I once spent a summer in a bowling league. 

Yeah, I don’t bowl. 

But my friends needed a fourth. And because of my then-unbreakable need to please, at whatever cost to my forearm tendons and dignity, I found myself bowling. Week after week. Despite zero skills in or zeal for bowling. 

Each time I faced down my mortal limits, my mutinous physique, my flaccid will. I barely scored. I confronted a human plight: we know what our bodies need to do, but despite our strongest command signals from our brain our limbs utterly betray us. 

I’d swear I aimed straight at the pins, but they’d magnetize to the gutter as if by tractor beam. As other bowlers would propel forth custom-made balls like Naruto, it looked like I was placing mine directly into the gutter. Just in case it needed a little kiss. 

Alexis to the rescue. My then-girlfriend now-wife informed me, gently, that I was human. She then, as she does often as a therapist and professor, taught me something.

In learning any new skill, she explained, there are four stages*: unconscious incompetence; conscious incompetence; conscious competence; and unconscious competence. I was in the second. It happens to be the most painful, where most people quit. 

Let me explain. Imagine you want to learn to drive. You visualize yourself gliding down the highway, the wind dancing across your skin. How hard could it be?  

You are a fool. This beginning stage is unconscious incompetence: you don’t know how much you don’t know.

For instance, you don’t grasp all the brain rewiring you’ll need to parallel park or weave through traffic. You are unaware of how unskilled you are. And in this, there’s a sweet, stupid bliss.

You continue: you start to engage with the new activity. In your freshly acquired awareness, you see you are actually crap at this because you’ve never done it before.** This is stage 2: conscious incompetence. You’re not used to the pressure to put on the gas without the car hurling itself forward. You forget your turn signal. You feel like a baby deer lurching and stalling. In this stage you see how not-yet-skilled you are. This can trample your sweet lil baby-deer ego. (According to Alexis, your mentality and self-talk will either make you give up or help you persevere.)

This was me bowling. A baby deer staggering along in stupid shoes, self-talking my way into my own greasy little doom gutter.

The next stage of conscious competence is better — if you can push through to it. You’ve driven for many, many hours. Your actions are practiced, more flowing, and deliberate. You start to see gains. You might actually be building some mastery!

Last is unconscious competence. You’ve been driving for so long that you can perform from muscle memory. You can go on auto-pilot: zone out on your commute and still navigate safely. You are one with the car. Maybe you’re destined to be a driving instructor.

In the tarot, the court cards are (in most cases): Page, Knight, Queen, King. Each exists for each suit: Cups, Swords, Wands, and Pentacles. They’re rich archetypes. It can feel like a lot to memorize. It’s also opaque, harder to connect to: I don’t really know what a Page is (spoiler alert: I am not a medieval courtier).

That’s why I, like many tarot practitioners, think of them in terms more closely aligned with stages:

Or:

If you’re pulling and the court cards emerge, this can be a handy framework to call upon. Many of us are Pages in some aspects of our life, and Kings in others. Or, we think we’re supposed to be at a Queen stage, but the tarot gently reminds us we’re firmly a Knight.

Of course, there’s a lot more to say about the court cards. Let me know if you want more in a reply to this post!

Did I get better at bowling knowing that I was in a Knight stage? No. I def got worse. To this day, if I see a shiny lane of any kind my butthole turns inside out with fear. But it made me feel less bad about it.

Thanks to Alexis for her help in creating these prompts!

I would love to hear what you come up with. Reply to this email to share your thoughts or your stages with me!

Thanks for reading,
Cristina

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