I think knowing how we best learn is super important and helpful.

It’s good to discover for yourself, if you’re a visual, audio or kinetic learner, or a combination of two or all three.

It's also helpful as you're learning to know what you don't know! 😆

Today on The Karen Kenney Show, we’re talking about the 4 stages of learning, and how they come into play in the different areas of our life.

We’ll explore how we go from having incompetence to competence and we’ll be digging into the importance of staying curious when learning something new.

Say goodbye to complacency and the old “been there, done that” way of thinking.

Instead let’s keep our minds open, and be willing to be surprised at what we may find.

Just like when we have babies or little kids around, they invoke a sense of innocence and wonder, because we're looking at things through fresh, new eyes along with them.

Learning something new can be a wicked exciting time!

Are you ready to let go of unconscious competence and open yourself up to a new stage of learning with me?

KK's Takeaways:

• Learning And Skill Development (5:21)

• Recognizing Incompetence (9:07)

• Improving Skills (13:56)

• Mastering Skills (20:03)

• Unconscious Competence (24:22)

• Competence (28:16)

• The Importance Of Staying Curious (33:33)

Karen Kenney is a certified Spiritual Mentor, Hypnotist, Integrative Change Worker and a Life Coach. She’s known for her dynamic storytelling, her sense of humor, her Boston accent and her no-bullshit approach to Spirituality and transformational work.

She’s been a yoga teacher for 22+ years, is a Certified Gateless Writing Instructor, and is also an author, speaker, retreat leader and the host of The Karen Kenney Show podcast.

A curious human being, life-long learner and an entrepreneur for 20+ years, KK brings a down-to-earth perspective to applying spiritual principles and brain science that create powerful shifts in people’s lives and businesses.

She works with people individually in her 1:1 program THE QUEST, and offers a collective learning experience via Group Coaching. She supports both the conscious and unconscious mind by combining practical Neuroscience, Subconscious Reprogramming, Integrative Hypnosis, and Spiritual Mentorship. These tools help clients regulate their nervous systems, remove blocks, rewrite stories, rewire beliefs, and reimagine what’s possible!

Karen wants her clients to have their own lived experience with spirituality and to not just “take her word for it”. She encourages people to deepen their personal connection to Self, Source and Spirit in tangible, relatable, and actionable ways without losing sight of the magic.

Her process called: “Your Story To Your Glory” helps people to shift from an old thought system of fear to one of Love - using compassion, un-shaming, laughter and humor, her work is effective, efficient, and it’s also wicked fun!

KK’s been a student of A Course in Miracles for close to 30 years, has been vegan for over 20 years, and believes that a little kindness can go a long way and make a miraculous difference.

Hey, you guys, welcome to the Karen Kenny show. I was just oh my god, apparently, I was just recording myself and I didn't even know it. And we're back. Okay, you guys, listen, this is I think it's Episode 239, which still just kind of blows my mind. And I think I want to call this one, the four stages of learning, or the four stages of competence, but maybe I'll just call it the four stages of learning. And I want to talk about it. I'm gonna, of course, going to tell you a little story, how it came to be, and then how we can apply this sucker to our own lives. Because that, to me, it's like just sitting around talking about shit doesn't really get us anywhere. I think that there is a time and a place for just talking, right receiving information, listening and all that stuff. But if we actually want to create any kind of change in our own lives, then we have to have some sort of implementation, some embodiment, some action. So I'm going to talk about like, how we can apply this shit perhaps. Okay, so first of all, if you're new to the show, welcome, I'm looking happy to have you here. Thank you so much. For I don't know, listening to your friend and clicking the link they send you or making time in your life to check this out, or however you got here. I'm just I'm so grateful and happy that you're here. And thank you for sharing some of your time with me. loyal listeners, you know, hardcore, I love you big time. So thank you also for continuing to support the show and sharing it and leaving reviews. And if you haven't done that yet, that's a great little way to show this, the little show that can that's what I was called, it's a little show that can Chugga chugga, chugga, choo, choo, it's one of the great ways that you can help me is to leave a review, leave a rating on Apple podcast, and then also continue to share it. So just thank you so much. Okay, let's dive into this. So recently, I was asked to come and speak to my friends team. And it's always an honor, it is a delight. First of all, it is a delight. And it is a happy honor, when I get asked to come into other friends, group coaching programs, or to speak at their events, or to speak on their stages or go on to their podcast, or to come into, you know, whatever their employees, their whatever, I get to speak to them, and share a little of what's on my heart in mind and try to be helpful in the best way possible and to get to serve people. And to help people learn new things. That's always wicked exciting to me, right, hence why we're talking about learning today. And back in the day, you know, I used to work@monster.com. And I'll tell you a little bit something about that in a second. But because I was asked to speak at my friends, you know, thing afterwards, one of the things that somebody said to me is like, you know, this seems so easy to you like just kind of like talking and like sharing and like storytelling and connecting the dots for people and holding space for people, whatever it can feel like, it seems like it's really easy for you. And when they said that it occurred to me that in some areas of my life, I have what is called on conscious competence. And that's what we're really going to be diving into today, those four stages of learning. And but before I go there, because I because I mentioned it, let me complete the thought. I used to work for monster.com. And some of you might remember that monster.com You know, it used to be the way that I always thought of them as though they were the people that helped you find a job over and over, right? So monster.com used to pay me to go into high schools all around New England, and talk to high school kids about how they learn, like in learning how they learn. And I think what like are they audio learners? Are they visual learners? Are they kinetic learners? Are they all three? Right? And maybe I'll do a whole podcast about that another time. But I think knowing how we learn is incredibly important, which again, I'll do a podcast about it. But today's episode is also about the four stages of learning how we go from being incompetent to competent, what these different stages are, and where you might find yourself in some areas of your life and it might be with skill sets that have to do with your job like your work. It might be in skill sets with how you communicate with your sweetie or your children or in your friendships or relationships. It might be you know, you can apply it to whatever Anytime you're learning something new, and this actually would be a good one to watch, because I'm going to be just holding up a couple of little graphics that might be fun to see or to get your eyeballs on. So the four stages of learning. So this is a model. Let me look at my notes here because I always like to give credit, you guys know this. Okay, so here's the thing. So the four stages of what I'm calling learning or the four stages of competence, it's often attributed to a guy a psychologist named Abraham Maslow in so, you know, I'm not going to spend like 19 hours, like going down down the rabbit hole. So I'm just going to tell you what I discovered in my own research, right? So often attributed to American psychologist Abraham Maslow. But this particular concept, the four stages of competence, it was apparently first met, mentioned in 1969. By a management consultant, his name was Martin Broadwell. And Martin Broadwell, basically came up with this. Let's call this hierarchy of learning or whatever, based on four different types of teachers. So he was using this to describe the four different types of teachers or to characterize them, okay. But then a little bit later on, these things also got incorporated into a life skills training course, by a dude named Paul Curtis, and Phillip Warren. So basically, this is like a psychological model that describes the progression from being incompetent in a skill, right, a specific skill to being more competent, or to becoming fully competent in it. So we're gonna talk about the four different layers. Now for me, you know, you guys know how I feel. If you're a longtime listener, you know how I feel, I don't feel like there's any better investment you can make in knowing yourself than in knowing yourself and really coming to understand yourself, why you do what you do think what you think, say what you say, believe what you believe. Why do I tell these stories? Why do I have these patterns? Why do I have these habits? Why do I have this conditioning? Because it's only when we become aware of something that we can actually change it alchemize it, transmute it, transform it, right? If it needs, if it needs changing, not, not everything does, I'm just saying. But to me to be able to invest time in understanding yourself, and who you are, how you came to be, how you want to be, who you're going to be, what actions you're going to stay take. But really understanding your own psychology and understanding where your skill skill skill set like lies in certain things. To me, this is wicked important. It's also wicked interesting. So if it's not, I don't know, maybe you'll stop listening now. Maybe a better shit to do. But for me, I find this fascinating. So I hope you'll stick around. So I'm going to just name the four stages individually, and then we're going to dive into them a little bit more. Okay, so remember, this is the four stages that people go through when they're learning a new skill, or they're learning something in a new area of knowledge, right? It consists of these four stages number one, right? And I'll call I have little nicknames for them, too, right? So there's stage one, which is unconscious, incompetence, on conscious incompetence. And this is where most of us start, most of us start here, in a state of what I would call like, ignorance.

This is when we're like a total novice. Okay. And we're gonna circle back and dive more deeply into each of these. But remember, your brain learns by repetition. So it's really helpful sometimes for me to repeat these things multiple times and that way it sinks into the old noggin, okay. Number two, is conscious incompetence. Okay. Number two is conscious incompetence. And this is what I kind of like to call like, beginner's mind, alright, having beginner's mind. Okay, stage three of learning. This is competent, I'm sorry, conscious, competence, conscious competence. And I think of this as like being proficient in a thing, okay? And then stage four is an unconscious competence. And this to me is when you are kind of like an expert, or you're very intuitive about being able to do a thing. Alright, so we're gonna go through each of these. Now, there's something in your life right now that you're trying to learn. Maybe it's learning a new language. Maybe it's learning to play the guitar, maybe it's learning how to knit. Maybe it's, you know, they don't always have to be physical things. Maybe it's learning how to communicate better, maybe it's learning how to share your feelings, because you grew up like a Masshole. And everybody in your family thinks that having feelings and crying is weak. So you're not accustomed to even acknowledging your own feelings. And you're learning how to be able to acknowledge your feelings, know that they matter, and communicate them and express them, right. I mean, you could be learning a gazillion different things. I mean, I am I am a lifelong learner double Amen hands to that I will be learning probably until I hit the grave. And I like to learn about a lot of different things. I'm a highly, highly enthusiastically curious person, right. But I think learning about myself is one of is one of the most fascinating things and learning about my own psychology and why and who and all that stuff allows me to learn more about my brothers and sisters out there right about the people and the animals in the world around me. So Alright, so let's dive into these suckers because I find them fascinating. So unconscious, incompetence like this is that kind of ignorance is bliss stage right? I kind of think of this like the, you don't know that you don't know stuff. You are not yet clued into the fact that you don't know shit, or you don't know what you're talking about, right? It's kind of that like, ignorance is bliss state. We see this sometime you ever just hear it? You see it a lot on the internet, man, let's just call it what it is. You see people on the internet running their mouth and posting about shit. And they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't even know that they don't know. They don't even know that they don't know. Okay, so here's a more in depth description of this. It's when a person doesn't know or doesn't understand how to do something. And then not only that, they don't recognize their own deficit. They don't recognize that there's a deficit in their knowledge and their knowing. Often Unfortunately, though, this doesn't stop them from opening their big bucket mouths. But here's the thing. They may even deny the usefulness of a skill. Like if they're trying to learn if there's like a new skill and they don't know it. And they don't, because they don't know what they'll be like, Oh, who cares? Who that's a stupid skill, right? They'll deny how useful the thing actually is. It's an ego thing. It's a protective mechanism that the ego puts in place because it doesn't like to appear stupid. Okay, to move out of this stage, though, here's what a person has to do. They have to recognize your own incompetence, you have to recognize that like you don't know this thing, you don't know how to do it, you don't know how to think about it, you don't know how to talk about it, you don't know how to communicate, right? You have to accept like, Hey, I'm a novice. I'm like it like ground zero here. Like, I've got to start building a foundation right? At this stage, right? They must also recognize the value of the skill, because why are you going to try to learn something that you don't care about, or you don't see any usefulness right around it? Okay. So before you can move on to the next stage, you got to recognize your own incompetence. And you got to recognize the value of putting in the time, the energy, the hours, whatever, your attention, right to learn the new skill, and the length of time that it's going to take usually at this stage, it depends on and I love this, I love the way this I read this line, it depends on the, quote, strength of the stimulus to learn, I might say that as the strength or the depth of the desire to learn, right? So if somebody is going to have asked something, it will take them out. Have you ever just become obsessed about something? Have you ever it could be anything from beekeeping to like, I know, I know, people that all of a sudden they're like, I'm gonna learn how to like, I don't know, what do you call it brew beer in my bathtub. You know, like, you get like, hooked by this idea or this skill set. And you're like, I want to learn everything there is to know about this thing. So I just leave way back from my mind because I was getting really excited to it. So I want to like when people like really go go down the rabbit hole and do the deep dive and they like buy all the things and get all the books in there. Like let's go let's go in there into it right. So, the amount of time an individual will spend in the unconscious incompetence stage depends on the depth and the strength of their desire to to learn the strength of the stimulus to learn, because to me, I'm the kind of person when when I'm like ready to go and I'm like, I'm all in Let's go. There's really no stopping me. I know I have so Have your friends like this as well. It's like once we're in, we're like balls to the wall, like, let's go. Okay, that's stage one. So you might want to pause here and think about if there's something in your life that you're a novice at. And then you don't take your temperature. Where am I at with this? What's the strength of the stimulus of my desire to learn here? Like, How long am I going to stay at novice? Now here's the thing. Sometimes you don't really care. Like, like, let's say you like playing pool, right? I used to work at a pool hall, I can shoot pool. I'm not like really good at it or anything. Like some people might even say I'm not any good. I mean, I can like gunk, gunk and clack some balls together. But I'm a novice. And I don't really care to get better at it right? Now somebody else like the person who like has their own their own bag and their own queues and their own sticks. And they got their own chalk. And they were the things that then the, like, there are people who are like, into it, you know what I'm saying? So sometimes we're happy being a novice. It's like, it's kind of fun here. I don't have to take it too seriously. I don't give two shits, right? Play, don't play. It's just fun. I have no skin in the game. Really? You know what I mean? And sometimes, though, we'll be a novice at something, and we get hooked and we fall in love. And then we're like, Let's go are all in. And that's an exciting time, isn't it? Okay, stage two, conscious incompetence. This is that beginner's mind stage. And I call this one I love this one, you know that you don't know. You're no longer ignorant, you are now highly aware about the fact that you don't know I am now aware that I don't know. Okay. So in this stage, a person doesn't understand or know how to do something. And they recognize that deficit, they recognize that gap between there's this thing, and kind of here's where I am on the chart or the graph and my ability to do the thing. They also are now record, they now recognize also the value of a new skill in addressing this deficit. So they're starting to recognize, hey, I have this deficit deficit. And it would be really helpful for me to learn this. Let's say you were starting a new job. In an area where many of the people were speaking Spanish. It might behoove you, you might become aware, like, hey, yeah, I can, you know, say el banyo. Like, I can ask for the bathroom. Or I can ask, you know, que pasa or, like, you might have very limited working language skills. And it might occur to you like, Hey, this is a deficit. And it would be valuable for me to pick up the pace and get a strongest skill set here, right.

This is also the stage where making mistakes can be really integral and really important to the learning stage. Right, this process of learning, it requires that we make mistakes. That's how we learn. We don't just rarely, rarely, rarely are we good at everything we try or everything that we do. Right. So this is that stage where it's like, yeah, I might be a little clumsy, I might, you know, might not be the smoothest at this yet. I recognize I'm in a deficit. But I have a desire to learn. And I want to learn, and I'm probably going to make a lot of mistakes. And that's okay, because I'm not going to see them as failures. I'm going to see it as feedback and information. And then I'm going to take those things that I learned by screwing up and messing up and being clumsy. And I'm going to apply them. Okay. That's a really exciting thing. So the beginner's mind is like, open. It's like, I'm aware of that. I don't know, I'm open to learning. And I'm open to figuring it out. This is a very exciting time, I think, to be in beginner's mind. Okay, stage three, this is conscious competence. And this is the stage that I call that, like you know about it, but you still have to think about it. So imagine that there's a skill, right? Where, let's say you're trying to learn how to, I don't know, I'm going to pull something out of my ass, like learning how to change a tire. Right? Somebody has shown you like your dad, your grandfather, your auntie somebody who's good with cars, whatever. They've taught you how to change a tire how to change a flat, okay? And you're like, I know how to do it, but I like have to have my notes next to me or I have it in my head. But I really got to think about each step that I'm doing. Like I remember when I first learned how to snowboard back in California back in the day, and I was not a good skier. I did not really like skiing, but snowboard like felt fun because I used to skateboard as a kid, right? I was I was a hardcore tomboy. I used to love to skateboard. And so I already kind of had that muscle memory in my body. But I still had to really think about like, this is how I stopped, this is how I turn this is how I like, you know, like, whatever this is how I fall, right? You even you have to learn how to fall, because we know mistakes are going to be a given in the learning process, right. So I can do it thing, but I still had to really think about it. It's kind of like riding a bike, when you're first learning to ride a bike, you know, and if you're lucky enough to have a parent, or a cousin, or a sibling, or a guardian, or somebody who first of all, you have a bike, right, if you're, if you're lucky enough, are in a socio economic situation. And never, you get a hand me down from your older brother or whatever, right and you have something to learn on. And, you know, while they're behind pushing you as you're finding your equilibrium, as you're finding right your your ability to balance and where you are in space while you're moving. And they're yelling things like, you know, keep your arm steady, keep your eyes forward, now pedal pump with your legs pedal, right. So they're calling out all these instructions, and you're like, Oh, I know how to do it. But I still kind of have to think about it a little bit, right. So you're more in this level I call this is when you're proficient, right? You know how to deal with things. But if you're just you still gotta be really present and really pay attention and be conscious. So you're using the conscious part of your mind, the front part of your brain, where decision making happens and your problem solving happens in your life kinda oftentimes, like working things out in the front of your head. Okay, so in this stage, this is the I can do it, but I still have to think about it stage. Okay, so you are now aware that, you know, you're, uh, you're aware that you know how to do something. But you're also aware that I gotta pay attention when I'm doing this thing. So the person at this stage, they know how to do something, they understand it. This at this stage, things can be broken down into steps, but there is still like, heavy conscious involvement in executing the skill. Okay. Demonstrating the skill or the knowledge that requires concentration, if this is broken, so let's say you're demonstrating demonstrating this skill, or, you know, you're like trying to demonstrate that you have the knowledge to do this thing, right, it still requires concentration. And let's say somebody interrupts you or you forget, the steps are whatever, you're gonna lapse right back into incompetence, conscious incompetence, right? So you're proficient, but you're not quite able to just kind of like, do it, like, boom, boom, boom, boom, okay. Then we go to number four, which is what I was mentioning, at the very beginning of the podcast, this is like a sweet spot, this one. And stage four of learning this fourth stage of competence is on conscious competence. And this is when you, you know this stuff so well, that you don't even have to think about it. This is when you become an expert. This is when things become really intuitive, and you know your shit down, Pat, you know, it's so well, then you can just do it in an unconscious way. And whenever I think about this, I always think about my sweetie. Right? So many of you know that I am my sweetie. I'm married to my sweetie, Chris Lester. And Chris is a professional musician. Right? He started playing music when he was like three years old, and he started banging on pots and pans and he got his first little drum kit. And he went on to play bass and guitar and keyboards and mandolin. And like all I mean, the guy is just, he's a multi instrumentalist. He's a singer. He's a songwriter. He's a producer. Now, when he's sitting around, which is every day, like right now, while I'm recording this, he's downstairs. He's actually downstairs working on a cool project right now. But he's downstairs. Playing music right now it's coming up through the vent. I can hear it. But he, while I'm talking to him, let's say he's sitting around the living room. He always has a guitar always has a guitar out. And so while he's talking to me, he can just like noodle around and play music and play songs while he's engaged in a conversation. Because his skill set in his hands is so unconscious at this point, right? That he can just do that, while he the front of his brain is having a present moment conversation, right? So the hands up just automatically intuitively, right? Expertly doing their thing. You might be at a place where you can drive without really thinking about it. It's really a form of being hypnotized when you go into trance. And I often say to people, you know, people get really nervous around hypnosis. I'm like, but you go in and out of hypnosis all day long. And I often say if you've ever driven somewhere, especially someplace that you drive every single day to and from work to and from the gym, picking up your dog Get doggy daycare, picking up your kids from your babysitter's house, whatever it is, whatever the thing is, right? A lot of times you'll be driving and sometimes you'll be aware that your gut to the place and you're like, I just don't remember the last five miles like my, because your subconscious, your unconscious was actually driving the car, while the front of your brain was doing whatever it was doing making a grocery list, like working out a problem thinking about a show like reliving something, whatever it was planning something.

So unconscious competence, this is when a person has like so much practice with the skill you've often heard. Or maybe you haven't, but some of you have heard about, it takes about 10,000 hours to really become an expert at something to in that's 10,000 hours of like, reading it, practicing it, breathing it, applying it embodying it right, the whole shebang before you really become an expert at something. So this is when a person has had so much practice with this with something that it becomes almost like second nature, like it's just wicked easy for you, you don't even have to think about it anymore. So you might just pause right now and think of something What's something in your life that you have total unconscious competence around, okay? This skill can be performed when you're doing other stuff, right? While you're executing other tasks while you're doing other things. You know, this thing is so deep in your bones, it's almost like in your DNA at this point, that you can just do it without even thinking about it. And at this point, is when you may, because not everybody can, but you might be able to also teach it to others. That's how proficient and expert ish, right you are. In this case, depending on how it was learned when it was learned, right? This becomes the stage of when you might now be able to take your, your expert, whatever skill set knowledge, whatever. And now pass it on to others, which is a pretty cool thing. So I'm sure in all places of your life, you are in different stages of this unconscious competence. This is when you're a novice, this is when you're ignorant. This is when you don't know what you don't know. conscious incompetence. This is when you're in beginner's mind. This is when you know that you don't know like you're aware like yeah, I don't know this thing. There's a gap here, right? Number three, conscious competence. This is when you are really proficient this is when you're like I can do the thing, but I still got to think about it. I know about it. But I have to think about it while I'm doing it while I'm learning it. And like I said, This could be anything that you're learning these apply. And number four, is an unconscious competent competence. And this is when you are an expert. This is when something just becomes really intuitive. You know, it's so well, you don't even have to think about it. Here's what's interesting, right? I love these different. So I told you, I was gonna hold up some graphs. So I found this little graph here. And I think that these are really funny. Okay. So stage one can also be called ignorance, right? And then stage four, that caught unconscious competence is sometimes called Mastery. But we're going to talk about that in a second. Okay, so stage one, you don't know that you don't know. Stage two, you know that you don't know, stage three, you know about it, but you got to think about it. Stage four, you know, it's so well, you don't even have to think about it anymore, which I think is pretty fantastic. But then here's the other thing. I love this other one I'm showing I'm showing you another little graph I found because I love the different ways that we can think about this. And the kind of teacher that I am, is I like to come at something from a bunch of different angles. Because remember going back to my, my days with monster.com. I know that people learn in really different ways. And in this case, because I can't you know, hand you anything or get your hands on things, whatever. All I can do is maybe talk about it for those of you who are watching, like I can hold something up. But mostly what I'm doing right now is verbal is verbal teaching, right? But I love to come at things from a couple of different angles. So we can also think about unconscious incompetence, right? So that's so unconscious. incompetence, that's stage one. Another way to think about this, you know, they sometimes say ignorance is bliss, right? That phrase ignorance is bliss. So you could also maybe think of that place as comfort. This place where you don't know that you don't know You're nice and comfortable with your opinions and you're nice and comfortable with like your ignorance, right? So that could be a place of comfort. But when you go into stage two, when you start to move into as you're learning, this conscious incompetence, like you start to become aware that you don't know what that can trigger sometimes for people is insecurity, they start to get a little nervous, they start to get all scared, they're like, oh, shit, I could get fired, because I don't know this, or I'm gonna make a mistake. Oh, my God, like you see it, you know, sometimes I have a lot of nurses in the family. And I've also talked to people who are in healthcare, and they're like, oh, when you're first learning to, like, try to find a vein to give somebody like an IV line or something. And you're like, Oh, my God, like, I practiced this a bunch of times. But I kind of know that I'm not the best at this, right. So there can be like, times when we have a little bit of insecurity. When you move into conscious competence, this is when you're more proficient, right? And you're like, I know this thing, I know how to do this thing, I still have to think about while I'm doing it, but we tend in this place to have confidence, right, I have the training, I have the skill, I put in the hours, I know how to like, do this thing. And I'm continuing to learn. So I have confidence in my ability to learn and bounce back from mistakes. And then there's the last one, right, which is unconscious competence. And this is when you start to feel more a sense of security, because you trust yourself, it is so in you that you don't even have to really think about it anymore. And I think we all in this lifetime, you know, have at least one thing that we are unconsciously competent about where it's like second nature, it just flows through you, you don't overthink it, it gets quiet in your head, and you just do the damn thing. You don't have to worry about it, you're like, give me the thing. I know how to do this. And that can be a really beautiful journey from moving from that place of comfort, because you don't know any better to insecurity because you're aware of that deficit or gap in your knowledge to a place of competence once you've started to do it more and more and more. And then when you hit those 10,000 hours, you drop into that place of what some people would call the expert, or a place of security. So I really liked kind of looking at it from that point of view as well. And then, let's see. Yeah, the last one I want to talk about this is kind of like the bonus one. So remember, I called it. So let's call this one, stage five. And this one is what we would call or is called right reflective mastery or reflective competence. Okay, so unconscious incompetence. Number one, number two, conscious incompetence. Number three, conscious competence. Number four, unconscious competence. And number five is reflective, conscious competence. And this is when you have mastery. This is when you kind of become like world class. This to me is like Bruce Lee level. That's how I kind of think about it, right? This is like Yoda level. This is like people who are masters of their craft, they are masterful. But what they have between Step Four And step five, or stage four and stage five, what they don't do is they don't get complacent. They don't stop at unconscious competence. They don't they don't they don't just stop and say, Oh, I know everything. I'm an expert now. Because to me, that ends up pointing us in some ways back in ignorance. Because we can become stale. We become complacent. We stop learning. We think we know everything, right? We lose our curiosity, we lose our beginner's mind, we're not open to seeing things from a different point of view. So this is when you know when to question your intuition. This is when you know how to eliminate errors. You are so masterful at this, that you How do I say this? You're so fucking good, that you know, to keep learning. You're so wise at this point that you know that there's always still more to learn. So it can be really tempting when you hit unconscious competence, and we see it a lot. I see it a lot in the arts. I see it a lot in the coaching world. I see it a lot in the entrepreneurial world. I see it a lot with writers or yoga teachers or whatever, is they just kind of rest on their laurels. Now I'm not saying there's not a time and a place to not be ingesting new information. I think practice, practice, practice, practice, right? I think apply apply apply. We don't always have to be consuming and learning and figuring out but we also don't want to pack a car in conscious you know unconscious competence and then stop being curious. Yes, and start being open minded and able to learn. So you guys, I hope you recognize yourself somewhere in here. I hope that knowing that there are different stages of learning that it inspires you or excites you to keep learning to want to improve whatever your skill set is, as my friend Walter Norton says, hashtag, let's

get better. Right? This is this is what the work that I do is all about in the alchemy, my group coaching program, and in the quest my one to one work, right. And when I have retreats, like my retreat on your magic that's coming up in November, you can find out about all of those Karen kenny.com, you'll just see them all on the homepage. This work is all about a friend was joking the other day said like, this is like be a better human school. Right? So we don't want to just get complacent and be like, oh, yeah, no, that Been there, done that, right. Like, it's like, no, let's keep our minds open. Let's keep our minds Young. Let's keep our minds in wonder. Let's keep our minds and curiosity. And stay open, calm, like, Forget everything you think, you know, and I don't mean forget it, like, like literally like wipe it from your mind. But be willing to be surprised. Be willing to learn from somebody who is just learning. Because it's just like why people say like, when you have babies around, or little kids around, they invoke a sense of wonder, because you're looking at things through fresh eyes and new eyes, and it can be a very exciting time. So you guys, I hope this was helpful for you in some way. That is always my intention, that when I do a show that somehow it will either educate or elevate or enlighten or entertain or evoke emotion and connect in some way. Right. So I hope this has been helpful. It's been wicked fun to talk about. And I'd love to know, what are some of the things that you have unconscious competence about? And what are some of the things that you're learning? Like what's lighten you up these days? What's floating your boat? What's tickling your fancy? What are you excited about? Drop a line. I appreciate it. You know, when I did the episode on I color intervention, a few of you actually took the time to send me colors of your eyes and told me what you thought your eye college was. And it was wicked fun. And I always love hearing from you guys. So thank you so much. So I hope you have an awesome rest of your day. And wherever you go, wherever you go, may you take your smarty pants brain and your a beginner's mind with you. Wherever you go, may you leave yourself and the people in the place and the planet and the animals better than how you found them. Wherever you go. May you be a blessing. Bye