Last week, I attended another session of the CT Health Foundation's, Health Leadership Fellows Program. (As an aside, applications for the class of 2014 are due April 1st). For me, a few different themes came together.

The first is the four stages of competence. In the first stage, we are unconscious of our incompetence. We don't know how to do something, and we don't recognize our lack of knowledge. The next stage is being consciously incompetent; we discover what we don't know and that we need to work on. The third stage is being consciously competent. After we work on a skill for a while, we master the skill, but we still have to think about it as we do it. The final stage is becoming unconsciously competent. The skill has become natural, effortless.

I tend not to think of myself as a leader and when it comes to leadership skills, tend to think of myself as in the first stage. Yet the program has caused me to rethink some of my views on leadership, as well as the skills that I have or wish to develop.

One of the most important areas of this is what I like to talk about in terms of intent and impact. When I write, when I try to work on something important to me, too often, I don't think about the intent. I am unconscious of my intent. On the simplest level, too many of us live lives of quite desperation, where our only intent is to get food and housing, to make it through the day, through the week. Yet shouldn't our lives be more than that?

Then, if we do get in touch with some greater intent, do we actually have the impact we were hoping to have? How often do we ever even know the impact we're having?

I think social media provides a good example of this. So many people working in social media intend to build audience. They look at how many followers or friends they have, how many hits their websites get, maybe even how many times something they say is shared or retweeted. Yet that isn't really a meaningful intent. It also leads to those trying to be more intentional in their use of social media not to focus as much on impact as perhaps they should. If I am being intentional in my social media activity, why do I want to get distracted by hit counts? I'm spending much more time trying to determine the intent of my social media activity, as well as other activities in my life, and then try to find out if the impact I'm actually having matches up with that intent.

This takes me to an aspect I thought about a bit during this month's Health Leadership Fellows gathering: What are our values? How often do we really think about our values? How do they relate to our intent in our various activities?

In a discussion leading up to the session, a few of us talked about how people's values don't always match their actions. In politics we scream at others for being hypocrites, claiming one value and acting in a different manner. I mentioned the saying that if you really want to know a persons values, take a look at what they like or post on Facebook.

However, perhaps the accusation of hypocrisy is overdone. Perhaps it relates back to the four stages, not knowing our values and not acting on them, knowing our values and but not acting on them, knowing our values and acting on them, and ultimately getting our values and actions so inline that we don't think of our values as we act them out.

Another way of looking at this is thinking about our values, what we believe internally, and our commitments, how we actually act. Consciousness, competency, intent, impact, values and commitments; all of these are ideas that I'm exploring further.