Speed Secrets: A Learning Journey into the Zone

My “discovery” of the fifth stage of competence.

Let’s go on a short journey, one that follows the path of learning about learning, and then into the Zone. How meta, right?

I thought I could recall when I first came across and read about the four stages of competence. I thought it was in Lessons from the Art of Juggling, by Michael J. Gelb and Tony Buzan, one of my all-time favorite books, but I just went back through it and didn’t find the information there (although it did mention the concept); so now, I don’t remember exactly where I first read about it! But I wrote about it in the Inner Speed Secrets book that I co-authored with Ronn Langford (published in 2000), so I’ll have to go back through my notes to find where and when I first discovered it.

What I do remember is having a big Aha! moment, for these four stages made so much sense to me as someone fascinated by the process of learning almost as much as I was by how I could use this to improve my driving and coaching.

As a recap, here are those four stages of competence, as taken from Wikipedia:

1. Unconscious incompetence: The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

2. Conscious incompetence: Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

3. Conscious competence: The individual understands or knows how to do something. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration, and if it is broken, they lapse into incompetence.

4. Unconscious competence: The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

In our Inner Speed Secrets book, after providing a very similar overview of these stages, I wrote: 

“…one difference between someone who performs well and a real superstar or master of the technique is that the master can explain how he does it. He is able to perform at the unconscious competencelevel while observing — while being conscious of what he is doing… When you are really driving in the zone, it should be as if your conscious mind is the on-board television camera, observing everything that is going on, including your execution — but it doesn’t interfere with your execution.”

I was hinting at something here, but what I was thinking had not fully formed in my head, yet. There was something missing: these four stages didn’t seem to perfectly coincide with what I had experienced when being in the zone, the highest level of performance or competence. 

Skip ahead a few years, and when my publisher asked me to put together what became the Ultimate Speed Secrets book, they just wanted me to merge all the best bits from my first six book into one. As that felt like a musician’s “Best of” album, I wanted to rewrite parts of what I’d written in the original books, update some other parts, and then add things that had fully formed in my thinking. I wanted to make it better than the sum of its old parts! By this point in time, I had clarified my thoughts about the stages of competence, and now I had introduced a fifth stage: unconscious competence with conscious awareness.