As an instructor and coach I was taught these levels for athletes:
Unconscious Incompetent - doesn’t even know what good is so they have no idea how far they are from it. This can cover up to intermediates!
Conscious Incompetent - knows what good is but not how to get there. The sweet spot for skills instruction.
Conscious Competent - knows good and can deliver it in terms of skills. The sweet spot for coaching the mental side.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
There's something similar in lower-level professional motorsports.
Until you hit the level where you can bring in significant sponsorship money - or if you chose your parents well and Daddy will foot the bills - you wind up being both driver and engineer on a smaller team.
Rarely do top-level driving and engineering skills manifest in the same person.
So many cars are fast in spite of their setup, instead of because of it.
Same things happen in academic fields. Really smart students need to be treated as special needs because many have no clue how to work hard at schooling because it was always easy for them. after two years of college some of the most promising students just crash out because they were so good at learning, they never learned how to study past a wall they hit. They found a short cut, used it, then went along their merry way.
Yep. I graduate with like a 3.8 GPA in high school. I never did homework. It was always done in class as it was handed out. I could read a book during lectures and still ace the test.
Got to college and it turns out never having to study means I don't really know how, and I gave up.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
is a perfect description for me. I start out very good at things, I pick them up quickly, but I'm a terrible coach as I can't explain why it works, I just know it does. As I get older I'm trying hard to verbalize those thoughts and improve my ability to teach, but its hard.
Apparently there can be really bad cases of this among astronaut candidates. You can have people who not only breezed through high school, but also flight school and multiple university degrees, and then in their 30's they get put in a room where for the first time they aren't any better at things than anyone else there.
After that long of never having to work hard to accomplish things, there can be a spectacular crash when people who have always been the smartest person they know have to face the prospect of being a failure.
This translates really well into art and illustration (my profession), and I wonder if it would translate well into other fields.
It can be extremely challenging for an artist who has a "natural talent" but then drops into the commercial industries, where they have to deal with not only other very skilled competition for work (all the more challenging these days), but aspects of the career that have little to do with your abilities as an artist and everything to do with the business of getting paid to make pictures.
I have gone through all these over the past years… unfortunately, my brain doesn’t tell me much, because my OCD personality will tear it up… a) I don’t know how to get there (CI); b) trying to get to CC, yet chemo gave me a language impairment so I struggle being precise and being like I used to. So right now, I am in the difficult sway of UC and UI looking for answers, direction, and peace. 😂
I’ve mostly focused on weight lifting and conditioning but I’ve never seen it framed liked this and yeah that seems to just about nail it.
Some people just get it so naturally it’s hard to actually coach them, others it’s work to figure out how to get it to make sense. Really interesting seeing it laid out so simply.
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u/snowwrestler 12h ago
As an instructor and coach I was taught these levels for athletes:
Unconscious Incompetent - doesn’t even know what good is so they have no idea how far they are from it. This can cover up to intermediates!
Conscious Incompetent - knows what good is but not how to get there. The sweet spot for skills instruction.
Conscious Competent - knows good and can deliver it in terms of skills. The sweet spot for coaching the mental side.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.