Psychology Simplified On the Four Steps To Achieving A Behavioural Skill

The following words or analysis in terms of the mechanics of behavioural patterning are not mine, but the description of the four stages to learning a new skill are, in my view, spot on:

1. Unconsciously Incompetent (don't know what we don't know)
2. Consciously Incompetent (find out what we don't know)
3. Consciously Competent (find out how to do it better or for the first time)
4. Unconsciously Competent (do it automatically as a habit)

But let’s just look at the ways, good and bad, that we can pattern these as behaviours.

Take a beneficial outcome, first. Let’s say we cannot drive a car, but we know a good teacher and we believe we can learn.

Stage One: we cannot drive a car because we have no idea about the rudimentary requirements of driving or what is involved. We are totally unconscious of them and therefore in that sense unconsciously incompetent.

Stage Two: Our teacher tells us what we don’t know and what we will need to be able to do. This makes us feel consciously incompetent, knowing now what we hadn’t been aware of and standing face to face with our incompetence. We can even suffer so much during our first lesson believing there is no chance we will ever learn how to drive!

Stage Three: With a car and our teacher, we can now work consciously at all the elements of steering, reversing, turning, emergency breaking and all other aspects of driving. The whole of this part of the learning process is a conscious struggle to apply the teaching and embed the lessons in our mind on how to drive. We finish each lesson less and less exhausted, as gradually our concentration begins to give way to our actions of driving beginning to become habitual. So we are now becoming consciously competent.

Stage Four: Becoming unconsciously competent is normally achieved in a real sense the more we drive after we have passed our test. If someone foolishly steps out into the road in front of us, our foot flies unconsciously from the accelerator to the brake. We drive the car more and more instinctively, and without being consciously aware of every action  

Now, lets look at a bad example. Let’s modify it to a degree, while still keeping to the four stages. Suppose our teacher is a friend has a shortcoming. Suppose this teacher has never turned a car round in the street. Worse, imagine he or she has never actually reversed a car and therefore cannot teach it! Finally visualize that we have such faith in this friend and teacher nevertheless, we are unaware of the need to question them.

All the other driving competences are embedded, but as and when our need during our driving test arose to turn the car round, we did as we were taught and without thinking more about it! We drove on in the wrong direction waiting to come upon a helpful roundabout so we could use it to first retrace our steps and then carry on in the other direction!

The test itself of course would be failed!

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Now please consider this a worse emotional case still. Imagine we had pretty competent Life Skill teachers in our parents. And they loved us. They taught us actually or by example how to behave in response to various situations. Just suppose, like our friend the driving instructor and reversing, our parents never argued. So not only did they ever seemingly resolve disputes or issues between them, they never taught us either. Only when the sulk or avoidance technique they used had dimmed, did the remaining normal family life resume.

Is it any wonder that soon we ourselves would have gone through all four stages and adopted a habitual avoidance technique in the face of disputes? Would we see it as unusual or self-evident when it became subsumed into all the other elements of our behaviour? Most likely not.

Could it be a crippling defect in our behaviour in the face of confrontation and dispute? Absolutely!

Often it can only be by revisiting our past that we can bring this to light for ourselves, begin to see it for what it is, work to correct it until we defend our corner when needs must.

Gerry Neale is an artist, mentor and writer. His first novel, Squaring Circles, has recently been published in Paperback and is already available on leading online sites such as Amazon (co.uk). The theme of the novel is how our spirituality, awareness of Nature and our emotions can dictate our cognitive behaviour. There is information on the book’s website at www.squaringcircles.co.uk. Examples of his mixed media watercolours can be viewed onwww.sirgerrynealeartprints.com