Hello and

welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra.

And in today's episode, we're going to talk about reframing our shortcomings, so they actually become

a source of power. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with

the sound of the bells. So in psychology there's something called the conscious competence model.

And this refers to four psychological states that one typically progresses through when moving from a place of

incompetence to competence when developing a skill.

So the first is unconscious incompetence.

This is where we're not good at something and we don't even know we're not good at it.

The next is conscious competence.

This is we're not good at something, but at least we're aware of the ways that we're not good at it.

As we continue, we move into conscious competence.

We're getting better at it, and we're aware of how we're getting better at it and we're aware of how we're getting better at it.

And then the fourth stage is unconscious competence.

That is we just do this thing well and we don't even have to think about it anymore. And so this is how

someone typically progresses through the development of a skill. But I am most interested in the transition from one to two, that is unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence,

since this is really where the whole process begins.

And whether your quest is to improve your relationship,

get better out of sport, or attain enlightenment, it's only when we become aware of our incompetencies that we're able to do anything about them.

However, a lot of us seem to get held up at this stage. I know I certainly have and I think there are many reasons for

this but the big one seems to be that it can be painful to acknowledge the parts of us that are less than perfect.

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