Be brave enough to suck at something new

Have you ever played the game of “what if” over wine with friends? You know the one: what if you won the lottery...

The responses usually focus on using the money to benefit key priorities such as family, travel, hobbies, and surprisingly, exploring alternative jobs. Many of my mid-career friends would leverage this as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. To explore passions and develop new skills.

While it's fun to imagine a world with no boundaries, it’s also something I’ve explored in real life. Sure, limitations do exist. However, I’ve found those walls are much farther away than I tend to give myself credit for.

Change is difficult, especially if the current post boosts our confidence and makes us feel safe. In Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast, Simon Sinek shares the concept of the infinite game – that unlike sports, in business there is no binary result. No winning or losing, the rules are fluid, and the goal is to just keep on playing.

Even though Simon coined this term, it made me realize I've been playing the infinite game for some time now. Unintentionally. Looking back on my presales days, the job was comfortable, colleagues were familiar, and my performance was well received. Then, I watched the leaders around me grow to more strategic roles and it became an aspiration of mine.

But...I lacked the strategic skillset to efficiently lead an organization on a broader scale.

As timing would have it, the Corporate Strategy team was hiring in Germany. With six years of experience under my belt, I was confident my background was enough. As the ink on the offer dried, my family now relocated to Deutschland, the reality of the first week on the job hit me hard. It was very evident my existing skills needed an upgrade.

Many years later, I learned the clinical definition of that feeling. It's the Four Stages of Competence. To demonstrate, here's my recent experience witnessing it in the passenger seat...literally as I taught my son to drive.

Credit: Noel Burch, Gordon Training International in the 1970s

Unconscious Incompetence

• He was so sure it was “going to be a breeze”, after all his old man does it while on a Bluetooth call. How hard could it be?

Conscious Incompetence

• Shockingly it is pretty difficult and nothing like Mario Kart, with the exception of the odd banana peel on the road.

Conscious Competence

• I don’t stomp on the imaginary break anymore and we run errands together comfortably. However, he still needs a silent car to stay concentrated. ?

Unconscious Competence

• Eventually he’ll drive without thinking about it, cruising with Spotify on.

For the majority, you'll start to notice most learning processes follow these steps. As we become better at admitting we don’t know everything, it becomes less scary (or even thrilling) to jump into the unknown.

To conclude: play the infinite game, embrace the stages of competence, and keep asking yourself...

If I weren't here, where would I be?