years ago, I was introduced to the idea of the Ladder of Mastery. It is a metaphorical framework to describe how people become very good at something—developing mastery at it. This ladder has four rungs:
Level 1: Unconscious incompetence—when we don’t know what we don’t know about a process, skill, practice, etc.
Level 2: Conscious incompetence—when we know enough to know we don’t know how to create a successful outcome—so we study and practice and learn and fail and practice and repeat.
Level 3: Conscious competence—meaning we know what to do, how to do, when to do, and why to do the things necessary to create a successful outcome, but we have to think about each of these things while we are doing them. We must be analytical/mindful/consciously choosing our moves while we perform them.
Level 4: Unconscious competence—meaning we create a successful result without having to think about how we do it.
We all have unconscious competence around some wildly complicated things. The classical example is tying a shoe. If you have ever tried to teach a child to tie shoelaces, you know something of how hard it can be to translate what you do unconsciously into words and instructions.
Probably for many of us, driving is a clearer example. Driving is a complicated process—and one that can have disastrous consequences if it goes wrong, but most of us drive every day without consciously thinking about how to drive. I spend a good deal of time in my car and driving seems as natural as walking (but I had to learn that too).
Now don’t misunderstand, driving automatically does not mean driving perfectly. It only means we are following our own process for driving automatically. It’s a good thing we do this too. Imagine driving down the highway behind a truck full of construction barrels. If one of those barrels pops off the truck toward you, you don’t want to waste time thinking through the possible outcomes of various options. That’s a tall order at 70 MPH. You need to react nearly instantly, in a way that keeps you and the people around you as safe as possible.
The downside of mastery is that once we have integrated a practice, process or way of being so completely that we can do it well reactively, we tend not to think about our process anymore. Our own competence puts blinders on us. I call this force cognitive inertia, and it can be very subtly dangerous. Inertia is the tendency to remain unchanged. Cognitive inertia keeps us stuck in the comfortable ruts of our own making. (It can happen to groups too. Ever heard someone say: “We can’t do it that way because this is how we’ve always done it”?)
Our unconscious competence is pervasive. Consider how you use and understand language (which is much more idiosyncratic than you might realize). Try this some time: Ask a group of people to freeze their mental image when you say a word—a common noun like “shoe.” Nothing too personal. Everyone in the room will have a slightly different conception of what “shoe” looks like. Now just imagine how wildly different the conceptions of more abstract words like “professionalism” or “acceptable” might be.
We probably have the highest degree of unconscious competence around how we think, our set of expectations, and how we perceive the world around us. We may not be experts at much, but we are each the world’s leading expert on being ourselves. We do it automatically, habitually, without thinking about it–until cognitive inertia causes a failure.
Therapists, coaches and counsellors are experts at helping us recognize areas where our unconscious competence has caused us or others some form of harm, limitation or other problem.
Our unconscious habits are transparent to us, but other people see their effects clearly. The other day, my wife asked me where I picked up a certain phrase. I had literally no idea what she was talking about, and I told her that. She said, “That’s funny because I’ve heard you use it several times over the last few days.” I was completely unaware of having said it, let alone multiple times. That’s an unsophisticated example of a blind spot, but it happened the other day so it’s on my mind.
There is a quotation from the Talmud—one often attributed to Anais Nin and one repeated by the great Steven Covey—that gets to the heart of this idea: “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” Our personal set of expectations determine what we perceive. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you tried to proofread something you wrote and missed an obvious error? Literally anyone else would have caught it right away, anyone but you.
Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle, wrote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” The people around us can never fully know our immense internal complexity—not the way we know it about ourselves. At the same time, they see and hear what we say and do in a way that we are unable to.
It takes some courage to look for the blind spots that are keeping you from being the person and leader you want to be. One of the quickest ways to find them (and develop trust with your team) is to ask for feedback on your own performance. You may hear things that surprise you, that you believe to be false, that might even enrage you. If that happens, thank them for their candor and examine what you hear as objectively as you can. Your personal sense of self is not the issue: how your people perceive you is the issue.
The first step in getting out of your own way is to assume you’re in your own way–whether you think you are or not.