Moving Your Life Forward-- Loops of Competence.

Experiential competence is one of the most valuable things you can participate in. I say experiential because for a lot of people, the act of increasing their skill and competence level with something involves study and knowledge gathering rather than practical application and real-world participation. This is the concept we call loops of competence.

What are loops of competence? Let's say, for example, that you want to run a marathon, but you've never done any exercise in your life. Studying about how to run a marathon is only going to get you so far. At a certain point, you need to go out running.

However, if you just try to run a marathon on day one, that probably is going to end badly for you. It's far more useful to start with a smaller chunk. What we call, a loop. Say, running 100 feet. After you mastered that, you can move on to a bigger loop, such as running 1 mile every day. Then, you continually increase the size of your loop, making sure to complete the loop by being successful at your assigned goal.

Setting yourself a goal of running 1 mile and succeeding is a completed loop. If your loop isn't complete, make a smaller loop. In other words, don't bite off more than you can chew.

I see a lot of people with Asperger's declare that they want to become independent, and then try to do everything all at once immediately and crash and burn. I fell victim to this. I declared that I wanted to make a million dollars in one month and have everything good happen in my life immediately, when I should have started with get a job.

I've seen so many young adults on the spectrum create a big loop and a big goal fail and say, I can't do it. And then, internalize the failure and have low self esteem. If that's you, that's not your fault. You just need to make your loops the right size.

Start with something that you know you can't fail at. If you want to be good at cooking, but you're afraid to cook, and you don't think you can cook, toast a piece of bread. Something that is laughably easy to the point where you have no question that you can do it.

Then, try to slightly exceed that. Maybe, it's time to try toasting some bread and then putting some meat and veggies on it. Boom. You just cooked and made a sandwich.

Obviously, there is more you can do with loops of confidence than just make a nice sandwich. You can use this concept to get better at anything, whether it be a job or a skill or something that you feel unsure of. The point is start small, go slow, and be consistent. Consistency wins over scale every day.

I'd recommend starting by picking one area of your life you'd like to improve, and then identify what the smallest loop you can do is. For example, if I wanted to focus on making friends, my smallest loop would be saying hi to one new person every day. Eventually, that will become easy, and you'll be on your way.

Troubleshooting when things go wrong. Troubleshooting is half art and half strategy. It requires figuring out what is wrong in a system and resolving it. In a mechanical system, that means isolating the problem part, taking it out, and replacing it. In an organic system, something that has grown, not built, that means examining the environment of the system to figure out where the issue is.

For example, if you have an issue with a tree, you can't necessarily just cut that part out and replace it. You need to look at the environment of the tree to see what's wrong. Do you need to give it more soil? Give it more nutrients? Give it more sunlight?

Obviously, this applies to more than just trees so let's take a real-life example, applying for a job. If I am applying to a lot of jobs and getting no callbacks or interviews, then I have two choices. I can either assume that I am unemployable, and no one likes me, or I can begin the troubleshooting process to figure out what is going wrong, and how to fix it.

First, we need to identify the steps that happen once I apply for a job. The first step is the actual act of applying for the job and filling out the application. Then, I have to get invited to an interview. Then, depending on the company, I may have to go through a second or third round of interviews. And then, I have to get offers. Once I accept one of those offers, I have a job.

Now that we've defined the steps, we need to ask, where do I get stuck? And what feedback am I getting? Are people just not replying to me at all? Have I started to follow up with them? As you start to take a look at the entire process, you can identify where the sticking point is, and then begin to focus more on that area.

So let's say that I'm not getting many calls back once I fill out applications. It might turn out that the PDF I've been sending of my resume is corrupted and unreadable. Or it might be that I have several typos in my resume that I didn't catch. Or it might be that I've only applied to two jobs, which simply isn't enough.

To give you another example of how this process works, let's take a look at food. There's a process called the elimination diet, where the idea is to eliminate the foods that are known to cause issues in some people, like wheat, for a month, see how you feel, and then introduce the food back into your diet. The thinking goes that after a month without the food, it will be a lot easier to tell how you feel when you eat that food. So in essence, we're just doing the troubleshooting process with food. We identify the problem, remove it, gather feedback, introduce it, gather feedback, and then make a conclusion from there.

Next time you get stuck and can't figure out how to proceed in life, try this process. It's simple, effective, and an extremely valuable part of how I live my everyday life.