Conscious Competence Curve

This is a common psychiatric tool created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham. It was designed to help people understand how they relate to the world around them. However, the concept can also be applied to how we learn and process skills and information.

Basically, there are two crucial axes to learning—conscious versus unconscious and competence versus incompetence. Here’s how it works. When you learn a complex task, you work very hard to learn the steps. You practice each component deliberately until you perfect it, and at that point, you’ve “learned” it.