This month my blog is focusing on the second tier of the Four Steps of Learning: Conscious Incompetence, or, you know what you don’t know. We go through four levels of thought: awareness, acknowledgement, acceptance, and action. I like to combine all of these understandings when I am working with my students and clients.
The first step of learning, Unconscious Incompetence, or you don’t know what you don’t know, is where a lot of people wander around a lot in business and life feeling lost or alone. Until the moment that there is an awareness. A new or surprising situation or hard experience occurs, and a series of thoughts begin running through their mind. There is a trigger of some sort. Once the awareness is awakened, we are given choices points. We can decide to dive into the thought or the lessons of the experience or choose to ignore it. After all, choice is a powerful thing, suffering is optional. My last blog talked about this level of learning.
The third, Conscious Competence, or, you know what you know, is next month’s blog. The fourth, Unconscious Competence, or you don’t know what you know, will be the last in this four-series of blogs. Stay tuned!
I had been in the workforce for thirty-seven years and making only $52,000 a year with a college education. I thought I was “making it.” My husband is the one who made the money that fed our family, put a roof over our head, and put the kids through college. My money was the extra for traveling to see my folks, and fun stuff like that.
In my fixed mindset, I reasoned that was okay, making only $52K regardless of all the hard work and long hours, because I should not be greedy and expect to make more money. Afterall, we were paying our bills and sending our kids to private school. Expecting anything more was just downright greedy. There was a lot of shame attached to being greedy and wanting more, in whatever more looked like for me. And the moment I thought about wanting more was cause for beating myself up and opening up myself to shame once again.
I still have a visual memory of what it looked like as I listened to my boss talk about people who were rich and then wanted even more success, money, better paying jobs, or bigger business. His face told the picture of what he thought about “rich” people, and his physiology was crystal clear that he didn’t think highly of that greedy mindset. That made an imprint in my mind. I remember thinking that I would never want him to think of me the way he was talking about “those” people. I made a (unconscious) decision to limit my “greediness” and that became a belief I operated my success from. I would take what I was told I was worth and not ask for a dime more.
In the beginning, when I moved into a state of conscious incompetence, I would feel guilty because I wanted more success, wanted to make more money and I wanted to build a business that provided the money for me to do things that I had only dreamed of previously. I have this dream to take my grandkids to every continent to see for themselves how amazing humanity truly is, despite the messages the media and collective few make to appear otherwise. The message I received was shame on me for not being satisfied with what God has provided. As a matter of fact, that vision is still something I know is there and I continually remind myself that was his perception based on a person’s life experiences and education within his system of learning.
I was also raised with the belief that rich people got rich by taking advantage of others and lining their pockets. It was as if every person who was an independent business owner was rich. I am literally laughing as I type this! No wonder I wanted to know what it felt like to be an entrepreneur when I started building You Empowered Services. All I had to do was hang an “open for business” sign and the people would come. There are so many different levels of amusement about that thought. The first one is that my first office was in my basement, and no one would even see the “open for business” sign!
Both foundational beliefs impacted my beliefs about my ability to experience success, make money beyond paying bills, and build a business that supports the dreams I secretly held (because I would never want anyone to know about my selfish dreams).
When my journey began, I fought the awareness that I had secret dreams. That voice in my head (the one that just said, “what voice?”) would always remind me that I was being selfish and greedy.
As I moved forward in my transformation, I acknowledged that I had an awareness and gave myself permission to dream of what could be. Because I was approaching all of this with great curiosity, I began embracing a growth mindset. My next thought was, what does “I have a dream,” really mean? And how in the world do I set in motion the possibility of moving my dreams of starting a business and experiencing a new level of success to a realization? I was at the second level of learning which is, “I know what I don’t know,” and I wanted to know more! This is how our evolution works.
That’s next month’s blog. I look forward to you reading and always welcome your feedback.
Derlene Hirtz works with stakeholders responsible for their own success to leverage a success mindset to be more productive, purposeful and profitable so they can have the business and life they deserve.
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