Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.
Learning any skill is a lot more of a puzzle than a task, and one of the most enabling and at the same time disabling aspects is how well we deal with mistakes we make along the way.
As Carl Sagan pointed out in his cautionary tale about the Bamboozle,
” If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge.”
But this effect happens at all levels of thought, we all avoid owning up to errors, especially if we worked hard to get to this incorrect position, and think we will need to restart the whole thing to get it right.
What can help with this is understanding what in a 1969 paper Management Trainer Martin Broadwell called the “4 levels of teaching” which today is better known as the “4 levels of competence”.
The four stages are:
- Unconscious incompetence. The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognise the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.[1]
- Conscious incompetence. Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognise the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
- Conscious competence. The individual understands or knows how to do something. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration, and if it is broken, they lapse into incompetence.[1]
- Unconscious competence. The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending on how and when it was learned.
Once we see that it is simply human nature to get everything wrong at first it makes it so much easier to retrace our steps and make a fresh start.
The main fear is that if it took us 10 years to get it wrong it will take another 10 years to correct this mistake.
No one is ever 100% wrong, it is usually more like 5 or 10%, and frequently it is not the physical aspects but how we think about or look at the physical aspects.
We were looking in the right direction but at the wrong thing.
The very fact that there is a Buddhist Sutras covering this is an indication of how prevalent it is among us all.
With respect to my Wing Chun training, this was definitely the case for many years in my past, and through conversations with my teacher/sifu it was also his experience, and he told me that his teacher had told him the very same thing.
We should not fear getting things wrong, it is only by understanding what is incorrect that we can recognise what is correct.
Obviously, the sooner we redress the situation the better, but it is NEVER too late.
I have been actively teaching Wing Chun for over 25 years, and it is my observation, from teaching hundreds of Wing Chun students, that most students do not recognise what Wing Chun is trying to teach them.
They are looking at what they think is Wing Chun, but they are seeing something else.
There is no need to be upset or embarrassed by this, I was in this place, as was my Sifu, Jim Fung, and as was his Sifu, Choy Shun Tin.
“I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t look at me; look at the moon.”
THE BUDDHA.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 