bruce@brucerossconsultingandcoaching.com

The learning experience.

Why most people Fail.

 There are over 5000 books on Amazon with titles that include the phrase “love yourself:” How to Love Yourself, How to Love Yourself: A Guide to Building Self, Esteem, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, Love Yourself: How to Have More Self-Confidence and How to Be Happy, Love Yourself: The Secret Key to Transforming Your Life, How to Love Yourself: Overcome Social Anxiety and Depression…and on it goes.

People write books to solve problems.

People buy books to solve problems.

Yet most people remain the same.

The self-esteem movement is about one thing, and one thing only: identity.

The theory is rather simple.

If you don’t think well of yourself, you won’t think you deserve success.

Ask successful people what they believe about themselves and this is the likely answer:

Their success was not a factor of identity, but of something more powerful and enduring: the motivation to accomplish the outcomes they wished to create.

In other words, they focused upon what they were creating, not upon themselves.

They had a vision of what and how they wanted to live their lives.

So instead of focusing on who and what you think you are (which has been learned) and shit your focus to be learning, how you happen to see yourself—good, bad, or indifferent—is irrelevant.

You have a different and better standard of measurement:

How close am I to where I want to be?

When you are learning, you can look like an awful fool, or terribly inept, or appallingly stupid, or offensively clumsy, or horrendously incompetent.

The learning curve usually dictates that you will be dreadful before you can be proficient.

 

Unconscious Incompetence —

This is the phase where you don’t know what you don’t know. There is a skill that you are missing but you don’t even know what it is yet.

This is the most vulnerable and dangerous stage as it applies to the context of our work/ business building and life in general. There are a lot of things in this world we don’t know and we are ok with that.

Ignorance is bliss after all.

But not when it comes to our careers/ or starting a business.

We may not want to or need to know the details of every aspect of our enterprise, when it comes to our specific jobs and our soft skills, it is disastrous for us to not know what we are missing.

But then again, this stage is the starting point of all learning.

So, we must acknowledge that there will always be things about our jobs and ourselves that we don’t yet know we need to improve while trusting that when the time and circumstance is right, we will naturally move to the next stage which is knowing what we don’t know.

Many people do not realise that learning is required to change their circumstances.

Conscious Incompetence —

This is the stage where we realize there is a gap and identify the exact skill we need to develop. We come to terms with our ignorance and incompetence in a particular area.

Here we come to a crossroads. We have to decide whether to lean in and begin the journey of learning this skill,

 or acknowledge we have a gap in a particular area and be intentional about living with it.

For the most part, our choice should be to learn and grow, because what has got you this far will not get you to where you want to be.

Be to learn and grow.

What is life without consistently learning and growing.

Both personally and professionally. And so, once we decide we have a gap, we set to work to close it.

This is a potential failure point. Many people choose not to learn.

Conscious Competence —

This is where the learning begins.

Conscious competence is the stage where we are actively working on the skill but we are yet novices.

We try some things, we fail, we learn some lessons and try again.

We keep getting better.

Our competence grows slowly and surely but it doesn’t come naturally yet.

We still have a way to go before our competency becomes a part of our DNA.

The key here is to be persistent and determined and not give up.

 

Unconscious Competence —

The final stage where we’ve mastered the new skill or behavior such that its instinctual.

We aren’t practicing anymore.

While we’re still learning and growing, we’ve established a strong foundation and can be confident about our competency in that area.

The resource centre will be of benefit to those who want to achieve the result they desire.

What has gotten you this far will not get you there.​