Have you ever tried to learn something new, and gone through that really irritating phase when everything you did seemed wrong, you had two left feet instead of hands, nothing made sense and all you wanted to do was throw in the towel and quit? I know I certainly have, and I’m willing to bet that you’ve experienced it too! But the really good thing is that this feeling is normal. Yes, normal! Everyone feels it at some point, and it’s actually just one of the stages of learning something new.

Whenever we attempt to learn something new, we move through four different stages:

Unconscious Incompetence

Conscious Incompetence

Conscious Competence

Unconscious Competence

The first stage is Unconscious Incompetence, where you don’t know that you don’t know! Ah, blissful ignorance! Unfortunately, this stage very quickly gives way to…

Conscious Incompetence, where we know that we don’t know, we know we’re doing it wrong, however we don’t yet have the skills, knowledge or dexterity required for the task. This tends to be the stage where we want to quit, we get annoyed and irritated and our self talk is often negative.

Conscious Competence is where we know what and how, still, we have to think through each action as we go. Left foot moves here, right foot here, swing around, watch the door, keep balanced, etc. We know that we know how, we’re just not yet at stage four.

Unconscious Competence is where we can do something automatically, almost without thinking! Hooray! This is the stage where to an onlooker everything looks easy! If you think back to learning to drive, do you remember having to consciously think about putting the clutch in, change the gears, let the clutch out etc? How’s your driving now? My guess is that you don’t think about it much at all, you’ve moved into Unconscious Competence, where your actions and reactions are automatic!

So next time you’re learning something new, or helping someone else learn something, keep an eye out for which stage of learning they’re at. If you or they are frustrated, remind yourself (and them!) of the stages of learning and that it is just a stage, with practice you’ll move past it!

I posted about my personal challenge re the 7 Habits on my personal blog, and made the comment that “I’ve been finding it challenging, because I can no longer whinge about something…” and a very wise friend left the comment:

“I don’t think whining and complaining is easier… it only *feels* like its easier because that is the habit that you have been most exposed to. One day, you will probably look back and realise that being proactive is actually easier because you have built up your strength from within and people are attracted to that and will want to help you.”

Isn’t that just so totally true? We start to build strong good habits within us, however it is not an instantaneous easy process. Staying in our comfort zone, continuing to do what we have always done and NOT changing is easy, and I know a lot of people who choose to do that. However, for those people who choose to change, it can be a long and painful process. Killing off the old bad habits and replacing them with productive good habits takes time and energy.

What habits do you have that are worth the time, effort and energy to change? What one habit, if you changed it, would bring about the greatest, most beneficial change in your life?

One of the things that nearly all of my clients, and myself, have in common is that we seem to not have enough time to get everything done. The reasons vary for everyone, we all have different demands on our time, however the end result is the same, stress, frustration and feeling of never being able to get everything done.

During a recent session with my own Coach, I mentioned that I was thinking of taking on another task that would take up around ten to fifteeen hours a week, and I didn’t know how I would fit it in as I was already so busy and feeling ineffective in what I had to do now! During our session, she asked me what I wanted to get done, how much time I had available and what was a realistic time frame for adding something new to my life. While looking at what I am doing now, contract work up to 32 hours, running a business from home, Tafe college up to 12 hours, and just being a wife and mother, I realised that it’s not so much that I’m ineffective, it’s simply that my expectations of how much I could get done in the time available were unrealistic!

This was a really good exercise for me, and funnily enough one that I use with my own clients but had not thought to apply to myself! My Coach had me list what I wanted to get done, and see how it fitted into the time I actually had available to do it all. When I looked at the list of time available, and compared it to tasks I had to get done, I have enough time to do the minimum required, but no extra. Not without giving up an awful lot of sleep anyway, which would end up being counter productive!

The end result of this was that I decided to take on the new task (if required, it’s not a certainty yet) as the long-term benefit would outweigh the extra stress and effort over the next six months. And for now? I’m taking it easy on myself, focussing on high priority tasks and giving myself permission to pass on the lower priority tasks.

So if you’re feeling the same way, that there’s not enough hours in the day, you never seem to get everything done, your days are packed full but you still feel like you’re running on a treadmill, try taking a step back and looking at what you have to do, how long it takes and how long you realistically have available to do it all in. Are you, like me, trying to cram 36 hours into every day and feeling frustrated when it doesn’t work out?

Ongoing to my following the 7 Habits for 7 Months, this month is focusing on being pro-active rather than re-active, taking responsibility for what I can control. Steven Covey talks a lot in this chapter on the 1st habit about a person’s Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern. Put very simply, your Circle of Influence is the things you have some control over, and your Circle of Concern are those things you have an interest in, but cannot change. For example, you can control what you do today, what you say, where you work, so those things are in your Circle of Influence (you can influence them). However you cannot change or alter things that have happened in the past, what other people say or do, those things are in your Circle of Concern.

Reading through this, I’ve been considering everything I do in terms of whether it is in my Circle of Influence, or Concern. We’ve been having some difficulties with our 10 year old daughter at school recently, problems caused in part by the amount of moves we’ve had in the last few years, with a few other issues. Looking at this problem through the lens of Concern or Influence, I’ve realised that I’ve been attempting to change things in my Circle of Concern, no wonder it’s been so frustrating! By changing to focussing on my (and our daughters) Circle of Influence, we suddenly have more positive options, and a lot more personal power and choice in this situation.

Then I started thinking about how Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence affect my relationship with my husband. I adore him, he’s a wonderful man, however he is human and can at times by annoying to say the least! That however is in my Circle of Concern. What is in my Circle of Influence is how I react, and how I avoid being so annoying myself (this goes two ways of course!)

How different can our relationships with other people be, when we look at what we can influence and become proactive about it? What is in your life currently where you are attempting to alter things in your Circle of Concern and not your Circle of Influence?

I came across a very interesting blog post recently.  Jemi from InMyHeels won six sessions with a Life Coach, and writes about her experience of the first coaching session.  Click here to read about her experience.

Jemi has very articulately presented what it is that we Coaches do, and how we work.  It’s going to be interesting to see what she says about future sessions!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Author - Stephen R. Covey, ISBN - 978-0-7432-6951-3

This is a book that I first read many years ago, and I have to say most of it went straight over my head! In my defence, I was only about twelve years old at the time! Recently I started reading it again, and with quite a few more years under my belt and a lot more maturity, it’s really resonating with me now. It’s all about living a Principle centred life, based on the natural laws of our world, such as fairness, honesty, human dignity, service and integrity.

In fact, it’s appealing to me so much that for the next 7 months, I have decided to take one habit each month and focus on developing that particular habit in myself, for that month.

Habit One, for July, is Be Proactive. Being Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life, your actions and reactions. Proactive people focus their efforts on their Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about: health, children, problems at work. Gaining an awareness of the areas in which we expend our energies in is a giant step in becoming proactive and one of the areas that I will be looking at very closely this month!

My Challenge to You! - Join me! Grab a copy of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People from Dymocks, Amazon, or your local bookstore. Read through the background and the first habit and join me on what promises to be an interesting adventure!

Tomorrow I’ll post more on how I intend to do this and what actions I’ll be taking each month!

Think about this, what is the TRUE cost of your debt in financial terms? If you said it’s just the cost of the interest, plus fees, then read on! You see, the true cost of debt is not just the interest that you pay, it’s also in the opportunities to invest that you miss. If you pay a debt off early, then you not only save on interest; you also have that extra money to invest in your long term future. Have a look at the following examples. Note that I have kept the examples very simple, they do not take into account fluctuations in interest rates, account fees etc as they are too variable and individual.

Paying out your mortgage early.

All examples here are based on a $250,000 mortgage, at 9.3% interest over the life of the loan. All figures come from these calculators.

Ok, so what if your budget is tight already and you just can’t increase your repayments by $232 per month? Have a look at the effect of increasing your monthly repayments by only a small amount.

So just by adding a small amount to each months payment, you can see the effect it has on your bottom line!

Here’s something for you to think about; if you added just $20 per month to your repayment, and paid off your mortgage 1 year and 5 months early, you would then have $35,445 that would have otherwise been used as your monthly repayment ($2065 + $20 over 17 months). What would YOU do with $35,445? Email me and tell me. How you would use that money that you have saved?