• Unconscious Incompetence is where you don’t know you’re not doing ‘something’ well.
• Conscious Incompetence is where you’ve discovered you are not doing something well but you now know that you are doing it.
• Conscious Competence is where you begin to change the ‘something’ but you can only do this while consciously making yourself make the change.
• Unconscious Competence is where you have absorbed your change so that you know you can do it without thinking about it.

These are useful for thinking about learning new skills, maybe you’ve recently learned that you sabotage yourself in relationships by moving too fast, too slow or having expectations very different from your partners’

At first you may not know that you do this: Unconscious Incompetence.

Then you meet somebody who tells you what you do and you begin to recognise that this doesn’t work for you: Conscious Incompetence

So, you learn about your expectations in a group, maybe meditate on your neediness or a fear of commitment and decide to practice these new behaviours. Sometimes you do this well: Conscious Competence and sometimes you forget; back to Unconscious Incompetence.

Eventually you begin to be these newer ways and forget the process, they have become who you are and this is: Unconscious Competence.

for more: prochaska & clemente