Four levels of learning – Conscious competence

The personal competence model

Unconscious Incompetence – We don’t know what we don’t know
Conscious Incompetence – We know what we don’t know
Conscious Competence – We know what we know
Unconscious Competence – We don’t know what we know

How to use the Personal competence awareness model:

To communicate with and influence learners it is a prerequisite to prepare them for your ideas and for them to accept the ideas of others (in the group).

Preparing them requires you to understand how and why they react.

An ideal way of understanding an audience is to remember what it was like for you when you first started learning a subject which you subsequently found to be quite difficult.

You may have gone through the four levels of competence or learning channels.

1 To explain these levels you need only think your own experience when you

first started learning to drive to drive. Before your first lesson, you may have been full of confidence thinking it would be easy. This first stage is described as the level of unconscious incompetence – you don’t know how bad you are yeti You are unaware of your own incompetence.

2 When you started to drive you would have then found out how difficult it 

was and you would have been aware of your own inability or incompetence. This stage is the level of conscious incompetence when you know how little you know. It is at this stage that people feel most uncomfortable.

3  After driving for some time you will have gained more confidence and you 

then became aware of how well you were doing – this is the level of conscious competence, when you are aware of your own competence.

4 Finally, you passed the test and started driving without even having to think 

of the sequence of steps needed to drive a car, you simply did it. This final stage is the level of unconscious competence where being good at something no longer requires a conscious thought process. You are now unconsciously competent. The second stage of the cycle is the one that causes us the most anguish. Human beings as a rule don’t like to know, they don’t know and this is where preparation is of vital importance.

How you prepare an audience will have a great bearing on how much you will communicate with them and how much they will allow you to influence them.

We start by acknowledging possible discomfort. We explain that what may be said may be new but that with sufficient time and explanation things will become clearer and easier. We recognise that there may be certain apprehensions, perhaps even misgivings about the subject. We point out that others, who may have felt the same thing before, benefited and are now using what we are talking about. The preparation is simply to put people at ease about themselves.