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It´s nearly been a week since I arrived to start a new chapter in my life with Boyfriend-W in Benidorm. It´s been a time of learning, a new language, a new job, a new life style (sleeping some of the day to stay up later in the evening and most importantly living with someone).

With the language I´ve started watching YouTube videos such as:

As for my new job table waiting I´ve been shaddowing my colleagues watching and more importantly getting my hands dirty and pitching in. My first night I was quite fustrated with myself – feeling like I wasn´t picking things up quick enough. I´ve never done this sort of work before and learned that I´m actually quite hard on myself. I had to remind myself of the stages of competence:

The Four Stages

Unconscious Incompetence
The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.

Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she may or may not be able teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Natural language is an example of unconscious competence. Not every native speaker who can understand and be understood in a language is competent to teach it. Distinguishing between unconscious competence for performance-only, versus unconscious competence with the ability to teach, the term “kinesthetic competence” is sometimes used for the ability to perform but not to teach, while “theoretic competence” refers to the ability to do both.

Certain brain personality types favor certain skills (see the Benziger theory), and each individual possesses different natural strengths and preferences. Therefore, advancing from, say, stage 3 to 4 in one skill might be easier for one person than for another. Certain individuals will even resist progression to stage 2, because they refuse to acknowledge or accept the relevance and benefit of a particular skill or ability. Individuals develop competence only after they recognize the relevance of their own incompetence in the skill concerned.

Possible Fifth Stage
Many attempts have been made to add to this competence model. This addition would be a fifth stage, and there have been many different suggestions for what this fifth stage would be called. One suggestion is that it be called “Conscious competence of unconscious competence”. This would describe a person’s ability to recognize and develop unconscious competence in others.

Another suggestion by consultant David Baume:

As a fifth level, I like what I call ‘reflective competence’. As a teacher, I thought “If unconscious competence is the top level, then how on earth can I teach things I’m unconsciously competent at?” I didn’t want to regress to conscious competence – and I’m not sure if I could even I wanted to! So, reflective competence – a step beyond unconscious competence. Conscious of my own unconscious competence, yes, as you suggest. But additionally looking at my unconscious competence from the outside, digging to find and understand the theories and models and beliefs that clearly, based on looking at what I do, now inform what I do and how I do it. These won’t be the exact same theories and models and beliefs that I learned consciously and then became unconscious of. They’ll include new ones, the ones that comprise my particular expertise. And when I’ve surfaced them, I can talk about them and test them. Nonaka is good on this
—Nonaka, I. (1994). “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation.” Organization Science 5: 14-37. (David Baume, May 2004)
(From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence, Last Accessed: 29 May 2010)

I´m currently conscious incompetent but getting better all the time.

As for my new life style, I´m loving it. Loving being with Boyfriend-W, going to bed with him and waking up with him. I´m adjusting my body clock to the evenings and most importantly looking forward to learning more.

Write soon,

Antony