Changing Your Habits with the 4 Changes of Competence (part 1)

Changing your habits is a hard thing to do.

What’s needed to achieve the habit shifts that lead to improved productivity is to be mindful enough of your existing habits so as to know where the improvements can come from.

Whilst this sounds like the easiest thing in the world, I’m sure we all know that it can be anything but. 

The ‘Four Stages of Competence’ model describes four stages that you must travel through when adopting any new skill or technique. Be self-critical enough to diagnose where your biggest productivity improvements may come from.

Over a series of 4 blog posts, we’ll explain the 4 stages

CORD Technique: time management

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE

Before you could drive a car, when you sat in the back seat or in the passenger seat and you watched someone drive, what did that driving look like to you?

It looked almost magical!

All of those knobs and levers and buttons and turning of keys and looking in mirrors. So complicated.

What you have there is an unconscious incompetence.

If at that point in your life, I asked you what would be required to even learn how to drive, or gave you a car and a private racetrack and told you to get on with learning to drive by teaching yourself, you’d probably struggle! You might even struggle with how to turn it on! You don’t know how to drive and you don’t know what you’d need to learn to change this.

 

You can find out more about the CORD technique at our How to Get Things Done Workshop

 

 

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