Your competence erodes the more you coast through life
Your competence erodes the more you coast through life
Before we dig deeper, let’s just establish one basic fact about the human condition: with everything else being equal, we’d rather take it easy. It doesn’t matter which part of the globe you come from or what you do for a living or what you look like, if you are like most people, you’d rather have it easy. You’d rather coast. It seems that this tendency is built into the human consciousness.
There’s a big problem with our very normal human tendency to coast through life: it erodes our personal competence. Bad news. Competence, just in case you are not already aware, is crucial to any kind of success in life. The bottom line is that you have to know what you are doing. You have to meet certain basic levels of competence to move on, much less succeed, with your life.
Personal competence is like a muscle. Your muscles get stronger and more powerful the more you stress them out by putting pressure on them. You're not going to develop huge, well defined and toned muscles if you just eat, eat and eat.
If you don't hit the weights, if you don't do push ups, if you don't put any kind of stress on your muscles, you're not going to develop them. They're just going to get wider and wider because of the fat accumulation under your skin.
You have to remember that any personal trait of yours that you want to improve and take to the next level can be improved only if you challenge them. In other words, you have to use them, you have to put pressure on them, you have to challenge them. That's how it works.
Competence is not any different from this. It's really like a mental and emotional muscle. Unfortunately, if you have stopped challenging your personal competence, it gets softer and softer. It starts to erode. Its value goes down. It becomes irrelevant.
You may think that you're at the top of your game. You may think that you have a lot of people in your network. You may think that you have a lot of things figured out as far as your select body of expertise may go.
Unfortunately, this is all in your head because as you coast through life, the world moves on. The body of knowledge that you think you're competent in starts to change. Unless you put pressure on your competence to at least stay abreast or keep in touch with the latest developments, chances are you will find yourself left behind. Not exactly a good position to find yourself in.
That's how it works. It's a muscle and for that muscle to get stronger or to remain toned, you have to put pressure on it. You have to use it. You have to challenge it.
Click here for a practical approach to build self confidence by challenging yourself strategically. By using this system, you can develop the self confidence you need to achieve continuous and predictable victory in many areas of your life.
