A key to being successful in life is becoming a sufficient self-evaluator. It is tough to find colleagues or friends who will tell you what you need to hear, all of the time. This means if you want to progress in anything in life, it’s up to you to figure out the next step. One way that I help my self-evaluation process is bucketing items into the 4 stages of competence. They are listed in the image below. 

I’m currently using these 4 stages in my journey through yoga, which ramped up this past August. There were 3 reasons that I started taking yoga classes weekly. The first is that a Hot Yoga studio opened up less than 10 minutes away from my house. I’ve tried yoga in the past, but never had a schedule or a studio close enough to fit my schedule. In the few times that I dabbled with yoga, I found that it needed to be hot yoga. Hot yoga is when they heat the room to over 100 degrees. I love to sweat and this makes the practice easier to fall into “flow” for me. What I mean by “Flow” is effortless attention. The second reason yoga caught my attention was that my body feels pretty messed up from my playing days. It’s hard to explain and no doctor has given me a clear path to how I could fix the problem. The easiest way I can describe it would be that I have general tightness, cramps and pain in pretty much every body part of the right side of my body. I found that some Physical Therapy methods helped, which are all extremely similar to things done in yoga. The third and last reason is that I needed to improve my batting practice. This was the reason I was looking for the most answers to make my body feel better. Yoga has tons of exercises to strengthen and mobilize the shoulders. Now that I’m 5 months into regular hot yoga practice, I can describe where I was and where I’m at using the 4 stages of competence. 

I’ll start with the top of the pyramid and talk about the unconscious competence that led me to yoga in the first place. I have always had flexible hamstrings and baseball was where I found this out. I was playing First Base for one of the first times when I was 10 years old. I went to catch a baseball and almost did a full split. I didn’t think about going that far and then it just happened. The team was shocked and ever since then, it has actually been a party trick. I can do a pretty good toe touch which is a cheerleading move shown below. 

Taylor, my wife, actually had me show her college cheer team at UNCG this move. So naturally when I went to my first yoga class, I was actually really good at some of the exercises…which made it pretty fun. This is the reason that yoga is the perfect exercise for me right now, because there are parts of the practice that I’m fantastic at and helps me push some boundaries. This comes in handy for some facets of yoga that I was in unconscious incompetence. 

Conscious competence would be that of my breathing. I just became conscious of my breathing techniques this summer. There were two major pushes that got me to be conscious of my breathing: 1) Mind Strong Project and 2) “Breath” by James Nestor. I started following Mind Strong Project on social media, and they post some great content about breathing. These posts just made me realize I need to know more. The book was groundbreaking for me. I found out the importance of nasal breathing and so much more. This was great because having an understanding of breathing is crucial for yoga. I can feel myself getting deeper into poses when my breathing is on point. My proper breathing is not second nature yet, which is why it’s in the category of conscious competence. 

I’m going to combine the two incompetence groups because I don’t know, what I dont know. I’ll start with conscious competence of something I knew going into my practice of yoga. Flexibility and balance. Outside of my hamstrings, I knew that I needed and still need years of practice to get where I want to be. Something that went from unconscious to conscious incompetence was my spinal health. I had always thought that stretching the hamstrings only had to do with the legs. Boy was I wrong. The standing forward fold has cracked my back in places that I never knew I could as I progress through the pose. Here is what I’m talking about. 

Spinal health is something that has recently come onto my radar and I’m excited to keep diving deeper into this. These 4 stages are easily demonstrated through yoga and many other aspects of my life. Here’s the list of my 4 stages through competence. Hope this helps you and your journey in self-awareness!

Yoga

1. UC- Hamstring flexibility
2. CC- Breath work
3. CI- Flexibility + Balance
4. UI- Spinal Health