Are you Competent ??

Most of us must have faced this question at one or the other time in our life-“Are you Competent?”
Really very difficult to answer . 

Why?

Because, there are no certain parameters to define competence. 

To understand competence, we need to consider two aspects:- 1. knowledge and 2. Practice. Both need consideration, and they may need different approaches.

Competence is relative to a context. 

What is expected of a person in a particular role? 

What mistakes are made in this context?

We need to know what counts as competent for a particular person in a particular situation, and they differ.

We all have experience of knowledge without practice. That is not competence. But equally, if one practices blindly, without any knowledge or guidance, the risk is that the time is wasted, or worse, that one “learns” things that will need to be unlearned later.

There are many approaches to learning, and vast amounts written about them. More than following a set path, perhaps find out which route is best suited to yourself. Or ask someone who knows you well as a learner.

But there will always be these two aspects to competence, usually acquired in different ways. The positive skill, in particular, needs practice, informed by some knowledge. The avoidance of mistakes needs knowledge, often supplemented by habits or drills that embed the safe practice.

Solutions we discover for ourselves frequently work better than those that others give us. Life’s best survivors are not especially bothered when what they see and think does not fit with the way that others think. They will experiment with different ideas or points of view to find out what works best. They seem less interested in who is right. They are more interested in connections between cause and effect. Furthermore, they continually seek information and new ideas that will explain how things work and how to make things work better. 

The really competent people in every sphere of human activity are those individuals who go beyond their teachers. They learn what they are taught, may try imitating what someone else does well, and then continue to learn what no one else could teach them. In contrast, people who follow instructions on how to be successful are seldom as successful as they could be. 

Think about several of the most capable people you know. Are they effective primarily because of a class they took or a training program they went through? No. Effectiveness, competence, skillfulness, and mastery result from self-motivated, self-managed learning.