How competent do you want to be at what you do? How competent do you want to be at something new? How do you base that competition? Do you have periodic tests, or evaluations against yourself, or perhaps against others? Do you put your work (s) on display in public for the whole world to see, or at least for your office and your boss to see? You see, no matter how you demonstrate your proficiency in what you do, there is definitely always an objective way by which you can and should be considered a success in that activity or skill.
While, as I just noted, there is always a way to demonstrate and evaluate your competence, what strikes me most peculiar is the fact that people who actually think they are incompetent at what they do often don't change their minds when indicators are presented to them. of your success and competence. Their self-doubts override the Competency Dictionary tests, like a judge in the court of his mind. However, this also works on the opposite side of the street. The proof of this would be most evident in all the reality shows we've seen burst onto the scene in recent years.
One such attention-grabbing show features dancers of all levels and walks of life performing weekly to entertain and win the show's grand prize. The first few episodes have a lot of those people who 'think' they can dance to a level that they think makes them worthy of being on the show, but they really can't. When they receive honest reviews from the show's judges (all of whom have been in the industry for many years), they resist criticism and proclaim their future success in dance. All the time you, the member of the audience, sit there wondering "how the hell do THEY think they can dance?"
Now I am not saying that they will never reach the level that they think they already have, what I am saying is that their belief in their competence is a driving force and that same driving force can work to their own advantage. I say this from my own experience, as well as from the experience of people I have come across over the years.
From my own experience, I can share a short story of how my own belief in my competition launched my programming business. Shortly after leaving the United States Armed Forces, I did computer programming, primarily as a hobby. While I was in the military, I used it to simplify my work by scheduling some record keeping tasks and the like. But mostly I did it as a hobby: reading about what was happening in the industry and studying current programming languages and seeing what I could do with them. After leaving the service, I decided to see what I could do with my hobby trying to turn it into a career. I was able to get a job at a medical billing company as a systems analyst, and a couple of months later I was promoted to programmer.
How? Well, I believed in my ability and in my proficiency in the programming language they were using for their billing system. But here's the catch ... I had only been programming in that particular language for about six months. So it wasn't my time or experience with your system or your language that led me to the promotion. No, it was my belief in my ability to use the knowledge that I had and in my ability to learn everything else I needed in the time that they waited. That is exactly what I did, I programmed the billing system for your doctors over the course of the next few months, applying all the best of what I had already learned. Apply all the knowledge and skills you had; not just from your system language, but from other languages you have previously studied and read.
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