Sales team leading: Learning process, Four stages of competence

Abraham Maslow defines four stages of competence in the learning process, it is very interesting to understand them in order to be able to complete a learning process successfully:

1. Unconscious incompetence

You don´t know what you don´t know. At this stage you are not aware of what you have to improve. Keep your eyes open and think about what do you want or need to change in order to achieve success in that particular field. A lot of people live in this stage as they are not in control of their emotions and they belief emotions control them. They just react to live instead of being in control of it.

2. Conscious incompetence

You know what you don´t know but you still don´t know how to do it. When you notice that you need to change it is the most interesting stage because you will start to notice what is your target and you will start thinking what you need to start doing to be/do/achieve what you want. It is very helpful to pick a model (someone that masters this particular field) and mirror him. Mirroring is very helpful , someone that masters a field is doing particular strategies in order to get to this point, learning from them will save us time. 

3. Conscious  competence 

You know what you don´t know and you know how to do it. You learned the strategies, attitudes, physiology and mental process that you need to learn in order to achieve the goal. At this stage you will make an effort to apply the strategies everyday. This stage can take days, months or years depending on the difficulty of the target. It can be slow and frustrating but remember that with discipline and effort you can achieve any goal.

4. Unconscious competence

You do things with success and you don´t need to think about how to do them anymore. I am sure at some point of your life you did something right and you could not explain why. Once you pass the conscious competence stage you will be able to achieve peak performance without having to think about it. Usually people that don´t make the effort and stay in the first, second or third stages will say that you are a lucky man. 

You can tell them: The more I work and effort the more lucky I am!

Apply this to anything you want to learn and with time, patience and discipline you will be able to master it!