A refusal to unlearn is a primary impediment to change …

It’s a myth that everyone hates change, but it’s true that many people don’t like and stubbornly resist it.

Take, for example, the story about a doctor who told one of his patients he needed to give up red meat … so the man stopped putting ketchup on his hamburgers!

Those who push against change employ as a primary impediment against it a stubborn refusal to unlearn.

Yes, you read that right. A refusal to UNlearn things we learned in the past is a primary means of impeding effective learning that leads to real change.

Many people have an undeveloped concept of learning, thinking we grow in knowledge and understanding, and live from a foundation of truth, because we first learn truth and then keep adding layers of learning on top of that as we go through life.

Not quite.

Many people receive information that is new to them that contains truth, but they reject it in favor of what they have already embraced as the truth, or what they want to believe to be true. Their refusal to UNlearn what they had learned previously, and replace it with a fresh understanding of the truth about something, impedes any change in their lives about that issue.

The problem is, there are at least three good reasons why we need to unlearn some old things already learned so that we can learn something else (new, or new to us – at least something different) that leads to change in our lives. Those three reasons are:

1. You discover what you thought was true really isn’t. That happens to all of us, in both big and small ways. It can be as simple as believing the “Easter bunny” brought you a holiday basket every year, to learning it was your parents who did it instead of some kind of rabbit. To refuse to unlearn the myth about an Easter bunny, and instead stubbornly hold to a belief that such a rabbit exists, would be a foolish thing to do. We need to “unlearn” any concept of an Easter bunny because we’ve come to understand it isn’t true, so we need to update our knowledge and understanding with fresh truth.

2. New information changes your understanding of things. Never in history have human beings faced such a constant deluge of new information than we do right now. Some of that information is true, some of it is partially true, etc. But the speed at which we’re inundated with new information is staggering. Industry Tap had a brief report trying to explain the pace of our gaining new knowledge as follows:

“Buckminster Fuller created the ‘Knowledge Doubling Curve’; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.”

If you’re a physician, you already find yourself battling to keep up with the latest medical knowledge. Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, reports:

“Medical knowledge has been expanding exponentially. Whereas the doubling time was an estimated 50 years back in 1950, it accelerated to 7 years in 1980, 3.5 years in 2010, and a projected 73 days by 2020, according to a 2011 study in Transactions of the Amercan Clinical and Climatological Association. Healthcare practitioners struggle to keep on top of every new piece of information, and that can have an impact on patient care.”

As we gain new information that is true and reliable, we need to unlearn the outdated information we had learned, and update our knowledge and understanding with the fresh information. This means we not only need to be “life-long learners,” but life-long “unlearners” as well.

3. Some things change. Sometimes, what used to be true changes, and because it no longer is true, we need to unlearn it and replace it with what is true. For example, when I was a kid I was given a globe of the world as a Christmas gift. The nations as displayed on that globe have changed! For example, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has broken up into 15 sovereign states, the most formidable being Russia. There have been some other changes, making that childhood globe an inaccurate representation of the nations of the world as they exist today.

Learning that leads to change requires us to be willing to unlearn some things we learned previously, and replace that old learning with updated knowledge for greater and more accurate understanding. How willing are you to unlearn as part of learning and addressing any needs for change in your life?

Scotty