HOW DO YOU BECOME AN EXPERT?

In the last Neuro-Semantic “Wisdoms,” July 8, I spoke about competence. I asked the question, “Who wants to be competent?” and then made several distinctions. The first one is the distinction between confidence and competence. It is a strange, and to my mind, a weird thing that so many people come to trainings or coaching wanting confidence. When we ask, “What do you want to achieve?” They say that they want to feel confident. A great many of them seem oblivious to the fact that you cannot legitimately feel confident if you are not actually skillfully competent to do with what you want to do.

But that’s the thing. Confidence without competence means you are fooling yourself. And it probably means that you are wanting to con others into thinking you can do something which you actually cannot. The problem of “confidence without competence” is that that is the definition of a fool who thinks he is something he is not. So first, if you want to feel confident, then do what is required to become skillful. Then confidence will naturally follow.

The next distinction distinguishes between having some skills and being competent. They are not the same. Question: Can you be skilled and competent at the same time? Yes. That is possible. You could become highly skillful in a particular skill, in fact, highly competent in doing that skill. But if the skill is a part of something larger, then you could have some skills, but not sufficient skills for competency. You could be skillful in scrambling eggs, but that is just one sub-skill of being a competent chef. You could be skillful at fixing a flat tire, but that is just one sub-skill of being a competent auto-mechanic.

The point? One sub-skill within the full range of skills necessary for a particular competency does not make you competent. You may be able to organize your thoughts into a coherent order but that does not, in itself, make you an effective public speaker. You may be skilled in asking Meta-Model questions, but that does not make you an effective coach or modeler. Each of those competencies requires more than just the questioning skill.

Actually, most competencies do not refer to a single thing or a simple thing. It is involves a lot of things at both the primary level and many more at the meta-level.

Knowing about the skill: know what, understanding. Knowing how to implement the skill: know-how, implementation. Ability (capacity) to do X. Context where to do X. Timing for when and how long. Practice, discipline, motivation. State: the right state, the right intensity. Convincer: person’s unique convincer strategy. Feedback loop: receiving and using feedback information to keep shaping a response.

Standards to evaluate: values, criteria. Intention to develop: Intentionality, purpose, one’s big why.

No wonder competency generally takes a lot longer than just learning a few skills. Once you know the skills and can perform them at will, then you have to integrate all of the sub-skills into a single unified response and do that until it becomes dependable and consistent. Competence requires a full integration. Anders Ericsson who studied expertise and developed the 10,000 hour rule (10 year rule) said that it does not arise from merely “practicing.” It arises from a special form of practice—deliberate practice.

This refers to breaking down a skill into its most elemental variables and then practicing each of those variables one at a time until it becomes a behavior that you can do with consistent dependability. That means doing it until it becomes automatic. At that point, it’s yours. Every sports-person knows that. Athletes know that you never get away from the basics. You keep returning to the basics to keep those fundamental variables fresh and rejuvenated. Baseball plays get together for “Spring Practice.” What do they do? They throw and catch the baseball; they practice pitching and batting the ball. Basics!

When you see true expertise or mastery and you stand back and observe it, it is awe-inspiring. We stand amazed at the athletic skills we see in the Olympics. We ask ourselves, “How did she do that?” “How did he learn that?” What comes together in one of those performances are a lot of sub-skills that were practiced over and over and over until the competence emerged as something more than the sum of the parts.

How do you become competent and develop expertise? Learning, implementation, and a thousand hours of practice every year. By contrast, many are self-deceived is in thinking that because they “understand” something, they know how to do it. What’s deceptive is that between knowing and doing is a gap—the neurological gap of translating from mind into neurology so that you body ‘knows’ how to do it. True competency requires that. And how you know what we’re doing in Neuro-Semantics to help people become experts.