01/18/2025
NOT LINEAR!!! Sometimes you have to go BACK DOWN this chart! 😬🫣
 (More on that later.)
First….
1.) This chart describes moving from ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ up to having awareness, but not competence, to being competent if you concentrate, to being able to automatically do a skill instinctively without giving any thought. 
Let’s use the example of driving a stick shift car. Let’s say you don’t even know that stick shift cars exist. You know how to drive an automatic and you don’t even know that there are other cars out there with manual transmissions- that’s clearly unconscious incompetence. Conscious incompetence spans the whole way from knowing that they exist not having ever seen a stick shift, to logically understanding the steps and having tried a bunch of times, but you keep stalling it out, and fail as often as you succeed at attempting to change gears. Conscious competence might mean you can barely drive stick as long as you’re concentrating. Maybe someone is talking to you through it, and you might pop the clutch occasionally, but you’re not stalling out anymore. Conscious competence might also mean that you’ve gotten really good at driving stick but you have to remind yourself each time to change gears. Unconscious competence means you can hold a conversation and drive the car and not even pause the conversation to shift. It’s like your hands and feet just automatically do the thing.
2.) It is supposed to be applied to microskills! So do not apply this chart to big concepts like “riding horses” but rather apply it to a detailed skill like “moving your hips with the horse during a trot leg yield,” or “softening the left rein momentarily after the horse gives correct poll flexion left.” You might be uncon competent at getting left poll flexion, but simultaneously completely unaware (unconsciously incompetent) of the fact that you keep hanging on your left rein even after you get it!
3.) And THAT is ONE reason why we sometimes have to go backwards down the chart.…. You might have to become more consciously aware of when and how you achieve flexion left in order to improve the timing of your release.
Another reason you might have to take a step back down this chart is so that you can take a skill that you utilize instinctively, and become more consciously aware of it, so that you can utilize it even better. For example, I was quite young when I learned how to use exclusively my seat to pick up the canter…. But at that point, I had never taught a lesson, and had never started a young horse. I could pick up a canter, on multiple horses, on either lead, by just thinking ”canter,” but I didn’t know how to teach it to a student, and I didn’t know how to teach it to a green horse.
When I first tried to really think about what my body was doing, I temporarily lost the ability to do it! As soon as I started thinking about it, I suffered paralysis by analysis and became consciously incompetent! But then I figured it out, but now I have the choice over whether I want to be consciously competent or unconsciously competent. If I just want to think canter and go, I certainly can. But I now also have words to describe what it is that I do, and I have the ability to consciously tweak my aids if needed. This makes me a better problem solver then just instinctively knowing how to do the thing.
4.) There is a lot going on when we ride - A LOT! So we absolutely must be able to do the large majority of our skills with unconscious competence. Too often people get to where they are just barely consciously competent at one skill, and then try to stack a new skill on top of it.  Take your time.  Bouncing back and forth between using your brain for one skill versus another skill can make it take longer to get good at either. This is especially true with seat issues!!! If you have an issue with your seat, please focus on fixing it with dogged determination!!! 
5.) Unconscious competence can slip into unconscious incompetence when you’re not paying attention! And maybe your right knee used to turn way out and you worked really hard to fix it! You may have spent a couple years concentrating on keeping your right leg turned in and stepping into your right stirrup. You practiced until you could stop thinking about it and still maintain a correct leg position. Congrats. But some time has gone by and you haven’t checked back in and isn’t that darn knee turning out again!
So basically, your goal is to move skills up the chart from unconscious incompetence, the whole way up until skills, become automatic , but you also want to make sure you come back into conscious competence from time to time in order to check in, and utilize your skills WITH your awareness so that you can improve them further, and prevent unknowingly back sliding. 
