Learning new skills can be difficult. It can often look like a path full of unknown pitfalls, despair at not learning fast enough and, of course, the unfiltered joy that comes from seeing the fruits of dedicated perseverance and newfound mastery of something you worked so hard on.
This isn’t something unique to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or martial arts, but BJJ does find itself uniquely situated to express this dilemma, with so much to learn before considering yourself truly competent in this sport.
Not only do you need a vocabulary of basic moves (like the arm bar or how to take someone’s back) but also the endless, smaller refinements and thousands of micro-adjustments that stand between knowing some moves and true fluency. These make all the difference when it comes to mastering fluid transitions from position to position, knowing how to react, how to shift weight, how to anticipate and how to, in short, be good at BJJ.
[Fundamentals of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu]
It’s a fascinating journey from showing up on your very first day, unsure of how to tie your fresh white belt to eventually becoming one with your movements — able to display a relaxed, playful mastery of yourself and your opponent.
Psychologists and business managers have also been interested in this progression of mastery and how it applies to other skills. They have created a handy chart breaking down this path named ‘The Four Stages of Competence.’ While you can apply this concept to any skill in life, we will continue using the BJJ journey as apply this concept to understand how we can progress.
Unconscious incompetence
This represents the first stage of learning a new skill. You don’t understand how to do something, and don’t have the knowledge to recognize what you’re missing. In some cases, you may even deny the usefulness of the skill. I never thought the de la riva technique would be something I’d use, yet it has become a favorite in my game.
At this stage, your very intuition may feel — and even be — wrong. Someone takes your back, and your mind screams to go belly down. Someone baits a triangle, and you pull that one arm out as fast as possible. You got mounted… Well, the best course of action is obviously to push them off with full straight arms, right?! (No, no, no to all of these!)
To progress from this stage, you have to realize you don’t know much and have a beginner’s mindset, being completely open to the idea that everything you thought you knew could be completely wrong. Until you admit this, you’re not going to grow.
Conscious incompetence
The next stage, conscious incompetence, is a fun stage where the most growth can happen. You now recognize that you don’t know a lot, but at least you understand the shape and, possibly, size of the problem.
Perhaps you now know all the positions in BJJ; you know you need to get out of a guard and pass into a better position. However, you try a knee slide pass to side control, but you turn too far away or don’t shut down your opponent’s hips and wind up with your back taken.
Yes, you still messed up, but now you can analyze where you made mistakes and learn how to progress from there. Your BJJ no longer consists of random floundering –it may involve some incorrect analysis, but you’re self-aware enough to recognize
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Conscious competence
Aside from the thrill of the previous stage’s rapid progression, this is where BJJ gets the most fun. You now know basic good Jiu Jitsu, you can break down the steps needed to achieve your desired outcome, you know how to get from A to B, you’ve even figured out why that old injured brown belt keeps shutting down everything you try despite throwing more and more new moves you found on Instagram at him. (By the way, don’t do this.)
In short, you understand what you’re doing and how to do it. However, this all still requires a lot of intense concentration. While you might fundamentally understand what you need to do, any lapse in focus during a roll can shatter that hard earned concentration and lead to you making a mistake.
This also represents the stage where you can do everything right, not make any mistakes, and still lose. This happens largely because the speed of the how fast you can implement your newfound conscious competence will take time to catch up. You can have the right analysis for a given situation, but your intuition hasn’t caught up with the new skill.
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Unconscious competence
The final stage of this learning progression involves unconscious competence. You’ve practiced so much that Jiu Jitsu has become second nature. You almost never have to think to execute high level maneuvers or react correctly.
At this stage, you could even perform other tasks at the same time — like holding a conversation with someone on the sideline while shutting down that pesky, new blue belt hungry to pass your guard. This stage also makes for effective teaching, as you’ve developed such an understanding of the skills necessary that simplifying them feels natural.
While this stage brings us to the final stage of the skill progression, it’s very much not the end of the journey. Once you reach this stage, you can look back on your game, and the moves you adopted, and see them much clearer. You can reiterate these four stages in more specific variations of the fundamentals you learned so long ago, endlessly repeating the process of learning in pursuit of refining martial arts.
Martial arts have so much to teach us, from life lessons and understanding people to how most effectively you can beat up your classmates and friends in a friendly match. The concept of ‘The Four Stages of Competence’ merely provides a way for you to conceptualize your own journey and where on the spectrum you lay.
The arts of Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai represent an endless source of novelty as every year, more and more ideas and techniques spill out, making the pursuit of mastery and unconscious competence an endless journey. To practice an open mind, ask questions. Do something so many times correctly that it becomes second nature.
