Bloom Your Mind

Ep 16: How to Try New Things

• Marie McDonald

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As you turn ideas into a real things, and you want to try new things, there are four stages to create any idea, in health, relationships, etc. You can learn how to take your concept to vision and put it out into the world. As you move through each stage, you'll gain awareness about your habituated behavior, and foster real habit change.

What you'll learn in this episode: 

  • How we can change our skill in relation to anything
  • The 4 stages of learning - from incompetence to competence
  • Progressive awareness as you move through each stage 
  • How change becomes natural and spontaneous

Mentioned in this episode: 

How to connect with Marie:

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We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

Hello, my friends and welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. We are on episode number 16 today. How are you? Where are you in the world? What do you see when you look out the window? I am looking out my window and watching an atmospheric river, cold, torrential, rain all over San Diego. San Diego is not used to this.

So that's what I'm looking at and enjoying today. And I'm wondering what you're looking at. Last week, my friends, we talked a little bit about listening because an integral part of turning ideas into real things in the world is communicating, collaborating, even if the initial part of what your idea is happening inside of you, eventually you'll get to the point where you share it.

And so, we talked last week about listening, and the other reason we talked about that is because it is a part of every one of our lives, both in our personal relationships and in how we just take in information and in any kind of projects that we do. outside of our personal lives. So that is a great set of skills if you haven't heard that one yet.

And today, we are going to talk about some really interesting stuff, which is basically about, as you turn an idea into a real thing, what are the stages that you go through and what is it like as you start to push your boundaries a little bit? And again, as I often anchor us down in understanding, we are talking about any change you want to make, any idea you want to put into the world, whether that is something you want to do for your own health, a change you want to make in a relationship, or an actual project you're starting.

All of this applies to all of the ideas that we're taking from concept, from a vision inside our head, an idea we want to make real, taking it from there and putting it out in the world where we can see and touch and feel and experience. 

So today, I want to start us off with this idea that none of us, you, me, all the people around us, none of us are good at things in general or bad at things in general.

None of us are skilled or not skilled, although I think sometimes, we tend to think of each other like that. We are all at a different level compared to everything that we do, from grinding coffee beans and making coffee that tastes just right, to driving a car to public, speaking to something like marketing or yoga.

Anything that we do, we are all on a spectrum. Of less skilled or to more skilled in relation to each one of those different things. So that's infinite, right? If we're thinking of all of the things that we could do, brush our teeth, or write a book, we are all at a different level of skill and experience, and there's a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck if you're interested in this way of thinking, is a fundamental place to learn about a growth-oriented mindset. But basically, it says that it's not helpful for us to think of ourselves or other people as good at things or not good at things. How many of y'all have heard other people say, or have heard yourself say, I'm just not good at art. I'm just not creative. I'm just not athletic.

We see when we're thinking like that is that we stay stuck in not trying new things because we think we're not good at them. And what's really interesting is the same applies to when we think we are good at things. So when you tell a child, Hey, yo, you're a great artist. That child then doesn't want to lose the badge and affirmation and status of being a good artist, for instance.

So they're less likely to try things that don't have guaranteed success. They're less likely if they're doodling and they're told that they're a good artist, they're less likely to try painting next. They're at risk of not being a good artist anymore if they try something new and start lower down on that learning curve or lower down in their skillset.

So I'm sharing this just to wrap our minds around this idea that we can change our skill in relation to anything. Everything is a practice. So if you have something you want to do that you've never done before, if you have an idea and you feel like you don't know what you're talking about, just add the word “not yet” to the end of that.

I don't know what I'm talking about yet … but I'm going to learn because we can all build skill. We can all start exposing ourselves to new ideas, new things that we're trying, and we will move along that spectrum of less. To more skilled. So here's an example. My husband is an amazing cook, and he just is. Do you hear the way I'm saying that?

See my brain doing that? He's an amazing cook, right? I've always thought of him like that. He just understands food chemistry. He just has the knack. He just knows how to cook. Everybody loves the stuff that he cooks. I’m not the best cook. That's what my brain has said that for a long time, a couple years ago during Covid, and just as things slowed down a little bit, I started realizing that the reason that I wasn't as skilled at creating delicious things on plates as my husband is because I really wasn't putting any mental energy into it.

I was like only coming into the kitchen to cook, to hang out with other people. I was only cooking when it required very little cleanup. I would do anything to just not clean up the kitchen. And so I wasn't engaging in any type of actual skill-building in cooking and my husband. Was meanwhile reading all the blogs on all the delicious flavor profiles and flavor combinations and food chemistry, he was exposing himself to information that built an understanding of cooking in his mind.

And he had been doing that for years. He used recipes. I usually just, went into the kitchen and threw things together and saw what came out. He would use a recipe, and then he would deviate from it because he had this other information in his mind about ways that you could deviate that were more likely to create delicious experiences.

And so, I started reading recipes and playing with recipes and cooking more. And I started to break down that story in my head that I'm not a good cook. So that's just a random example. Maybe you have one that is like that. So the key to understand here is all of us are at a different skill level in relation to anything we do, and nobody is skilled or not skilled.

Nobody's good at stuff and not good at stuff. No matter what your brain is telling you right now, as they say that and as we have an idea that we want to put into the world, we can just know when we hear ourselves say I've never done that before. I'm just not good at that, this other person is way better at that.

We can just pause our brain and say, hey, wait a minute. What if I had a growth mindset about this? What if I didn't tell myself I'm good at some things that then I do all the time and I return to all the time because I know I have a guarantee of success and status and respect in those areas, and I'm not just not good at other things that I tend to avoid because there might be a greater risk of failure in those things, but I actually get to choose, and I can expand myself.

I can do new things. I can try new things. I can create new things whenever I want, if I'm willing to not be good at them for a while, and as we do that and pause our brain and make a choice to try something new or to grow in a certain area, or change our habits, or change our practices, or learn new things, there are four stages that we'll go through.

Now, I was really interested in talking to you about this because when I found this out, it was so helpful, it allowed me to just give a name to the experience that I was having. And so I'm sharing this with you now because maybe it will do the same for you. And I'll go into a little bit more about the examples of this in a little bit.

So when we are learning something, or we're in a situation where there's something that we need to learn, we will be in a stage of what's called unconscious incompetence. So we're not really great at something and we don't really understand either that we're not great at it or why we're not great at it.

And at that level we're just rolling. And we might have a high level of confidence and yeah, we're doing a thing because we don't really realize that we're not so great at it. So here's an example. Let's say that I just interrupt people a lot in conversations, and maybe that kind of turns them off and frustrates people, and maybe I see their frustrated expression, but I don't really understand why.

I just keep interrupting people because I have ideas and I have things I want to share, and I get excited about what we're talking about. So I cut them off and I interrupt them. That's an example of being in a state of unconscious incompetence. That's stage one. We don't really know we're doing it or why we're doing it or what's happening, but something there needs to change.

And then let's say I start realizing that I'm interrupting people. I'll move into the second stage of learning something, which is called conscious incompetence, and that's when I keep having these conversations and after the fact go, no, I interrupted people that whole time again, I can start to see that I'm doing it, but I can't quite stop doing it.

So I am learning about interrupting people and learning that maybe I shouldn't do it as much, and I can't quite stop myself because I have this habituated way of talking to people where I can't really stop myself from jumping on top of what they're saying. So in this stage, the second stage of learning, we tend to have lower confidence and feel a little bit bad about ourselves and feel like, duh, why did I do it again?

I keep doing this. Ugh. And this is the stage where it's really helpful to understand your path as you're learning something new because instead of giving up, you can just stay. This is the. where I'm learning, but I'm not quite at the skill level where I can intercept this habituated behavior yet.

So you're like, okay, I'm terrible at this and I'm realizing I'm terrible at this and I am going to commit to getting better. And then as you commit to getting better and you start noticing more and more, let's say, as I notice more and more that I'm interrupting people, I'll begin. To move into stage three, which is conscious competence.

And in this stage, I will begin to start to interrupt somebody and start to say, pause myself with much effort and strain and maybe even interrupt someone and then pause and say, hey, I'm sorry, I just interrupted what you were saying. I'm going to hold my thought. Will you? I might even in the moment put on the brakes, right?

But this is the stage where I have to work really hard at something. It does not come naturally to me, but I'm putting in the effort to change a habit. So I either am about to speak and interrupt someone and I stop myself, or I rewind the conversation. And this is the third stage conscious competence, and it can last a long time. 

Some things can happen quickly, other times it really takes a long time. I was talking to someone the other day about this, and he was saying that it's been pretty much a decade where he is a leader for a team and other people that he supports on the team feel things more emotionally and he doesn't.

And he used to just skim over them and ignore them. And he's learned to pause and validate whatever the experience and the feelings are that the person's having. But it really takes conscious effort. And he was saying, no matter how long I've been doing this, it still takes me a conscious effort.

It got easier and easier over time, but he's still needing to intentionally pause and validate what they're feeling. So with the interrupting, again, that could take a really long time, but eventually most things move into the fourth stage, which is called unconscious competency. And you could probably see where I'm going with this, which is you do it so much that it becomes natural.

And one day maybe I get to the end, long conversation, I realize, whoa, check me out. I didn't interrupt once, and I didn't even have to think that hard about it. It just becomes natural. So you've introduced a new neural pathway in relation to whatever that trigger is of somebody else talking or whatever it is.

You're learning something new, and you've practiced it enough times that it is now your dominant response to whatever that situation is. So there are four stages that we just talked about to growth and learning. The first one is that unconscious incompetency, where I'm blundering around and interrupting people and seeing that people are frustrated but not really understanding why.

And I start learning that I'm doing it. And I move into the second one, conscious incompetency, where I have to like notice that I'm doing it, but I can't interrupt it yet. And then I’m practicing. practicing, and then I move into conscious competency where I can stop interrupting people, but it takes a lot of effort, and then eventually I do it enough so that it becomes unconscious competency. 

So pause for a moment and think about something that you do and orient yourself. What stage are you at? I think about yoga, and of course every pose is different, and every day is different, but I remember when I was at stage one, and I'm pretty much at stage four right now, where I know the poses, I know the flows.

I've been doing them for 25 years. And mostly I have some unconscious competency there. Maybe there's something athletic that you do, or physical practice or intellectual practice or cooking or driving or anything really pouring a glass of water. You can think about where you're at. And then of course within yoga, there's like things like handstands where I'm at a two or a three, and I keep practicing and I really have to focus on it. 

So this is something that can really be helpful for you to understand that when you're trying to change something, and we talked about interrupting people, but let's think of something else, like people pleasing, and you're at that phase where you're like, oh, I did it again. I did it again. I'm completely subverting my needs and doing what I think everybody else wants me to do. 

You can just pause and say, it's all right. Nothing has gone wrong here. I'm hanging out in stage two and stage three is just a little bit away. I'm still doing it, but pretty soon I'm going to interrupt myself and stop doing it, and then eventually that's going to become natural.

And then sometimes, stage four, it sneaks up. You all of a sudden realize that something's gotten a lot easier for you. That used to be a struggle. You all of a sudden realize you've changed and that is really fun. There's one more thing I want to talk about here, which is when something's scary and you're trying to change it, when something is harder for you to expose yourself to, it's taking a lot to change. 

So maybe something like public speaking, we generally have like a green zone, a safe zone. If you picture a stop light and you're like, I don't even know if this is the order, they're actually in, but let's say there's green at the bottom, yellow in the middle, red at the top.

Let's say you're in that green zone on the bottom, that means you're super comfortable. If we're talking about public speaking, maybe that means you're really comfortable not doing it, you're really comfortable when you're speaking one-on-one or when you're speaking just to people you know really well, but you want to get a little bit more comfortable.

You want to gain skill in public speaking or speaking in front of groups. There's a really helpful visual with this stoplight that can help you understand how far to push yourself in a way that will be really healthy for you and fun. 

So if you look at that green area down at the bottom where you're really comfortable doing it, if you keep staying in that green zone and you never do anything that pushes your comfort, you're going to stay in that green zone and your green zone's going to shrink a little bit over time because you're never pushing it at all.

So if you never push yourself, to talk to three people instead of two or four people, instead of two or to say two sentences to a large group. If you never push yourself at all, you'll get more and more stuck in only wanting to talk to one other person in only wanting to offer up the mic to other people and say, I just don't speak in front of groups, and that's fine.

You can choose it. You choose whatever you want, but it can be fun to know that you can expand your comfort zone. It's very possible. And here's how it works. If you feel social anxiety or child feels social anxiety, for instance around public speaking or being in front of a group being looked at, the way you expand that is not to get up on a stage in front of 2,000 people.

And it's not to send that child into a big group of a whole bunch of gregarious peers where they know no one, it's not to get up in front of a whole wedding without having prepared a speech and take that on. You can do that if you want, but generally what that does is it backfires a little bit.

If you go really high stakes and you go into a situation that's really scary, that's the red zone. And generally what happens when we do that is if we're trying to expand our comfort zone, our green zone, and we shoot all the way up into the red zone, we prove it to ourselves that it's terrifying and a terrible idea, and we bounce back to the green zone and want to stay there.

So, if you want to move your comfort zone and expand it a little bit, you want to just push into the yellow zone over and over again. Go bounce in between the green zone and the yellow zone. So the yellow zone might look like having a dinner party with 10 people or being at a dinner party and telling a story, and maybe it's a dinner party with people that already love you and care about.

Or, maybe it is recording something that you could practice over and over again and edit if you want, and then putting it out there in the world on a YouTube channel or a podcast or a reel or a video to your friends or whatever that is. Maybe it's posting something to LinkedIn that's an article.

Maybe it is standing up in front of your family and giving a toast, but it's something that just proves to you that you can do something that's a little bit uncomfortable and hard and bounce back from it or be comfortable in it. And what happens is, as you bounce back and forth between your comfort zone and pushing your comfort zone a little bit into that yellow zone, your green zone expands instead of shrinking by staying in it your green zone or your comfort zone or what.

Okay, doing and comfortable doing gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger over time. And that, my friends, is how you can have a growth-oriented mindset as you try new things and push into areas that are a little beyond your comfort zone and start to build some skill. And as you do, you can start to understand if you're in an area where you.

Some conscious competency or conscious competence or some unconscious incompetence. You can just know that it's okay where you are, and that's what I've got for you today. 

So this week I'll encourage you to just notice as you do things, if you're in your comfort zone or, are you telling yourself that you're just good at things or not good at things?

Are you pushing yourself to expand that comfort zone? Or are you just doing the things that you think you're good at already? And then maybe you can push yourself a little bit outside of your comfort zone to try something a little bit new. 

And just notice, am I in that conscious and competency, that second stage where I'm like, I'm still not doing this very well, but I can see that I'm not doing it very well compared to what I want. And I'm going to keep practicing. I'm going to keep going. This is just right. This is fun. This is how I expand my green zone. This is how I expand myself. This is how I evolve and contribute to the world.

This is how I take my idea out of my head and into the world where it can. All right, my friends. That's what I've got for you today. Next week we'll talk a little bit about how the journey of doing this, what it looks like. I'm going to give you a little bit of a bird's eye view of this work, of taking ideas out of your head and into the world.

And I'm going to share some stories about what to expect as you begin to change on the inside. And then as the world around you begins to change. So go out this week, notice where you are in the four stages of learning. Notice where you are in pushing your comfort zone or just staying in the green zone. Know there is no right or wrong way.

There's just fun to be had in the awareness and maybe make some choices to go onto the yellow zone or maybe not. You get to choose you to buss and I will see you next week.

Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.