Choose to Take the Journey

So I started taking golf lessons recently. My first thought was, “My god, this is an expensive hobby.” My second thought was, “Good god, this is an expensive hobby!” And my third thought was, “Why am I so bad at this?!” I had no idea I could actually be so inept at something at which I thought I was fairly adept. I spent an entire lesson trying to achieve a single proper swing with an 8-iron club. Even by the lesson’s end, I was unable to make the needed corrections to my form. Searching for encouragement within my demoralized brain, I came upon the legendary Bruce Lee.

I remembered that he often waxed eloquent about the 4 stages of competence, stages that everyone must pass through in order to achieve mastery at anything.

The first stage is unconscious incompetence. It is essentially where I was before I started taking lessons. My skills were lacking, but I was unaware that they were lacking to begin with.

The second stage is conscious incompetence. It’s exactly what it sounds like. I’m still incompetent, but at least I know I am. I may even know where I err, but up until this point I have been unable to correct course.

The third stage is conscious competence. It’s the stage I would like to reach by the end of my beginner’s set of lessons. With concentration and willed effort, I should be able to hit the ball with proper form and in a respectably consistent manner.

The fourth and final stage is unconscious competence. Not only are you successful, but the path to your success has been engraved into your nervous system. Your body knows what to do without your mind directing every little muscle movement and position. It is like playing a song on an instrument, forgetting what comes next, and yet your body proceeds uninterrupted. In fact, over-thinking each note may actually cause you to falter. That is why you may want to pay for professional instruction at the outset. You don’t want to embed mistakes into your unconscious mind and body, or you may have to spend years trying to undo them as you pass through the 4 stages. Most people will give up during the stage of conscious incompetence. Their psychology becomes overtaken with frustration at their ineptitude, when if they just kept at it a little while longer, they would achieve the emotional high that signals their arrival into competence.