1ST task

 

THE ‘NATURE’ OF SKILLS

Skills represent your talents, abilities, and aptitudes – in short, what you are good at doing. Skills are built gradually by repeated training or other experiences. They may be, manual, intellectual or mental, perceptual or social.

(Source: I)

Skills are built gradually by repeated training or other experience. May also be defined as any competence possessed by someone; in an employment using there hands well among manual workers.

The acquisition of skill is a tortuous process that takes us through the following sequence:

1. Unconscious incompetence

This is the stage when ignorance is bliss, when it looks easy and you don’t realise how much there is to it. In an example of a skilful presenter to the observer, he may be performing the task effortlessly.

2 Conscious incompetence

This is the realisation that, when you first try to emulate the skilful performer, you can’t do it. This is an unpleasant discovery which may shock you into giving up and returning to the relative comfort of stage 1.

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3 Conscious competence

This stage is hard work! It is when you are able to do a competent presentation, but only by investing an enormous amount of conscious effort into every aspect of it. You have to force yourself to make adequate eye contact with the audience and to stand still. You have to force yourself not to talk to the visual aids and to synchronise your gestures with your main messages.  This is such hard work that you may decide that it isn’t worth the effort and abandon your attempt to acquire the skills in question.

4 Unconscious competence

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