THE COMPETENCE TRAP

You ever take a course on leadership, communication or transformation, and when asked what you learned that was new, the answer ends up being, “Mostly that I know this stuff pretty well”?

That’s the experience of increased competency and understanding bankrupting itself.

It’s nice to have your competency affirmed. There’s a safety in it as well. If what you wanted was confirmation that you’re already thoughtful, capable and ahead of most people in the room, then great — mission accomplished.

But people don’t usually sign up for things like that in order to have their existing range reinforced. They sign up because some part of them is hoping for access to something they don’t yet have.

This is where the safety of this tendency becomes its trap.

There comes a point where more competency and understanding stops opening anything new up. They just keep expanding inside the narrow range your identity is built to handle.

If that keeps happening often enough, things start to harden internally. You stop expecting much that is genuinely new. Desires you have that lie outside of that range start looking unrealistic.

What makes this challenging is that it’s not experienced as a collapse. Instead, you adapt around and with it.

“Guess there isn’t that much else out there”.

The adaptation doesn’t feel like resignation. It feels like maturity, discernment, and “being realistic”.

I call it empowered resignation.