Humans make around 35,000 decisions each day.
Just pause and consider that for a moment.
If you discount sleeping time, that is about 2000 decisions each hour.
Every Day.
How conscious are you of the decisions you are making?
Some decisions are so minute they don’t register consciously. For instance, you made the decision to continue to read this post (thank you!); to ignore that ping from your phone, to uncross your leg, take a sip of water etc etc.
Other decisions are so significant you CAN’T ignore them: accept a job offer, make a pitch to the boss, buy a new car, break up with your hairdresser etc etc.
Most decisions fall somewhere in the middle. These are the ones that need a little more consideration.
You are probably familiar with the competency model – you start anything new, take for example, learning yoga, and you eventually land in a very different place from where you started.
You step onto your mat for the first time and there is someone at the front of the room telling you to do something called a down dog. You have no idea what that is, so you look around the room to try to figure it out.
Unconsciousness Incompetence.
After a few classes, you start to realize, hey, there might be something to this yoga thing and, wow, what the heck is Adho Mukha Svanasna? You are aware there’s a bunch of stuff you just don’t know (BTW: this is the Sanskrit, the language of yoga, way of saying “down dog”). You know what you don't know.
Conscious Incompetence.
Once you find your fave classes, and you become more of a regular, you no longer have to look around the room, or remember to lift the hips, release heels to the floor, and align the ears to your biceps: you simply take the down dog pose.
You remember these steps because you are now in Conscious Competence.
After you’ve been practicing for a while, all the instructor has to say is “move into your vinyasa” and you know that includes a down dog at the end at the end of the sequence.
Unconscious Competence.
But, the competency model doesn’t address what happens next.
For a lot of things, being unconsciously competent serves us well. You don’t want to spend any time thinking about how to tie your shoes in the morning. On the yoga mat, it allows for an ease of the flow of a class, while still pushing the edges of deeper explorations of a pose.
For some things, it makes us go a little asleep to what we’re doing. I was reminded of this when Claire Cafritz Carr joined Sherry and me on the podcast. Claire was doing what most of us do every day with unconscious competence: driving her car. Claire felt quite competent in driving her car and made a decision to respond to a text.
That split-second decision changed her in heartbreaking ways. You can find more about her story here : https://lnkd.in/gAWnZGEZ
There is no way to bring consciousness to 35,000 decisions a day…but, I ask you to consider: where have you gone a little asleep to the decisions you are making because you feel competent in them?
