Learn to Unlearn
What does it mean to unlearn?
That’s a weird thing if you’ve never heard that concept before. You might ask is unlearning important? What do I need to unlearn? Essentially unlearning is discarding something that you’ve learned in the past. Something that you decide or you have figure out is either false or it’s outdated information. Unlearning a bad habit is probably the most important thing to unlearn.
In order to unlearn you first have to accept that whatever it is that we think we know is not right in the first place. So in concept, that might sounds easy to just rethink something. To simply say “ta-da, it’s not longer the truth in my mind”, but it’s really not that easy as a human.
How to be absolutely sure of everything?
A lot of us have taken this life class called “how to be absolutely sure of everything”. Have you taken that class? How to absolutely sure of everything. Do you know someone that knows everything about everything? This person has to be right all the time and they don’t listen to anyone else’s opinion. No matter what it is, if it’s a topic that they believe that they know, then they are absolutely sure of everything as it relates to that.
Whether you said yes that you’re one of these people or whether maybe in your business today you’re trying to coach one of these people, then how do we help them? The moral of the story is it’s really ourselves. How do we help ourselves and others unlearn things that we believe are correct and right today in order to relearn better habits, life skills, become more open minded and generally grow as individuals? How do we do that?
Practice self actualization
So there’s a ton of exercises on self actualization or realization. There’s a lot of stuff out there that you can kind of dig into. The first step, the number one first step is understanding that our biggest hurdle is getting over our own ego. Right? That’s a big word, right? E-G-O. Now, you maybe thinking, “Hey, I don’t think I’m all that. I don’t have an ego problem. What is she talking about?” We all have an ego problem. It’s a human condition. You’re not a bad a person if you have an ego. Ego is the fact that we’re all driven to be right more than focusing on being happy. We will honesty damage relationships, alienate people. We will basically sabotage our chances of success and networking just to be right when we’re having conversations or when we’re training or we’re pointing out things to people in our point of view. It’s a human condition. We all do it.
If you don’t believe that’s you, then this conversation is really for you because we all do it. So take a minute and think about what do you do? What kind of arguments you have had recently with people that you were really wanting to push your point, where you were standing your ground? Because definitely sometimes you are right. However, nine times out of ten, if we were to rethink about the way we think about things, we would at least see the value from the other person’s perspective.
Accept you are not always going to be right
So as humans, we’ll never be able to unlearn things until we can accept we aren’t always right in the first place. If you find that challenging, it’s okay. There are tons of exercises in self actualization to help you get over your ego.
So here’s some specific things though that you can do to really implement this idea of unlearning into your life and in your business because obviously we don’t need to unlearn everything. Not everything we think is wrong but a large portion of it is. But where do we start? You can’t just relearn everything you’ve learned in your life.
Start with unlearning what serves you the least
So what serves you? What’s the most important thing for you to focus on? You need to identify what does not serve you and let it go.
If you have life goals. If you know where you’re going. If you have a very specific direction that you’re trying to move forward to. If you are trying to become a better person. If you want to build a successful business. If you are trying to make an impacting on other people’s lives in a positive way… Then there are definitely beliefs that are floating around in you mind, in you heart and in our subconscious that do not serve that higher purpose.
They actually might hinder you.
Step One: Identify Beliefs that Do Not Serve You
The first step is to identify those beliefs that are NOT serving you and your higher purpose.
Step Two: Become Curious
Once you identify the beliefs that are not serving you, then you have to become curious. That’s the second step. You’ve got to be curious so that you will enjoy the journey when you begin searching for a different way to view those things, to validate a new set of understanding and eradicate to the least that’s not serving you. Because if you don’t enjoy the process of learning and being curious about how to get better with these things, then it really is an uphill battle, and it doesn’t feel good.
Step Three: Reinforce With Education and Growth
The third step is to really reinforce your new level of understanding with continued education and growth. And this is really powerful. If you’ve not been to a live training event, if they’re not really on your most do list, you need to put them on there because this is the most powerful way to really reinforce new levels of understanding and self actualization and continue your education and your growth.
When you attend a live training event it’s an immersion. Lots of science will tell you that’s so important.
Here’s a quick exercise that’s going to help illustrate what I mean.
I want you to immediately begin writing down your very first thought and emotions that pop up. Don’t filter it, don’t think about what you’re writing. You may even want to close your eyes and just jot down literally any of the emotions that are running through your body as I say what I’m getting ready to say. Okay?
Your webinar will be at least an hour long and you will teach on that webinar at least three concepts to your audience, whether that audience is zero or if it’s a thousand people, it doesn’t matter. You will teach to them three concepts you’ve learned in your business in the last 20 to 30 to 40 days. If you attended any webinar and attended any training, you’ve got something to teach. You will hold this webinar within the next seven days, right? So this is no scheduling it out a month from now. Within the next seven days, you will host this webinar.
When you are done hosting your webinar, it only takes about an hour for Google to like do it’s little processing thing, you’ll have a share link at that point. It will be live on your YouTube channel. You will then take the replay of that webinar and you’re going to post it on your blog if you have one, on your fan page if you have one, and then I want you to send out an email using your auto responder with the link to view it. Whether you send the link to your blog or your YouTube channel, it’s up to you.
Now, you should be writing down some stuff. I talked for a while there. You should have a lot of things on your list you should have a lot of emotions and immediate thoughts that came to mind as I was speaking that specific task that you’ve already committed to doing before you even knew what it was.
So to give you specifics of how this whole thing works with unlearning things and why it’s so important. I’m going to break down what the … I have a fair amount of certainty in my mind that some of the things I’m getting ready to mention are things that are probably on your list or maybe you saw them and didn’t want to write them down, right?
We’re resistant to even write down negative things too. We know that it isn’t how we’re “supposed” to feel. So if you didn’t write these things down but you felt them, that’s a big wake up call too that you have to realize where you’re at mentality with this whole self awareness.
So here’s a couple of things that I’m pretty sure that is on most of your list. Again, depending on where you are in your business, if you sell a lot of webinars, the idea of it may not freak you out as bad. But even me, who I’m literally do webinars every single week, I always have a little trepidation when I go to schedule a new one or I get always that moment of nervousness. Always. Doesn’t matter. It’s just the way it is. So even if I were to write down things that I’ve got, I would say nervous. I would say nervously excited. I would say, “Oh no. What am I going to talk about? I worried about the topic.” Those are things that I would write down for sure even though I do it every single week. You’ve never done it.
I’m sure you have some things written down like fear, resistance. I can’t do that. I don’t know three things that people would want to hear about from me. What in the world would I talk about? I need more time. There’s no way that I can do that within a week. No one’s going to be there to listen. So why would I even do that? That’s silly. I would never share that on my personal page. That’s way too vulnerable. That makes me way too vulnerable. I don’t want people’s feedback because I know it will be negative. I know it’s not going to be good. So yeah, I might do it. But I’m not going to post it anywhere publicly.
Guys, if you wrote down those things, look at that list, and, again, if you felt any of those things but didn’t write it down, write it down right now because it is most imperative for you to identify what beliefs are rattling around in your mind, that are disempowering you from moving forward in your business and in your life. So the things that are on your list right now are the things that you have to unlearn immediately. These are the things that you, even at a subconscious level, know to be true and are holding you back. The reason you wrote them down is because you believe it to be true. If you wrote down something like, “I can’t do it. I don’t know three things. A week is not enough time for me to prepare and do this thing. You and your own subconscious mind believe that to be true and I’m telling you right now it’s not. It’s not because I was there and I pushed through and I did the due anyway and that’s how I grew my business period. There’s nothing else that can come between you and success besides the idea that you can’t or you’re not good enough or you need more time.
So these are the things you must unlearn if you wish to learn how to become a successful entrepreneur. So, guys, does this topic interest you? If you really want to dig into this unlearning concept, a guy who has a couple of good books is Jack Uldrich, two books, Higher Unlearning and then Unlearning 101, which is 101 lessons to thinking inside out the box. They’re both really good books.
tell me some of the beliefs that you wrote down and that you’re going to eradicate from your mind and in your business so that you can achieve the success that you deserve.