Learning Cycle

Any athlete who is going remain truly competitive for their entire athletic career must always be open to learning and improving themself in whatever ways necessary during their career.

In my experience it is valuable for a coach and and an athlete to understand the learning cycle for an athlete to progress and continue learning and improving. Once someone understands the learning cycle, the dynamics involved in moving through the cycle, where resistance to learning and change comes from and how and why to overcome resistance the more likely that person is to continually improve as an athlete or as a coach or simply as a human being.

The stages in the learning cycle present both obstacles to improvement and opportunities for improvement. A coach needs to understand how each athlete responds or reacts to the obstacles or the opportunities in each stage and how to leverage an athlete's personality to minimise those obstacles and maximise those opportunities.

There are a number of "learning cycles" the one I will focus on here involves the following four stages:
- Unconsciously Incompetent
- Consciously Incompetent
- Consciously Competent
- Unconsciously Competent

Unconsciously Incompetent - I don't know or I am not aware of what I don't know or can't do.

In this stage the athlete is not aware of what they are not doing or what they are doing incorrectly.

It is a state of sometimes blissful ignorance. Sometimes the athlete may actually be incredibly frustrated because they are working really hard and not getting the desired results.

Unless an athlete develops an attitude of wanting to know what they can change or improve they can limit themselves enormously by remaining unaware of the areas where they can change or improve.

Consciously Incompetent - I know or I am aware of what I don't know or can't do.

This stage can be immensely challenging. It requires an athlete to acknowledge something they are currently incompetent at.

Fragile egos can block development at this stage by refusing to acknowledge incompetence. There are societal and peer pressures to pretend that we know it all and that we have no 'weaknesses' and that to acknowledge incompetence in an area is to be weak or inadequate as a person. The opposite is true as it takes courage, self-belief and self-love to acknowledge our own incompetence and to accept that we are less than perfect.

An athlete can improve when they frame their thinking something along these lines:

If there is nothing that I am incompetent at then there is nothing I can work on to improve so I will never get any better than I am now.
I need to welcome recognising those things that I am incompetent at because they hold the opportunities for me to improve.

Consciously Competent - I know or I am aware of what I know or can do

In this stage the athlete knows what they need to do but it is a constant challenge to do it. They need to consciously concentrate on the thing they are trying to do.

It often does not feel natural. They need to fight old habits, move out of comfort zones, build new habits, exercise sometimes extreme patience, become self-aware and positively self critical and self-correcting. Sometimes an athlete has to put pride aside and take steps back to be able to move forward again.

Repetition, repetition, repetition.

Self-disicipline, self-disicipline, self-discipline.

What is new can feel so "wrong". That feeling is actually a reaction to the unfamiliar. Sub-consciously most of us consider things that feel unfamiliar as wrong and so we fight the new and unfamiliar. Another reframing is needed here to understand that what is unfamiliar is not necessarily wrong. The new new thing feels unfamiliar because the old habit wants to be obeyed.

Here is one of the greates lies I have ever heard in coaching: "Practice makes perfect."

This cliche is trotted out time and again, the lie perpetuates and the athletes suffer. Here is what should be said:

Practice makes permanent. Imperfect practice makes imperfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Unconsciously Competent - I don't know or I am not aware of what I know or what I am doing correctly

This is the stage we strive for, where the athlete does a particluar thing correctly without being consciously aware of doing it correctly. The hours of repetitive practice, correction and self-correction are paying off. The correct technique is performed without the athlete having to consciously instruct themself to do it correctly. The mind is now free to do other things while this aspect of the athelete's skill set is performed effectively.

And so the athlete and coach look for further opportunities to apply this learning cycle and work on gaining additional improvements.

Any coach worth their salt should also always be searching for ways to apply the learning cycle to themself to be able to continually progress and continually increase their value to their athletes.