Growth Requires Unlearning as Much as Learning

"Growth and aliveness require a commitment to unlearning. To occasionally letting go of behaviors, assumptions, mindsets, worldviews, and ways of thinking and acting that used to work but no longer do, no longer fit the changing circumstances of your life, or start bringing you diminishing returns, whether at the individual, organizational, or cultural level.

But unlearning isn't like learning. It isn't merely additive—adding new knowledge or habits to your existing inventory. It's subtractive. It's stopping a certain behavior, questioning a certain assumption or expectation, or decommissioning a habit. It's recognizing and accepting that a change needs to happen, that your old way of doing something isn't working anymore. It's then finding sources of new knowledge and inspiration, whether through books, videos, classes, or mentoring. Then it's erasing and redrawing, overwriting your data, and doing a cancel-clear.

Unlearning requires patience with this shift, and the willingness to take one step backward in order to take two steps forward. After all, you’re attempting to think, act, and perceive things differently, to break down often long-held beliefs, biases, and behaviors, and the core perceptions that fuel them, and it can sometimes require patience on the order of years.

As for how you gain the motivation to unlearn something, this may be a function of pain finally outweighing gain, of an old pattern becoming a noticeably losing proposition, if not actively holding you back from who you want to be and how you want to live. But it requires admitting this to yourself, which typically happens long after the evidence has begun piling up. However, if the reward for unlearning something is significant enough you're more likely to let the old behavior go."

Read the complete article available at Psychology Today!

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