Progress in your growth may require more unlearning than learning. Just to clarify, while I support the idea of growth and development through learning, I realized that at a certain point in life, unlearning can mean much more for your development and growth. This can lead to better engagement, improved relationships, higher effectiveness and better health. I am always on the lookout for my own hardwired beliefs and assumptions that undermine my effectiveness and success. Once identified I undertake the challenge of unlearning some of these reflexive tendencies that limit my options and keep my subjective worldview in place.
During the first few years of life our brains are required to learn incredible amounts of information from our surroundings to facilitate and ensure our survival. Human beings are born with less instincts than many other mammals (many argue this is due to our ever-changing environment, and that instincts that were useful 100 years ago would be less useful today.) Therefore, we rapidly download information from our primary caregivers, peers, and culture. Infants and children are acutely aware of the responses, fears, beliefs, and behaviours of their caregivers. They learn what values and practices will support their survival, wellbeing and security. Understandably their focus is on safety and survival. At this stage they look to the outside for validation. Their identity, self-worth, and security are based on whether they are accepted by others. They (we) become socialized and encultured, if we don’t, we face rejection from the group and that means death.
This is survival-based programming or conditioning: We can rapidly assimilate cues, beliefs, and behaviours from our surroundings because of brain frequency. From birth to 2 years of age the human brain predominantly operates at the lowest frequency of 0.5 Hz, known as delta waves. Then from 2-6 years of age a child begins to spend more time at a higher frequency called theta waves between 4-8Hz. These are the same two zones of brain frequency that hypnotherapists use to induce in their patients. This is how children up to the age of 6 can download incredible amounts of information needed to thrive from their environment. In this way children download worldly wisdom from their parents directly into their unconscious memory. As a result, their parent’s beliefs or ‘truths’ become their own. Therefore, we often become programmed and hardwired by our culture and we carry this programming or mapping with us unchallenged throughout life. This is good if the beliefs are accurate, useful, constructive, and resourceful. But what if they are not? During this time, we seek validation from external sources, from others outside of the self. As we get older our brains operate more from alpha and beta wave frequencies (8-35Hz) which is less susceptible to outside programming, locking in the earlier learned responses, assumptions, and beliefs.
Now you have internal conditioning and programming that orients you towards safety, security and survival. This was imprinted during the formative years of your existence. It is not good nor bad. It was necessary for you to acquire the essential skills in order to navigate and survive in your environment. The real question is whether they are now enabling or constraining your development and effectiveness. Just because these competencies and tendencies were useful as a child and to get you to where you are today, it doesn’t mean they are useful in getting you where you want to go. And more often than not, a lack of awareness about these conditioned behaviours, can be the very obstacles between you and the future you are committed to creating.
What if the next step for your growth and development as an individual or leader was not to learn more things, but to unlearn the conditioned responses that you are unaware of but are governing your actions, behaviours and outcomes?
Technically we don’t have beliefs; our beliefs have us. We can’t see them; we see through them. Our beliefs, accurate or inaccurate, bias our perceptions and interpretations. They hold our subjective reality in place, and often with that they can hold us captive to protective, ineffective, and limiting modes of operating. Our responses are controlled by perceptions and not all our perceptions are accurate. We don’t perceive objects, we perceive meaning. We filter our experiences and perceptions through beliefs, memories, understandings, assumptions, and meanings that we have associated with emotionally significant events.
Your learned responses from your childhood environment and the subsequent assumptions will influence your perspectives, effectiveness and long-term health.
Most people fall into one of these three categories, where do you see yourself?
1. If your nurture environment required that you to be nice, pleasant, kind, loyal, or liked in order to be accepted and validated, then today you will believe that you need to be compliant to the expectations of others and that you need their approval to be ok. You may believe your role is to serve the needs of others. Your self-worth and security will be based on how well you satisfy the expectations of others. You will be mostly people oriented and talk and behave in ways that please others at a significant cost to yourself, your growth, your health, your effectiveness and your authenticity. Deep down you may be motivated by the fear of rejection. If you fall in this group, you have an increased chance of developing cancer or autoimmune disease.
2. If your nurture environment required that you win, get results, be perfect, or achieve high standards in order to be accepted, then today you will believe that you are the results that you achieve. That if you do not get results, then you are not ok. Your personal worth will hinge on the tasks you accomplish. You will be extremely task oriented and will likely use high control tactics to achieve results at whatever the cost. This could include being overly ambitious, autocratic, insensitive, and driven and will likely come at a cost to your ability to trust, delegate, and collaborate. High levels of adrenaline and cortisol are associated with this mindset, which may lead to an increase in hypertension, cholesterol and diabetes that will predispose you to atherosclerosis, strokes and heart disease. Deep down you may be motivated by the fear of failure.
3. If your nurture environment required that you protect, detach, or distance yourself from an emotionally or physically volatile environment in order to survive, then today you will believe that you are safe when you operate mostly from your “head”. You will be ok when you are rational, intellectual and brilliant. Your self-worth and security depends on you being perceived as smart, knowledgeable, self-sufficient, independent, and superior. You may come across as distant, cold, overly analytical, critical, or arrogant. This hyper-independent mindset may come at a high cost to you in terms of limiting your influence, connection, engagement, and forming deep relationships. Deep down you may be driven by the fear of being vulnerable.
Your current mindset and subsequent learned skills and competencies may have been absolutely essential in helping you to get socialized and adjusted to the world. However, overusing, over-identifying, and over-relying on these strengths, may become a weakness, and may constrain your growth and effectiveness. The beliefs that keep these over-used strengths in place are inherently self-limiting because they restrict behavioural options. Here we operate on autopilot and we’re in service of reflexive strategies that are designed to meet our needs, manage our anxiety, and keep us safe.
There comes a time when we should stop seeking validation from the external world but seek it from within. If your identity, security and self-worth is always based on what you believe the world expects, you will remain reactive to the feedback/stimuli you receive. You will only be “ok” if you live up to the self-defining assumptions supplied by my environment. In order to mature, to the next level and grow you need to become the author of your story. You become the author of your own life when you are independent of past conditioning. Then your life is no longer authored by the dictates of old beliefs based on the expectations of others.
This stage marks the shift to an internal locus of control. By unlearning conditioned assumptions, we start to see the habitual ways of thinking that we adopted while growing up that were socialized into us. These embedded habits of thought form the core of the reactive mindset (software). They have served us well and are now reaching operational limits. They are not complex enough for the complexity of life and leadership into which we have grown. We must identify, see and unlearn these assumptions in order to grow, transform, excel, and thrive.
Have you reached a point where you need to reboot your operating system and upgrade your software to facilitate growth and become the author of your own story? If you need to step up your game to keep up with the complexity and uncertainty in the world, let’s have a conversation.
