How to Keep Levelling Up Your Skills

I like to listen to the Multiplier Mindset podcast series every couple years, and every time I re-listen I listen, I’m reminded of lots of good and valuable frameworks for thinking about learning and growing.

One of the ideas Dan Sullivan introduces at the start of the series is the 4 steps towards a breakthrough:

1. Commitment
2. Courage
3. Capability
4. Confidence

He talks about it in terms of entrepreneurs working towards taking their businesses to the next level, but what struck me today while listening to it is how this applies to learning skills.

When we take on learning any new skill, we have to work through these four stages. We commit to something new, work in a state of courage while our capabilities don’t yet match what we’ve committed to, and eventually learn and develop the capability, and confidence. But there are always levels to learning any skill, and the feeling of comfort and confidence with being good, but not great, leads a lot of people to learn to the point of feeling confidently mediocre and stop there.

I’ve been learning Spanish on and off for the past 8 years and have gotten to the point of feeling confident speaking the language day to day. I know that I have a lot more to learn, and over the past 2 months have been focusing on improving my accent, but not making progress as quickly as I would like.

It struck me while listening to this today that I haven’t been pushing myself outside that comfortable “confidence” stage. I’ve learned enough to feel confident as a second language speaker, but in order to make a breakthrough and work towards the next level of fluency, I need to start back at step one and find a commitment that forces me to practice the skill at a level that I’m currently not capable of. Going through that process again is the only way to make a big breakthrough in developing new capabilities and newfound confidence.

I’m not sure yet what that looks like when it comes to my Spanish practice–maybe trying to record some videos/or podcasts in my second language–but I am sure that I want to keep reminding myself of this and finding ways to level up skills when I’m getting too comfortable.

Are there skills you know you could get better at but aren’t making progress with? What is a commitment you could make that would start you back at the start of these four steps towards making a breakthrough?