what you don't know
You think you're doing OK. You're making budget fairly consistently, the occasional big deal falls into your lap and you manage not to mess it up, so how come your colleagues are doing a bit better than you? Or how come you're still earning the same as you did four years ago? Or why is your manager riding you to work harder, write more, bring in more new business? Most of us simply tell ourselves that things are OK and go along with the status quo. Nothing much changes, but we're doing OK, right? At about the point that we're convincing ourselves of this, some of us get lucky and run into someone who pushes the right buttons, and they do that by asking the right questions.
STEP 1 - Unconscious Incompetence
Most of us are living in a state of Unconscious Incompetence. We are completely unaware that we're incompetent or unskilled in certain areas and we have no frame of reference to let us know that we're unskilled. It's not that we're absolutely useless and know nothing, after all, we know enough to get by, but perhaps there's more that we could learn, things that would make our lives easier, skills that could improve things for us. How do we find out about those things unless someone or something happens to make us aware of our lack of knowledge.
It is absolutely impossible for us to know what we don't know. The two are mutually exclusive. How do you prove a negative? How do you know just what are the things you don't know now? More specifically, how do you know exactly what are the things you need to know.
STEP 2 - Conscious Incompetence
We get lucky. Someone happens to mention that they know of a skill that would be helpful to you, or colleagues are talking about a sales strategy you've never heard of and don't understand, or you get tired of running into brick walls every time you come to a certain point in the sales process, you're sick of not having an answer, especially when you don't even really know the question. This is the dawning of Conscious Incompetence. We're still not skilled, but at least now we know it and can do something about it.
STEP 3 - Conscious Competence
We're aware that we lack a certain skill. Now we have a choice; we can choose to keep on doing the same old things we've always done, getting the same old results we've always gotten, or we can choose to learn. If our choice is to learn, then we need to do our homework before we take one single lesson. We need to discover the very best means for us as individuals to acquire the skill we lack. This differs from person to person. Some of us will benefit from reading books on the subject or listening to audio training material or watching videos, others will do better seeking a personal trainer or joining a training program, still others will find themselves a mentor, a colleague willing to take them under their wing and show them the way. Once we've learned the skill, we enter a state of Conscious Competence. We sort of know how to do it, but still need to practise our newly acquired skill and concentrate whenever we practise so we don't mess it up. It doesn't yet come naturally to us.
STEP 4 - Unconscious Competence
Success! We've learnt our new skill, have practised it backwards, forwards and sideways. We know it so well, we can do it in our sleep, or certainly without even thinking about it. And that is exactly the point we're aiming for, the point of Unconscious Competence, where we have learned the skill so well that it's second nature to us. We don't have to concentrate on it, it just happens, it's become part of our skill set. This is Unconscious Competence, which is just another word for SUCCESS!!!!
There's only one hitch....
....Once you discover that there's something you don't know and you set out to learn about it, you will invariably discover other things you don't know, other skills you could acquire that would help you. When this happens, you're back to Step 2 and you get to start all over again. | 
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