A week ago, a three-part series was offered. Mattering, Formation, Adult Responsibility: three blogs, one argument, one closing call to the grown-ups in young people’s lives to stop diagnosing the youth and start examining ourselves.
In the week since, we pondered the question, which many readers may have had and who may have taken the series personally in the best sense: if you are asking us to do this work, what does the work actually look like? Whilst the three-part series made the case, it may have failed to draw the map.
This is the map, a companion blog that takes us inside the climb, the three-part series that asked us to make. To walk it, we borrow a frame from an unexpected source.
Executive coach Brad Stulberg’s new book, “The Way of Excellence”, offers a developmental ladder, the four phases of competence, that maps almost exactly onto the inner journey of becoming the kind of adult a young person needs. I am not borrowing his vocabulary of excellence. Excellence is the wrong word for parenting, teaching, or facilitating youth formation. His four competence phases articulate what the three-part series implied but did not specify. We are still becoming. That is the most honest thing we can model for our children.
The Southeaster as Teacher
Anyone who has lived a few summers in Cape Town learns to read the southeaster. Not by looking at a weather app. By something quieter: a shift in the light over the bay, the way the trees in your neighbourhood begin to lean, a particular tightening in the air that tells you to bring the washing in, close the upstairs windows, and warn the kids the trampoline is about to take flight.
Visitors don’t notice any of this. Newcomers feel the gust hit and only then react. Long-time residents read the wind before it arrives, unconsciously, the way you read a familiar face.
The four phases of competence show how adults learn to anticipate a young person’s moods before trouble arises.
Phase One: Unconscious Incompetence
This is the adult who does not yet know what they do not know. The principal who believes discipline is the answer to disengagement. The parent who confuses providing with being present. The teacher who reads a Grade 8 boy’s slumped silence as defiance rather than overwhelm. This is not a failure of character. It is the visitor on one of our beaches who feels the first gust and assumes it is a passing breeze, not the front edge of a thirty-knot wind that will reshape the afternoon. You cannot read what you have not yet learned to recognise.
Most adults begin here, with the best of intentions and the wrong instruments. Mattering is not obvious until someone teaches you to see it.
Phase Two: Conscious Incompetence
This is the uncomfortable middle ground, the phase where you can feel the wind, but you do not yet know how to move with it. You start to see the gap between what young people need and what you have been offering. You notice the moment your child stops telling you things, and you understand, with a small cold drop in your stomach, that you may have helped engineer the silence. You watch a learner shut down in front of you, and you know, this time, that something more is happening than bad behaviour.
Stulberg observes that most people, when they reach this phase, retreat. The discomfort of confronting your own gaps is real, and the modern world offers infinite anaesthetics: doomscrolling, busyness, polarisation, and the endless consolation of being right about things that do not matter. He calls it zombie burnout: filling the void with motion that goes nowhere.
The three-part series was, in effect, an invitation to stay. Stay in conscious incompetence long enough for it to do its work. The southeaster does not flatter you. It teaches you, but only if you are willing to keep standing in it.
Phase Three: Conscious Competence
This is where formation lives, for adults too. This is the principal who deliberately learns to ask questions before issuing instructions. The parent who prioritises being present over maximising productivity, fully aware of the associated personal or professional costs. The teacher who thoughtfully designs both the lesson plan content and the relational framework supporting it. The coach who has done the inner work to know when their feedback is about the child and when it is about themselves.
It is the Capetonian who has begun to read the trees, the light, the air, but still has to think about it. Still has to consciously check the windows before leaving the house. The work is no longer invisible, but it is not yet automatic.
Amanda Williams, facilitating at our Learning Facilitation Centre at Kensington High School, sits squarely in this phase. So do every facilitator who has ever taken the Rudder4Life Lesson Plans seriously. The work is deliberate. The presence is chosen. The competence is conscious because it must be, every week, for every learner, in every encounter.
This is also where Stulberg’s most useful warnings apply. Process over outcomes: the antidote to the adult who measures their parenting or teaching by what the young person produces rather than by who the young person is becoming. Fit over grit: the warning against forcing young people through systems that do not fit them, even when our intentions are pure. We can be conscientious and still be wrong about what a particular child needs. The work of phase three is learning to hold both.
Phase Four: Unconscious Competence
This is Ubuntu in the body. It is the grandmother who walks into the room, and the children settle not because she has issued an instruction, but because her presence itself is a regulation. It is the teacher whose classroom holds together before a word is spoken, because something in the way she stands, looks at them, and breathes communicates: you are seen here, and you are safe.
It is the long-time Capetonian who closes the windows without thinking. Who knows, without knowing how she knows, that today is not a beach day. The reading of the wind has become her character.
Stulberg is careful here, and we want to be careful too. Phase four is not arrival. There is a trap waiting at the end of every developmental ladder, known to psychologists as the arrival fallacy: the belief that you have figured it out, that the work is done, and that you have become the person you needed to be. He notes that high achievers often describe a strange hollowness even after winning their fields’ highest honours. The summit, it turns out, is not where life happens.
Ubuntu reminds us why. I am because we are. If becoming is relational, it is never finished, because relationships are never finished. The grandmother who has worked for forty years still has new grandchildren to teach. The teacher with 20 years in the classroom is still teaching this year’s Grade 8s, who are not last year’s. Phase four is not unconscious competence as a final state. It is unconscious re-engagement with the work, week after week, learner after learner.
What Clean Fuel Feels Like
Here is the question that decides whether the climb is worth making. Stulberg distinguishes between two sources of energy for hard work. Dirty fuel is fear, obligation, guilt, status anxiety, and the desire to be seen as a good parent, a respected teacher, or a competent leader. It burns but leaves a residue. It produces motion without much warmth. Clean fuel is love, joy, curiosity, and genuine care for the work itself.
Children can tell the difference. They cannot always articulate it, but they feel it in their bodies. They know which adult is truly present and which is merely performing presence. They know which teacher cares about them and which cares about being seen as a teacher who cares. The young people we are trying to reach have far more sophisticated instruments for reading our inner state than we care to admit.
This is, in the end, what the three-part series was trying to say, and what this companion blog is trying to extend. We cannot give them what we have not built in ourselves. Mattering cannot be transmitted by an adult who does not feel it. Formation cannot be modelled by an adult who is not in formation. Responsibility cannot be carried by an adult who has not learned to carry themselves.
The southeaster is still blowing. It always will be. The question is not whether the wind exists. The question is whether we are still learning to read it.
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