How to Help Your Team Overcome Self-Doubt When Learning Something New

By using the Conscious Competence learning model.

If there’s one thing I’ve seen colleagues struggle with more than anything else throughout my HR career, it is self-doubt. Self-doubt often strikes when we face new challenges but lack confidence in our ability to rise to the occasion.

Never was the self-doubt cycle more pervasive than when I worked as a University Relations Recruiter and was responsible for recruiting dozens of recent graduates to join my company in their first full-time jobs post-graduation.

The days following their new hire orientations became eerily predictable over the years. For the first few days, everything was still shiny and new. They practically glowed with an untarnished sense of possibility and potential.

But, after a week or so, the novelty had worn off, and concern riddled their faces.

“I just don’t feel like I’m learning fast enough,” they’d confide in me. “I’m afraid I’m falling behind, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

The blissful ignorance of not knowing what they didn’t know had worn off, and they were suddenly all too aware of their blindspots. Self-doubt had taken hold.

While self-doubt may peak during new experiences like these early in our careers, plenty of us will go on to grapple with these same doubts on and off for years to come. Every time we take on a new project, start a new job, or learn a new skill, we are susceptible to falling into the trap of self-doubt.

And while this a completely normal part of the learning process, it’s also quite uncomfortable and can certainly pose some problems if we don’t learn how to progress through the discomfort.

That’s where you come in as a leader.

You can help your team overcome self-doubt by teaching them how to manage their expectations of themselves using the Conscious Competence learning model.

Initially developed by Noel Burch, the Conscious Competence model explains the “psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.”

The model hinges on two factors that affect our psychological state as we learn new things — consciousness and competence. Consciousness refers to our level of self-awareness, and competence refers to our ability — or inability — to do the work.

According to MindTools, cultivating an awareness of the model “helps you to stay motivated when you feel inadequate, or subject to self-doubt; and it helps you manage your expectations of success, so that you don’t try to achieve too much, too soon.”

As a leader, simply talking about this model with your employees is a helpful way to help them manage their expectations of themselves and increase their understanding of why they’re feeling the way they are at each step of the learning process. And while it won’t take away their discomfort, it will help them learn to persevere through it.

Here’s what to focus on during each stage of the learning process.

Stage 1: Unconsciously Incompetent

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Remember the phrase, ignorance is bliss? That’s what this stage is all about. Not knowing what you don’t know is the epitome of blissful ignorance and it’s a very comfortable place to be... right up until it isn’t.

Someone at this stage is entirely unaware of their lack of skills or knowledge and may appear — and even feel — far more confident than their abilities warrant. As a leader, this overconfidence may be jarring the first time you see it. That’s because you have something that they do not; you have perspective. You know what they don’t, and you know it in its overwhelming entirety.

During this stage, your role is to have patience with their sometimes irritating over-confidence. Take time to highlight why learning specific skills or processes is critical to their future success, and encourage them to seek input from their more-tenured peers on where they should focus their time.

In my experience, this stage is relatively short-lived, especially for someone starting a new job and going through formal classroom or on-the-job training. Because once they’ve started training and are drinking from the metaphorical firehose, the magnitude of how much they have yet to learn becomes apparent quite quickly.

Stage 2: Consciously Incompetent

You know what you don’t know.

As soon as my recent hires complained about not learning fast enough, I knew they had crossed over to the land of the consciously incompetent. They were suddenly aware of just how much they didn’t know and had started to realize that the job demands were far greater than their current levels of competence.

They were wading in the discomfort of knowing that they didn’t know, and that’s not a fun place to be.

You can’t remove this discomfort from their learning experience and, frankly, you shouldn’t try to. Their newly heightened level of self-awareness is an important part of the process, and it develops grit and resilience.

The best thing you can do for your people is to remind them of the model and validate that self-doubt is completely normal and expected at this stage. Candidly, I like to tell team members that I would be more concerned about someone who isn’t doubting themselves at this point than someone who is.

This is also a great time to relate to them as human beings by sharing your own past experiences with feeling consciously incompetent. The reality is that none of us started out as experts. The only difference between you and them is that you’ve come out on the other side.

Simply telling your story and reiterating your confidence that they too will emerge as an expert goes a long way with people.

Stage 3: Consciously Competent

You know you have the skill.

I like to tell people that they’ve likely crossed over into conscious competence when they notice they’re able to make it through a full workday without asking for help every few minutes. They start to realize that they know what they’re doing and simultaneously begin to give themselves some credit for their newly acquired skill set.

But just because someone is doing the job does not mean they’re doing it as well as they could be, which is why your feedback and coaching are critical at this stage. And, no — feedback and coaching are not the same things.

While feedback is backward-looking and corrective, coaching is preparative and full of possibility. Both are necessary at different times, but it’s essential to understand their distinct purposes.

Practice makes perfect in this stage. The more they apply their new skills and adjust their approach using your feedback and coaching, the more competent they become.

Stage 4: Unconsciously Competent

The skill is second nature to you.

Once they feel like they can do the job with their eyes closed, they’re likely unconsciously competent. They know what to do without putting much thought into it and are essentially running on auto-pilot. Self-doubt is a thing of the past, and their competence now matches their hard-earned confidence.

This is all well and good, but your job as a leader is not over. It never is, is it?

As team members at this stage naturally start to train and mentor others, it’s important to remind them of this model again so that they don’t grow impatient with the blissful ignorance of those who come after them.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the process of how we got to where we are, and reminding them to offer grace to others is a necessary lesson in emotional intelligence.

Finally, your job is to make sure that your employees don’t grow complacent. Not everyone will want to climb the corporate ladder, and that’s OK. But once employees get comfortably and consciously competent in their roles, it’s likely time to challenge them to move on to something bigger and better.

Just when they thought things would remain comfortable, it’s time to start over at unconscious incompetence.

And so the cycle repeats itself over and over again.

I’ve always felt that the most rewarding part of being a leader is watching your team members learn, grow, and fulfill their potential. But no one said that process would be easy, and it certainly won’t always be comfortable.

A leader’s job is to meet each of your team members where they are, sit alongside them to help manage their expectations of themselves, and encourage them to step into the discomfort associated with learning something new time and time again.

Because when nothing changes, everything stays the same. And growth only happens once we push past the self-doubt.

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