The road to mastery

Many years ago I read a wonderful book on mastery. If I remember it was mainly about mastery in sports, but the ideas could be applied to mastery in all fields including weight management .

The gist of the book was that it is a journey to mastery. You start as someone who is not even interested in the topic or perhaps you do not know the field exists.

Next you are in the novice stage. At this time perhaps you know next to nothing about the field. This is the stage of conscious incompetence. Here you have to think about everything you do consciously. Thus if you are learning to drive with a stick shift you have to think, "OK, first press the clutch down. Now, move the gear forward. Next, slowly bring your foot back out…"

Soon you will get to the next stage when you basically know what you are doing but you still have to consciously think about it. So the gears no longer "crunch."  You can start the car moving forard on steep inclines with it rolling backward. But you have to think about it.

Finally you have mastered the task. You do it automatically without thinking about it consciously. This is the stage of unconscious competence.

Now what the book mastery wrote about is that on the journey from conscious incompetence to unconscious mastery you have quite a few bumps in the road. You plateau for a while and appear not to improve at all. In complex tasks such as reducing your weight, learning to ski, learning to play the piano there are times (sometime a long while) when you move backward even.

This can happen because you have learned something wrongly and you have to first unlearn a bad habit (say in skiing the way you hold your knees) and then you can learn a better habit. The trick is not to become discouraged on the way and just continue to persist.

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