New competencies: the 4 stages of learning

If you want to (start) learning something new, there are 4 stages you go through before you can say you have a particular skill. Noel Burch created the 4 stages of competence in the 1970s. This is a model you can use when learning something new, such as hypnosis. This is a model that deals with your subconscious and your conscious when it comes to learning something new

After all, before you start learning anything new, all sorts of things are already happening in your subconscious until you can consciously say, "Yes, I am a hypnotist!"

Also, if you are in the process of teaching your clients something new, it is helpful to know the four stages. That way you can check where your client is in the stages of learning during the hypnosis treatment.

So you have 4 stages:

1. Subconsciously can't do something.
2. Consciously not being able to do something.
3. Consciously wanting to be able to do something.
4. Unconscious ability.

Stage 1: Subconsciously not being able to do something

Do you know the phrase, ignorance is bliss? Remember when you were a virgin and didn't know why everyone still didn't get off on talking about sex?

If you don't know something exists you don't miss it.

If you don't know what knowledge you're missing, you just don't know it. In the first stage of learning something new, you are not even aware that there is something new to learn.

For example, many people who go to college find that the more they learn, the more they know they know nothing.

While there are also people who know almost nothing, but think they know everything. Especially those people are still in stage 1, because they are unaware that they cannot or do not know something.

Stage 2: Consciously not being able to do something

Did I mention about people learning something new and finding out that the more they learn, the more they realize they know very little?

At some point, you become aware that there is something you cannot do. You lack certain skills that have suddenly become important in your life. These may be skills related to your personal life or your professional life.

You know something exists and you also know you're not good at it.

For example, your client might suddenly realize that he or she is allowed to stand up for themselves, but also knows that this is a skill they haven’t yet mastered.

Even if you are just starting out as a hypnotist or are still in training, you may find that there are certain techniques that you can use to help your client very well, but unfortunately you are not good enough at them yet.

Especially then, you have to keep practicing and practicing and practicing.

Also, forgive yourself for going wrong once in a while. You are only human, and it is in the moments when things go wrong that you can learn an awful lot.

Remember what it was like to learn to ride a bike? Keeping your balance was difficult and even steering sometimes went wrong. You knew it was important to learn to ride a bike to get to school and your friends, but it was still quite difficult.

Especially since it could take a long time to ride a bicycle without training training wheels, this learning process could be long and frustrating. This was mainly because you were aware that you couldn't do it.

Has cycling been a piece of cake for you? Then think back to math, Dutch or any other frustrating subject in high school.

Stage 3: Consciously wanting to be able to do something

During this stage, you know approximately what you need to do to accomplish a task, but you still need to be incredibly focused.

For example, if you have learned English, or any other foreign language, often in the early stages you are still incredibly busy translating the words in your head and putting them in the right place in the sentence.

Indeed, in Latin languages, such as French and Spanish, the word "also" (aussie and tambien) is placed at the end of the sentence rather than in the middle of the sentence, as in Dutch.

By now you are probably fluent in English and this is much more automatic.

Or perhaps you can recall it more clearly from the time when you were learning hypnosis. Induction techniques—you knew what to do, but you still had to really force yourself to strike the right tone, put a smile on your face for your client so they’d feel good too, and so on.

At this stage, you’ve essentially already mastered the skill, but you may still experience stress during tests, which can cause you to perform poorly.

Stage 4: Unconsciously being able to do something

Logically, in the final stage, you can do something without really thinking about it. You can now perform an induction on a client (almost completely) mindlessly. You react automatically to how your client reacts.

You know exactly what and how to say something to get a resistant client into hypnosis anyway, where in Stage 3 this was still a step too far.

Learning a competency under hypnosis

Whether it's learning a language, learning to ride a bike or hypnosis for everything you learn you go through these 4 stages.

At some point you become aware that you want to learn something, that you can't, that you can do it with effort and then it becomes automatic.

Moving through these stages is also at a different speed for everything you learn. Whereas you can learn to ride a bike in 1 afternoon (if you're lucky), learning to drive a car can still take up to 2 weeks or even a month all in all.

Now that you know what phases there are, this can help you feel less frustrated if a phase feels incredibly long to you. Therefore, it can also help to tell your client what he/she is going to experience while learning a new skill with hypnosis.

If your client gets frustrated because he/she is just not succeeding at something, you can reassure your client that this is all part of the learning process.

It does not matter if this involves learning that spiders or other animals are not scary or learning that it is ok to walk down the street and other people really don't think anything of it at all.

Get rid of restlessness by learning something

If your client comes to you because he/she is "stuck" in the life he/she has now. You can help him/her. Often this is stage 1. Your client cannot do something, he/she feels it, but does not yet know what it is.

After conducting conversations, you can form a picture of what is missing. The client may also realize this after engaging in a Socratic dialogue or regression.

If you find that he/she secretly already knows, but is not yet aware of it, it can help to conduct an induction in which your client is at the beginning of a new discovery. Your client feels the solution of what he/she needs to learn bubble to the surface, so to speak.

Of course, for discovering what they need to learn, other techniques are also available. When this is accomplished you will find that your client feels relieved because they have a new goal to pursue, a new thing to learn.

Being able to explain the 4 stages your client will go through also makes it a lot less scary to take that new path. After all, if you know what to expect, the new path is less unfamiliar.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and exactly how it works? Then come to a workshop or sign up for the training program at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.