Mastering the Four Stages of Skill Development

What if the difference between failure and mastery of a skill is just a matter of awareness of four key stages? Discover the transformative Athlete Learning and Mastery Model that reveals how athletes and individuals progress from being unaware of their weaknesses to achieving effortless skill execution. We'll explore each stage in detail, from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, and highlight the critical transitions that make mastery possible. This episode isn't just for athletes; anyone committed to growth and learning can benefit from these insights.

Curious about how to apply these principles beyond the playing field? We'll also dive into how these learning stages can be a powerful tool for business owners, entrepreneurs, and anyone keen on self-improvement. Whether you're looking for consulting, remote training, or free assessments in southeastern Idaho, we've got you covered. Send in your questions, and let's delve deeper together. Your journey toward mastery starts here, and we're excited to guide you every step of the way.

Chapters

• 0:27 Athlete Learning and Mastery Model
• 10:16 Athlete Learning Model Expansion

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:28

What is up, folks? Let's get into it. Today we're going to be covering the athletic or athlete learning model. Come into the facility to be, you know, master some of the things we're working on and then being able to take that to the next level when they get to play collegiate sport, when they have to start training themselves, whatever. So whether they, you know, become a college athlete, professional athlete, or whether they go on to just get their education in college, they're going to have these tools, through the process of learning and mastery, to be able to take care of themselves and keep themselves very capable for the rest of their lives. So what we kind of buy into and what we've seen with athletes over the last decade plus, is the four stages of mastery. So if you haven't heard about this yet, listen up. This is a really great model to follow, not only for athletes in the context that I'm talking about today, but anything you're going to do in life, whether that's to be a parent, whether that's in your professional life, in your relationship, whatever. I think this model can really apply to all of that.

Speaker 1: 1:50

So, number one we'll go over kind of the first stage of mastery and that's unconscious incompetence. So you may have heard me speak about this before. It also can be classified as ignorance. This is where most people start, so it's the land of unknown and unknown. So, in terms, of you are unaware of problems or don't recognize the importance of improving. So this is somebody coming in that just really has no idea. You know why they aren't fast, why they have pain, or even really what to do with their training. To take to the next level again, there's no problem with being here. Everyone, everyone starts here. So it's, honestly, the first time somebody steps in our facility for the free intro assessment, this is their state of mind, you know, walking in and maybe over the first five minutes, okay. Next is conscious incompetence. We can just classify this as awareness and this is what we try to bring in our free assessment. When athletes first walk in and then throughout the journey, there's different aspects that always start with. This awareness to this is something that we can improve and this is how we're going to improve it. This is a really frustrating stage. So I'd say in our facility, we get to be here and help them through each phase of it. So this statistic doesn't really apply to that, but this is where 90% in the real world.

Speaker 1: 3:20

People quit. You realize that there's something wrong. It's an awakening call and you gain some self-awareness to limitations and you start to understand the difficulty of the skill or the adaptation that you're trying to make. And it's really easy to quit here because it takes some work to get out of this stage and into the next stage, conscious competence. And it's uncomfortable because you don't know how to improve. You're mostly aware of the issue, how to improve, you're mostly aware of the issue, but there's not really a direct path or a laid out path for you to make that improvement. This can be very applicable to owning a business or being an entrepreneur as well. So next phase, we move into conscious uh competence.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Um learning. This is where you're in the process of learning, um, this, or you can also call the enlightenment phase. Uh, if mastery was climbing a mountain, this would be the last but steepest rise, right? So this is where you can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, um, but it's to be quite a push to get there. This is where you can kind of perform a task well, but it requires effort. So a way I would apply that back to the gym is you know. This is when an athlete can perform a movement well, can sprint well, but there's some thought and effort and constant reminding that comes from the coaches and effort from the athlete during the movement to perform it well. So, again, this is learning. And this is funny because it kind of ties into, if you've heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect I'm a massive believer in this in terms of the less you know, the more confident you are in your field.

Speaker 1: 5:12

And then there's kind of a curve that comes from that. So you can imagine you don't really know a lot and then all of a sudden you have confidence of I know everything. Maybe you saw something on social media and you're like man, I know everything. But as you actually start to gain knowledge in the field that you are thinking of respective field or work or coaching or being an athlete even you realize oh, there's a little bit more to this and your confidence is not as high as it was when you thought you knew everything. And then it kind of moves over to. I'm never going to understand this because the deeper you go, the more levels and complex it gets into and this confidence is even lower as you get more knowledge. And then you get to the point where it starts to make sense. You're able to kind of work through these concepts, you're feeling confident with them and then lastly, just really starting to understand. And you know, when somebody asks you a question about it you're like man, you know it's really complicated, you know there's a lot of effort that needs to go into learning this and progressing through this. And that's where confidence starts to rise again. But I don't think it's ever as high as when you don't know anything about something, how confident you are in that very beginning stage where you think you know everything. So that's where people will say the common phrase of the more I know, the less I know, the more I understand about the concept, the less I know and the more of a learning attitude I have towards continuing to get better. So again, that's kind of a conscious competence phase.

Speaker 1: 6:47

And then, lastly, this is where we aim to get all of our athletes. I think this is when you really know a master is when you have the unconscious competence. So this is where you truly master the skill. It takes no thought or effort, you just perform the skill naturally very, very well. Think about like Mozart with the piano, stephen Curry with three-pointers, whatnot. So just think of some examples like that.

Speaker 1: 7:15

And this is where we want to get athletes, because then, truly, the work that they're doing here at the facility is now carrying over to athletic performance, carrying over to the field, because they don't have to think about it, they just are able to produce that result, naturally, with little to no effort when it comes to the mental side, and they don't have to be aware of what they're doing and they're doing it well. This is often associated with state of flow being in the zone, peak performance. The skill is just wired in your subconscious and now, honestly, it takes more effort to do it wrong than it does to take it right, and that's really, truly, you know, mastering something. So, again, that's where I speak about. You know athletes be able to go to that college level. We can get them to the stage before they're able to hit the weight room running because they don't have a lot of mental effort into it. They are doing the skill well and then coaches can start to build on that. They are doing the skill well and then coaches can start to build on that.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Same with building a business as you get into this stage, oftentimes you're making more right decisions than wrong decisions, just naturally. And again, that's mastery. The hardest part is probably getting through the first two phases and getting into that learning and growth phase, and then it just takes time and reps and effort to get to that mastery phase. It's a. It's a. It's a long journey. Um, again, being in the field for over a decade, uh, I feel like you know we do a pretty good job. Uh, we've spent countless, countless hours of learning, uh, immersing ourselves, and there's always something to be learned. And uh, I wanted to just give you guys that kind of insight into you know, that development.

Speaker 1: 9:05

If, whether you have an athlete coming in or you have something you're working through in your personal life, give you guys some motivation to like to keep going through those first two phases and some awareness to it. Right, so you might've started listening to this podcast, not known this model before, and then you realize there's a lot of things in life where you're in that unconscious incompetence or conscious incompetence that's where this conversation would take you to. Is that next stage? And then it's learning and getting to that conscious, competent phase where you know you're learning all of this, you're, you're getting after it whatever you're doing in your life and you're trying to start to gather knowledge so that you can apply that and make it something that you do naturally, or develop a habit, habit with um, and this is that's where, again, it applies to athletes that come in or youth that come in, that don't make it to collegiate sports. You know, if this is ingrained in who they are and performance is ingrained in, uh, how they perform every day in life, they're going to do better in school. They're going to do better in relationships. They're going to do better in school. They're going to do better in relationships. They're going to do better in anything in life, as well as keeping themselves physically in shape and capable to do the things that they love as they transition to hobbies, as they transition to parenthood, anything like that.

Speaker 1: 10:16

So, thanks for tuning in, guys. I'm loving making these episodes. I'm going to continue to make more. If you have any questions on this learning model that I just went over today, please send them over. I would be happy to dive a little bit deeper into any of them. Again, I appreciate you guys' time. If you guys want to learn more, we have consulting for facilities, for business owners, entrepreneurs. We have remote training for athletes if you're not in the physical area, and obviously we have our free assessment and onsite training for anyone in that southeastern Idaho bubble. So have a great day, guys. Appreciate you.