Why do people go see a trainer or a coach? Because they have encountered a challenge! They have concluded that they need to do something and they don’t know how to do it, so they need a particular skill or knowledge. This determination is usually accompanied by an experience of a failure of some sort and considerable pain. And they tackle it by becoming consciously incompetent. They know they need or want to get better at something.
If you choose to become proficient in the matter, then this is where the learning process starts. In this phase you learn a lot in a very short time, but just as quickly you realize that there is also so much you don’t know yet and at this point, uncertainty can grab a hold of you. Thanks to self-reflection and feedback from others, this is how you shape your learning process. How the process unfolds is influenced by your preferred learning style.
Psychologist and education expert David Kolb states that you can have a preference for one of four learning styles: learning from experience, observation, conceptualization or experimentation. We often see people combining several approaches and hereby enriching the learning cycle. Nevertheless, this second phase in which you are consciously incompetent can often be discouraging, especially if there is not enough constructive feedback. A supportive trainer-coach is therefore very important at this stage, as well as courage and perseverance.
In phase three, through practice and experimentation, you begin to realize that you are integrating the knowledge and applying it in your own way. You practice like crazy and at the beginning of this phase you might still see more of your attempts fail rather than succeed. Here, too, that unpleasant feeling can arise that translates into a burning questioning: “Am I ever going to be able to do it?”
This is why support and growth feedback remain vital even at this stage. In order to be able to progress to the next stage, it is important that you use the new acquired skills as often as possible. This way, over time, you will automatically reach the phase where you are unconsciously incompetent in your new knowledge and skill. To illustrate this, just remind yourself of how you learned how to drive a car…