Learning stuff is great fun for many people, and a complete pain for others, and most would agree that there is never enough time to learn all the stuff that you want for that new job, or promotion, career change or just to be so damn good at something that everyone is prepared to pay you a tonne of cash just to get your thoughts on something.
And the reason for this is a good old thing called the competency model. No-one for sure knows where it comes from and it suggests that there are four stages of competency that we all go through”
1. Unconscious incompetence
You don’t know that a skill exists and therefore you don’t have it!
2. Conscious incompetence
You are aware of the existence of a skill but its something that you fail at or have to be very careful at doing successfully.
3. Conscious competence
You can successfully deploy the skill, although it takes conscious attention and concentration to do so.
4. Unconscious competence
You can do it in your sleep, the skill is “in the muscle” and requires no conscious processing power, it’s an automatic skill.
The idea is that to adopt a new skill you need to consciously work it out to the point that it becomes repetitive, at which point your unconscious says “hey I get it, it works like that, right?” and takes over. Learning to drive a car is a great example of these steps, if you are a driver, if not then consider walking. Our little man Ben has only recently moved to unconscious competence with walking, as he now happily eats, drinks and talks whilst walking, whereas a few weeks ago he would fall over if someone called his name whilst he was concentrating on putting one foot in front of another without losing balance.
So it works, as a model of learning it is very useful. It does, however, underestimate the power and intelligence of the unconscious mind. After all, does everything have to go through the conscious mind to be learnt? Can you think of examples of learning directly by the unconscious? How about music… do you consciously analyse the notes of a tune and go through the 4 stages to be able to hum something? The unconscious mind is very, very smart, and it can learn stuff all by itself and put you straight to step 4, if you let it. And if you would like to know how, read on.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I photoread. That is, I use a relaxation technique to allow my unconscious mind enough access to my eyes to be able to read stuff for me, such that when I dip into a book for information, or read a novel, it has already been pre-processed by the smart part of me.
This technique can be used with “how-to” books, those with step-by-step instructions, to allow the unconscious mind to process the steps directly and integrate them in to your behaviours without going through the first 3 steps. This technique is called Direct Learning. This is how it works:
1. Preview the book, flick through it for 5 minutes to get a feel for the structure and whether it is suitable for your purpose.
2. Note how you feel at the thought of having all of that knowledge “in the muscle”.
3. Go in to the accelerated learning state. Make positive affirmations about your ability to concentrate, and for your unconscious mind to absorb and apply the skills detailed in the book.
4. Photoread the book.
5. Return to your relaxed happy place, then imagine a timeline of your life. Note where you are right now on the timeline and where the future is. Then imagine yourself floating out of your body and along your timeline to situations in the future where those skills will be applied. Float in to your future self and notice the feelings evoked by having those skills. Notice what you see and hear, how people behave around you, and enjoy that situation. Float out of yourself and further forward to another time and repeat until you can really feel great about having those new skills.
Then, at a point way in the future where you can really notice how much better your life is for those having those skills, look back along the timeline to today and notice all of the changes that took place to get you to that point. Enjoy that feeling and float back to today, past all of those future scenarios, and return to your body. The point of this exercise is to give your unconscious mind a context within which to integrate the learnings. Oh and by the way if you manage to do this, then congratulations, you’ve learnt to hypnotise yourself in to reaching your goals!
5. Allow the changes to take place. Dismiss the thoughts from your conscious mind and trust yourself to make the changes. Changes are organic, they happen bit by bit, you won’t suddenly be able to juggle, though you might find you get really good quickly, and the more success you feel and enjoy, the quicker your unconscious will integrate the learnings.
Now, it is worth mentioning that you should do this with a number of books, some directly related and some indirectly. For example, I am currently using this to integrate NLP and Hypnotic language patterns. So I’m doing this with 4 “how to” NLP and hypnotic language books, plus another book on influence and a further book on coaching in general. This allows your unconscious mind to sift through the data and build robust functional models in 3 dimensions, filling in the gaps left by each book individually.
And so, finally, how am I getting on with this you ask? Well it’s only recently that I’ve felt confident enough in photoreading to give this a go. So this is my first exploration in to direct learning. Ask me again in a month and I’ll tell you about my success. Enjoy!
