As a business coach and mentor, working in the Midlands and London, I am often coaching business owners and directors around the subject of recognising how Masterful they are or how Masterful their staff are in a particular field. Often this has a lot to do with their uniqueness and the uniqe selling/sales point  - called the USP. It is all about being the business expert or being Masterful at something but because it is normal to the individual they don't see it as expertness or Masterful. One way of explaining this Masterfulship is with the Unconscious Competence model and this article, which uses the Ugly Duckling story as an example, will help you identify your Masterfulship, come out from where you are and recognise how expert you are.

After reading this tip sheet, you will:

• have a good understanding about Unconscious Competence
• start to recognise where your Unconscious Competence lies or begin to start looking for it
• understand that maybe you cannot see your own “expertness” but someone outside of you can
• make yourself think about your behaviours to discover what are the different parts of your Unconscious Competence
• be able to create your own exciting USP’s based on your Unconscious Competence

Masterful - Business expert and Unconscious Competence

We are all ugly ducklings and beautiful swans within .. it is just a question of recognising it… how to recognise what we consider as normal in oneself but is really excellence and translating that into a language that others can understand

I have no idea if you have been driving along and suddenly you ”wake up” after a few miles and have no recollection of having driven them. Well, when I talk to people in my workshops about “unconscious competence”, it seems that a number of people have these moments. Basically, it was your unconscious competence doing all the driving for you ie. something you do so naturally that you don’t know you’re doing it and all of this whilst you were chatting to someone

All this came to me when Shahida, one of my clients said she was having difficulties communicating to a very good friend of hers, Leah, who was also responsible for recruiting her for a new job. The challenge they both had was that they were talking but they were not able to communicate. They both knew that Shahida was just the ticket for the job but there was a brick wall and they both agreed to have another meeting once Shahida had put her ideas down on paper.

While that was all very well but Shahida is not an “ideas on paper” lady. She is very much a creative, ideas-led person, lives in the moment, excellent spokesperson, “meeter and greeter” of people, imbues excellent trust and feel-good factor amongst strangers, but to put on paper the plan, the process, the steps, well that’s kind of difficult .. except that this bit is easy for her “boss” friend Leah, who believe it or not is not a “meeter and greeter”, has difficulty standing up and talking to groups and audiences, thinks long and hard about what she is or isn't going to do, runs numbers and scenarios through her head time and time again, before making a decision.

The fact was that neither understood the difficulty that the other was having understanding the other. They were both talking from their own unconscious competences and neither was communicating in the other person's competences language. They were both talking about something that was so automatic and natural to themselves that they couldn't possibly understand how or why the other one didn't understand what each one was talking about.

Shahida’s language was all about energy and passion and taking great the leaps in thoughts from one idea to another missing out huge parts of the process, with lots of waiving of her arms and Leah was just lost. Shahida’s words were tumbling out in a torrent of energy, much too fast for Leah’s processor type brain. Leah was trying to hear and see a plan, map, even some steps but structure was something that Shahida’s brain did not do at the best of times. This time it was less than structured as it was all so “instantaneous”.

The interesting thing for me as an outsider was that both of them were approaching the art project from exactly the same unconscious values of passion for art, artists and creativity but their implementation process was completely different. Shahida’s process was instantaneous, seat of the pants, impulsive ideas whilst Leah’s was to think, then plan a process and finally implement it.

The saving grace was that they both had the same unconscious driver of going the extra mile to “do what was needed to make it work” - “it” being their relationship and the project. If egos or any prejudices had been involved, it is highly probable that they would not have both agreed to another meeting to think how they could discuss “it”, the project, in more detail.

Once they realised that they both had huge amounts of unconscious competences to give each other, to fill in each other's gaps, all they had to do was to honour each other's thought processes and gradually “have a meeting of their minds”.

The lesson from this short event is one that this type of event is occurring all over the place to many of us when we are talking to business colleagues, friends, loved ones and of course to ourselves.

The solution is to honour the difference and use it to create a solution using both unconscious strengths. The trick is to understand that we all have these unconscious competences, some of which we are unable to see in ourselves because we live with them 24/7 and they are an invisible part of our makeup.

Often it is only a third party, someone on the outside that can see the ability and honour it. So if you see somebody doing something so naturally, like

• like resolving a difficult issue
• carrying out a complex mental arithmetical problem quickly and accurately
• talking to a group of strangers easily and fluently
• making people feel at ease with grace
• polishing a table effortlessly
• cooking a meal that smells so delicious whilst carrying on a conversation and laughing at the same time
• driving a car through traffic smoothly and safely
• pruning a plant deftly
• presenting a report accurately and with passion

then take time to honour the person in the moment with a few words of praise. You may never know how much you increased their understanding of themselves, that they have such an unconscious skill, but you will have made a difference.

© William Barron  Creating Insight