Competence is on the list of universal human needs and I hear it named often. But usually when I hear someone identify a need for competence they are really trying to meet a need for worthiness, belonging, or acceptance. Competence as a need arises as you attempt to complete a task and you don't have the knowledge and skill to do so. As you fail at a task for which you lack competence, the inner critic might launch doubts about your worthiness, belonging, and acceptance. These needs typically overshadow the need for competence, but it can be difficult to see at first that you are not really connecting to a need for competence.
When competence is linked to worthiness, belonging, and acceptance, you can become "over-sensitive" to any comments about your skill or capacity. That is, it is more likely that any competence related comment is perceived as criticism and thus a potential threat to these deeper needs.
Reactivity associated with competence will be most intense if a sense of identity has formed around it. When someone’s identity is linked to competence they often take any opportunity to show what they know or can do. Again, trying to earn worthiness, belonging or acceptance. Sometimes this looks like criticizing or making fun of others for not knowing something that they know. Other times, it looks like interrupting someone to share a related story that shows what they know or can do. It can also show up as impatience, irritation, or defensiveness when someone asks about a task related question.
If you are on the receiving end of this behavior, you have a sense that there isn't much room for you in this person's world. The more unexamined the reactive pattern is, the less curiosity about others is offered. You might have a sense that you have to fight to be seen for the knowledge and competence you bring. You might suddenly find yourself insisting that the other person recognize that you were right and then feel disturbed that you have moved out of integrity and into a competency competition.
Perhaps the most tragic thing about building a self around competence is that it leads to a dull disconnect. We are complex and dynamic beings. Any attempt to build a one dimensional, sense of self blocks access to aliveness. For the person caught in this pattern, there's an emptiness that can't be filled. For others, it’s like relating to a mirage - authenticity is hidden behind the show of competency.
At one level, building a sense of self around competence is a set of habits. Habits can be changed by increasing awareness until one can identify them as they arise (recognize reactivity) and then learn to pause and thereby increase the capacity to choose something new.
At another level, one must seek to continuously expand one’s sense of identity until identity is experienced as a fluid mystery unfolding. This expansion directly supports equanimity as one’s needs for belonging and acceptance don’t depend on measuring up to a single static definition of self.
Expanding a sense of self can start simply by reflecting upon and integrating powerful experiences of one’s innate goodness or a deep sense of communion with life. These experiences are often simple moments of grace. For example, for me, two experiences stand out. One is when I was about four years old. I am outside with ducks, geese, horses and the splendor of nature all around me. I am alive with the goodness of life and I am not separate from it. Another is when I was a young adult beginning to sit meditation retreats. At the end of the retreat, I am standing in front of a bright red Japanese maple tree with sun streaming through the leaves, and in that moment nature reclaims me and I know the beauty of the maple tree is the same beauty in me.
Experiences like these are your touchstones that bring you back to an awareness that goes beyond the judgments and evaluations that come when we imagine ourselves separate.
Practice
Whether you know you get caught in identifying with competence or you know someone else who does this, the healing response is the same - see and seek out recognition and celebration of complexity and the dynamic unfolding of life. Offer presence and seeing of another when they are not demonstrating competence.