Yes, You Can Teach the Thing You’re Naturally Great At

When you’re naturally or intuitively really good at something, but don’t know the steps you go through to do that thing well or you don’t know what makes you good at it, you’re in the top zone of the stages of the competence pyramid: Unconscious Competence. This is a great place to be because you don’t have to expend mental energy thinking about how you’re doing the thing in order to do it well.

The downside of being in unconscious competence when you’re leading a team is that it can feel like you aren’t able to teach your team how to do the things you’re so good at. Because you don’t articulate to yourself how you do something so well, it feels like you can’t articulate how you do something so well.

This feeling that you can’t teach what you do is a big inhibitor to scaling yourself since it prevents you from delegating and subsequently focusing your time on the highest leverage things you can do in your role. It also leaves your team being less effective than they could be.

The good news is that you actually can teach the thing you’re so intuitively good at. The secret is that you just have to try. It’s really that simple.

When I run into this with the founder and executive clients I coach, I typically ask my client to spend just 30 concentrated minutes writing down how they do something so well. They are amazed at how much they are actually able to articulate when they try.

I worked with one founder who was incredibly knowledgeable about his business domain and its intersection with technology, which made him an exceptionally good decision maker. The issue was he was getting pulled into too many decisions. In just 10 minutes during a coaching session, he was able to articulate the key principles he uses to make decisions at the intersection of business and technology. After the session, he polished the principles and passed them onto his team. This allowed his team to make a lot of the decisions themselves, escalating only the particularly difficult or high stakes decisions to him. While his team may never fully match his decision-making expertise in such a complex domain, he can now focus more of his time on the work he’s truly uniquely suited to do.

Another executive who I worked with was very skilled at making influential presentations within the unique context of his company, but he was stuck on how to help his team make better presentations. Once he took a bit of time to write down a framework for how to create influential presentations, his team loved it, started using it, and asked him to write down how he did something else he does so well.

Teaching not only elevates your team, it also makes you even better at the skill you’re teaching. The conscious competency pyramid as typically presented stops one level too short. There’s a step above unconscious competence: Mastery. When you can teach something, you become a master.

I experienced this first hand when Rich Litvin, the leader of the coaches group I am a member of, asked Levina Li (another coach in the group) and me to create an experience to help coaches in the group uplevel themselves during one of our in-person intensive retreats.

When thinking of what kind of experience we wanted to create, Levina and I realized that we did our best coaching when we were able to sink deeply into specific states of being including: presence, complete acceptance and lack of judgement of our client and ourselves, and tapping into the field of universal human love. At the time we had little idea of exactly how we got into these states, though we knew when we got in them it yielded the best results for our clients.

We spent just a few sessions over Zoom articulating, experimenting, and testing ways to quickly and frequently get into these states of being. We came out with a 90-minute experience that we knew would be really transformational for the other coaches in the group. Even though we knew the session would be good, the impact we had on the coaches in the group was even greater than we expected. One coach said that during our session was the most powerful she’d ever felt as a coach. Another coach said he’d been doing deep transformational work on himself for decades and uncovered huge new insights about himself during our session.

Going through the process of teaching what was previously in the unconscious competence stage for me has allowed me to more reliably and quickly enter key states of being that allow me to be the best coach for my clients.

What’s the thing you’re so naturally or intuitively good at that you haven’t yet tried to teach?

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